George Herbert(1593–1633)

George Herbert was born at Black Hall, Montgomery, on the third of April 1593, fifth son of Richard Herbert of Montgomery Castle and Magdalen Newport of High Ercall. The Herberts were the leading princely Welsh family of the Marches, descended from the Earls of Pembroke (William Herbert, the first English-Welsh Earl of Pembroke, executed 1469) and held the Montgomery castle from the late fifteenth century. His father died when George was three; his mother Magdalen (the great Magdalen Herbert later Lady Danvers, the patroness of John Donne and the subject of his autograph elegy Of the Progress of the Soul) moved the seven surviving children first to Eyton-on-Severn in Shropshire and then in 1601 to London, where she took the house at Charing Cross. He was schooled at Westminster School under the head master Lancelot Andrewes from 1605, was elected to a Westminster scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609, took his BA in 1613 and his MA in 1616.

He was elected Fellow of Trinity in 1614, served as Reader in Rhetoric of the University from 1618, and was elected Public Orator of the University of Cambridge in 1620, holding the post for the next eight years. The Orator's role was the public Latin voice of the university to its visitors and patrons; he delivered the Latin oration to James VI and I on the King's visit to Cambridge in 1623, was personally complimented by the King, and was elected MP for Montgomery in the 1624 Parliament. On the death of his patrons the Duke of Lennox in 1624 and James VI and I in 1625, his prospects of a court career dissolved, and he turned to the Church.

He was ordained deacon in late 1624 and priest in 1630, took the small rural rectory of Fugglestone-and-Bemerton on the southern outskirts of Salisbury in April 1630 in his thirty-seventh year, and held the cure for three years. He rebuilt the parsonage at Bemerton, rebuilt the parish church at Leighton Bromswold which he had been given the prebend of in 1626 (the church survives, still in regular Anglican use as he completed it), drew the model of the country-priest ministry that he set out in the long prose treatise A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson (composed at Bemerton 1632 to 1633, posthumously published 1652), and walked twice a week the two miles to Salisbury Cathedral for the cathedral evensong where he played the lute and the viol in the small private cathedral musical circle.

He composed across the three years at Bemerton, in the intervals of the parish work and through the worsening of the consumptive illness from which he had suffered since university, the body of English-language religious lyric poetry on which his world reputation rests. On his death-bed in February 1633 in his fortieth year he sent the bundle of manuscript poems by his friend the Wiltshire deacon Edmund Duncon to Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding with the message that Ferrar should publish them if he thought they might do any soul any good, otherwise burn them. Ferrar published the collection at Cambridge in November 1633 as The Temple. Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, the hundred and sixty-seven lyrics arranged on the architectural figure of the Anglican parish church (the Church-porch, the Altar, the Sacrifice, Easter, Love III as the closing lyric). The Temple ran through thirteen editions in fifty years, was the most-printed book of English verse of the seventeenth century after the Authorised Version, and remains on every modern syllabus of seventeenth-century English literature. T. S. Eliot's 1962 British Council pamphlet George Herbert puts him at the centre of the seventeenth-century English devotional lyric tradition.