The Sermon

by Brian Howell

[Includes some direct C17 quotation from an actual sermon with non-standardised English such as 'then' for 'than'.]

When they arrived in the city on the tenth of June, 1619¹, Doncaster made no pretence of haste over arrangements concerning Princess Elizabeth, Electress of Bohemia. They and their enormous train would find plenty of inns to accommodate them, even if in rather scattered fashion.

From where they rested their horses down in the city, looking up at the reticule of windows presented by the magnificent Castle, Donne could not put from his mind the image of the multi-lensed eye of a bee, perhaps, indeed, of a queen bee.

It was a question of protocol. If Doncaster lodged at the Castle, even with the Elector temporarily away, precedence would be conceded to Elizabeth. This in turn would compromise Doncaster's efforts on behalf of her father James to gauge the temperature of feelings towards the new Emperor Ferdinand's policies regarding the Protestants.

Donne did not relish the thought of starting out on an unharmonious note. The sermon he would give to Elizabeth and Frederick was of more importance to him than he would have been comfortable admitting to Doncaster. The Electress knew his poems and had collected a number of them in manuscript through various wiles, and in so doing, Donne had concluded as a result of his correspondence with Huygens and Carleton, she had formed an impression of him that was closer to an older—and younger—Donne.

It could not be said that she was irreligious. And it could certainly not be claimed that he was in any way a libertine. His office, if nothing else—though there was much else—precluded even the suspicion. Yet he wondered if her image of him was nevertheless that of a curious creature carcerated in amber: turning such an object might change the angle and intensity of light, and indeed show a different facet, it was true, but the object itself would not in principle change its being; in fact, not one molecule would change.

This said, the preacher had no wish to be confined in the city, pretty as it was and so near the Neckar. Rather, he wanted to climb the hill to that observant castle, feel the touch of the forest floor on the slopes, and most especially to explore De Caus's famous and nearly-completed gardens. There was also the matter of a world-renowned library, though part of that could be savoured in the town. From what he had heard—and the to-and-fro of letters between kings, princes, and dukes would not let him forget it—the dawning conflict between religions should be headed off at the very least for the damage it would do to this wondrous place alone. Now, barely installed half a day in their inn, whose owner had assaulted him for half an hour with stories of Elizabeth's arrival in Heidelberg six years earlier, detailing every stoppage of her progress to her husband's seat, which the innkeeper could not possibly have lived through himself, Donne was becoming restless, not to say hungry.

He was determined to walk somewhere, if not to the Castle, then at least to survey the lower reaches of the hill on which it sat. But before he could do so, he heard a knock at the door. It was Doncaster, looking sheepish, indeed far from his customarily imperious self, though he was tricked out as elegantly as the recent death of Elizabeth's mother would allow him.

'You will get your wish, John.'

'Oh, how so?' Donne inquired.

Doncaster laughed.

'She has banned all inns and markets from serving us. Can you imagine?'

Perhaps there was some irony in this, Donne thought, trying hard to disguise a smirk. Doncaster, who was as famous for his double suppers as for his ability to mediate and report to James, would find himself at the mercy of Elizabeth's cook, unable even to buy the food to abet him in any expensive culinary venture on behalf of the princess.

Elizabeth's action could only mean one thing: she was insisting they all stay at the Castle, and with this Doncaster could hardly be held responsible for handing over precedence. Now, the only question was how he could extricate himself from this faux pas—unless he were to be sent a second invitation.

Yet, Donne thought, nothing had been said and nothing needed to be said.

'We are expected and indeed have the right,' he told Doncaster, 'to draw up there with our train. We need merely to send a messenger ahead.'

'It is true,' he conceded. 'This is quite enough.'

At this, Donne sighed and turned back to his room to collect the small black box containing his manuscripts—it was the only personal possession besides his clothes he would not entrust to his page.

Yes, Donne thought, internally echoing Doncaster's words, he would get his chance, at last, but was he prepared and would he be given enough peace and solitude to finish what he was writing? In truth, he held two thirds, if not more, of his sermon in his head, and he had deliberated many months over what failure might mean. Visions had come at night while he lay fixed to his mattress as if on a wrack, half awake but unable to stir a limb: hellish visions of charnel houses, people flayed, children thrown onto pyres. Such images had started with that first and last ghostly visitation of Anne when she had died in childbed whilst he was in France. One vision was of a house of death that was at the same time the World, and yet outside this house wandered naked figures of great repose and contentment, hand in hand, as in the Garden. Was it heresy to travel mentally from one locus to another, the two in such propinquity?

The journey up the hill took an intolerably long time, with such a vast train consisting of more than twenty-five carriages in all. Had it not been for ceremony and duty, Donne would have got out of his carriage and walked up through the forest. But what sight would that have presented? In his long black gown and sandals, he would, emerging in some clearing, have been taken either for a common peasant, a revenant, or—to the less sharp-eyed or eager hunter—a stag. Yet was the thought of being carried the rest of the distance with an arrow in his side to be greeted by a tearful Elizabeth so terrible? Should such a simple solution torture one so much who he had already debated the idea of suicide so cleverly and in such depth?

Mercifully or not, that was not to be, because they were eventually greeted by Elizabeth herself, who mentioned that she had been entertaining the most unexpected but thrilling guests in the form of a curious philosopher called Cornelis Drebbel and a Dutch painter he had probably not heard of going by the curious name of Jan Torrentius, both Dutch. 'He will paint my portrait at some stage, I hope,' she added, almost the young and excited bride she had been proceeding through the streets of London not so long ago. 'And of course, if that is not distraction enough, our worthy De Caus is here and hard at work on the final stages of the gardens.'

Here, Donne had to wonder. He had heard of De Caus's famous designs, knowing of his work in England for the late Prince Henry, Elizabeth's devoted older brother. He remembered the detail and precision of the plans and, above all, both their uniformity and their contradiction: the two axes that made an L, how the one axis proceeded in a regular pattern that reminded one of the rhyming of verse, and yet that spanned an octave, and the other which symbolised in complicated ways a succession of numbers from one to nine. The former symbolised the universal and the natural, while the latter represented the path of history. This much he knew from De Caus, yet one might have expected the former to be anything but regular and the latter to be simpler in allowing one to detect its sequence of numbers. Instead one had to decipher the numbers through many clues.

'My husband sends his contritest apologies; he is detained at Heilbronn with the princes,' she said, principally to Doncaster. 'But we will have diversion enough till his return.'

Diversion, thought Donne, is hardly what we have time for. Strange, too, that Elizabeth had made no concession herself to the predominance of mourning dress in Doncaster's entourage, donned out of respect for her mother's death some little time before they had left for Germany.

'How was your meeting with the Archduke in Brussels?'

'Fine, Madame,' Doncaster said without any self-consciousness.

'Come, come, my Lord. My spies tell me you were made to stand. . .'

'Ah, a trifle, Madame, I would stand a year for your dear self, a hundred. . .'

'You have the boldness of our heroic but besotted Christian, my Lord.'

'Of Brunswick? I am honoured, Madame. He is a fine warrior.'

Donne and Doncaster knew that the embarrassing episode at Mariemont with Archduke Albert was simply a rebuke to James for the latter's own action towards Albert's ambassador on his visit to England.

'Please accept His Majesty's and our condolences on the decease of Madame's mother, the gracious Anne,' Doncaster brought out suddenly; Donne was unsure if this was a genuine non sequitur or an attempt to divert the conversation away from the subject of Albert and Ferdinand. Elizabeth was not known for her patience in discussing politics, yet neither was she shy to engage in such when necessary; he decided that Doncaster did not deem it appropriate to go into too great detail about their progress before Frederick's arrival.



'And your sermon will be on which text?' Elizabeth asked at supper that first evening.

'On Salvation, Madame,' Donne replied.

'Well, that is a serious subject for times such as these, is it not?' she said, surprising her guests with her irreverence.

'Time is the essence of it, Madame. We have hope that your husband and all his supporters and the Protestant cause will thrive, but we cannot know that the present time, the now, will continue the same as before, can we? Who is to say that the Lord will not show himself tomorrow? Where will we all stand when that day comes?'

Elizabeth, with her monkey, Jacko, a present from Carleton, running up and over her lap and around her chair in unceasing circles, stared at the preacher's heavy-lidded eyes and was disturbed to see no irony, no sign of the double meanings she was so used to in his verse.

Doncaster, who was as ill-disposed as Elizabeth to gloomy talk of this nature over the dinner table, interjected with the story of a Dutch innkeeper whom he had recompensed with all his expenses, though the embassy had not so much as passed outside the innkeeper's establishment. Donne had heard the anecdote several times already and had been astonished at his lordship's extravagance. He was hearing Elizabeth's intermittent comments but soon he was not listening. The eyes that he was looking into were James's long-lashed women's eyes and now the words falling out of those tightly-pursed lips like pieces of timber down a rapid were James's too. And James's words were his salvation because those words were pushing him towards holy office. Without such encouragement where would he be now?



Blankness now. When he awoke he had no conception of where he was. The disorientation only lasted a few moments but, rescued from the edge of the cliff of dawning forgetfulness, was the image of a drowning horse in the ocean. Had he once been marooned and forgotten about it? No, but becalmed at sea, for days, yes. As washes of memory splashed lightly against the sides of his consciouness, he remembered more, so that the blankness was separated from real memory and the memory joined the life he was part of now, as he now recalled, in the Castle. But if there had been a calm, when had the storm taken place and where? By one of those tricks of perception when dream is snatched back into life, like a mother grasping her baby's hand from certain death down a rocky defile, the movement of that dream, the sensation of being on a ship, on water, inveigled its way into him and he felt the bed move. Then, just as suddenly, a woman was mounting him, her haunches holding his thighs down. Oh sharp North, sadly declining West!

Ashamed, he awoke to the touch of a cold cloth against his forehead, pressed with the urging insistence of a cat's forepaws.

It was Elizabeth, unattended, holding a bowl of cold water, into which she dipped the cloth from time to time.

He thought he saw a breast being quickly covered, then drifted back into half-consciousness. Fragments now fell out of the sky, lines of poems, words, favourite knick-knacks from childhood, his own children's toys, measuring instruments of all kinds, telescopes, compasses, they all fell on him as if in rebuke.

'I did not know you to be so ill, dear John,' she said. 'I was, even before our departure, but it relented. And I did not wish to miss this opportunity. . .'

'Rest' was her sole reply before exiting the room, leaving him to wonder if her intervention and his excitement had been solely the issue of his feverish mind. Then he heard the words:

Sleepe is pains easiest salve, and doth fulfil
All offices of death, except to kill.

But by whom they were said he did not know.



Yet once more in the night he awoke. Rising suddenly, aware of the moonlight, he went to the window and was shocked to see the gardens well-lit, as if by lines of small stars specially constellated for this purpose. They outlined the different shapes and paths, the squares, circles, arcs, and floral patterns; so many intriguing geometric shapes that he had heard report of. It was all on display now, as if for him alone - if he was not dreaming. He could see figures moving, perhaps Elizabeth with a servant, and at least two more. Surely Doncaster had not decided to institute a midnight supper, a bizarre event to complement the intricacies of the gardens, or, worse than this, he feared, to upstage Elizabeth?

By interminable flights of stairs and many winding passages, his progress not helped by the cassock that overlapped his sandalled feet, then paths, he finally found himself in the gardens, shivering, though curiosity placed a warmer blanket around him than the thickest robe might ever have done. He walked down the central series of parterres where he had seen Elizabeth and her companions, starting with the parterre with an octagonal fountain at its centre, a cube surmounted by an imitation of a rocky scene adorned on its sides with lions' heads. He thought he heard a voice whispering 'the rhyme AABAABAA', then the long aspiration of an 'Ah', but wondered if he was still feverish. But then he heard 'universal. . .before the Fall', and noticed several torches moving ahead of him, then turning left.

He hurried now till he reached the parterre from which the figures had turned. This parterre also had at its centre an octagonal shape, though it bore a column with on it the Reichsapfel, or Imperial orb. This parterre was the axis for the second series of parterres that, he knew, led out from the castle, though in parallel to it, to the pavilion to give directly on to the Neckar. Then he saw her, Elizabeth, in what seemed an involved discussion with two men, one a little older than the other, the former of perhaps forty-five years or so. They seemed to be scrutinising the layout of the gardens. He tried to get closer but they were moving too fast for him. Before he retreated he heard a significant word come from the older man, whom he now recognised as Salomon de Caus. It was the word 'salvation'.

'For now is our salvation nearer then when we believed'. The words of the text Donne had chosen for the sermon had taken Elizabeth aback. The preacher argued that they, above those of all other religions, that is those of the Reformed Church, would come into the kingdom of heaven as they were in their various ways closer to grace than those of any other, whether they be Jews or Roman Catholics. She would not claim to understand every stage of this long, complicated sermon, but there were many impressive, if terrifying, images along the way. She remembered particularly that of God's House, of those who lived outside his house and who sometimes achieved salvation, and then those who lived in his house, above and below stairs, of how those below were enviable because they were becoming closer to God all the time, and who were in her opinion more enviable than those who were above stairs and already possessed salvation.

And yet she did not want to see so far into the future, despite Donne's claim that there was no difference between past, present and future. Indeed, she was dreaming of a future life with Frederick, who was sitting now beside her, whether she were to be Queen of Britain or indeed the consort of the Holy Roman Emperor. As the preacher's words darkened, something resisted, lines from his poem suggested themselves: Thine age asks ease. . . Shine here to us, and thou art every where. And to have his words shine on them now was all she asked, to push back those darker Protestant thoughts of the house of one's final days where they would come to rest and walk into God's kingdom. Donne perorated:

'. . .Before the grinders cease, because they are few, and they wax dark, that look out at the windows, before thou go to the house of thine age, and the mourners go about in the streets, prepare thy self by casting off thy sins, and all that is gotten by thy sins: for, as the plague is got as soon in linings, as in the outside of a garment, salvation is lost, as far, by retaining ill gotten goods, as by ill getting; forget not thy past sins so far, as not to repent them, but remember not thy repented sins so far, as to delight in remembering them, or to doubt that God hath not fully forgiven them; and whether God have brought this salvation near thee, by sickness, or by age, or by general dangers, put off the consideration of the incomodities of that age, or that sickness, and that danger, and fill thy self with the consideration of the nearness of thy salvation, which that age, and sickness, and danger, minister to thee: that so, when the best Instrument, and the best song shall meet together, thy bell shall towl, and thy soul shall hear that voice, Ecce salvator, behold thy Saviour cometh, thou maist bear a part, and chearfully make up that musick, with a veni Domine Jesu, Come Lord Jesu, come quickly, come now.'²

No, she would take the wafer from him soon and drink the blood of Christ and they would walk out in the Garden, lose themselves in the intricacies of De Caus's handiwork, walk from the original Garden into history, into a future reformed, from which they would survey the distance, the sun rising, into a world of love.

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