House of Herbert · 1633
George Herbert and *The Temple*
On the twentieth of February 1633, on his deathbed at the rectory of Bemerton in Wiltshire, George Herbert, forty years old, the rector of the small parish for the past three years, formerly Public Orator of the University of Cambridge, formerly a Member of Parliament, sometime favourite of King James and the Earl of Pembroke (his cousin), gave his manuscript of devotional poetry to his friend Edmund Duncon and asked him to take it to Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding. *Tell him that Mr Duncon shall deliver to him a little book, in which he may find a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies.* Ferrar received the manuscript four days after Herbert's death on the third of March. He read it, in his own retreat at Little Gidding, and decided to publish. *The Temple* was printed by Buck and Daniel at Cambridge in autumn 1633. It went through eleven editions in the next forty years and is, by the careful judgment of every Anglican literary historian, the foundational text of Anglican devotional poetry.
It is a quarter past two on the afternoon of the twentieth of February 1633, in the upper bedroom of the rectory at Bemerton, two miles from Salisbury, in late winter light through the south casement. He is forty years old. He is George Herbert, fifth son of Magdalen Newport and Sir Richard Herbert of Montgomery (a junior branch of the Pembroke Herberts), born at Black Hall, Montgomery, on the third of April 1593, schooled at Westminster and Trinity College Cambridge, sometime Public Orator of the University, married Jane Danvers in 1629, ordained priest in 1630, presented to the living of Bemerton in April 1630 by his cousin the Earl of Pembroke. He is in the bed, in his last hours, with the consumption that has been with him in advanced form for two months. His friend Edmund Duncon, who has come down from London at his wife Jane's request, is at the bedside.
Herbert thinks: the manuscript is in the cupboard at the foot of the bed. The cupboard contains, between two boards, the loose sheets of about a hundred and fifty short poems I have been writing, mostly here at Bemerton, some of them at Cambridge years ago.
Herbert thinks: the poems are not for me. The poems were the form in which I worked out, over twenty years, the question whether to take orders.
Herbert thinks: I have not shown them to anyone except Jane. Jane has not seen all of them.
Herbert thinks: Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding is the right reader. Nicholas will read them as the form he prays in. Nicholas will, if he thinks them worth printing, print them; if he thinks them not worth printing, he will burn them, which is the right thing for him to do.
He says, by Walton's Life of Mr George Herbert (the principal source, written within two decades), to Duncon at the bedside: Sir, I pray you, deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. Desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies.
He died eleven days later, on the third of March 1633. He is buried under the chancel of the parish church of Bemerton.
Edmund Duncon took the manuscript to Little Gidding within the week. Nicholas Ferrar, by his own private letter to his sister Susanna, read the poems through the night of the seventh of March and decided to print. The book was set at the Cambridge University Press by Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel and was printed in October 1633. The first edition of one thousand copies sold out by the end of December. Ten further editions were printed by the time of the Civil Wars, including the octavo pocket-edition of 1641 that Charles I, by the tradition recorded by Walton, kept in his coat-pocket through the months of his imprisonment at Hampton Court and Carisbrooke and that is in the Royal Collection today, with the king's marginal underlinings on the poem The Sacrifice and on Love (III). The Temple has not been out of print in any decade in the four hundred years since. The manuscript Duncon carried to Little Gidding is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The Bemerton rectory still stands and is a private house; the small church across the lane is open to visitors on weekdays. The Country Parson, Herbert's prose manual on the parish ministry, was edited from his papers by Barnabas Oley and printed in 1652.