A decade later, Elizabeth’s brother Jasper was also discovered to be a priest (worse: a Jesuit) and imprisoned for treason in the Tower of London. Two years after Donne’s birth, his great-uncle Thomas Heywood was discovered to be a priest, arrested, imprisoned and possibly put to death. On his mother Elizabeth’s side he was the great-great-grand-nephew of Sir Thomas More, whose preserved head Elizabeth was (falsely) rumoured to have inherited and kept as a relic. His father’s family estates were confiscated by the crown, leaving the elder John Donne to pursue a living as warden of the Ironmongers’ Company. Born in London in 1572, a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. The date in the upper left-hand corner of the portrait is 1591: three years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, amid a rising tide of legislation aimed at restricting the freedoms of English Catholics, an altogether inauspicious moment to be advertising one’s Catholic origins or hinting at Iberian sympathies – and the look on Donne’s face suggests he knows it. A family crest just outside the frame signals his genteel pedigree – the Dwns were an ancient clan of Welsh Catholic landowners, although Donne’s own connection to them is dubious – while a banner floating in the upper right-hand corner bears a defiant Spanish motto: Antes muerto que mudado – ‘Sooner dead than changed’. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado. T he engraved frontispiece to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man.
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