Ichabod!

I have ended the teaching term with a session on Donne’s Anniversaries, a trial of endurance alleviated for the students only by a dole of sherry and mince pie. Preparing the session led me to look for works of the same kind, and so I found my way to the mournful (sorry!) The honour of vertue. Or the monument erected by the sorowfull husband, and the epitaphes annexed by learned and worthy men, to the immortall memory of that worthy gentle-woman Mrs Elizabeth Crashawe (1620).

The situation here was all too typical: a godly young wife, dying in giving birth to her first child. But it wasn’t, in the main, the anniversaries of Donne that I was reminded of, but his verse epistle ‘To Mr Tilman, after he had taken orders’, with its candid address to the social status of the clergyman in a society which, while officially giving the church the greatest respect, evidently never forgot birth and social rank when it came to the individual cleric.

For Mistress Crashaw was a ‘gentlewoman’, as the memorial pamphlet says in its title. The little publication, its type carefully set out in places like the carving of a memorial inscription, can be thought of as a substitute for the canopied tomb her status would have secured, had she not married down, to a clergyman, a widower of twice her years.

The pamphlet repeated mentions this signal act of virtue. The funeral sermon of Doctor James Ussher (no less) is paraphrased, and it enumerated her virtues:

“2. Being yong, faire, comely, brought up as a Gentlewoman, in musicke, dancing, and like to be of great estate, and therefore much sought after by yong gallants, and rich heires, and good jointures offered, yet she chose a divine, twise her own age. 3 Her extraordinary love and almost strange affection to her husband, expressed in such excellent and well tempered passages of kindnesse, as is too rare to find in one of her age, person, and parts…”

…. “6. her husbands discretion being questioned by some, for such a choice; and it being the common conceit, that by this marriage they had lost a good Preacher: contrariwise her comeliness in attire, and excellencie of behaviour graced him everywhere; and her zeale in religion, her kindnesse to him, her care of his health, and her honorable estimation of his profession, encouraged him to do more than he ever he did…”

Or, among the elegies, my near namesake ‘R. Boothe of Cantab’ (wrong University, though) similarly cannot quite get over the choice she made:

“Religion was her soules delight,

Good workes her Recreations were

To’th’poor as free as aire and light,

That shedd their comforts everywhere.

Young, faire, wise, comely, yet refus’d

Both youth and braveries golden Rayes

And dubble her owne age she chus’d,

With a Divine to spend her dayes…”

Altogether, the tributes paid to Elizabeth Crashaw give an impression of the godly rallying round. William Crashaw the husband had been, rather hearteningly, chosen by the ‘Rara avis in terris’ (‘CW of the Inner Temple’, writing in Latin and English, actually uses the Juvenalian phrase). God had taken her away, and maybe there’s a slight insecurity behind their effusions – the very best go first, they affirm, anxious not to suggest that those whose marriages flout the social rank God had seen fit to place them in are also susceptible to an early departure.

But in the end the longest elegy in the book did look like the work of a writer who had read the Anniversaries. The italicized first couplet in the quotation below is repeated a later points, as though Donne’s ‘She, she is dead, when thou knowest this’ couplets were being imitated. The poem is impersonal, unsigned, but it might conceivably be by her husband: its extra length makes it prominent, and the writer appears really worried about his grief. Here are some extracts, with a few comments:

‘An elegie, or mournefull meditation upon the uncertainty, and vanity of this life, occasioned upon the untimely and deplorable death of that thrice worthy Gentlewoman Mistress Elizabeth Crashawe: of whom the world was not worthy.’

O Earth, Earth Earth, O all mortality,

Know God is just, and thou mere vanity:

Fooles talke of fortune, lotts, misgiving, chance,

Fooles talke of dreames, and of the fayryes dance:

Trippings of horses, bleeding at the nose,

Itching of elbowes, and rat eaten hose

Tingling of eares, and crosseing of a Hare,

Sparkling of fire, and changing of the ayre…

~ an unexpected opening. The author is talking about all the things we foolishly attend to instead of hearing the truth. I suppose having your hose eaten by rats was as good a token of misfortune as any, but I’d never heard of it before.

He turns on astrologers:

Fooles cast their figures, and believe that true,

And only that which their lewd schem doth shew…

Andhe moralises about our propensity for false worship:

Nothing in earth so deepe, in heaven so high,

But serves for some kinde of Idolatry…

The central consolatory part of the elegy depends on the bare comforts of a cliché:

Oh learne the best go first, the worse remaine

Here rests that Rare One, whose life and death do show

The truth of this to all, that troth will know

Her yeares so few, her virtues were so many…

Her time was short, the longer is her rest,

God takes them soonest whom he loveth best:

For he that’s borne too day, and dyes to morrow

Looseth some dayes of joy, but yeares of sorrow…

A more interesting passage follows, in which the writer expresses his feeling that more of the good are dyin - ‘good Prince Henry’ initiated this unfortunate trend in 1612:

Aske and observe: observe with admiration,

Since good Prince Henry great hope of our nation:

Chang’d this dull kingdom for a shining crown

How many which then stood, are now falne downe

Observe not that alone but this as most,

What they have beene, which since this land hath lost.

What they were like to prove, what need may be,

Of such, in some points which this land may see…

~ the language falters, the writer hardly seems able to say outright what he really means, but the gist of it is clear enough: God is punishing the nation by taking away those the nation needs. There’s some political point at the back of this, one suspects. He continues - and in the following lines his own consolations, as offered earlier in the elegy, are now rejected

Happy those soules (per’anter some may say)

Whose happy lott was first to flie away:

I say not so, I wish it were not so,

Sorrow and griefe may utter too much woe…

Again, he seems disconcerted to be out on a limb like this, and apologetically offers his theory as to what is going on. The hand of God is in these deaths, and that means the worst, God’s anger (he hopes he is wrong):

But sure I am, Gods scourges there are shaken

Whence in short time so many good are taken

And yet it may be I doe err in this,

I thinke I may and pray my feares may misse…

William Crashaw’s little volume in tribute to his beloved young wife, who so cruelly lost her life in delivering one, ends with words assigned to her from the here-beyond, and a return of the usual consolation. It’s in three distiches:

‘HER Answere to them all.’

It is not I that dye, I doe but leave an Inne,

Where harbored was with me, against my will, much sinne:

It is not I that dye, I doe but now begin,

Into aeternal life by death to enter in.

Why mourne you then for me deere Husband, friends and kin

Lament you when I lose, why weepe you, when I win.

Even so, all was not well with this little community of the godly. James Ussher, soon to be made a bishop by the King, had preached at the funeral taking a text from the first book of Samuel, chapter 4 (his text was verse 20, but the context would have been important and understood):

¹⁷And the messenger answered and said, Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God is taken.

¹⁸And it came to pass, when he made mention of the ark of God, that he fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years.

¹⁹And his daughter in law, Phinehas' wife, was with child, near to be delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was taken, and that her father in law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself and travailed; for her pains came upon her.

²⁰And about the time of her death the women that stood by her said unto her, Fear not; for thou hast born a son. But she answered not, neither did she regard it.

²¹And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel: because the ark of God was taken…

The text chosen was perhaps gloomy enough to have been offensive in anyone else but a revered scholar-cleric, though the godly present in such large numbers at the funeral (“At which Sermon and Funerall was present one of the greatest Assemblies that was ever seene in mans memorie at the burial of any private person. This Text, His Sermon, and that Spectacle, made many a heavy heart, and such a Churchfull of weeping eyes as have beene seldome seen”) would have known their Bibles well enough to understand beyond the text its general context, the lament that ‘the glory is departed’.

I am fairly sure that one could now guess the name of the posthumous child: it would surely have been ‘Ichabod Crashaw’.

Oh SHOVEL! Worthy of a better Fate

This will be my last post for a week or more: I am off with Booth junior to the Scilly Isles, for a swimming holiday.

The big early modern event in the Scilly Isles was a surprisingly fierce campaign by Parliamentary forces to dislodge the Royalist forces there, as detailed in Joseph Leveck’s A true accompt of the late reducement of the isles of Scilly published; in regard of the many false and scandalous reports, touching that service (1651).

More famous is the loss of the Association, and the death of Sir Cloudesley Shovell. I thought I knew something about this, having read Davina Sobel’s Latitude not so long ago. She repeats the story everyone knows, of the sailor having the temerity to approach his Admiral after a counsel of all the sailing masters had decided that they were in the latitude of Ushant, with his opinion that they were far to the west and heading for the Scilly Isles. For which insubordination, Sir Cloudesley had him hanged…

It isn’t true: there was a counsel on board the Association, in which one man, the sailing master of the Lennox, thought that the fleet was far to the west, but a majority view prevailed against him.

The best transcripts of contemporary documentary details of the disaster are on this website:

http://www.hmssurprise.org/Resources/SIR_CLOUDESLEY_SHOVELL.html

while on this site a partisan of the admiral is gathering information about the man and the traducing myth that got attached to him:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/3682/clowdisley.html

How and why Sir Cloudesley became the victim of this amazingly successful story would be hard to explain. It converted a well-regarded man (“No man understands the Affairs of the Navy better, or is beloved of the Sailors so well as he. He loves the Constitution of his Country and serves it without factious aim; he hath very good Natural Parts; familiar and plain in his Conversation; dresses without affectation; is a very large, fat, fair Man”) into a type of the inflexible and overbearing upper class military leader whose incompetence dooms his men. One might suppose that salient examples of that type have always been needed in England. Or it was black propaganda put out by Scillonians, heavily implicated in the robbery of Shovell’s corpse, even of his murder, craftily denigrating their victim?

To do him some further justice, I have transcribed the following elegy on his death (and his death alone). It isn’t one of the great maritime disaster poems, but it has its moments. The main interest in reading it is in watching how circumspect the anonymous author is about the potential embarrassments of writing a funeral elegy on a man called Shovel. The 17^th century would have given in to the temptation, rejoiced in it, found no collocation of ‘shovel’ and ‘grave’ unsuitable. But, writing in an age of sentiment, the 1707 elegist manfully avoids all such frivolities:

A new elegy on the lamented death of Sir Cloudesly Shovel, rear admiral of Great Britain; and Admiral of the white squadron of Her Majesty's Royal-Navy; who was cast away on the rocks of Scilly, on Wednesday the 22nd of October, 1707. at 8 at night, as he was returning home from the streights, in Her Majesty's ship the Association

In Sable Weeds let widowed Albion mourn,

And dismal Pomp her shining Cliffs adorn;

Let want of Light on her once Glorious Shore,

In Mourning tell Great SHOVEL is no more:

While swoln Clouds their shaggy Fleeces dip,

And over Britain hang their Heads and Weep;

Oh SHOVEL! Worthy of a better Fate,

But Death’s blind stokes distinguish not the Great,

The Good or Brave when he Decrees it so,

Must with their load of Worldly Honour go;

But sure thy loss was not in Anger meant,

Heav’n is too just, and thou too Innocent.

As thro’ the Mourning Crowd I pass’d e’en now,

I mark’d a Gen’ral sadness on each Brow,

All mingle Tears, their Cries together flow

And from a hedious Harmony of Woe.

Great Neptunes Sons like lifeless Statues stand

Dropping their useless Swords from every Hand,

As if to say such Weapons useless are,

Farewell the Glory and the Hopes of War.

Oh Britain! Britain! If thou e’er dids’t Mourn,

Now thy Melancholly Weeds return:

Not Verse alone declares the heavy News,

The Winds conspire to assist my Muse:

The Tidings comes with each unwelcome blast,

For News so doleful always comes too fast,

Let the sad Sound be Born thro’ evry Sea,

And the Winds Groan while they the News convey:

Our Ships will need no other Cannon roar

Nor dreadfull sounds to terrifie the Shore.

What Grief shall not the British Sailors shew

For they have lost their joy, and Leader too:

Each do’s in Sighs his future Wishes send,

And to the Gods their SHOVEL recommend.

Say envious Stars did he deserve your Spight,

Or did the Day grudge him her Glorious Light:

T’avoid those Rocks, on which by error led,

He was by fatal Destiny Convey’d:

The bulging Ship upon the Shore struck fast

And scarce two Minutes but she struck her last:

Was quite o’re whelm’d with the next rolling Wave,

Aid and Endeavours were in vain to Save,

Whom Fate had destin’d to a Watry-Grave.

Each saw his unavoided Destiny,

Left the sad Wreek, and plung’d into the Sea:

There SHOVEL unamaz’d, by nature Brave,

Spreading his Arms Embrac’d a briny Wave,

And where he had reign’d with Honour, made his Grave

No Pomp, nor state, tho’ he deserv’d it all,

Attends on his untimely Funeral

As when the Summons of Commanding fate,

Sounds the last call at some proud Palace gate;

When both the Rich and Fair, the Great and High,

Fortunes most darling Favourites must dye;

Strait at th’Alarm the busie Heraulds wait,

To fill the Solemn Pomp, and Mourn in State:

Scutcheons, and sables then make up the show

Whilst on the Hearse the Mourning streamers flow

With all the rich Magnificence of Woe.

But SHOVEL, was deny’d those Honours due,

Or Neptune that so well his Actions knew:

Proud of that Honour, did all Pomp prevent,

And Tomb’d him in his Wat’ry Element

But Oh! I wander from the Task in Hand,

SHOVEL shou’d all my wand’ring thoughts command

Yet no Obscurity can blot his Name,

For round the World the thousand Mouths of Fame,

Shall spread his Praises and his Deeds Proclaim.

A Man, till now, that e’re was fortunate,

Precisely Good, and regularly Great:

His Soul with Native Honesty was Drest,

And a Good Conscience always fill’d his Breast:

His words were few, but of Important weight,

Mix’d with no stain of flattry or Deceit

The Bations Trust, and Sailors joy he prov’d

And still where ere he came he was belov’d:

None ever fought her Cause with more success,

None ere did more – or ever boasted less

His early Valour did Proclaim his Worth,

And help’d to set the growing Hero forth;

At Bautree, Beachy, and at Malaga,

The French too well his dauntless Conduct saw:

There you might see the Brittish Glory shine,

And SHOVEL break th’impenetrable Line.

From whom they steer’d, and wou’d be brought no more,

To tempt that fury they had felt before.

His Name was dreadful, as his Courage Great,

And Glory did on all his Actions wait.

On towring Wings, with SHOVEL in my view

How would my willing Muse the Theme pursue,

But Oh! no numbers ever can restore

The Good, the Valiant, SHOVEL is no more,

His Loss we Mourn, and if Grief e’er was just,

We ought to pay it to his Glorious Dust.

Statues are due but SHOVELS Fate alas,

Endures without those Monuments of Brass.

Nor can I in my Song forgetfull be,

T’express the Murm’rings of his Family,

His Consort unconsol’d Laments his Fate,

To which the manner adds a double weight;

Down’d near that fatal shore; she needs must Mourn,

On which she waited for his Wish’d Return

Weeping she sits, and all Chagrin appears,

To which her Children add their Dutious Tears.

The Servants in the Mournful Consort joyne

And at their Masters fatal loss repine.

His Royal Mrs. too Mourns o’re his Grave,

She knew him usefull, as she knew him Brave.

No Man his Country with more Honour Serv’d:

Or less for Interest, from his Duty Swerv’d:

Rest SHOVEL then, and let the Watry Grave,

That is intrusted with thy relicks have

This just Encomium that it holds the Dust,

Of one that was both Loyal, Brave and Just.

The EPITHAPH

Ye sacred reliques buried in the Deep,

There undisturb’d by wars, in quiet Sleep:

Discharge the Trust which when it was below,

SHOVEL’s undaunted Soul did undergo,

Who was the Seas Palladium from the Foe,

Still watch thy Country’s Good, or if Above

Thou’rt Soard: regard us with thy wonted Love.

Beneath the cacuminous thick Beeches

I have a seminar to give on sections of Tennyson’s In Memoriam,

http://victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/imov.html

and this led me back to William Lathum’s Phyala lachrymarum. Or A few friendly teares, shed over the dead body of Mr Nathaniel Weld Mr of Arts of Emanuel Colledge in Cambridge who in the short journey of his life, died betwene the five and sixe and twentieth yeare of his youth, (1633).

I don’t think much is known about Lathum, and don’t recollect that Bruce Smith’s Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England book does anything with such putatively gay elegies. Like Tennyson’s, his long poem is a broken-hearted lament for an idolized friend. Lathum veers between his personal loss, and the loss to everyone who knew Weld. To him, it feels as though death has broken off a marriage:

“… two true hearts in love united fast.
For well his tongue and 'haviour could indeed
Of faithful love a learned lecture read,
And well him love became, who loyal was
Unto his love; (unhappy love) alas,
Which when both hearts, and hands, and friends consent
Had all clapped hands with infinite content,
And all things ready to enjoying, had
(Save publication) death the Banes forbad.”

But these special feelings were (perhaps reassuringly) shared by everybody:

“… Oh my dear WELD, whose conversation was
So lovely unto me …

… how lovely wert thou (living) unto all?
All, for thou wert not sullen-cynical,
Nor of a supercilious-haughty eye,
But affable, and full of courtesy,

Well pleas'd with mirth, and harmless merriment,
Which (but injuriously) can ne're be shent.
How did all hug thee, and embrace, for thy
Thy (hardly-sampled) self, and company?”

That little stutter ‘thy / Thy’ is not a misprint in the text. ‘Hardly-sampled’ means something like ‘unequalled’; the modern sense of ‘sampling’ is not yet in the language. Lathum follows this with a passage in which the winding sheets, coffin, and earth, personified as female, receive Weld’s body with sensuous delight in embracing him.

Tennyson, quizzed about the matter, asserted that he had never even kissed Arthur Hallam, and Lathum celebrates in his sublime friend the “single Caelibat of his chaste youth”. My quotations so far make the poem look more physical than it is: Weld’s body seems to have been imaginatively off-limits, sex only comes to him in the embrace of the winding sheet.

Does Lathum know what his feelings (at least, as we would understand them) were? I looked at his (earlier) translation of Virgil’s Eclogues - which will always crop up in these contexts - and his version of ‘Formosus pastor Corydon’. He starts off, perhaps, a touch defensively (‘this idle stuff’):

“The Shepherd Corydon erst dearly loved
His Master’s darling, young Alexis faire:
But in pursuit thereof he still improved,
Not having what he hoped; but reaped despair,
Though every day alone he did repair,
And 'mongst the cacuminous thick Beeches shade,
In vain, this idle stuff, to hills, and woods bewray'd.”

(‘Cacuminous’ is that joy of the absolute pedant, an OED antedating, for the dictionary doesn’t have it till 1871. It apparently means formed into a pyramidal shape.)

But in his commentary, he can expand on Corydon’s overpowering feeling as ‘the instinct of [his] nature’:

“The meaning is … deal with me as you think good; avoid my company, disdain me; nevertheless I know not by what propensity of inclination, I am (will I, nill I) haled on to affect your Love: neither will I alter my desire herein, howsoever you demean your self towards me: For I must confess, I am led by the instinct of my nature thereunto, as pronely, as the Wolf is to the Kid, or the Kid to the bushy shrubs; and as every thing in the kind, is drawn by sense, to follow that which they find to bee agreeing, and most fitting to their natures.”

The much lamented Nathaniel Weld is represented as an early victim of tobacco, and Lathum has quite a lively passage of dirae on the herb that robbed him of his beloved, who seems to have been smoking when he suffered what one guesses was a tubercular haemorrhage:

“ 'twas this unsavory fulsome weed,
That traiterously conspir'd his death indeed;
Provoking him to cough, which broke a vein
Within his lungs, first causer of his bane.”

An interesting poem, antecedent to the Lycidas collection. The image is a Raphael double portrait.