Poets, Patrons, and Professors

Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists

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Part one Daniel Rogers

I Early experiences

Dousa designed the University of Leiden as an enterprise which would open up new perspectives for the northern Provinces. But the publication of his Nova poemata implied an appeal beyond the national boundaries. Significantly, the book already included one reaction from abroad. It is the earliest specimen of a foreign literary interest in the University, a Latin poem written at Leiden on 26 April 1575, not more than three months after the foundation day.

The author, who appears to have been familiar with the town's disputed nomenclature - ‘Leiden’ or ‘Lugdunum Batavorum’ - and who does not fail to comment on the ‘market places tidy like your houses’, undoubtedly knew what he was talking about. For he saw the opening of the University as ‘a chorus of Muses entering while Mars still rages’, and appropriately concluded with the crucial question:

Who would not approve of a war which moves you, Leiden, to favour the Muses and purity of religion alike?¹

The poem is headed ‘Danielis Rogerij Epigramma’ and we know this writer can be identified as the English poet and diplomatist Daniel Rogers.

1 Daniel Rogers, ‘Ad Leidam, urbem Batavicam’ (Dousa, Poemata, 1575, sig. Q vij - i.e. end of book). The same text is included in Illustris. Academia Lugd-Batava, Leiden, 1613, sig. *** iij, where it is the only foreign commendatory verse. See Appendix II, no. 4.

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In order to account for the presence of this poem and to elucidate the earlier stages of Anglo-Leiden contacts, it is necessary to follow the career of this man from the beginning.

Daniel, the eldest son of John Rogers, must have been some seventeen years old when his father, then a well-known preacher, and divinity lecturer at St. Paul's, was burned at the stake in the early years of Queen Mary's reign. Once an orthodox-catholic chaplain to the Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp, John Rogers had emphasized his complete conversion to the new religion, after a brief acquaintance with William Tyndale in 1535, first by abandoning celibacy¹, and then by editing, as ‘John Matthew’, the great ‘Matthew's Bible’ which Jacob van Meteren caused to be printed in 1537, probably at Antwerp. Considering also his pronounced views after a long contact with Melanchthon at Wittenberg², it was almost inevitable that he should become the first Protestant martyr in Mary's reign. He showed no sign of repentance, moreover, during the series of cross-examinations of which his own reports were found in a little black book that ‘his wife and one of her sonnes called Daniell’, after the execution, happened to notice in his cell - ‘a blacke thing ... in a blynde corner’³. John Day, the learned Protestant printer, remembered his cheerful equanimity in prison. He died, ‘persisting in his opinion. At this conduct the greatest part of the people took such pleasure that they were not afraid to make him many exclamations to strengthen his courage. Even his [eleven] children assisted at it, comforting him in such a manner that it seemed as if he had been led to a wedding.’⁴

With all the terror of this almost baroque martyrdom still

1 Daniel Rogers' mother was one Adrienne (van) der Weede of Antwerp. See Figure 1.

2 After his return to England in 1548 John Rogers lived in the house of Edward Whitchurch who printed in the same year: A Waying and Considering of the Interim, by... Melanchton, translated into Englyshe by John Rogers. On the significance of ‘a Wittenberg background’, cf. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. A.G.H. Bachrach and tr. D. Verspoor, The Hague, 1960, commentary, pp. 194-195.

3 J. Foxe, Ecclesiasticall History, London, 1576, II, p. 1419.

4 Thus the French ambassador in London, Count Noailles, in a letter quoted without full reference in the D.N.B., 49, p. 129.

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vividly before him, Daniel revisited his place of birth, Wittenberg, where it was intended that, as a student under Melanchthon, he should become one of that host of preachers whose training had been his father's last instruction to John Day. He subscribed to the ‘new discipline’, perhaps at Frankfort where Anthony à Wood reports him to have been, on 21 December 1557.¹ He may have been wanting in vocation, or perhaps his continental travel, alone and away from his theological acquaintances at home, had made him a devotee of renaissance letters. At any rate the Marian exile abandoned his earlier course, and having returned to England on Queen Elizabeth's accession, took an Arts degree at Oxford in August 1561, and found ways to be introduced at Court by the Queen's French secretary, an old Flemish friend of his father's, who more than a quarter of a century later was to become his own father-in-law². Many sixteenth-century scholars sought preferment in the more exciting and hazardous world of the Court. Rogers' continental humanism, his staunch adherence to England's Protestant cause, and his probably thorough knowledge of a variety of modern languages made him a suitable candidate for such preferment.

Like a true humanist Rogers had begun to test his poetic abilities with great enthusiasm. From 1562³, or possibly earlier, he wrote a prodigious amount of Latin verse, much of which has survived in manuscript. But with that modesty affected by the courtier-poets he permitted himself only one independent publication, an early work singing the praises of Antwerp. In it the descriptions of which he was so fond make delightful reading, as, for example, when he gives an account of the opening hours of the Antwerp Exchange where

... you will see the people, of all origins under the sun, flocking towards it in dense array, the happy throng of Englishmen taking their places (they alone occupy the spaces in the middle), Italians on the right and Spaniards adjoining, stalking warily through

1 C.H. Garret, The Marian Exiles, Cambridge, 1938, [Census] 351.

2 D. Rogers to C. Clusius, Rostock, 19 August 1588: ‘... Ego ante annum uxorem duxi, [Susannam] Nicasii Yetsweirtii filiam, qui Serenissimae Reginae, in Gallicis secretarius fuit:...’ (Leiden, University Library, MS. Vulc. 101).

3 D. Rogers, ‘Ad Petrum Torrium ode’, dated 9 November 1562 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Dupuy 951, f. 24).

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the front halls; the offspring of France walks on the left, and one may even discern Dutchmen ...: you hear a discordant noise, the very place is filled with various languages and various costumes.

O choice delight to the eye, and wonder to us all!
The greater orb has come to life in a tiny circle.¹

And he merrily recalls how ‘sweetly he drank his wine, and bought his books’ in the middle of the river Schelde when it had frozen over that winter.²

When he reached Paris in or about 1565 he was therefore not altogether inexperienced as a poet. There he was to become a member of the household of the English ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, for whom he was frequently employed in travel, and who describes him as ‘one Rogers very well learnid in the Greke and latin, whose father was burnt for the Relligion; this man being stewarde of my howse, and allso instructer to my children’³. In that setting where he gradually met the interesting people, writers, politicians, and the like, to whom his verses pay tribute⁴, he found more and more scope to indulge his delight in recording innumerable events and encounters in poetry. Hardly any name of renown is absent from his manuscripts. Many of his dedicatees were

1 D. Rogers, De laudibus Antverpiae oda sapphica ... etiam alii eiusdem versiculi quidam, Antwerp, Plantin, 1565, sig. B3^v-4. See Appendix II, no. 5.
That same year a commendatory verse of his was printed in Georgius Schroegelius, Elegia ἐὴ in urbem Handoverpiam, Antwerp, 1565, sig. B4^v.

2 Rogers, De laudibus, sig. B5. See Appendix II, no. 6.

3 The passage continues, characteristically:
‘... he was captured the other day, but they had nothing to obiect ageinst him, but that he is of the Relligion. wherwithe they have not to do being myne. for that I wold not kepe him if he were otherwise’. H. Norris to W. Cecil, Jenville, 11 February 1569 (P.R.O., SP 70/105, f. 97).

4 Hundreds of them have survived, mainly in two MSS. The Paris MS. Dupuy 951 (to which Dr. H. van Crombruggen has kindly referred me) is the earlier, and most miscellaneous in character; it comprises 334 ff. The other is now in the possession of the Marquess of Hertford (Ragley Hall, Alcester). Its 583 ff. have obviously been selected and arranged by Rogers himself for publication; parts have been indexed in the Report of the H.M.C., Hertford. Hereafter references will be made to ‘Dupuy MS.’ or ‘Hertford MS.’.

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gentlemen of similar poetic tastes and offered their verses in return.

From among the lasting friends he made in Paris, one at least should be brought to the fore. He is the same Janus Dousa whom we have already met, and who, at the time, was a student at Paris. In this young Dutchman's Album Rogers wrote five epigrams¹, thus starting a close literary friendship which was to cover three decades.

Dousa, who had not yet visited England, arrived in Paris early in 1564, fresh from study at Louvain and Douai, not quite twenty years old and still a Roman Catholic. His years with Rogers coincided with the prelude to the Dutch Eighty Years War. There is, it seems, reason to believe that his future renown as one of Holland's most liberal, yet most faithful champions of Protestantism, and his never-ceasing concern for the bonae literae were directly inspired by his early days in France (during this period when the alliance between the Guise and the exponents of a politique religious policy was at its height²) and by the wealth of literary experiences which he there shared with the martyr's son, ‘whose rare faithfulness could for ever dispel all future doubts as to the permanence of his friendship: whose good will was only to be expected, if not because of his learning, prudence, and virtuousness, then at least because he was so very dear to Valens (Germanus Valens Pimpontius), Buchanan(us), Auratus (Dorat), Baïf(ius), Florens (Florent Chrestien), Altarius (Des Autels), Thorius (Thore), and indeed to all men.’³

The way in which Englishmen and Dutchmen first became acquainted with the poetry of French scholars and courtiers, that poetry's early impact on some British visitors, their private and imitative experiments, in short all the questions which arise during the uncertain years before a Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia could be written, literary scholarship

1 Leiden, Univ. Libr., MS. BPL 1406, ff. 20-20^v.

2 For an outline of Anglo-Dutch political connexions in these years, see H. Brugmans, Engeland en de Nederlanden in de eerste jaren van Elizabeth's Regeering (1558-1567), diss. Groningen, 1892.

3 J. Dousa to D. Rogers, Leiden, 1575 (Dousa, Novorum poematum secunda Lugdunensis editio, Leiden, 1576, sig. Q v^v). See Appendix II, no. 9.

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has left largely unanswered.¹ The proper significance and antecedents of ‘the new poetry’ have hardly been defined. Although this term, which is generally applied as from The Shepheardes Calender of 1579, must remain vague as long as no serious attention is paid to the actual genesis of the new movement in English poesy, a student of Anglo-Continental history cannot altogether overlook more than twenty years of Anglo-French literary contacts, that preceded, let us say, the writing and the implications of Sidney's Apologie for poetrie.

On the whole, these exchanges at Court and in the Universities seem to have been conducted in Latin and Greek, and much less frequently in a modern language.² This, incidentally, resembles the practice of the French themselves who maintained that a good French poet should be in the first place a good humanist.³ The inspiration which English poets were then receiving from France appears, generally, to have been exerted on three levels: the academic, the courtly, and the religious. The first, in which De Baïf's Academy must have played its part, is responsible for what may be the earliest and strongest fields of contact and has left more traces in the correspondence of its humanist participants than the second, which (apart from a number of dedications, some Pléiade echoes in Elizabethan writings, and evidence in the form of printed sources) remained so informal as to become obscure to later generations. The third led English writers to apply the poetic accomplishments of the other two to religious themes. Combining all that was ‘sweet and profitable’, and adding new significance to vates as a poet's title, the religious element introduced a French-inspired literary movement in the enlightened Protestant circles of England⁴

1 See A.H. Upham, The French influence in English literature, New York, 1908; and S. Lee, The French Renaissance in England, Oxford, 1910; both works restrict themselves to noticing similarities, borrowings, and translations in sixteenth-century English literature. See also I. Silver, ‘Ronsard in European literature’, Bibl. d'Hum. et Ren., XVI, 1954, pp. 241-254; and P. Laumonier, ‘Ronsard et l'Ecosse’, Rev. de lit. comp., IV, 1924, pp. 408-428.

2 Cf. Sidney's own case, pp. 101-103.

3 See P. de Nolhac, Ronsard et l'humanisme, Paris, 1921, p. 141.

4 It was continued, through Sidney, in the circle of Mary, Countess of Pembroke.

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and the Low Countries¹. Thereafter, in a milieu determined by politics and scholarship, a cultured poetry both Latin and vernacular was to emerge and to prove ‘new’ indeed in prosody, sentiments, subject-matter, and not least in the purposes for which it was used. The odes, sonnets, elegies, epigrams, and the like, written by these poets, whether in Latin, Greek, English, French, or Dutch, display all the ‘generalized emotion’, devotional exhortation, political message, and polite compliment which they were expected selfconsciously but non-professionally to phrase in classical metaphor and witty conceits of the early-renaissance kind. The French origin of some late sixteenth-century courtly verse in Britain and the Low Countries is known. But the earlier stages of this interest in French letters, which included the introductory work of neo-Latin poets, are obscure.² Many a reference in the following chapters will be seen to suggest that the key to much of the literary history of England and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century must be found in Paris, ‘in illo hominum eruditorum velut microcosmo’³, during the 1550s and 1560s.

A considerable amount of evidence could be adduced to show that great numbers of English, Scottish, Dutch, and German scholars and politicians were very familiar with the literary activities of the Parisian writers - De Baïf, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Dorat, and many others - with whom they were often personally acquainted. Moreover, the foreign visitors (among whom we find various young men who were to become prominent poets in their own countries) were no passive audience; for they themselves became contributors to the

1 See W.A.P. Smit, De Dichter Revius, Amsterdam, 1928, pp. 21-31; and see below, p. 36, note 1.

2 Cf. C. Maddison, Apollo and the Nine, London, 1960, p. 288, where it says: ‘Since the ode enters English literary history in this later period [viz. after 1584] it comes under the auspices of the French. However, once the English began emulating the Pléiade and writing odes, their classical education ... caused them to go from the French to the ancient and neolatin poets for their models’; but no proper evidence is given for this statement.

3 F. Foppens, Bibliotheca Belgica, Brussels, 1739, I, p. 165, biography of C. Utenhove (see below, p. 16, note 2), of whom Foppens writes: ‘Praeter vernaculam ac graecam, calluit linguas gallicam, anglicam atque Italicam’.

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Parisian literary scene of the 1560s.¹ The hundreds of poems, letters, and dedications in which the evidence is contained indicate that a careful study of guests and hosts at their poetic rendez-vous - which certainly includes the ‘sacra Musarum aedes’ of Morellus (Jean de Morel) and his accomplished daughters - would reveal important details about much foreign apprenticeship.² With special, though not exclusive,

1 See De Nolhac, Ronsard et l'humanisme, Pt. II; and Un poète rhénan ami de la Pléiade, Paul Melissus, Bibl. lit. de la ren., n.s. XI, Paris, 1923.

2 An excellent example of one such guest-apprentice is the multilingual Ghent poet Carolus Utenhovius (Utenhove: see fig. 1), who was a good friend of Buchanan, Rogers, Dousa, Paulus Melissus and many others, and almost a member of the Pléiade. It was Utenhove who admonished Ronsard to apply himself to divine poetry; and Buchanan, while calling Utenhove ‘censor meorum carminum’, granted him in 1564 the rare privilege of publishing his works. Utenhove had been tutor to Morellus' daughters before coming to England - where lived his uncle Jan, one of the founders of the London Dutch church - in November 1562 as a companion and secretary of Paul de Foix, the French ambassador. In the next few years he found a patron in Cecil, wrote poems to numerous English personages, including nineteen to the Queen (some in French, others in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew - one of which latter poems Camille Morel rendered in Latin), and taught Cecil's accomplished wife Greek. He left this hospitable country in 1565, the year of the Bayonne Conference and of Ronsard's dedicating his Elegies to Queen Elizabeth (below, p. 18, note 3), a copy of which was given to her, through De Foix, by Cecil - who was being kept informed about ‘the archpoet of France’ by Sir Thomas Smith, English ambassador in Paris (see P. Champion, Ronsard et son temps, Paris, 1925, pp. 217-225). Three years later Utenhove published at Basle Buchanan's Franciscanus and further works, adding much poetry by Du Bellay and others, and his own Xenia which was dedicated to Elizabeth. This remarkable book contains poems by most Pléiade writers and has, among Utenhove's own poems, verses addressed to a variety of notables, including De Heere, Leicester, William of Orange, and Hubert Languet. In 1560 he had already published his Epitaphium on Henry II, in twelve languages (the English and Scottish translations being by one H. Keir), with epitaphs on Du Bellay. In 1568 he hoped to dedicate a ‘history of the Spanish Inquisition’ to the Queen (see Cal. S.P. for. 1569-1571, no. 47). In 1570 Dorat wrote the epithalamium on his marriage. He was to have no children, but later adopted Janus Gruterus (see fig. 1 and cf. pp. 109-110). See De Nolhac, Ronsard et l'humanisme, pp. 172, 348, 349; W. Janssen, Charles Utenhove, sa vie et son oeuvre (1536-1600), diss. Nijmegen, 1939; George Buchanan Glasgow quatercentenary studies 1906, Glasgow, 1907, pp. 403, 432-434.
Dousa's Album contains inscriptions by Morellus (f. 27^v) and his daughters (f. 28). The Hertford MS. ends with a number of poems (f. 366 ff.) addressed to Rogers by various Pléiade writers, and includes verses by him to C. Utenhove (f. 54^v), Dorat (f. 62^v), De Baïf (ff. 87^v, 291), Buchanan (f. 88), and Ronsard (ff. 294, 348); the Dupuy MS. has many more, also some connected with Morellus.

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reference to England two other meeting places appear to be of interest: the English embassy at Paris and the French embassy in London¹, where poetry followed and supported the trend of politics - a phenomenon that was to recur in later years².

In this light Dousa and Rogers are typical representatives of the humanists who visited Paris in these years. They were both destined for a life of action in their respective countries' service, and derived an essential part of their intellectual make-up from early literary experiences in Paris. In one and the same city they saw the great politico-religious movements of the day, heard renowned lecturers in every branch of modern scholarship, and listened to the brilliant products of the most advanced school of poetry: as poets they learned - as Dousa was subsequently to recall³ - that letters are as serviceable to the common-wealth as politics. It is difficult to overestimate the effect of these stimulating experiences on the two young men. Personal contacts and friendships with men of letters they sought and enjoyed. In the following twenty years we shall again and again find allusions to these

1 Not surprisingly, numerous courtly writers of the Tudor age seem connected with France through these embassies, often enjoying the patronage or friendship of the literary-minded ambassadors themselves.

2 See below, Pt. I, ch. v, and Pt. II, ch.i-v. There is reason to believe that some contacts were facilitated besides by kinship as much as by friendship, as for example in the case of French and Flemish refugees (cf. fig. 1), who, after all, often acted as active and not seldom accomplished supporters of the English Protestant Court. Finally, some Flemish poets (such as Jan van der Noot, Lucas de Heere, or Carolus Utenhove), who were less slow in following the French, may be found to have had more influence in the northern Netherlands and even in England than has so far been realized.

3 J. Dousa to J. van Hout, Leiden, 1576: ‘Dabimus ansam reprehensionis ijs, qui nesciunt, maximum ad virtutem incitamentum esse Poeticam, atque (ut rectissime ab Horatio scriptum est) mares animos in Martia bella versibus exacui: nec cogitant, non minus in libris & literis, quam in curia & foro Rempub. tractari posse, ...’ (Dousa, Poemata, 1576, sig. S iij).

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events in letters and poems written long after they had left that accomplished society of French courtiers and scholars.¹ Dousa appears to have been a pupil of Dorat, and to have met most other literati of the Parisian world, including - it has been argued² - Ronsard. Rogers, too, knew them and collected their verses, including one addressed to himself by the same Jean-Antoine de Baïf³ who had shared the first few pages of Dousa's Album with Jean Dorat⁴. The precise details of their Parisian sojourn - and indeed of visits by numerous others like them - are as yet unknown and really lie outside the scope of the present enquiry. It should suffice to stress the obvious, general significance of the circumstances under which two young scholars from England and Holland first met.

When Dousa departed in 1566 to travel north through the disintegrating Low Countries, he took with him that intellectual keenness which seems to have ruled and inspired his whole ambitious generation. As a promising poet he imported its ideas into the northern Provinces. Rogers could do the same a little later. But Dousa was to have the greater opportunity for introducing his ‘Parisian’ views when nine years later he gave shape to ‘his own’ Academia - a singular privilege for a humanist.

1 See for examples Appendix II.

2 See P. van Tieghem, La littérature latine de la renaissance, Paris, 1944, p. 84; and De Nolhac, Ronsard et l'humanisme, pp. 211 ff., 224, 346.

3 A. de Baïf, ‘D. Rogerio, Anglo’ (Dupuy MS., f. 116^v). Cf. also p. 100. It may be worth noting that the only acknowledged English translation of a work by Ronsard (an honoured guest in England, who had dedicated to Queen Elizabeth his Elegies, Mascarades et Bergeries, 1565, which included eulogies of Leicester and Burghley) was Rogers' friend Thomas Jeney's A Discours of the Present Troobles, Antwerp, 1568, dedicated to Norris.
Another of Rogers' Parisian friends was Sir Thomas Hoby, translator of the Cortegiano, English ambassador in Paris during the last few months of his life (1566). The Hertford MS. (ff. 171-176) contains a separate collection of commemorative poems addressed to Hoby's widow, in MS., entitled: Tumulus ... Thomae Hobbij ... Elaborata omnia Danielis Rogerii, partim industria, partim eius studio a doctissimis amicis conquisita et in libelli formam coniecta.

4 Leiden, Univ. libr., MS. BPL 1406, ff. 4-5.