Giggs, another direct ancestress of Donne's. She was a kinswoman of the Mores, possibly an orphan, who was adopted by the Chancellor and brought up with his daughters. Margaret Giggs was what we call "a character," and Holbein no doubt appreciated her individuality. She became a famous blue-stocking, one of the most learned women of her time, and a miracle of intellectual accomplishments. She was a passionate admirer of her adoptive-father, and when his daughter Margaret Roper was permitted to remove his body from the chapel of the Tower, the shirt in which he had been executed passed into the possession of Margaret Giggs, who made an heirloom of it. She was twenty-seven when the tragical event occurred, and had probably been for some years married to Dr. John Clements (or Clement), another distinguished ancestor of Donne.

John Clements was one of the most successful doctors of his time, and rose to be President of the College of Physicians. In his youth he was presented to Sir Thomas More, who made him tutor to his children. He thus met Margaret Giggs, whom he may have married about ten years after Wolsey, who was his patron, had made him Reader in Rhetoric to the University of Oxford. It would seem that the Clements escaped the general ruin of the More interests in 1535, but upon the accession of Edward VI. in 1547 they felt it advisable to emigrate. They settled at Louvain. Meanwhile two threads of family history had been pleasantly joined by the marriage of their daughter Winifred to William Rastell, the distinguished jurist, who was the son of John Rastell and Elizabeth More. He was a staunch Catholic, who was threatened with disabilities at the close of Henry VIII.'s reign. The Rastells accompanied the Clements in their flight to Louvain, and settled there through the reign of Edward VI. John Rastell the younger, afterwards a prominent Jesuit, also retired to Louvain; he was a brother or a cousin of William.

Elizabeth Rastell,

We descend another generation. the daughter of William and Winifred, married the famous John Heywood, and these were the grandparents of Donne.

John Heywood, who is supposed to have been born in 1497, was of the same stubborn Catholic fibre as the rest of the family. He was a singer and a "player on the virginal" to Henry VIII. in his boyhood, and after 1520 he developed a dramatic talent, which placed him easily at the head of the primitive theatre of his age. His interludes, of which the most remarkable are The Pardoner and the Frere and The Four P.P., led the way directly to the foundation of English comedy. He was a jocose and laughter-loving man, but of immovable fidelity to his religion, and he fell from his comfortable place at Court in 1544, when he was accused of denying the royal supremacy. Heywood, however, was not of the stuff of martyrs, and he escaped execution by publicly recanting at St. Paul's Cross. Through the remainder of the reign, and until the close of the next, John Heywood was probably at Louvain or Malines.

John and Elizabeth Heywood had three childrenElizæus (commonly called Ellis), Jasper, and Elizabeth, the mother of our poet. Elizæus was born in London in 1530, went early to Oxford, and was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls' in 1548. Jasper, who was five years younger, after having been page of honour to the Princess Elizabeth, went to Oxford at the age of twelve, and eventually became Fellow of Merton in 1554. The brothers seem to have lived quietly at the university through the reign of Edward VI., though persisting in their Catholic faith. Their sister, Elizabeth, may have been born as late as 1540, and probably shared her parents' vicissitudes. She outlived every member of her own generation and of the next, surviving the latest of her children and dying in 1632, when she cannot have been less than ninety-two or three, and was probably more. Had it occurred to Walton to question this aged lady, or had her memory survived in extreme years, she would have thrown light on much that is now obscure in the early life of her illustrious son.

At the accession of Queen Mary the dew covered the fleece once more. The ancestors of the poet, in company with other distressed co-religionists, came hastening back

from the Low Countries. John Heywood sat under a vine at the coronation of Mary, as Stow informs us, and congratulated her in a Latin discourse. His interludes

and his epigrams, his ballads and his jests, were alike to the Queen's taste; to please her he indited and published in 1556 his elaborate allegorical poem of The Spider and the Fly, in which the cruel destroyer was the Protestant, swept away, before it could suck the juices of the pious fly, by the firm domestic hand of Mary. All through her reign John Heywood basked in the Queen's unbroken favour, and when she sank into her final dejection, he is said to have been brought to her bedside to divert her with his jokes.

The Rastells, too, returned from Louvain, and William, abandoning the printing-press, regained his prominent position in the law. He was active in the councils of Lincoln's Inn; in 1555 he was made a Puisne Judge. The family seems to have kept up an establishment at Louvain, where William's wife, Winifred, Donne's great-grandmother, died in 1553. His brother (or cousin), John Rastell the younger, returned thither on the accession of Elizabeth; but William struggled on in London until 1563, when he lost his judgeship, and withdrew to the Low Countries in disgrace. During the period of his favour at court he obtained permission to publish, in 1557, the Works of Sir Thomas More, the great family heirloom. William Rastell died in banishment in 1565, and in 1568 John left Louvain and settled in Rome, where he became a Jesuit, and lived on into the poet's childhood. Dr. Clements accompanied the Rastells back to England when Mary came to the throne, and he practised as a physician until the Queen died. At this event he and his wife retired to Malines. These persons-the great-great-grandparents of Donne-lived to be old people, and died, he on the 1st of July 1572, and she on the 6th of July 1570, both buried at Malines. They had been accompanied thither in 1558 by John Heywood, who was threatened, as a contumacious Catholic, with the loss of his lands, and who presented to his daughter Elizabeth, Donne's mother,

an estate, probably in Kent, which had belonged to her mother, and which he was afraid might be forfeited.

The uncles of Donne suffered no less than the rest of the family by the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth. Elizeus Heywood threw up his Fellowship at All Souls' and went to Rome; Cardinal Pole became his patron, and, as the secretary of that statesman, it is possible that he visited England, but Florence was his residence. His brother Jasper resigned his Fellowship at Merton in May 1558 to avoid expulsion; but it could not have been, as has been supposed, for religion, as the Queen did not die till November 14. He was recommended to stay at Oxford by Cardinal Pole, who sought to obtain for him a Foundation Fellowship at Trinity, although without success. But late in 1558 Jasper Heywood secured a Fellowship at All Souls', perhaps the very one which Elizæus was resigning. From 1559 to 1561 Jasper was publishing his contributions to the grotesque joint-translation then being made of the tragedies attributed to "the most grave and prudent author Lucius Annæus Seneca," in verse of the "ugsome bugs" kind which has made the names of the translators ludicrous. He seems to have found it hopeless to withstand the new flood of Protestantism, and he soon withdrew to Rome, where he became a Jesuit in 1562. He was made a D.D. and appointed to the Chair of Moral Theology at the important training college of Dillingen, in Bavaria, in 1564, and thither his brother Elizæus came two years later, becoming himself a Jesuit there. In 1570 Jasper was appointed Father of the Society in Dillingen, and Elizæus was made the Head of the Jesuits in Antwerp.

Although it is not possible to point to a series of ancestors so active and distinguished as these on Donne's paternal side, yet there is evidence of the staunchness of the Catholics among whom his father was brought up. John Donne the elder, who was probably born about 1530, served his apprenticeship to James (afterwards Sir James) Harvey, Alderman of London. His interests were with the Ironmongers' Company, into whose freedom he was

admitted in the reign of Mary. A wealthy ironmonger, Thomas Lewin, died childless in 1557, and we find John Donne immediately afterwards managing the affairs of the widow. By his will, dated 20th April 1555, Lewin bequeathed all his property in London and Bucks, which was very considerable, to his widow for her life, and after her death he directed that it should pass to the Master, Warden, and Company of "the mystery or occupation of the Ironmongers of the city of London and their successors, to hold the same until such time as a new monastery be erected at Sawtrey, in the county of Huntingdon, of the same order of monks as were then in the old monastery before its suppression, charged with the maintenance of a mass priest in the Church of St. Nicholas aforesaid, to pray and preach therein, and prepare other services as set out. . . . The said Master and Wardens are further enjoined to pay yearly to the Friars Observants within the realm of England the sum of five pounds; and a like sum to two poor scholars, one to be of Oxford and the other at Cambridge, towards their maintenance. Immediately after the rebuilding of a monastery at Sawtrey, the said Master and Wardens are to pay to the abbot or prior the money previously devoted to the mass priest, . . . and shall cause a mass daily to be said, and four sermons yearly to be preached within the said monastery for the good of his soul."

Dr. Jessopp remarks that, "As far as I know, this is the first and last important bequest made after the plunder of the monasteries by Henry VIII. for the restoration of a suppressed religious house; and as the widow did not die till the 26th October 1562, when Queen Elizabeth had been on the throne nearly four years, Alderman Lewin's intentions, so far as the rebuilding of this Cistercian abbey was concerned, were never carried into effect, and the bulk of the property is still held, I believe, by the Ironmongers' Company, subject only to the charges for maintaining the two scholars at Oxford and Cambridge down to the present time."

We may conjecture that the elder John Donne married