Samuel Daniel's gifts of books to Lord Chancellor Egerton.(Articles)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-05

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THIS is an article about twelve rare books. Eleven of these books are in the Huntington Library in California and one of them is in the Beinecke Library at Yale. (1) The books, containing poems, plays, and histories written by the poet Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), arrived in the United States late in 1917. Daniel's books were a small part of the famous Bridgewater Library purchased from the Earl of Ellesmere for a million dollars by Henry E. Huntington who made it the cornerstone of his new library in San Marino in Southern California. (2) Some of the treasures of the Bridgewater collection--the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales for instance--far exceed this small set of books in importance, but there are nevertheless good reasons why we should examine the books closely. For one thing, they point to a sustained connection between Daniel and Sir Thomas Egerton--the founder of what became the Bridgewater Library--over a period of fifteen to twenty years; for another, they show how carefully Daniel chose to present his poems and histories to Egerton, at the appropriate moment and in the proper format.

Scholars have known for two centuries and more that Sir Thomas Egerton (1540-1617) was one of Daniel's patrons. (3) The important verse epistle that Daniel addressed to Egerton in print in 1603 implies as much. The starting point of this austere and impressive poem is the confused condition of civil law at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Egerton is the officer of state entrusted by the monarch with the job of protecting people from the delays, wrangling, and over severity of the law courts. He has been chosen, Daniel tells him, to preserve the "sanctuarie" to which (lines 122-24)

Th'opprest might flie, this seate of Equitie Whereon thy virtues sit with faire renowne, The greatest grace and glory of the Gowne. (4)

One measure of Daniel's high standing with Egerton is that he is able to write to him so openly in these terms, and to express his own opinions. Daniel's views on equity, perhaps informed by passages from Aristotle's Ethics, were not out of line with Egerton's, (5) but the poem has some straight-talking passages in it about harsh law and corrupt lawyers. It is inconceivable that Daniel could have written like this unless he was already, in some sense, a client of Egerton's. The poem was published early in May 1603, at the head of a folio collection of six verse epistles Daniel had written to other members of the Jacobean court elite (Lord Henry Howard, Lucy, Countess of Bedford and so forth). (6) In this folio, the epistle to Egerton is placed immediately after the Panegyric Congratulatory that Daniel wrote to King James at his accession (he presented the poem to the king in an autograph manuscript on 23 April). The title Daniel uses to address Egerton at the outset of the epistle, "Lord Keeper of the Great Seale of England," is another indication of a degree of familiarity between them. Egerton, who been had Lord Keeper since May 1596, gave over this office in June 1603 when he was appointed Lord Chancellor, (7) but in the epistle, at least a month earlier, Daniel is already addressing him as the "Great Minister of Justice" who sits in the court of equity (the reference to the "seate" in the lines above is probably an allusion to the woolsack, the symbol of the Lord Chancellor's position). Daniel was only a minor player on the fringe of the court set that was bringing in the new king, but he was close enough to the Egerton circle to know, weeks or months before it was made public, that the Lord Keeper was due to be made Lord Chancellor.

The image Daniel used to describe Egerton's new office confirms that the connection between them was not a distant one. The poem opens with King James's "powreful hand of Majestie" setting Egerton in "th'aidfulst roome of dignitie" (that is, giving him the office in which he could be of most help):

As th'Isthmus, these two Oceans to divide Of Rigor and confus'd Uncertaintie, To keepe out th'entercourse of wrong and pride, That they ingulph not up unsuccoured right By th'extreame current of licentious might. (8)

Daniel made this striking comparison out of well-known lines early in the first book of Lucan's De Bello Civili. For a brief time, Lucan writes, the triumvir Crassus kept Pompey and Julius Caesar at peace, despite them wanting to make war on each other. He was like a strip of land between two raging seas (I.99-103):

Nam sola futuri Crassus erat bella medius mora. Qualiter undas Qui secat et geminum gracilis mare separate Isthmos Nec patitur conferre fretum, si terra recedat, Ionium Aegaeo frangat mare. (9)

This wasn't the first time Daniel had drawn on this passage in Lucan, and his return to it for the Egerton epistle was, most likely, deliberate. In Book 4 of the 1595 Civil Wars, his epic poem on the wars of the barons, Daniel had described how the murder of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had removed the only man (like Crassus in Lucan) who was preventing a civil war. With Gloucester's death, the flow towards war in medieval England became an unstoppable torrent, and the full force of mischief began (IV.91.6-8):

T'a vniuersall ruine to extend, That Isthmus failing which the land did kepe From the intire possession of the deepe. (10)

This time the isthmus is Gloucester, the great Lord Protector whom Daniel praises in earlier stanzas for--in this respect he is like Egerton--observing strictly "due forme of Iustice towards euery wight" (IV.78.1-2).

The evidence that in 1603 Daniel was consciously recalling lines in a poem he had published in 1595 comes in a private letter he wrote to Egerton in or around 1602. In this, Daniel thanks the Lord Keeper (his title at the head of the letter) for, in some unspecified way, assisting his brother. "Amongst all the great workes of your worthynes," Daniel tells Egerton at the start of the letter,

it will not be the least that yow have donne for me, in the preferment of my brother, with whome yet now sometimes, I may eat whilst I write, and so go on with the worke I have in hand, which, god knowes, had long since bene ended, and your Honour had had that which in my harte I have prepared for yow, could I have but sustayned myself and made truce within, and peace with the world. (11)

Daniel sent this letter to Egerton attached to a presentation copy of his 1601 Works folio, one of the Huntington rare books to be examined in a moment. When he refers to the "workes" of "worthynes" that Egerton has done for him (presumably small gifts of money or speaking on his behalf to others or perhaps loaning or buying him foreign books), (12) Daniel obviously intends a parallel with his own Works: the moral is, good works by patrons draw good works from poets. The particular help Egerton has given Daniel in this case is the "preferment" of his younger brother, John, who at this date was an undergraduate studying music at Christ Church in Oxford, where he graduated in 1603. John went on to write some of the best lute music of the age--in achievement not far behind Dowland so the musicologists tell us--and it is no surprise that Egerton, who was fond of music, was prepared to help a talented Oxford student whose brother was a leading poet. (13) What this preferment of John amounted to is not clear. Daniel almost certainly wrote the letter in London (see below) where, because of Egerton's kindness, he and John were now able to dine together occasionally. Perhaps Egerton found John a temporary (or vacation) job with someone at court who needed a music tutor for their children, or who simply wanted musical entertainment from an accomplished player. Whatever the explanation, John doesn't seem to have received any further help from Egerton, at least (as we shall see) as a composer or music teacher.

The letter, which begins as a thank you note, quickly becomes an apology. It appears that Daniel is working on two distinct pieces--poems we must assume--the first an unfinished work, which should have been completed long before, and the second something he has planned (or perhaps promised) to write for Egerton but which he hasn't started yet. A little later in the letter we learn that the unfinished work is the Civil Wars, six books of which Daniel had completed in the 1601 Works folio, but which left him no more than half way through the projected history. We cannot know for sure what the second piece was--at this stage perhaps no more than an idea or rough notes--but there is a good chance that it emerged, a year or so later, as the 1603 verse epistle to Egerton. (14)

If we accept this, it becomes possible to offer a plausible scenario for the exchanges between Daniel and Egerton in this period of 1602-3. At the end of the 1590s Daniel had been acknowledged in public, on the strength of the Civil Wars, as the "English Lucan," as well as Spenser's successor. (15) He was already familiar with several of the top people at court--Lord Mountjoy was his chief patron, and through him there were connections with the Earl of Essex--but he had doubts about whether he should carry on writing, and whether he could afford to (in the letter he speaks of needing to sustain himself and to make "truce within, and peace with the world"). (16) Egerton had done him some favours, but evidently these didn't include giving him a regular income, since he had been forced to become a tutor, "constrained to live with Children" is how he puts it. One of his pupils was Lady Anne Clifford, a demanding and self-willed young aristocrat (she was twelve in 1602) who must have taxed his patience and taken up a large amount of time. (17) Daniel had few if any other options, however, since by 1600 Mountjoy was out of the country, serving as Lord Deputy in Ireland, and Essex was in too confused and perilous a state to be of any help to him. How Daniel made contact with Egerton, and exactly when, is discussed below, but certainly by the date...

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