Early life , London Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was married to Elizabeth Heywood. He was of Welsh descent and a warden of the
Ironmongers Company in the
City of London. He avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of religious persecution. Upon discovery, this wedding ruined Donne's career, getting him dismissed and put in
Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest
Samuel Brooke, who married them, and his brother Christopher, who stood in, in the absence of George More, to give Anne away. Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name:
John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's
dowry. After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in
Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they lived until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in
Mitcham, Surrey, where he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year. Though he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to
Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity. Anne gave birth to twelve children in sixteen years of marriage, including two
stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child. The ten surviving children were Constance,
John,
George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patron
Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret and Elizabeth. Three, Francis, Nicholas and Mary, died before they were ten. In a state of despair that almost drove him to kill himself, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote but did not publish
Biathanatos, his defence of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his
17th Holy Sonnet.
Career and later life In 1602, Donne was elected as a member of parliament (MP) for the
constituency of Brackley, but the post was not a paid position. Queen
Elizabeth I died in 1603, being succeeded by King
James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave Donne a means to seek
patronage. Many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially for MP
Sir Robert Drury of
Hawsted (1575–1615), whom he met in 1610 and who became his chief patron, furnishing him and his family an apartment in his large house in
Drury Lane. In 1610 and 1611, Donne wrote two
anti-Catholic polemics:
Pseudo-Martyr and
Ignatius His Conclave for Morton. He then wrote two Anniversaries,
An Anatomy of the World (1611) and
Of the Progress of the Soul Although King James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders. At length, Donne acceded to the king's wishes, and in 1615 was an ordained priest in the
Church of England. In 1615, Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from
Cambridge University. He became a
Royal Chaplain in the same year. He became a reader of divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616, where he served in the chapel as minister until 1622. Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in
old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him by
Nicholas Stone was erected with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. The memorial was one of the few to survive the
Great Fire of London in 1666 and is now in
St Paul's Cathedral. The statue was said by Izaac Walton in his biography, to have been modelled from the life by Donne to suggest his appearance at the resurrection. It started a vogue of such monuments during the 17th century. In 2012, a
bust of the poet by Nigel Boonham was unveiled outside in the cathedral churchyard. ==Writings==