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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Life of Herbert, at Woodford

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

• Life of Herbert, last weeks

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

• Life of Hooker, parish duties

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

• Life of Sanderson, pulpit

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