The Lives of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson

Summary

Izaak Walton's Lives are short, affectionate biographies of English churchmen, written by a London tradesman and angler who loved the Church of England and the men who served it. The library text is the second volume of the Cassell's National Library edition of 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition with Austin Dobson's notes, and contains three of the five lives: Richard Hooker (first published 1665), George Herbert (1670) and Robert Sanderson (1678); the lives of Donne and Wotton belong to the first volume and are not included. The Life of Hooker opens with Walton's explanation that a friend he reverences asked him to write it and that he gathered his facts from the Cranmer family and others who had known Hooker. Walton follows Hooker from his birth at Heavitree near Exeter, through the patronage of Bishop John Jewel and his studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to an unhappy marriage arranged by his landlady, Mrs. Churchman, and the scene in which his pupils Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer find him tending sheep with Horace in his hand before he is called away to rock the cradle. As Master of the Temple he preaches against Walter Travers, so that the morning sermon speaks Canterbury and the afternoon Geneva; seeking quiet, he moves to Boscombe and then Bishopsbourne in Kent, writes The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and dies in 1600 meditating on the order of the angels. An appendix discusses the fate of his last books. The Life of Herbert traces the poet from his noble family at Montgomery and his mother Magdalen, through Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, his years as University Orator and his hopes of the court, to his turn toward holy orders after the deaths of his patrons. Married to Jane Danvers after a three-day acquaintance, he becomes rector of Bemerton near Salisbury in 1630, lies prostrate before the altar at his induction, reads prayers twice daily so that ploughmen pause at his bell, and helps a poor man reload his fallen horse on the way to music at Salisbury. Dying of consumption in 1633, he sends the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding. The Life of Sanderson, dedicated to George Morley, tells of the Rotherham-born scholar's bashfulness, his parish at Boothby Pagnell, his cases of conscience, his professorship at Oxford and ejection under Parliament, Walton's rainy meeting with him in Little Britain, the Savoy Conference, his preface to the 1662 Prayer Book, his last illness as Bishop of Lincoln, and his will.

Plot or Argument

• Life of Hooker: Introduction, youth and Oxford

  Walton explains his sources and his reluctance, then tells of Hooker's birth near Exeter, his early gravity, Bishop Jewel's help, his studies and tutoring at Corpus Christi College, and Jewel's loan of his horse, which turns out to be the walking-staff he carried through Germany, with ten groats for the road.

• Life of Hooker: Marriage, the Temple and the Laws

  Hooker's marriage to Joan Churchman and parsonage at Drayton-Beauchamp, the visit of his pupils, his appointment as Master of the Temple and the pulpit controversy with Walter Travers, his removal to Boscombe and Bishopsbourne, and the writing of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

• Life of Hooker: Last illness, death and appendix

  His long sickness after a cold, his care for his manuscripts when his house is robbed, his last conversation with Dr. Saravia, his death on 2 November 1600, and an appendix on the fate of the last three books and his family.

• Life of Herbert: Family, Cambridge and the court

  Herbert's birth at Montgomery, his mother's care and friendship with Donne, Westminster School and Trinity College, his election as University Orator, his court hopes under King James, and his illness and recovery at Woodford and Dauntsey.

• Life of Herbert: Marriage and Bemerton

  His marriage to Jane Danvers, his induction to Bemerton in 1630 and his vows at the altar, his twice-daily prayers, his teaching on the Prayer Book, his charity, his music at Salisbury and the story of the poor man's horse.

• Life of Herbert: Death and The Temple

  His decline from consumption, his message and manuscript sent to Nicholas Ferrar by Mr. Duncon, his last songs, his death in 1633, and his will; followed by a letter to Ferrar and notes on his works.

• Life of Sanderson: Dedication, preface and early life

  Walton dedicates the life to George Morley and explains his purpose, then tells of Sanderson's birth at Rotherham, his studies at Lincoln College, Oxford, his learning and memory, and his timidity in the pulpit.

• Life of Sanderson: Parson, professor and confessor

  His more than forty years as parson of Boothby Pagnell, his kindness to a flooded tenant, his cases of conscience, his appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity, his ejection in 1648, and Walton's rainy meeting with him near Little Britain.

• Life of Sanderson: Bishop and last days

  After the Restoration he becomes Bishop of Lincoln, takes part in the Savoy Conference, writes the preface to the revised Book of Common Prayer, and dies in 1663; Walton prints his will and letters from friends.

Characters

• Izaak Walton, author and narrator

  Devout, gentle biographer who knew Sanderson and gathered the others' stories from their friends.

• Richard Hooker, subject

  Patient and learned divine, author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

• John Jewel, patron

  Bishop of Salisbury who supports the young Hooker at Oxford.

• Walter Travers, opponent

  Presbyterian lecturer at the Temple whose sermons answer Hooker's.

• Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, pupils

  Hooker's former Oxford pupils who visit him at Drayton-Beauchamp.

• Adrian Saravia, friend

  Canterbury prebendary who gives Hooker the sacrament before his death.

• George Herbert, subject

  Poet, University Orator and country parson of Bemerton.

• Magdalen Herbert, mother

  Herbert's widowed mother, a friend of John Donne.

• Jane Danvers, wife

  Herbert's wife, a kinswoman of the Earl of Danby.

• Arthur Woodnot, friend

  Herbert's companion at his induction and his deathbed.

• Nicholas Ferrar, friend

  Head of the household of prayer at Little Gidding who receives The Temple.

• Robert Sanderson, subject

  Casuist, Oxford professor and Bishop of Lincoln, shy in the pulpit.

• George Morley, dedicatee

  Bishop of Winchester and Walton's friend, to whom the Sanderson life is dedicated.

Lessons

• Patience in a narrow lot

  Walton's Hooker accepts a poor parish and a difficult household without complaint, and his pupils find him minding sheep with a book of Horace in his hand. Walton presents patience as a quiet strength that let Hooker write his great defence of the Church amid daily cares. Readers should know that later scholars have questioned Walton's portrait of Hooker's wife and marriage.

  • What do Sandys and Cranmer find when they visit their old tutor?
  • How does Walton explain, in terms of Providence, the hardships of Hooker's marriage?
  • Why might a biographer who did not know his subject rely on family memories, and what are the risks?

• Turning from ambition to service

  Herbert hoped for advancement at court, but after his patrons died he took holy orders and became a country parson. On the night of his induction at Bemerton he tells Woodnot that he now sees the court as empty and finds fulness of joy in God's service. Walton shows a gifted man choosing a small place and filling it well.

  • What did Herbert hope for as University Orator, and what ended those hopes?
  • What does Woodnot see through the church window at the induction?
  • Is it a loss or a gain when a brilliant person chooses an obscure post?

• Mercy in small things

  Herbert stops on the road to Salisbury to help a poor man reload his fallen horse, arrives soiled among his musical friends, and says the deed will be music to him at midnight. Sanderson goes himself to a hard landlord on behalf of a tenant whose hay was swept away by a flood. Walton's lives teach that holiness shows itself in ordinary acts of help.

  • Why do Herbert's friends think he has disparaged himself?
  • How does Herbert connect his prayers with his actions?
  • What does Sanderson do for the tenant, and what does it cost him?

• Conscience and order in a divided church

  All three lives are set in the long contest over the shape of the English Church: Hooker against Travers at the Temple, Herbert defending the Prayer Book in his parish, and Sanderson ejected from Oxford and later working on the 1662 Prayer Book. Walton writes as a loyal churchman and admirer; his opponents appear chiefly through his eyes. The lives show how men of conscience on each side argued about worship and church government.

  • What did Travers hope to establish at the Temple, and how did Hooker answer him?
  • Why does Sanderson, in the Little Britain conversation, defend the Collects of the Prayer Book?
  • How should a reader weigh a biographer's sympathies when he describes a controversy?

Context

The three lives span about a century of English church history, from the Elizabethan settlement through the Civil War, the Commonwealth's abolition of the Prayer Book and episcopacy, and the Restoration of 1660. Hooker defended the Elizabethan Church against Puritan and Presbyterian critics; Herbert served as a parish priest under Charles I; Sanderson lost his Oxford chair under Parliament and became a bishop after the Restoration. Walton wrote the lives in the 1660s and 1670s, when the restored Church of England was re-establishing itself and nonconformists such as John Bunyan were being prosecuted, and his portraits offered models of the learned, humble and loyal clergyman.

Composition

The Life of Hooker was written at the request of Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, and published in 1665, partly to correct an earlier account by John Gauden. The Life of Herbert appeared in 1670, when Walton also collected his first four lives in one volume; the Life of Sanderson followed in 1678. Walton revised the lives in successive editions. The library text (Project Gutenberg #13139) is Volume Two of the Cassell's National Library edition, dated 9 August 1898, based on John Major's 1825 edition of the text of 1675 and annotated by Austin Dobson; it contains the lives of Hooker, Herbert and Sanderson with their appendices, letters and notes.

Reception

Walton's Lives have been admired since the seventeenth century for their gentle tone and portrait of holy living, and Samuel Johnson planned an edition of them. Wordsworth praised them in a sonnet in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Modern scholars treat them as affectionate idealizations rather than critical biographies: C. J. Sisson's The Judicious Marriage of Mr Hooker (1940) argued from legal records that Walton's picture of Hooker's wife and family was unfair, and others have noted Walton's habit of inventing speeches. They remain the main early source for Herbert's life.

Comparisons

• grace-abounding

  Bunyan wrote his spiritual autobiography in Bedford jail in the same years Walton was writing these lives; the Baptist preacher imprisoned for refusing to conform and Walton's loyal churchmen show two sides of Restoration religion, each in its own words.

• donne-sermons-and-devotions

  Donne, Walton's own pastor, was a friend of Herbert's mother Magdalen; his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions give a first-person record of serious illness to set beside Walton's accounts of Hooker's and Herbert's last sicknesses.

• vasari-lives-of-the-artists

  Both are collections of lives written to rescue admired men from forgetfulness and both mix fact with remembered anecdote; Vasari celebrates artistic skill, Walton holiness and quiet learning.

• plutarch-lives

  Plutarch's moral portraits are the classical model for biography that teaches by example; Walton's lives likewise select scenes, such as Herbert and the poor man's horse, to show character.

• boswell-life-of-johnson

  Johnson admired Walton's Lives; Boswell's long, documented life shows how biography later moved from Walton's brief devotional portraits toward detailed record.

• practice-of-the-presence-of-god

  Brother Lawrence and Walton's Herbert, near-contemporaries, both find God in ordinary duties, the kitchen at the Paris Carmel and the parish round at Bemerton.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How Walton tells the reader where his information came from in each Introduction or Preface.
• The visit of Sandys and Cranmer to Hooker at Drayton-Beauchamp and what it shows of his patience.
• Herbert's induction at Bemerton, when Woodnot sees him prostrate before the altar.
• The story of the poor man's horse on the road to Salisbury and Herbert's answer to his friends.
• The rainy meeting between Walton and Sanderson near Little Britain, the one scene Walton witnessed himself.

Key terms and names

The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

Hooker's defence of the order and worship of the Elizabethan Church of England against Presbyterian critics; Books I-IV appeared in 1593 and Book V in 1597.

Master of the Temple

The clergyman in charge of the Temple Church in London, which served the lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temple; Hooker held the post from 1585.

Presbyterian discipline

Church government by elders rather than bishops, which Travers and Cartwright hoped to set up in England.

University Orator

The Cambridge officer who wrote and spoke for the University on public occasions, an office Herbert held.

Induction

The ceremony installing a priest in his parish, at which he tolls the church bell; Herbert stays long alone in Bemerton church at his.

Little Gidding

Nicholas Ferrar's household of prayer in Huntingdonshire, to which Herbert sends The Temple.

Cases of conscience

Careful moral judgments on particular hard cases, for which Sanderson was famous.

Savoy Conference

The 1661 meeting at the Savoy in London between bishops and Presbyterian divines over revising the Prayer Book, in which Sanderson took part.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How did Hooker come to be Master of the Temple, and what happened between him and Walter Travers?
2. Comprehension What did Herbert do at his induction to Bemerton, and what did he say to Woodnot afterward?
3. Comprehension Why did Sanderson read his sermons instead of preaching them from memory?
4. Interpretation Why does Walton compare Hooker tending sheep to humble and innocent Abel?
5. Interpretation What does Herbert mean when he says The Temple shows the spiritual conflicts between God and his soul?
6. Interpretation How does Walton's own presence in the Little Britain scene change the feel of the Life of Sanderson?
7. Big Question Should a biography of a good man aim chiefly to inspire or chiefly to record every fact, even unflattering ones?
8. Big Question Is quiet faithfulness in a small place as great an achievement as public fame?

Faith Connections

• Luke 10:30-37 (Scripture)

  Walton calls Herbert like the Good Samaritan when he helps the poor man with his fallen horse and pays for their refreshment.

• 1 Peter 5:2-3 (Scripture)

  Peter tells elders to feed the flock willingly and be examples to it. Herbert's daily prayers at Bemerton and Sanderson's care for his Boothby Pagnell parishioners are Walton's pictures of such shepherds.

• George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson (Great Conversation)

  Herbert's own handbook of pastoral duties, published after his death, describes the parson Walton shows him being: praying, catechizing, visiting the sick and keeping charity.

• Book of Common Prayer (1662), Preface (Great Conversation)

  Sanderson wrote the preface beginning It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, defending a middle way between rigid fixity and constant change in worship, the cause all three of Walton's subjects served.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A good life is best taught by example. Hooker, Herbert and Sanderson each combined learning with humility, patience in affliction and loyalty to the Church. Therefore recording their lives, even in small domestic scenes, preserves models of holy living that readers can imitate and honours men whom the world might forget.

Rhetorical device: exemplum. Walton teaches through small illustrative scenes, such as Hooker with Horace among the sheep and Herbert helping the poor man's horse on the Salisbury road.

Debate: Resolved: that Walton's idealizing portraits are more valuable to readers than a strictly critical biography of the same men would be.

Memory Work

the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight

a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master: in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Walton writes three lives of clergymen with different gifts: Hooker the scholar, Herbert the poet and Sanderson the casuist. Argue what single ideal of the Christian minister unites them in Walton's eyes.

Comparison with Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: Compare Walton's portraits of loyal Church of England clergy with Bunyan's account of his own life as an imprisoned nonconformist preacher. How does each writer understand faithfulness to conscience?

Medical Lens

Walton's lives contain several seventeenth-century sickbed and deathbed accounts. Hooker falls into a long sickness after a cold taken on the Thames about 1600, suffers thoughtful days and restless nights, loses his appetite and seems to live on the smell of food in his last weeks. Herbert is described as having a body apt to consumption and fevers; about 1629 he treats a quotidian ague himself at Woodford by a strict diet of salted meat and little drink, which Walton says removed the ague but left rheums, other weaknesses and a supposed consumption, of which he died in 1633. These accounts reflect contemporary lay medicine: change of air, dietary regimen and self-treatment. The lives also record the pastoral visitation of the sick by Hooker and Herbert. Sanderson's invincible bashfulness, which made his memory useless in the pulpit, is a period description of what might now be called performance anxiety; such a reading is retrospective. Walton's deathbeds follow the pattern of the holy death, in which patience, prayer and the sacrament are the chief remedies.

• Life of Hooker, last illness

  Hooker's long sickness after a cold, his restless nights, his loss of appetite and his final conversation with Saravia.

  Death Dying Starvation Nutrition
• Life of Herbert, at Woodford

  Herbert's quotidian ague, his self-prescribed diet, and the supposed consumption that followed.

  Fever Infection Tuberculosis Consumption
• Life of Herbert, last weeks

  His decline at Bemerton, the visits of clergy, and his deathbed reflections and songs.

  Tuberculosis Consumption Death Dying
• Life of Hooker, parish duties

  Hooker's diligence in enquiring after and visiting the sick of his parish.

  Nursing Caregiving
• Life of Sanderson, pulpit

  His fear and bashfulness, which forced him to read rather than preach his sermons.

  Neurosis Anxiety

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the conversation between Herbert and his musical friends at Salisbury on the evening he arrived soiled from helping the poor man's horse.

• Classroom

  Read three poems from Herbert's The Temple, such as The Collar, Love (III) and The Pulley, and connect each to an episode in Walton's life of Herbert.

• Essay

  Walton never met Hooker or Herbert but knew Sanderson. Compare how he gathers and presents evidence in the three lives, and argue which portrait is most convincing.

• Dialogue

  Imagine the rainy hour in which Walton and Sanderson shelter near Little Britain, and write their conversation about prayer and the Prayer Book.

Further Reading

• The Temple, George Herbert

• Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker

• The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton

• The Judicious Marriage of Mr Hooker and the Birth of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, C. J. Sisson

• Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, John Drury