CHAPTER XVI POSTHUMOUS ACTIVITY THE death of Donne was evidently foreseen, and his pulpit was soon filled. Already, a week after the event, one of his intimate friends was appointed his successor. On the 8th of April, the King wrote to Laud, now Bishop of London, and to the Chapter of St. Paul's, that "That Church being destitute of a principal minister by the decease of Dr. Donne, late Dean of St. Paul's, the King hath appointed for supply thereof Thomas Winniff, D.D., and Dean of Gloucester.' 1 The Dean's mother, after the death of her third husband, Mr. Rainsforth, had come to live with her son in the Deanery of St. Paul's. She was still an unbending Romanist. It is probable that when Donne was obliged by his health to go down to Abrey Hatch in the autumn of 1630, he took with him his mother and left her there on his final return to London. At all events, after his death, she appears to be in the charge of her grandchildren, Samuel and Constance Harvey. Donne stated, just before his death, that "it hath pleased God, after a plentiful fortune in her former times, to bring my dearly beloved mother in decay in her very old age," and he was therefore careful to leave her comfortably provided for, the money to be used for her maintenance and divided among Donne's children after her death. That event was now not long delayed, for Elizabeth Rainsforth was buried at All Hallows, Barking, in Tower Street, on the 28th of January 1632. She must have been over ninety years of age. Of Donne's principal patrons, his excellent friend the Earl of Carlisle was, during the Dean's last illness, appointed 1 Domestic State Papers. Groom of the Stole and First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, but this was the latest of his many promotions. He was beginning to fail in health, and on the 25th of April 1636 he died. The Earl of Kent lived until the 21st of November 1639. The Earl of Dorset, who was of a younger generation, long survived his friend. He was Lord Chamberlain through the dark years of the Civil War, and he lived until the 17th of July 1652. Sir Robert Ker underwent several violent vicissitudes. On the 31st of October his eldest son, William Ker, was created Earl of Lothian, and in 1633, to raise the father to a like honour with the son, Donne's old friend and correspondent was made Earl of Ancrum. The rebellion reduced him from ostentatious wealth to extreme poverty. He remained a faithful royalist and fled to Holland, where, in Amsterdam, he died in wretched conditions about Christmas 1654. His dead body was seized for debt, some months after its burial. Later than all these, Elizabeth, the luckless Queen of Bohemia, lived on until the 13th of February 1662. George Herbert was buried at Bemerton on the 3rd of March 1633, having imitated, after a gentle fashion of his own, his master's dramatic manner of dying, singing to his lute on his death-bed "such hymns and anthems as the angels and he now sing in heaven." Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, having been transferred to Norwich, was ejected in 1644, and retired to his house at Heigham, where he died on the 8th of September 1656. Bryan Duppa, who asserted his right to clanship in the Tribe of Ben, by contributing a poem to Jonsonus Virbius in 1637, was one of the nine bishops who survived to see the Restoration. In 1660 he was promoted from Salisbury to Winchester, and died in his palace at Richmond on the 16th of March 1662. Duppa's funeral sermon was preached by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, by whom the tradition of Donne's friendship was carried on till the 30th of September 1669. On the death of her troublesome husband, Mrs. Cokain retired to her property at Ashbourne, and remained there until her death on the 29th of August 1664. Dr. Simeon Foxe resided in the House of the College of Physicians in |