IV A gathering of Dutch vates
Daniel rogers' many movements during the following few years make him an eye-witness of nearly every Anglo-Dutch happening within the political developments of that period. A diary survives of only some few months1; but his scattered correspondence and dozens of his verses record the details of countless visits to the Low Countries, as an independent ambassador, or travelling with Sir William Winter, Thomas Wilson, Philip Sidney, or Robert Beale.
Continuous friction between the Merchant Adventurers and the ‘sea beggars’ gave him an early opportunity to display his diplomatic talents, while the Prince of Orange's small confidence in an English alliance kept Rogers far from unemployed. The entourage of the Prince, the ‘Pater Patriae, for so they commonly call and accompt him’2, was that group of Protestant diplomats whose future manoeuvring was to determine the early stages of the establishment of the Dutch Republic. The group included Philip Marnix of St. Aldegonde who ‘feareth God, and is therefore greatelie hated in Bryssels and of al men’3. Marnix was to visit England for an early offering of sovereignty to Queen Elizabeth in 15764 with that unfortunate Anglophile Paulus Buys, who one day was to be the prisoner of his champion the Earl of Leicester.
It should be unnecessary to repeat that busy employment by no means excluded these literary politicians from non-
political activities. One can imagine that during their frequent spells of seclusion on the small islands of Zeeland, Dousa and Rogers with men like Marnix and Adriaan van der Myle1 would concern themselves with literary matters. Rogers used his first few months to become acquainted with Hadrianus Junius2 who had written to him after receiving some of his verses from Dousa3. There was an exchange of poems - just before Junius' death4 - which, much to Dousa's delight, consolidated their friendship5. Nor is it surprising, therefore, that the English diplomat also availed himself of the first opportunity to pay a visit to Leiden soon after the foundation of the University, the spirit of whose inauguration, as discussed above, must have been particularly congenial to him.
By now it must seem a matter of course that Rogers should have celebrated the foundation in verse - his lines ‘In Lugdunum novam Batavorum Academiam’ quoted before. At about the same time he wrote a few more poems in honour of Dousa, the first of which contained the following compliment:
A quarrel about you, Dousa, arose among the gods, when Mars called you his, and Phoebus called you his also. Phoebus said, ‘to us he has been devoted from the very cradle’; ‘in our service he is’, Mars said, ‘because he has chosen a military profession’. Jupiter feared a sad discord between the two gods, and therefore said, to settle the dispute: ‘He will serve Phoebus in peace, but Mars in turmoil of war. Dousa, o Mars, is yours, and, Apollo, he is yours also’.
You fulfil the words of Jupiter as they were decreed, Dousa, and serve both Mars and the learned Gods in times of war. For Mars is sweet to you, but ‘dulces ante omnia Musae’ [i.e. Dousa's device]; one hand draws the sword, the other stretches out for a book. Since both admired the vigour of your genius, Mars gave you a sword, Apollo gave you a lyre.1
This flattery - which called forth Dousa's protest ‘I am not whom you think, not that Apollo about whom Rogers, that poet of yours, has recently been telling you lies’2 - is hardly unusual. But it is curious that this verse should in its conceit repeat Rogers' poem on the University: Mars-Apollo or Mars-the Muses, and not the obvious image for the University of Mars and Minerva. This shows that Rogers was celebrating not a great Seat of Learning, but a recently liberated town where, within the youngest University of Europe, the Muses had found a refuge.
What he found were the tentative beginnings of Dutch renaissance ‘poesy’ and even of a ‘Leiden school’, so to speak, which in the following ten years was to include such names as Lips(ius), Dominicus Baudius (Baude), Georgius Benedicti (Werteloo), Janus Gruter(us), and Jacob Walraven, well before Daniel Heinsius made Leiden a European centre of literary scholarship3. Rogers witnessed the obscure early days from which, apart from Junius, who did not live to see the sequel, only two figures stand out clearly: Janus Dousa and Jan van Hout.
Leiden has had the unique fortune of bringing forth Dousa and Van Hout, two vates, one of Latin, one of Dutch verse. Both are called Janus: should a third Janus, the god, be with them, then all barriers will open up to their wit. Seeing that, o Leiden, he will call you happy in them both, he will wish your Keys4 for himself. And Rome, which used to honour him, will have enough of Janus, will desert him, and will wish, o Leiden, your Januses for itself.5
In these two Januses, whom Benedicti justly describes as ‘key-figures’ in the history of Dutch writing, we find the juxta-
position of various elements that were ultimately to create a new literature. Dousa was an aristocratic scholar whose firsthand acquaintance with the best writers of his age had already qualified him for most humanistic modes of expression with Latin as a solid means of international communication. Van Hout on the other hand was no nobleman but a non-academic Town Clerk, lover of vernacular writing, critical supporter of the old Chambers of Rhetoric, a man of small Latin but great energy.1 At a time when vernacular verse was rarely published because those few readers who would be interested could always obtain a manuscript copy, their Dutch poetry had little chance of survival. Consequently very few of Van Hout's poems have come down to us, and those few are obscured by masses of printed Latin by his humanist fellow-writers. Van Hout was probably representative of the other poets in having also a personal hesitancy towards publication: ‘I have never been much concerned with such honourable-seeming vanity in my youth, wherefore should I now?’ he wrote in his testament bequeathing his poems to a friend (who subsequently lost the manuscript). But it did not mean that they had not, privately, been playing seriously with their ‘ink-wasting toys’. From what one can gather about their first joint attempts, Dousa inspired Van Hout with a deep concern for the bonae literae - with some emphasis, probably, on what was being done in France; while Van Hout in his turn tried to influence Dousa to write in his own language. The result was, though on a smaller scale, the same kind of literary reform which Ronsard, De Baïf, and their friends had, some years before, advocated in Paris, and which, some years afterwards, Sidney, Spenser, and their group were to bring about in England.
The date when Dousa and Van Hout began to take an interest in each other's work is uncertain. A reference to Van Hout in a manuscript verse on the visit of Giselinus and
3. Janus Dousa (left) shaking hands with Jan van Hout after the
siege of Leiden. Painted by Van Hout in Dousa's Album (f. 102v), and accompanied by Dutch verses.
Lernutius to Holland in 15701 suggests an earlier date than 1574, the one generally assumed. What does stand out quite clearly, at any rate, is that their proposed reform was really becoming articulate by 1575, soon after the siege of Leiden. Then a lasting friendship between the two prominent defenders, captain Dousa and secretary Van Hout, was initiated in quantities of verse - not unlike Sidney writing his Arcadia in banishment. Van Hout, who ‘first ventured to touch the strings of the Dutch lyre’ was the more important in that it was he, chiefly, who attempted to overcome the greatest and most characteristic obstacle of the time, that of finding a new poetic diction in the vernacular. In spite of his contempt for popular opinion and his admiration for classical and neo-Latin poetry he wrote in the vulgar tongue, Dutch. The great hesitation of Leiden scholars to follow him is a measure of the radical nature of his task. Sometimes, as in the case of Lipsius, they were quite unwilling to lay themselves open to such perils: ‘what should I be but the laughing-stock of sailors and inn-keepers? Like Icarus who fell in his flight because he rose on deceptive wings’2. Indeed, Van Hout's efforts must have met with much more resistance in an academic world than they would have done in the metropolitan and courtly setting of Paris or London. And whatever we may think of the quality of these first odes and sonnets in the literature of the northern Netherlands, he alone had inspired that literature's growth. ‘Will you hear the truth from me, my friend?’, one critic, less confident of his successors, prophesied, ‘I will tell you: while you live, Batavian wits shall live, and when you die, they shall die’3.
One cannot fully appreciate the literary developments which took place in Leiden during this unsettled time without taking two more aspects into account. One is that Dousa by his correspondence and meetings with friends in Flanders and by the useful experience of his days in Rogers' library,
had been kept abreast of contemporary literature. The other is the vast amount of poetry (in addition to the few verses still extant) which Van Hout, like Dousa, is known to have produced before they began to formulate their views: divine poetry, psalms, odes, sonnets, epitaphs, epigrams, love poems,1 at the same time as or followed by translations from Des Portes, Buchanan, Petrarch, Horace, Janus Secundus2, and Plautus3.
By itself this impressive list of literary exercises - enough, incidentally, to suggest that the ‘new school’ had started well before 1574 - gives the outlines of Van Hout's intentions almost as eloquently as his intriguing address ‘To the gathering and assembly of those within the new University of Leiden who are exercising themselves in Latin or Dutch poetry, and of all other lovers of the Dutch language’4. The address amounts to an Apology for Dutch Poetry, which Van Hout composed to introduce his (lost) translation into Dutch alexandrines of George Buchanan's Franciscanus5. It should be read together with two of Dousa's letters from the same year6. The modest sum is a light-hearted plea for poetry as a useful thing, tracing its ancient descent through inspired poets like Moses, David, Orpheus, and Homer, and for its practice as ‘poesy’ rather than rhetoric with a proper regard for ‘new subjects’ and a ‘modern appearance’: somewhat less than the English Apologie for Poetrie, but, except for its moral bias, the similarity is evident.
The struggle with a vernacular which scarcely seemed to
allow either the eloquence or the prosody of classical verse - a continuous source of trouble and delight - need not now be treated from the Dutch point of view. In this subject they were to have a common meeting-ground with English writers. But one even stronger link with England already existed in the person of Daniel Rogers, that least alien of foreign visitors to Leiden. For Rogers, whose interest in the martial Muses of Leiden had appeared at such an early date, was by this time finding his way into the very court circles which would produce - or, more likely, were beginning to produce - the Protestant group of courtly writers which has long been mistakenly referred to as the ‘Areopagus’, namely the Sidney circle.
He may first have become personally acquainted with Sidney as a scholar, or as a faithful supporter of Walsingham's Protestant policy, or as a lover of Ireland: when exactly they first met seems difficult to decide, but again perhaps much earlier than can be proved. His first demonstrable connexion is, significantly, in verse. Written in 1575, shortly after the young nobleman's return to England, it is the earliest poem ever addressed to Philip Sidney.
To Philip Sidney, a most promising and talented young man
Now that you have roamed through the country of Italy, now that you have met the people of France and have with wandering steps explored the states of Bohemia after seeing the towns of Germany, was it Ireland that was left for you to inspect, that land beyond the western bays? I am inclined to think that Fate has moved you to travel towards such coasts, to the distant plains of Ireland.
You will not come to find yourself a visitor in these regions, like most people who live as strangers in these parts, but rather to teach them whatever you may have learned in all the other places, and so to cultivate those barbarians. Thus, Philip, you will show yourself worthy of your father whom Ireland claims for its own father. Who knows whether fate will not leave you to rule this country, a viceroy to keep the viceroy (his father) company? For the house of Sidney was destined for the land of Ireland, a house that is worthy indeed to prescribe the law to a state.
Therefore, young man, prepare yourself for the rule of Ireland, for you are the son of a viceroy, and born for command.1
Of course, this one poem - in which the prophecy gives an unexpected clue to Sidney's days of idleness before the 1577 embassy - is not enough to associate Rogers with Sidney's literary milieu. But many a reference in the five years following, particularly the long and relevant Elegy of 15791, will demonstrate his close acquaintance not only with Sidney, but also with Fulke Greville and Edward Dyer. This again implies connexions with Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser, borne out by one of Harvey's well-known Familiar Letters:
You [i.e. Spenser] may communicate as much, or as little, as you list, of these Patcheries, and fragments, with the two Gentlemen [Sidney and Dyer]: but there a straw, and you love me: not with any else, friend or foe, one, or other: unlesse haply you have a special desire to imparte some parte hereof, to my good friend M. Daniel Rogers: whose curtesies are also registred in my Marble booke. You know my meaning.
Nosti manum et stylum. G.2
If one fails to ‘know his meaning’, at least Rogers is seen to emerge in the ‘Immerito’ correspondence as one who shared with Sidney and Dyer the Anglo-Latin prosodic experiments of Harvey and Spenser. Rogers will appear again and again as one who is uniquely familiar with the progress of writing on both sides of the North Sea. But one thing makes his exact place difficult to determine: not a single line of his English poetry appears to survive. This puts us in almost the same position as Anthony à Wood who was obliged to
state that Rogers ‘hath also published... Poems in English mentioned by other Persons with great commendation, but these I have not yet seen’1.
While it would be somewhat premature to expect a conscious affinity between the two ‘new schools’ of writing at a date when the Sidney circle had not yet undertaken anything seriously, it may be worth noting, if only in anticipation, that both sides were already developing one similar trait through their admiration for the kind of divine poetry they found in George Buchanan's works. This, of course, is hardly surprising when one considers their common idea of poets as vates, of which ‘the chiefe, both in antiquitie and excellencie, were they that did imitate the inconceiveable excellencies of God’2. Moreover, it must be remembered that the new poetry in both countries originated in groups which, though not to an equal extent, derived their characteristics from being determined chiefly by a politico-religious cause. In the case of England this became particularly clear when in these same years the Leicester-Sidney circle took the side of Walsingham against the anti-Puritan policy of Burghley. With their philosophical conception of ‘divine poetry’ and their obvious desire to assimilate the ‘new’ religion and ‘new’ poetics, Duplessis Mornay, Guillaume du Bartas, and ‘so piercing wits as George Buchanan’ - to use Sidney's own phrase - naturally excercised a lasting influence on their admirers' poetic ambitions. It has even recently been argued that Buchanan was a member ‘in absentia’ of the Sidney circle3, loved, admired, and emulated.
At the time when Dousa and Van Hout were first experimenting, and before their vernacular theories became fully articulate, George Buchanan, the leading neo-Latin divine poet, could not fail to be a source of inspiration. These writers were more concerned with themes and ideas such as were to be found in Buchanan than with the minor points of ‘rhyming and versing’ which have received such emphasis in modern times. Thus one is not surprised to discover that Buchanan's
work was known even before it officially appeared in print. How Anglo-Leiden contacts made this possible may be illustrated by the following example.
Rogers, whom Languet was to describe to Buchanan as ‘communis noster Amicus, qui te unice colit’1, had been among Buchanan's correspondents for many years, probably long before 1571 when he was thanked for his French news ‘de statu Religionis et Literarum’2. It has been shown3 that after Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador in Scotland, he was Buchanan's closest English friend. Subsequent to the publication of some of Buchanan's works in the late seventies through the interest of the Sidney circle, Rogers personally supervised the 1580 edition of the Divine Poems in consultation with Buchanan and many friends, some of whom are actually named4. Sturmius, Hottomannus (Hotman), and Dousa are among them. Dousa was a familiar name to Buchanan, thanks to Rogers: ‘I introduced Dousa to you when you were staying in Paris, and am now with the author's consent sending you a recent edition of his poems’, he wrote in 15765. For Rogers was pleased to describe in this same letter that he had found in the Low Countries ‘plurimos, duos imprimis tui Nominis studiosissimos, Janum Douzam, & Philippum Marnixium’ - ‘whom you have known in Paris’ - ‘Ingenio, Genio, et Genere nobilissimos’. Ten years later the poet Paulus Melissus Schedius (Schede) was to put Buchanan, Rogers, and Dousa side by side in his ‘Ad Elisabetham ... Epos primum’ as representatives of three different nations, a fine compliment to Rogers and Dousa.6
This personal contact is probably another reason why Buchanan's oeuvre found its way into Dutch literature on a larger scale than incidental borrowings, on a larger scale even than the derived work Rerum caelestium liber primus (1591) which Dousa's son Janus wrote after the first publication of Buchanan's completed Sphera in 15861. And indeed through these contacts some of Buchanan's poetry entered Dutch literature at a very early date. For at Leiden Jan van Hout had access to his works and produced translations of some of his poems. He translated not only Franciscanus2 - interesting because it fits in with other anti-catholic satires like Marnix's Beehive 3 - and an epigram which survives in Van Hout's Dienstbouc (1602), but also the Sphera, as we know from references in poems of the Dousas4.
It is interesting that Van Hout was able to translate the Sphera as early as 1574-76 (the assumed date), many years before its first edition and at a time when several scholars in vain requested Buchanan to send them a copy of his composition5. Part of the answer may lie in a postscript to the earliest edition (of only 310 lines of Book I); which appeared in 1584: ‘The rest is desideratum’, it read, ‘in Mr. Daniel Rogers’ apograph. Meanwhile the reader should use, and benefit by
this fragment’.1 It would be tempting to connect this edition from ‘an apograph of Rogers’, printed perhaps in Geneva, with Rogers' request in 1576 ‘that you would send us a copy of your books of the Spheres, for which I have asked you again and again’2. But this would rule out the possibility of Van Hout's using a Rogers manuscript in the preceding years.
The history of the circulation of this manuscript prior to publication is more satisfactorily explained in that letter to Rogers in which Dousa had recalled his first visit to England, his legatiuncula of 15723. For there we find: ‘do you think that I could forget that kindness with which... you then communicated these works to me? Among others the work of the Sphere by that great Buchanan, of which - I have reason to recall the event - I received a copy from Miggrod4 who had with his own hand most accurately transcribed it, in my honour, and with your permission’. At what date Rogers possessed a manuscript of the poem is therefore not such a ‘profound mystery’ as has been thought.5 In 1572-73 he must have owned an early and incomplete version which could in his transcript circulate in Europe until one derived manuscript was printed in 1584. His request of 1576 referred of course to the later completed version, printed in 1586, which Buchanan was so reluctant to part with. The early version was the one Dousa brought to Leiden in 1573, a valued piece of ‘divine poetry’ which Van Hout could read and translate in the earliest days of his literary experiments. This is but one instance of the way such treasures might impart their message to scholars in Holland even before any proper literary traffic could be established.
Such an interest in the poetry which he himself had helped to transmit and the signs of promising developments in literature account for the delight which Daniel Rogers showed
in the poem celebrating his first visit to the University of Leiden in 1575. He immediately made his own contribution, again largely practical, and it was received with deep gratitude. ‘I speak’, Dousa was to write, ‘of that wonderful collection of very select books which were sent to me from the most distant parts of France and had to be transported again from London to Holland’.1 With due thankfulness Dousa dedicated the ‘libri adoptivi et selectiora carmina’ in his important collected poems of 1576 to his considerate friend, meanwhile blaming him, as usual, for being an irregular correspondent: ‘be careful’, he writes, ‘you are dealing with a Dutchman, and, what is more, with one who is beginning to acquire a taste for the genius of this adolescent Academy; you know, of course, what arrogant pedants they are who suffer from a poetic calm; you must abandon the severer Muses and drive all politics from your mind until some other time’.2
Rogers did his best and wrote numerous verses that autumn. Besides poems to Thomas Wilson, to Burghley, and some to Dousa, he wrote one on the death of Charles Boisot, the Sea-Beggar commander who fell in a skirmish off one of the isles of Zeeland - where Rogers happened, as usual, to be present - and yet another on the death of Lodewijk Boisot, the liberator of Leiden.3 He could, on the other hand, scarcely afford to
let his thoughts drift from politics to poesy too often, for these were busy years. The Merchant Adventurers at Antwerp had elected him secretary in July 15751 - his father had been their chaplain thirty years before - but Rogers does not appear to have taken his appointment very seriously. Perhaps he was too busy negotiating in respect of far greater Anglo-Dutch interests: ‘I cannot express how much I have (these two years) tried to make the Queen take an interest in the Prince's cause’2, he confided to Buchanan. For more than a year he followed the Prince of Orange from town to town and sent the results of his conversations and dealings in a regular series of reports to England. Few of them give such a lively picture of his informal meetings as an entry in his 1576 journal which records a piece of after-dinner conversation at Vere (in the presence of Robert Beale, and probably also Marnix and Paulus Buys). The Prince tells
how that he had bene in Englande about the year 1556, at which tyme he understood that the Quene which now is, at the coronation of Quene Marie, should have carryed her trayne: at which tyme Quene Marie had at dinner with her divers embassadors, wher likewyse the Quene did sitt, but after the ambassadors. The French Ambassador after dinner came to the Quene, which now reyneth, and declared unto her how that daye Her Majestie had carryed the Queens traine and satt at dynner; that he doubted not but Her Majestie should wer the crowne and that the other should carry her trayne.3
Further details would only mean a repetitive list of the activities, literary and political, of Rogers in those months. There is, for example, the description of his unsuccessful search for Dousa at Bruges in December 15764, the more unfortunate because Dousa had just left there after a whole week together with Hubert Goltzius, Lernutius, and Giselinus.5 He often had meetings with Lipsius (in Louvain),
who in the same year had written to Dousa of his love for ‘your sweet Rogers’ who ‘in ipsa paene mensa extorsit epistolam istam’1. Besides, this must have been a decisive year mainly for the political career of Rogers. He was a successful diplomat who had gained the esteem of his immediate superior. Sir Thomas Wilson, the English ambassador. On New Year's Eve 1576 the latter went so far as to write this postscript to Leicester:
Your Honour maye not forgett poor Mr Rogers, when any bysshoppes are choysen. Suerlie it is greate pitie to see learnynge and honestie joyned together to go a beggynge. He hath wel deserved a bysshoppes lyvinge, not onelie a pension of 50li.2
Rogers never became an Anglican bishop - perhaps his affinities with the Puritan party were too evident. Yet the idea did not seem too preposterous for Wilson. Rogers was now an enlightened diplomatist with a strong interest in Anglo-Dutch affairs; his familiarity with continental Protestant circles and his extraordinarily wide contacts in France, Germany, and the Low Countries marked him out as a most eligible ambassador for these countries. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that he might have claimed to have done a vast amount of work with regard to Anglo-Dutch dealings in preparation for the following period of eight years which preceded the arrival of Leicester.
He went back to England in February 1577 with letters for Walsingham, only to return to Flanders in the early days of March in the company of Philip Sidney, her Majesty's new envoy.
