2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

26 ENGLISH STUDIES I Jesus College Annual Report 2012
They provide further insight, for example, into the language of Puritan friendship and
brotherhood. In Stubbs’s correspondence with Michael Hickes, for instance, a close
Cambridge friend who had found employment as a secretary to William Cecil, his
mutilation, and the words written subsequently with his left hand, become closely tied up
with the men’s friendship, and with their concern for one another’s godliness. In the
earliest surviving letter written by Stubbs’s left hand, for instance, he asks Hickes to “pray
for your old poor restrained friend that he may never commit any thing unworthy any of
your Godly acquaintances, or that should make you ashamed to acknowledge him to be
that he is your loving and faithful fellow and friend”. Hickes would thank Stubbs for his
godly words and “assure” him that “these few lines, in this ragged piece of paper, and
written with the left hand, do [...] truly declare yow to love me”.
Stubbs, meanwhile, wrote many more letters of the same kind, urging Hickes to
“deplore the folly and idleness of our misspent youth”, and redeem it “by spending the
rest with more conscience to our building up in faith and faithful conversation, whereby
we may in some godly vocation glorify our God and benefit our brethren and withal live like
Adam’s children”. His letter to Cartwright, in which he encloses the copies of his Psalm
translations and urges “those my good brethren with you” to “admonish them frankly”,
shows us that writing and sending poems was an intimate part of that Puritan
conversation.
So too was keeping them safe. Stubbs’s poems were copied into this Cambridge
notebook shortly after 1591, when Cartwright had been prosecuted, tried before the Star
Chamber and imprisoned on charges of sedition (relating to his preaching in England and
the Netherlands). The fact that the poems were copied down at this particular time might
well show us, in a kind of paper chase, how Puritan papers and archives might have passed
from hand to hand at moments of persecution and danger.
Stubbs’s poems were written to be sent across the English Channel to Antwerp, along
the same route (and possibly in the very same ships) as the mercantile traffic passing
between England and the Netherlands at the time, to which Stubbs himself refers to in his
letter to Cartwright: “thank Mr Travers, and warrant unto him that the richest merchant in
Antwerp cannot speed me of such merchandise as his letters contain, so fit for mine use,
and so pleasing mine humour”. That relationship between poetry and merchandise –
traffic and correspondence in godly words and rich merchandise – is something that I will
be working on this Easter Term, in a fellowship funded by the Centre for Research in Arts,
Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH). Into this hitherto unappreciated
cross-Channel history of letters and poems, Stubbs’s modest translations give us a piercing
insight. ■