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Francis Quarles
- Baylor University Press
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617 Francis Quarles (1592–1644) Born into the Essex gentry, the younger son of a high-ranking Elizabethan civil servant and puritan mother, Quarles took his BA at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1609, departing the next year for Lincoln’s Inn to get a gentleman’s acquaintance with the law. After Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Elector Frederick in 1613, Quarles joined the noble company escorting the couple to Heidelberg. It was on this trip that he probably met Robert Sidney, later Earl of Leicester, to whom he dedicated his earliest published work, a paraphrase of Jonah entitled A feast for worms (1620)—the first of several biblical paraphrases published during the 1620s. By 1620 he had married (the couple had eighteen children) and moved to London to pursue “the life of a cultivated gentleman of scholarly and literary interests” (ODNB). Between 1626 and ca. 1630, Quarles was in Ireland as secretary to Archbishop Ussher, whose royalism, loyalty to the established Church, and (presumably) Calvinism he shared. The two men remained friends, but by 1632 Quarles was back in Essex where he enjoyed a period of creative energy and literary fame—and the friendship of two other Cambridge poets, Edward Benlowes and Phineas Fletcher, who, like Quarles, were experimenting with new allegorical forms of devotional poetry. Quarles ’ Divine fancies came out in 1632, his Emblems in 1635. The first of his topical religiopolitical pastorals, The shepherd’s oracles, probably dates from the same years, although the work was heavily revised in the early 1640s and only posthumously published in 1646. He was appointed city chronologer in 1640, the same year he published his very popular Enchiridion, a collection of royalist political maxims, most near-verbatim pilferings from Bacon and Machiavelli. The work was later translated into Latin, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and German—and, in 1650, re-plagiarized under the title Regales aphorismi and attributed to King James. During the last four years of his life, he wrote a series of prose tracts defending the royalist cause and his one attempt at drama: an allegorical political comedy entitled The virgin widow. His anguish over the political crisis of the early 1640s was exacerbated by personal calamities in the form of increasingly dire financial straits and malicious allegations of crypto-Catholicism. Religion in Early Stuart England, 1603–1638 618 [\ Quarles, Christopher Hill remarks, may have been “the most popular English poet in the seventeenth century” (“Francis Quarles” 188). His Emblems was undoubtedly “the most important and most successful English emblem book,” perhaps “the most popular book of English verse of its century.” No other English emblem book had a second edition; Quarles’ went through over fifty. In its own day, Divine fancies was yet more popular, going through eleven editions between 1632 and 1676, compared to Emblems’ eight.1 While some of his poems have considerable merit, aesthetics alone cannot explain Quarles’ astonishing popularity, which must rather have something to do with his success “in gauging the protestant religious feeling of Englishmen at large”; as Hill observes in connection with Quarles, “minor poets are even more useful to the social historian than major poets: for the virtues and vices of the small man are apt to be those of his age” (“Benlowes” 143). Quarles’ wife said much the same, although without the condescension , describing her husband’s religion as that of “a true son of the Church of England” (Liston xviii). If Hill and Mrs. Quarles are right in viewing Quarles as representative of the “protestant religious feeling” of Caroline “Englishmen at large,” his sacred poetry is of considerable historical interest, especially with regard to the vexed question of what constituted early Stuart “mainstream” religion.2 For Anthony Wood, Quarles was a “puritanical poet.” Modern scholars generally find the term inconsistent with Quarles’ warm royalism, preferring to describe him as “a staunch middle-of-the-road Calvinist Anglican” (Hill, “Francis Quarles” 190) or, less informatively, a “moderate Protestant” (ODNB). In truth, there is virtually no scholarship on the Divine fancies, perhaps because the poems create problems for doctrinal labels. Many of the poems deal with issues central to Calvinist teaching, yet the poems themselves are unmarked by Calvinism. They are not Arminian, not even anti-Calvinist, just un-Calvinist. Thus the first poem deals with the relation between divine grace and human agency, the second with predestination, but in the former the bellows of God’s organ apparently blow equally for all, and it is up to us, the organists...