Just Another Catholic Recusant Poet: Edmund Bolton

Because I discovered Mrs. Dorothy Lawson's father, Henry Constable, the poet, I learned about one of Constable's contemporaries and friends, Edmund Bolton. Bolton was a poet and historian, born in 1575. According to Father Herbert Thurston, SJ in the Catholic Encyclopedia, he died circa 1633 and 

He seems to have been born of Catholic parents in Leicestershire, and must have been of good family and position, for he claims to have continued "many years on his own charge a free commoner at Trinity Hall, Cambridge", and after going to London to study law to have lived there "in the, best and choicest company of gentlemen". There can be no doubt that there was a strong Catholic element among the lawyers of the Inner Temple (Richard Southwell, the father of the martyr, might be named as one example among many), and the tone of the drama and much of the lighter literature of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period shows that the Bohemian society into which Bolton and his fellows were thrown was often pronouncedly papist. But while many who for a while were Romanizers, like his friend Ben Jonson, ultimately fell away, Bolton, much to his credit, remained stanch to his principles. Of his ability and zeal in the pursuit of knowledge there can be no question. He was the friend of Cotton and Camden; whose antiquarian researches he shared, and as a writer of verses he was associated with Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, and others in the publication of "England's Helicon". Many influential friends, including for example the Duke, then Marquess, of Buckingham, tried to help him in his pecuniary embarrassments, but there seems no doubt that his Catholicism stood in the way of his making a living by literature.

Thurston cites as an example of this issue the rejection of his biography of King Henry II because it was too favorable to Saint Thomas a Becket! He did have friends at Court, however, including James I's favorite, George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham: 

It seems, however, that through Buckingham's influence he obtained some small post about the court of James I, and in 1617 he proposed to the king some scheme for a royal academy or college of letters which was to be associated with the Order of the Garter, and which was destined in the mind of its designer to convert Windsor Castle into a sort of English Olympus. James I gave some encouragement to the scheme, but died before it was carried into execution. With the accession of Charles I, Bolton seems to have fallen on evil days. The last years of his life were mostly spent either in the Fleet or in the Marshalsea as a prisoner for debt, to which no doubt the fines he incurred as a "recusant convict" largely contributed. The exact date of his death is unknown. Besides his contributions in English verse to "England's Helicon" Bolton wrote a certain amount of Latin poetry.

Here's an example of his verse from England's Helicon. Bolton also wrote Nero Caesar, or Monarchie Depraved (1624), and other works.

The 1885-1900 Dictionary of National Biography has these details about his family and later life:

All his schemes failed. He was now becoming advanced in years. He had a wife [Margaret Porter, the sister of Endymion Porter?] and three sons, and very slender means of support, none indeed at last, for there can he no doubt that he is the ‘Edmund Bolton of St. James, Clerkenwell,' who being assessed as a recusant convict at 6l. in goods, is returned by a collector of the subsidy of 1628 as having to his knowledge no lands or tenements, goods or chattels on which the tax could be levied, ‘but hath been a prisoner in the Fleet’ ever since the assessment was made. The same return was made in 1629, the only difference being that his place of detention was then not the Fleet but the Marshalsea. It was after this that he made his appeal to the city authorities [for a detailed history of London], and he appears to have made some progress with the work; but here he found himself anticipated by his friend Ben Jonson, who had promised to prepare for them ‘Chronological Annals;’ and when he talked of the history and the map costing 3,000l. or 4,000l., Sir Hugh Hammersley told him plainly that in prosecuting the application he would but berating the air. The latest letter of his at present known is addressed to Henry, Lord Falkland, on 20 August 1633. Probably he died soon afterwards, but the exact date of his death is not known.

So he made some progress in his intellectual pursuits, seemed to have some great ideas, the ability and energy to pursue them. Bolton's Catholicism held him back financially, assuredly, but he remained a recusant. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that he thought he was allowed to practice his faith freely [Writing to the secretary Conway on behalf of a catholic priest, he says that King James, whose servant he had been, allowed 'him with his wife and family to live in peace to that conscience in which he was bred' (Calendar of State Papers, Dom. 1625)], but clearly there were costs and consequences. 

I would like to know if his widow and his sons continued to be true to the Catholicism of Bolton, and I hope he was able to receive the Sacrament of Extreme Unction before he died.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Portrait of George Villiers by Peter Paul Rubens.