A Virtuous Mother (or: George Herbert Part II)

In reading about the English poet George Herbert, I've come across Izaak Walton's 1670 biography, "The Life of Mr George Herbert". In an excursus Walton describes Herbert's mother, Magdalene, and it sounds as though she was a fine lady. Here are a few snippets:

(1) She and her husband, Richard, had ten children - seven sons and three daughters (George was the fifth son). Of this, Magdalene said "[it] was Job's number and Job's distribution".

(2)When George was four, Richard Herbert died, leaving Magdalene a widow for twelve years.

(3) When her eldest son Edward left for university, Mrs H. moved from the family home, Montgomery Castle - yes, of course, it was a castle - to Oxford, so that she could spend more time with her son. (Edward was living in a university college.) Now I know a mother moving into town when her son starts university sounds like a recipe for disaster, but not in this case it seems. Walton says:

[She] kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her child; but with such a sweetness and compliance...as did incline him willingly to spend much of his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.

(4) While living in Oxford, Mrs H. became friends with and a major benefactor of John Donne. He wrote an elegy for her called The Autumnal Beauty; as Walton says, "both he [Donne] and she were then past the meridian of man's life." Walton also reproduces a letter from Donne to Mrs H, in which he writes: "I commit the enclosed holy hymns and sonnets...to your judgment, and to your protection too, if you think them worthy of it."

All self-effacing aside, she must have been on good terms for Donne to have asked her to 'judge' his work. It's unfortunate that the hymns and sonnets which accompanied the letter have not survived.

I couldn't leave this summary without saying that an editorial footnote to Walton's short biography claims that it contains "many factual inaccuracies". Not about Magdalene I hope!

"George Herbert Part 3" will follow soon.