Part one Daniel Rogers

I Early experiences

Dousa designed the University of Leiden as an enterprise which would open up new perspectives for the northern Provinces. But the publication of his Nova poemata implied an appeal beyond the national boundaries. Significantly, the book already included one reaction from abroad. It is the earliest specimen of a foreign literary interest in the University, a Latin poem written at Leiden on 26 April 1575, not more than three months after the foundation day.

The author, who appears to have been familiar with the town's disputed nomenclature - ‘Leiden’ or ‘Lugdunum Batavorum’ - and who does not fail to comment on the ‘market places tidy like your houses’, undoubtedly knew what he was talking about. For he saw the opening of the University as ‘a chorus of Muses entering while Mars still rages’, and appropriately concluded with the crucial question:

Who would not approve of a war which moves you, Leiden, to favour the Muses and purity of religion alike?1

The poem is headed ‘Danielis Rogerij Epigramma’ and we know this writer can be identified as the English poet and diplomatist Daniel Rogers.

In order to account for the presence of this poem and to elucidate the earlier stages of Anglo-Leiden contacts, it is necessary to follow the career of this man from the beginning.

Daniel, the eldest son of John Rogers, must have been some seventeen years old when his father, then a well-known preacher, and divinity lecturer at St. Paul's, was burned at the stake in the early years of Queen Mary's reign. Once an orthodox-catholic chaplain to the Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp, John Rogers had emphasized his complete conversion to the new religion, after a brief acquaintance with William Tyndale in 1535, first by abandoning celibacy1, and then by editing, as ‘John Matthew’, the great ‘Matthew's Bible’ which Jacob van Meteren caused to be printed in 1537, probably at Antwerp. Considering also his pronounced views after a long contact with Melanchthon at Wittenberg2, it was almost inevitable that he should become the first Protestant martyr in Mary's reign. He showed no sign of repentance, moreover, during the series of cross-examinations of which his own reports were found in a little black book that ‘his wife and one of her sonnes called Daniell’, after the execution, happened to notice in his cell - ‘a blacke thing ... in a blynde corner’3. John Day, the learned Protestant printer, remembered his cheerful equanimity in prison. He died, ‘persisting in his opinion. At this conduct the greatest part of the people took such pleasure that they were not afraid to make him many exclamations to strengthen his courage. Even his [eleven] children assisted at it, comforting him in such a manner that it seemed as if he had been led to a wedding.’4

With all the terror of this almost baroque martyrdom still

vividly before him, Daniel revisited his place of birth, Wittenberg, where it was intended that, as a student under Melanchthon, he should become one of that host of preachers whose training had been his father's last instruction to John Day. He subscribed to the ‘new discipline’, perhaps at Frankfort where Anthony à Wood reports him to have been, on 21 December 1557.1 He may have been wanting in vocation, or perhaps his continental travel, alone and away from his theological acquaintances at home, had made him a devotee of renaissance letters. At any rate the Marian exile abandoned his earlier course, and having returned to England on Queen Elizabeth's accession, took an Arts degree at Oxford in August 1561, and found ways to be introduced at Court by the Queen's French secretary, an old Flemish friend of his father's, who more than a quarter of a century later was to become his own father-in-law2. Many sixteenth-century scholars sought preferment in the more exciting and hazardous world of the Court. Rogers' continental humanism, his staunch adherence to England's Protestant cause, and his probably thorough knowledge of a variety of modern languages made him a suitable candidate for such preferment.

Like a true humanist Rogers had begun to test his poetic abilities with great enthusiasm. From 15623, or possibly earlier, he wrote a prodigious amount of Latin verse, much of which has survived in manuscript. But with that modesty affected by the courtier-poets he permitted himself only one independent publication, an early work singing the praises of Antwerp. In it the descriptions of which he was so fond make delightful reading, as, for example, when he gives an account of the opening hours of the Antwerp Exchange where

... you will see the people, of all origins under the sun, flocking towards it in dense array, the happy throng of Englishmen taking their places (they alone occupy the spaces in the middle), Italians on the right and Spaniards adjoining, stalking warily through

the front halls; the offspring of France walks on the left, and one may even discern Dutchmen ...: you hear a discordant noise, the very place is filled with various languages and various costumes.

And he merrily recalls how ‘sweetly he drank his wine, and bought his books’ in the middle of the river Schelde when it had frozen over that winter.2

When he reached Paris in or about 1565 he was therefore not altogether inexperienced as a poet. There he was to become a member of the household of the English ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, for whom he was frequently employed in travel, and who describes him as ‘one Rogers very well learnid in the Greke and latin, whose father was burnt for the Relligion; this man being stewarde of my howse, and allso instructer to my children’3. In that setting where he gradually met the interesting people, writers, politicians, and the like, to whom his verses pay tribute4, he found more and more scope to indulge his delight in recording innumerable events and encounters in poetry. Hardly any name of renown is absent from his manuscripts. Many of his dedicatees were

gentlemen of similar poetic tastes and offered their verses in return.

From among the lasting friends he made in Paris, one at least should be brought to the fore. He is the same Janus Dousa whom we have already met, and who, at the time, was a student at Paris. In this young Dutchman's Album Rogers wrote five epigrams1, thus starting a close literary friendship which was to cover three decades.

Dousa, who had not yet visited England, arrived in Paris early in 1564, fresh from study at Louvain and Douai, not quite twenty years old and still a Roman Catholic. His years with Rogers coincided with the prelude to the Dutch Eighty Years War. There is, it seems, reason to believe that his future renown as one of Holland's most liberal, yet most faithful champions of Protestantism, and his never-ceasing concern for the bonae literae were directly inspired by his early days in France (during this period when the alliance between the Guise and the exponents of a politique religious policy was at its height2) and by the wealth of literary experiences which he there shared with the martyr's son, ‘whose rare faithfulness could for ever dispel all future doubts as to the permanence of his friendship: whose good will was only to be expected, if not because of his learning, prudence, and virtuousness, then at least because he was so very dear to Valens (Germanus Valens Pimpontius), Buchanan(us), Auratus (Dorat), Baïf(ius), Florens (Florent Chrestien), Altarius (Des Autels), Thorius (Thore), and indeed to all men.’3

The way in which Englishmen and Dutchmen first became acquainted with the poetry of French scholars and courtiers, that poetry's early impact on some British visitors, their private and imitative experiments, in short all the questions which arise during the uncertain years before a Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia could be written, literary scholarship

has left largely unanswered.1 The proper significance and antecedents of ‘the new poetry’ have hardly been defined. Although this term, which is generally applied as from The Shepheardes Calender of 1579, must remain vague as long as no serious attention is paid to the actual genesis of the new movement in English poesy, a student of Anglo-Continental history cannot altogether overlook more than twenty years of Anglo-French literary contacts, that preceded, let us say, the writing and the implications of Sidney's Apologie for poetrie.

On the whole, these exchanges at Court and in the Universities seem to have been conducted in Latin and Greek, and much less frequently in a modern language.2 This, incidentally, resembles the practice of the French themselves who maintained that a good French poet should be in the first place a good humanist.3 The inspiration which English poets were then receiving from France appears, generally, to have been exerted on three levels: the academic, the courtly, and the religious. The first, in which De Baïf's Academy must have played its part, is responsible for what may be the earliest and strongest fields of contact and has left more traces in the correspondence of its humanist participants than the second, which (apart from a number of dedications, some Pléiade echoes in Elizabethan writings, and evidence in the form of printed sources) remained so informal as to become obscure to later generations. The third led English writers to apply the poetic accomplishments of the other two to religious themes. Combining all that was ‘sweet and profitable’, and adding new significance to vates as a poet's title, the religious element introduced a French-inspired literary movement in the enlightened Protestant circles of England4

and the Low Countries1. Thereafter, in a milieu determined by politics and scholarship, a cultured poetry both Latin and vernacular was to emerge and to prove ‘new’ indeed in prosody, sentiments, subject-matter, and not least in the purposes for which it was used. The odes, sonnets, elegies, epigrams, and the like, written by these poets, whether in Latin, Greek, English, French, or Dutch, display all the ‘generalized emotion’, devotional exhortation, political message, and polite compliment which they were expected selfconsciously but non-professionally to phrase in classical metaphor and witty conceits of the early-renaissance kind. The French origin of some late sixteenth-century courtly verse in Britain and the Low Countries is known. But the earlier stages of this interest in French letters, which included the introductory work of neo-Latin poets, are obscure.2 Many a reference in the following chapters will be seen to suggest that the key to much of the literary history of England and the Netherlands in the sixteenth century must be found in Paris, ‘in illo hominum eruditorum velut microcosmo’3, during the 1550s and 1560s.

A considerable amount of evidence could be adduced to show that great numbers of English, Scottish, Dutch, and German scholars and politicians were very familiar with the literary activities of the Parisian writers - De Baïf, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Dorat, and many others - with whom they were often personally acquainted. Moreover, the foreign visitors (among whom we find various young men who were to become prominent poets in their own countries) were no passive audience; for they themselves became contributors to the

Parisian literary scene of the 1560s.1 The hundreds of poems, letters, and dedications in which the evidence is contained indicate that a careful study of guests and hosts at their poetic rendez-vous - which certainly includes the ‘sacra Musarum aedes’ of Morellus (Jean de Morel) and his accomplished daughters - would reveal important details about much foreign apprenticeship.2 With special, though not exclusive,

reference to England two other meeting places appear to be of interest: the English embassy at Paris and the French embassy in London1, where poetry followed and supported the trend of politics - a phenomenon that was to recur in later years2.

In this light Dousa and Rogers are typical representatives of the humanists who visited Paris in these years. They were both destined for a life of action in their respective countries' service, and derived an essential part of their intellectual make-up from early literary experiences in Paris. In one and the same city they saw the great politico-religious movements of the day, heard renowned lecturers in every branch of modern scholarship, and listened to the brilliant products of the most advanced school of poetry: as poets they learned - as Dousa was subsequently to recall3 - that letters are as serviceable to the common-wealth as politics. It is difficult to overestimate the effect of these stimulating experiences on the two young men. Personal contacts and friendships with men of letters they sought and enjoyed. In the following twenty years we shall again and again find allusions to these

events in letters and poems written long after they had left that accomplished society of French courtiers and scholars.1 Dousa appears to have been a pupil of Dorat, and to have met most other literati of the Parisian world, including - it has been argued2 - Ronsard. Rogers, too, knew them and collected their verses, including one addressed to himself by the same Jean-Antoine de Baïf3 who had shared the first few pages of Dousa's Album with Jean Dorat4. The precise details of their Parisian sojourn - and indeed of visits by numerous others like them - are as yet unknown and really lie outside the scope of the present enquiry. It should suffice to stress the obvious, general significance of the circumstances under which two young scholars from England and Holland first met.

When Dousa departed in 1566 to travel north through the disintegrating Low Countries, he took with him that intellectual keenness which seems to have ruled and inspired his whole ambitious generation. As a promising poet he imported its ideas into the northern Provinces. Rogers could do the same a little later. But Dousa was to have the greater opportunity for introducing his ‘Parisian’ views when nine years later he gave shape to ‘his own’ Academia - a singular privilege for a humanist.