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Poets, Patrons, and Professors (1962)

Poets, Patrons, and Professors

(1962)–J.A. van Dorsten–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists


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III Years of introduction

Where Dousa still had to make his way into English circles, Junius was eminently suited to arrange an introduction. ‘Literatissimus Hadrianus Junius’1 had last visited the country in 1568 to present his Eunapius Sardinianus to Queen Elizabeth, and his life-long interest in England had been undisturbed by the changing tides of the Tudors. This scholar had been thirty-three when Bishop Bonner had induced him to come to England. He had quickly attracted the attention of the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, while practising as a physician in his father's household.2 He had then become tutor to Surrey's children, and there will have met at least one other contributor to Tottel's Miscellany, Thomas Churchyard, professional soldier and for half a century devotee to the Dutch cause.3 In 1553, after the untimely death of his patron and three years in the Netherlands, Junius attempted to present his Philippeis on her marriage with Philip II to Queen Mary4, and in 1558 renewed the effort by dedicating his Commentarius de Anno & Mensibus to her. Lastly, in 1568, he offered Queen Elizabeth his Eunapius, which was afterwards to be translated into English5. Her gracious reception seems doubtful when seven

years later one finds Rogers suggesting that Junius should dedicate another work to her Majesty and give him a copy of the Eunapius to take along.1 From all this, and from his published correspondence, Hadrianus Junius appears to have been one of the earliest intellectual links between Holland and England, and had he not ‘changed this life for death, in the year of Christ 1575, at the age of 63, on the 16th day of the month of his name’2, shortly after his appointment among the first professors of Leiden, Junius would have probably been a main figure in the present enquiry. He did find his way into English literature (after his death) when from his famous Emblemata - one of which had been ‘Ad Vict. Giselinum’3 - twenty blocks and much inspiration were taken by Geoffrey Whitney for his Choice of emblemes as published at Leiden in 1586.4

It is not surprising, therefore, that Janus Dousa, one day Junius' successor as official historiographer to the States, should have called upon the one Dutchman who was widely known in England and of similar scholarly tastes to give him introductions for his first visit to the country with which he was to become so familiar.

The official status of this small embassy (‘legatiuncula’) - ‘my own destiny, which was more fortunate than that of the commonwealth’5 - is hard to define. Not wishing to depend entirely on the effect of Junius' letter, Dousa made sure of the reception of his dispatch by expressing it in two Latin odes, one addressed to Mr. Secretary Cecil6 as a ‘covering letter’ for the other and more important one to the Queen. In the second he followed, perhaps unknowingly, the example of the great Huguenot Philippe Duplessis Mornay who, having just escaped from the Massacre, had arrived

with a poem in which he pleaded on behalf of the Protestant cause1.

Dousa deliberately addressed Elizabeth as

 
Queen, issue of great kings,
 
Yourself taught by the hand of the Muses,
 
Second to none among the Graces...

The Queen was warned of the approaching end to ‘religious liberty’ - not ‘Protestantism’ - ‘as though she knew it not from former dangers of her own’, and Dousa concluded by begging

God and the Queen of a wealthy island to make us see our country in its former condition, ruled by one God, and restituted to Him. Then we shall sing your praise with a worthier sound of our Zither, and the future will not belie our words2.

Rogers, whose idea it was, perhaps, to win a learned Queen by poetic force, hurried to Kingston to meet his long-neglected friend3. Their reunion after eight years was moving: ‘who could ever have thought that I should, in the middle of England, in London, find Paris?’4 The Englishman simply buried his friend in books and manuscripts by himself ‘and other learned friends’ whom they ‘had shared in France’5, and Dousa spent those months in London eagerly copying great quantities of modern literature from the apparently well-furnished library which Rogers had collected in eight years of travel between the courts of Britain and France. After Dousa left England6 and her Queen whose ‘doctrina, eloquium, forma et pietas’, he had in another poem asserted, ‘never could nor would in future times be paralleled’7, Rogers' liberal distribution of reading matter did not cease. ‘The dearest things to my mind’, Dousa wrote, ‘are those

letters which you sent me some time after my departure [1573?] to accompany copies of Ronsard's Franciade [1572], Belleau's Bergeries [1565]’1, and other works.

It is curious that so stimulating an infusion of contemporary French literature should have reached the receptive mind of Janus Dousa through the library of his English friend. He was to have ample chance to read these books during the great siege of the following year, and their impact may have contributed to the beginnings in the near future of a new Dutch poetry.

 

In the middle of the same year, 1572, eighteen year-old Philip Sidney had gone ‘out of England into parts beyond the seas, with three servants and four horses... for his attaining the knowledge of foreign languages’2. Naturally this educational tour would bring so promising a young gentleman into contact with precisely the same people with whom Dousa and Rogers were acquainted. Though there is little documentation to ascertain exactly which of the illustrious poets, patrons, and professors whom he could have met in Paris, Strassburg, Heidelberg, and Vienna were in fact introduced to him, some such contacts have been proved beyond question. At Paris, in Walsingham's house, he was able to feel the atmosphere so familiar to Dousa and especially Rogers, even though Sidney's personal acquaintance with the poets of the ‘Pléiade’ is uncertain. Driven out of Paris by the Massacre3, Sidney travelled for about a year through Germany and Austria, spending some time at Johannes Sturm(ius)'s famous school in Strassburg4 where he renewed

his recent contact with the great printer Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne). This renowned humanist had followed Sidney from Heidelberg to Strassburg in order to see him and present a small autograph manuscript of Greek maxims, in anticipation of later dedications of scholarly productions from his own press.1 It was on this tour that Sidney began his famous friendship with Rogers' ‘old Burgundian friend’2 Hubert Languet. They first met either at Frankfort in the house of the printer Andreas Wechel3 - a scholars' rendezvous - or, more likely, in Vienna where Sidney spent part of the summer with him4 and other ex-pupils of Melanchthon like Carolus Clusius (Charles de L'Escluse), a future Leiden Professor of Botany5.

The untiring devotion of Languet, whose vast experience in matters of religion, diplomacy, and education remained at Sidney's disposal until his death in 1581, is too well-known to require any comment. In 1573 he wrote to Robert Beale, who was to be a travelling companion of his old refugee-friend Rogers and of Sidney, as follows:

We have with us an extraordinary young man, whom I greatly admire for his charming manners, his witty mind, and really a wisdom that generally exceeds what his age would lead one to expect. In one word, I think he is full-sail persuing virtue, and I tell you, happy the parents who gave birth to a son of such exceptional talents.1

These words can be paralleled by numerous similar statements - if not quite so parental as Languet's - from other learned gentlemen who with delighted astonishment were quick to appreciate Sidney's ‘exceptional talents’. The good-will engendered by his educational tour, was a benefit to all, both for the present and in the future: thus, for instance, he was ‘whithe Counte Lodovik the prince of Oronges seconde brother, whose honorable usage was’, says Sidney to Leicester, ‘suche towardes me, and suche good will he seemes to beare unto your Lordeshippe, that for wante of furdre habilitie, I can but wishe him, a prosperouse success’2. Sidney clearly attained far more than ‘the knowledge of foreign languages’ on this first tour abroad. He was appreciated by and became interested in the great yet intimate world of continental humanism, that of the diplomats who influenced his Protestant views, and the writers who initiated him in continental scholarship and poetry. The humanists saw in him the promise of realizing the ideal derived from their renaissance doctrine - and, more particularly, a Protestant, north-European doc-

trine - though it should be remembered that they enabled him to see this ideal.

In the summer of 1574 Sidney was in Italy, Rogers at Court, and Dousa besieged in Leiden. In October, when Leiden was liberated, Sidney returned to Austria for the remaining months of his Grand Tour1, while Daniel Rogers went with Sir William Winter to Antwerp on his first mission to the Netherlands.


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