John Donne's strategies for discreet preaching

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2004 by Marla Hoffman Lunderberg

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The portrait of Donne I want to paint is one of a careful, thoughtful--yet questioning--supporter of his monarchs: a principled loyalist. Donne was a strong supporter of the English monarchy. He envisions a close connection between a person's service to God and his secular service to the king, preaching that "obedience to lawfull authoritie, is alwayes an essentiall part of religion." (14) He justifies this religious understanding of civil obedience through an analogy between God and the king: he declares that "[t]he kings of the earth are faire and glorious resemblances of the King of heaven" (Sermons, 5:85). (15) The king's acts are God's acts; kings are God's commissioners on earth (Sermons, 8:115).

Donne sometimes aligns his comments with Stuart divine right theory. He voices the absolutist commonplace that a ruler's power is God-given: "All forms of government have one and the same soul, that is, soveraignty; that resides somewhere in every form; and this soveraignty is in them all, from one and the same root, from the Lord of Lords, from God himself, for all power is of God" (Sermons, 4:240-1). He even accepts certain occasions when "a prince departs from the exact rule of his duty" (Sermons, 4:249). He says that even though there are both good and bad kings, people must always pray for their king and attempt to protect him from danger (Sermons, 4:239).

Yet Donne's relationship to the monarchy is not simple, for in his preaching he outlines limits to royal absolutism. Stuart defenses of absolutism claimed that the king was above the law, but Donne declares that law, and not the king, is at the foundation of the state: "The law is the mutuall, the reciprocall suretie betweene the state and the subject. The lawe is my suretie to the state, that I shall pay my obedience, and the lawe is the states suretie to mee, that I shall enjoy my protection" (Sermons, 6:253). Donne's only concession to kingly power in this 1625 sermon, Donne's first preached to King Charles, is that kings can offer pardons which go outside of the strict letter of the law; he does not allow kings full freedom to bend the law (Sermons, 6:254). (16) Again, Donne identifies law, and not the king, with the state when he proclaims, "The state, the law preserves and distinguishes, not onely the meum & tuum, the possessions of men, but the me & te, the very persons of men; the law tels me, not onely whose land I must call every acre, but whose son I must call every man" (Sermons, 7:426). When Donne claims that God works through the king, it is not through any and all of the king's acts, but through the king's lawful acts (Sermons, 8:115). This emphasis on law was voiced more frequently in Tudor, rather than Stuart, defenses of monarchy. John Aylmer wrote in 1559 that monarchs are subject to law, as did Thomas Bilson in 1585. Richard Hooker's Law of Ecclesiastical Polity argued that Elizabeth's authority was limited by English law. (17)

Donne is often quite cagey in his analyses of law and king-ship. For example, in a discussion of law in ancient Rome, Donne refuses to clarify whether he agrees with the axiom that "the pleasure of the prince is above all law." He admits that "the affections of men, or the vicissitudes and changes of affairs may vary" the way this axiom gets interpreted, but he does not specify how he, as a Jacobean preacher, might interpret it (Sermons, 3:185). By shifting his focus from the Roman legal axioms to an apostolic higher law (which is to maintain a charitable interpretation of others), Donne avoids either agreeing with or refuting the axiom himself.