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508 John Earle (ca.1600–1665) Born in York, he may have been the John Earle who matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford, in June 1619, as well as the John Earle who graduated BA from Merton College that July, becoming a fellow there soon afterward and proceeding MA in 1624, DD in 1640. However, there seems no doubt whatsoever that John Earle wrote the anonymous Theophrastean character sketches entitled Microcosmography, first published in 1628 and reaching a sixth edition by 1630.1 In 1632 Earle was made rector of St. Mary’s, Gamlingay , a Cambridgeshire parish in the gift of Merton. During the 1630s, Earle was a frequent visitor to Great Tew, “no man’s company . . . [being] more desired and more loved,” where he taught Greek to Lord Falkland and claimed to have received in turn “more useful learning by his [Falkland’s] conversation than he had at Oxford.”2 At some point during the 1630s, Earle also became chaplain to Philip Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke, who presented him to the rectory of Bishopston, Wiltshire, in 1639.3 It was probably via Pembroke that Earle came to the notice of the King, who was sufficiently impressed to appoint him tutor to the future Charles II, when in 1641 the Prince’s former tutor, Brian Duppa, became bishop of Salisbury. Pembroke, although Charles’ lord chamberlain and a lover of painting, hunting, and literature (Shakespeare’s first folio is dedicated to him), sided with Parliament, which is probably why in 1643 Earle was nominated to the Westminster Assembly. He declined, and in 1644 was deprived as a malignant both his Bishopston rectory and chancellorship of Salisbury Cathedral, to which he had just been appointed. Soon thereafter Earle went into exile. From 1651–60 he was with the English 1 All the twelve 17th-century editions were anonymous, although the 1628 entry in the Stationer’s Register calls the work “Earles Characters” and contemporaries seem never to have doubted the attribution; Earle’s name first appears on the title page in 1732 (McIver). 2 So Clarendon, himself a member of Falkland’s circle, writes; for more on Great Tew, see the introduction to William Chillingworth . 3 Both the ODNB and DNB follow Bliss’ 1811 edition of Microcosmography in claiming that Earle became Philip Herbert’s chaplain ca. 1630, when Herbert was chancellor of Oxford. Philip Herbert, however , lost the election for chancellorship in 1630—he lost it to Laud. 509 John Earle court in Paris, serving as Charles II’s chaplain and clerk of the closet—and producing Latin translations of Richard Hooker’s Laws of ecclesiastical polity4 and the Eikon basilike, the latter published in 1649. These were difficult years for Earle, the King being often unable to pay his chaplains, but the Restoration brought abundant recompense with preferment to the deanery of Westminster in 1660, the see of Worcester in 1662, and that of Salisbury in 1663. All surviving testimonies depict Earle as a lovely human being: “universally beloved,” as John Evelyn wrote, “for his gentle & sweet disposition” (ODNB); the non-conformist Richard Baxter noted in the margin of a letter Earle had written him, “O that they were all such” (ODNB). According to Gilbert Burnet, Charles II, who had a generally low opinion of clerics, valued Earle “beyond all the men of his order” (DNB). He died at Oxford in 1665 and was buried with considerable fanfare near the Merton chapel high altar. [\ It is important not to read Earle’s “characters” as sociology, although one suspects that they had some empirical basis. Yet even if his sketches render in part a world he perceived, in part half-created,5 we generally have no way of telling which parts belong to which half. We cannot, therefore, view Microcosmography as a mirror held up to nature; as a lamp, however, it proves quite, as it were, illuminating; that is, it sheds light on the religious views, visions, and nightmares of its author and his textual community. Prior to the 1640s, when a side had to be taken, Earle’s stance eludes our customary labels (not godly, not Laudian, not Calvinist conformist, not even particularly avantgarde ). In the 1630s, the Earl of Pembroke took him in, as did Great Tew; the former ended up siding with Parliament; those associated with the latter followed the King; both parties making their opposed choices with considerable ambivalence and repeated attempts at mediation. The invitation to join the Westminster Assembly suggests that as late as 1643...

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