George Herbert's Distemper: An Honest Shepherd's Remedy for Melancholy

What a striking change there is in tone when one compares George Herbert's 1619 letter to his step-father and his advice to Arthur Woodnoth in continuing his living with the same Sir John Danvers twelve years later. The younger Herbert seems both flattered by his forthcoming Cambridge oratorship and eager to benefit from the prestige and sense of power of such employment:

The Orators place . . . is the finest place in the University, though not the gainfullest; yet that will be about 30 l. per an. but the commodiousness is beyond the Revenue; for the Orator writes all the University Letters, makes all the Orations, be it to King, Prince . . ., he takes place next the Doctors . . . and sits above the Proctors.¹

The mature priest of Bemerton, on the other hand, gives serene words of encouragement to a friend who doubts his usefulness in fighting against the extravagance of John Danvers in his second marriage and to whom Herbert had earlier boasted the merits of becoming public orator: "Though you want all success either in inclining or restraining, To desire good & endeavour it when we can doe no more, is to doe it" (p. 381). Commentators and biographers of Herbert have often wondered at such a transformation. The turning point in Herbert's life occurred in those years for which we have the least information. How can one account for Herbert's letting go of court hopes and committing himself not only to the Church but to the small parish of Bemerton? Had he simply lost all his patrons? Was it illness, as he himself claimed, that made him "unable to perform those Offices for which I came into the World"?² Did the death of loved ones – especially that of his mother in 1627 – lead him to further relinquish worldly honors? Or was it all a matter of personal piety?

Lynette Muir, who looks at George Herbert's life from a historical viewpoint, alongside that of his Cambridge days friend, Nicholas Ferrar, dismisses the third hypothesis, the most attractive in building up Herbert's saintliness. Muir's answer to both men's simultaneous withdrawal from public life is political: they sought disengagement and a commitment to Christian separation as part of a reaction not against monarchy itself but Charles's monarchical absolutism. One may notice how such an interpretation substitutes political idealism – the Church becoming "a new satisfactory institutional identity" – for pureness of faith.³ Even Izaak Walton implicitly stated that Herbert's taking orders was to be linked to the loss of his patrons:

God . . . in a short time put an end to the lives of two of his most obliging and most powerful friends, Lodowick, Duke of Richmond, and James, Marquess of Hamilton; and not long after him King James died also, and with them all Mr Herbert's Court hopes. So that presently he betook himself to a retreat from London, to a friend in Kent. . . . In this time of retirement he had many conflicts with himself, whether he should return to the painted pleasures of a life or betake himself to a study of Divinity and enter into the Sacred Orders?⁴

Of course, suggesting that Herbert may have chosen "the painted pleasures of a Court life" had he wished to do so, enhances the final decision of "Holy Mr Herbert."

Cristina Malcolmson's biography of George Herbert reads as a serious challenge to traditional interpretations of those relatively mysterious years from 1624 to 1630 during which the poet abandoned his seat at Parliament and took up holy orders, accepting a modest church position and resigning his Cambridge oratorship in the process. She argues that the period emerges neither as a moment of disinterested retirement from public life, nor as deliberate disengagement, but rather as a time of continued "frustration at lack of preferment," whether in the Church or more worldly positions.⁵ While I am greatly indebted to Malcolmson in what follows, I would like to suggest yet another reading of these years which shows that apparently conflicting interpretations are not in fact mutually exclusive...