James Farrer - Books Condemned to be Burnt

But strange are the evolutions of men. The author of the burnt satires rose from dignity to dignity in the Church. He became successively Bishop of Exeter and Bishop of Norwich, and to this day his devotional works are read by thousands who have never heard of his satires. He was sent as a deputy to the famous Synod of Dort, and was faithful to his Church and king through the Civil War. For this in his old age he suffered sequestration and imprisonment, and he lived to see his cathedral turned into a barrack, and his palace into an ale-house, dying shortly before the Restoration, in 1656, at the age of 82. Bayle thought him worthy of a place in his Dictionary, but he is still worthier of a place in our memories as one of those great English bishops who, like Burnet, Butler, or Tillotson, never put their Church before their humanity, but showed (what needed showing) that the Christianity of the clergy was not of necessity synonymous with the absolute negation of charity.

Davies, too, Marlowe's early friend, rose to fame both as a poet and a statesman. But he began badly. He was disbarred from the Middle Temple for breaking a club over the head of another law student in the very dining-hall. After that he became member for Corfe Castle, and then successively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General for Ireland. He was knighted in 1607. One of the best books on that unhappy country is his Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the Crown of England until the beginning of Her Majesty's happy reign (1611), dedicated to James I. His chief poems are his Nosce Teipsum and The Orchestra . In 1614 he was elected for Newcastle-under-Lyme, and he died in 1626, aged only 57. Yet in that time he had travelled a long way from the days of his early literary companionship with Christopher Marlowe.

The Church at the end of the sixteenth century assuredly aimed high. At the time the above books were burnt, it was decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed in the future; and that no plays should be printed without the inspection and permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London! But even this is nothing compared with that later attempt to subject the Press to the Church which called forth Milton's Areopagitica

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