Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we may be said to lose sight; for he seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, as soon as it is written that his wife departed unto her reward. Comment on his character is equal comment upon hers, and adds new force to the classic episode of a lady philanthropist espousing a ne’er-do-weel and a featherbrain. Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra-contemporary gossip, calls it “a disagreeable match,” disappointing to the bridegroom’s kindred; but adds that “he married her for love of her wit.” Now, wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to be suspected that there was also, and in the immediate vicinity, “metal more attractive,” as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea parish-books is an entry, the first of its kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had settled his account with “the poore,” a matter of thirty pounds’ loan (in which the vicar must have connived), for the year ending in January of 1628. If the payment were, by any hap, in advance, it may have fallen in Lady Danvers’s own lifetime; and if so, it is quite as likely that she paid it, with an admonition! Her “high tides of melancholy,” of whose true cause she certainly would not have complained to Dr. Donne, had something to do with this young spendthrift, who must have had his wheedling way, sooner or later, with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant. Perhaps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was both shrewd and charitable, in suppressing mention of his new relative.[15] The longer one looks into the matter, the less curious seems his unexplained silence concerning this late graft of a family hitherto always respectable and always loyal.
There are gleams of subsequent private history in the tell-tale records at Chelsea. We are not incurably astonished to learn that as early as May of 1629 was christened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Danvers and Elizabeth his wife. This Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne him four children, died, as did his mother, in 1636; and left him even as she found him, none too monogamous. In 1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared at the venerable altars where his first saint never had a memorial, loving, honoring, and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in Gloucestershire, and, as it is to be surmised, leading her tame fortune by a ribbon. His debts and difficulties, not of one but of all time, sprout perennially in the registers. His indefatigable name, oftener than any rival’s whatsoever, figures as borrowing and paying interest on a forty-pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was always forthcoming so soon as it was demolished. This disgraceful business was the man’s chief concern: for the older he grew the deeper and deeper he sank into entanglements, particularly after the death of the King. It was never doubted, in his day, but that this was a judgment on the former Gentleman Usher who affixed hand and seal to the warrant of his sovereign’s execution.[16] His own family, it is said, as well as the royalist Herberts and Newports, dropped his acquaintance; and who knows whether Mrs. Grace Hewet was faithful? At his favorite Chelsea, in the April of 1655, and in about the seventy-fourth year of his age, Sir John Danvers ended his career by more conventional agencies than the rope and the knife, which might have befallen him in the Stuart triumph of the morrow. His manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In 1661, the dead republican was attainted, and all of his estate which was unprotected was declared regal booty. The year before his own burial at Dauntsey he laid there, “to the great grief of all good men,” the body of his elder son Henry, who had just attained his majority. The Earl of Danby had died, “full of honors, wounds, and days,” in 1643, while this Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful child; and on him alone he had taken pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, in turn, was persuaded to bequeath the major part of them to his father’s ever-gaping pocket, the remainder reverting to one of his two surviving sisters. The third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, had also a son Charles,[17] who petitioned the crown for his paternal rights, but died in old age, with neither income nor issue.
Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and, by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against Carolus Agnus.[18] But that would have been a very different matter from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a makeshift and a speculation!
He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved. He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,” common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys, which were also the “horti deliciæ dominæ” recalled thrice in the music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down, and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think, nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly, and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies which must always look amusing, even to a friend.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Walton confuses this Edward Herbert with a namesake entered at Queen’s College; and he follows the erring dates of the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. The boy’s age is correctly given as fourteen in the college registers.
[2] Donne had been in residence at both Universities, but took no degree at either, as he had scruples against accepting the conditions imposed. He was at that time, and until about 1593, like his parents, a Catholic. His father was of Welsh descent: a fact which may have borne its share in attracting him towards the Herberts.
[3] Anne Donne, it may be remarked, was also the name of Cowper’s mother.
[4] Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle, 1684, mentions Dr. Donne as one of his “heroic Grecians,” and adds, in the same breath, that he was “a great visitor of ladies.”
[5] Dr. Donne’s conceit about the ages of his friends is better handled in the young Cartwright’s