He was ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England
and in his theology and practice embraced the High Church reforms of Archbishop
Laud. Crashaw became infamous among English Puritans for his use of Christian
art to decorate his church, for his devotion to the Virgin Mary, for his use of
Catholic vestments, and for many other reasons. During these years, however,
the University of Cambridge was a hotbed for High Church Anglicanism and
for Royalist sympathies. Adherents of both positions were violently persecuted
by Puritan forces during and after the English Civil War (1642–1651).
When Puritan General Oliver Cromwell seized control of the
city in 1643, Crashaw was ejected from his parish and fellowship and became a
refugee, first in France and then in the Papal States. He found employment as
an attendant to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Maria Pallotta at Rome. While in
exile he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. In April 1649,
Cardinal Pallotta appointed Crashaw to a minor benefice as canon of the Shrine
of the Holy House at Loreto where he died suddenly four months later.
His poetry, although often categorised with those of the
contemporary English metaphysical poets, exhibits similarities with the Baroque
poets and influenced in part by the works of Italian and Spanish mystics. It
draws parallels “between the physical beauties of nature and the spiritual
significance of existence”. His work is said to be marked by a focus toward “love
with the smaller graces of life and the profounder truths of religion, while he
seems forever preoccupied with the secret architecture of things”.
Richard Crashaw was born in London, England, circa 1612 or
1613. He was the only son of William Crashaw (1572–1626). The exact date of
Richard Crawshaw’s birth and the name of his mother are unknown; it is believed
that he was born either in late 1612 or in January 1613. His mother, William
Crashaw’s first wife, may have died while he was an infant. William Crashaw’s
second wife, Elizabeth Skinner, whom he married in 1619, died in 1620 in
childbirth. Richard Crashaw may have been baptised by James Ussher, later the
Archbishop of Armagh.
William Crashaw was a Cambridge-educated clergyman who
served as a preacher at London’s Inner Temple. He was born in or near
Handsworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and came from a wealthy family. William
Crashaw wrote and published many pamphlets advocating Puritan theology that
were sharply critical of Catholicism. Despite his opposition to Catholic
thought, William Crashaw was attracted by Catholic devotion; he translated many
verses by Catholic poets from Latin to English. According to Cornelius
Clifford, William Crashaw was “a man of unchallenged repute for learning in
his day, an argumentative but eloquent preacher, strong in his Protestantism,
and fierce in his denunciation of ‘Romish falsifications’ and ‘besotted
Jesuitries’. I like to mention his childhood memories as scholars believe
that as a child, Richard Crashaw read extensively from his father’s private
library. It contained many Catholic works and was described as “one of the
finest private theological libraries of the time”. The Crashaw library
included works such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, the
life of Catherine of Siena, the Revelations of Saint Bridget, and the writings
of Richard Rolle.
With the death of William Crashaw in 1626, Richard Crashaw
became an orphan at 13 or 14 years old. English attorney general, Sir Henry
Yelverton and Sir Ranulph Crewe, a prominent judge, were appointed as Crashaw’s
legal guardians. Richard Crashaw matriculated as a scholar at Pembroke on 26
March 1632. At that time, the college’s master was the Reverend Benjamin Lany,
an Anglican clergyman and friend of William Crashaw. Early in his career, Lany
shared many of William Crashaw’s Puritan beliefs. However, Lany’s beliefs
evolved toward more High Church practices. It is likely that Richard Crashaw
was under Lany’s influence while at Pembroke. Crashaw was acquainted with
Nicholas Ferrar and participated in his Little Gidding community, a family
religious group. Little Gidding was noted for its adherence to High Church
rituals centred around Ferrar’s model of a humble spiritual life of devoted to
prayer and eschewing material, worldly life. Little Gidding was criticised by
its Puritan detractors as a “Protestant Nunnery”. Pembroke Hall conferred on
Crashaw a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1634. This degree was promoted to a Master
of Arts in 1638 by Cambridge, and through incorporation ad eundem gradum by the
University of Oxford in 1641.
In 1643, Cromwell’s forces took control of Cambridge and
immediately began to crack down on Catholic influences. Crashaw was forced to
resign his fellowship at Peterhouse for refusing to sign the Solemn League and
Covenant. He soon decided to leave England, accompanied by Mary Collet, whom he
revered as his “gratious mother”. He arranged for Mary’s son, Collete Ferrer,
to take over his fellowship at Peterhouse. Soon after Crashaw left Cambridge,
St Mary’s was ransacked on 29 and 30 December 1643 by William Dowsing under
orders from the Parliamentarian commanders. Dowsing recording that at Little St
Mary’s “we brake downe 60 superstitious pictures, some popes, and crucifixes,
and God the Father sitting in a chair, and holding a globe in his hand”. Crashaw’s
poetry took on decidedly Catholic imagery, especially in his poems about
Spanish mystic St Teresa of Avila. Teresa’s writings were unknown in England
and unavailable in English. However, Crashaw had been exposed to her work and
the three poems he wrote in her honor—“A Hymn to Sainte Teresa,” “An
Apologie for the fore-going Hymne,” and “The Flaming Heart”-- are,
arguably, his most sublime works.
Crashaw began writing poems influenced by the George
Herbert’s collection The Temple--an influence likely derived from Herbert’s
connection to Nicholas Ferrar. Several of these poems Crashaw later collected
in a series titled Steps to the Temple and The Delights of the Muses by an
anonymous friend and published in one volume in 1646. This collection included
Crashaw’s translation of Giambattista Marini’s Sospetto d’Herode. In his
preface, the collection’s anonymous editor described the poems as having the
potential to induce a considerable effect on the reader, it would “lift thee
Reader, some yards above the ground.” According to contemporary accounts,
Crashaw’s sermons on this subject were powerful and well-attended, but no
records of them exist today.
In 1644, Crashaw and Collet settled in Leiden in the
Netherlands. It is believed that he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism
at this time. According to the Athanae Oxoniensis (1692), antiquarian Anthony à
Wood explains the reasoning for Crashaw’s conversion as the result of fearing
the destruction of his beloved religion by the Puritans: “an infallible
foresight that the Church of England would be quite ruined by the unlimited
fury of the Presbyterians”. However, according to Husain, “It was not the Roman
Catholic dogma, or philosophy, but the Catholic ritual and the reading of the
Catholic mystics, especially St. Teresa, which largely led him to seek repose
in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Crashaw’s conversion was the confirmation
of a spiritual state which had already existed, and this state was mainly
emotional, an artistic abandonment to the ecstasy of divine love expressed
through sensuous symbolism”. At some point in 1645, Crashaw appeared in Paris,
where he encountered Reverend Thomas Car a confessor to English refugees. The
poet’s vagrant existence made a lasting impression on Car, as shown by The
Anagramme:
“He seeks no downes, no sheetes, his bed’s still made.
If he can find a chaire or stoole, he’s layd,
When day peepes in, he quitts his restlesse rest.
And still, poore soule, before he’s up he’s dres’t”.
The writer “Abraham Cowley” discovered Crashaw living in abject poverty in Paris. Cowley sought help from English Queen Henrietta Maria, herself in exile in France, to help Crashaw secure a position in Rome. Crashaw’s friend and patron, Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh, also lobbied the Queen to recommend Crashaw to Pope Innocent X. He travelled as a pilgrim to Rome in November 1646. He lived there in poor health and poverty while waiting for a papal retainer. Crashaw was finally introduced to Innocent X, being called “the learned son of a famous Heretic”. According to Sabine, the Puritans who forced Crashaw into exile would have described him also as the heretical son of a learned performer. After repeated lobbying by the Queen, Innocent X finally granted Crashaw in 1647 a post with Cardinal Giovanni Battista Maria Pallotta, who was closely associated with the English College, a seminary in Rome. Crashaw was allowed to reside at the college.
At the college, Crashaw witnessed immoral behaviour from
some of Pallotta’s entourage and reported them to the Cardinal. This action
created such bitter enemies for Crashaw that Pallotta eventually removed him
from the college for his own safety. In April 1649, Pallotta found a cathedral
benefice for Crashaw at the Basilica della Santa Casa at Loreto, Marche.
Crashaw left for Loreto in May 1649. Weakened by years of privatation, Crashaw
died in Loreto of a fever on 21 August 1649. There were suspicions that Crashaw
was poisoned, possibly by his enemies in Pallotta’s entourage. Crashaw was
buried in the lady chapel of the shrine at Loreto.
His work has as its focus the devotional pursuit of divine
love. According to literary historian Maureen Sabine, his poems “reveal new
springs of tenderness as he became absorbed in a Laudian theology of love, in
the religious philanthropy practiced by his Pembroke master, Benjamin Laney,
and preached by his tutor, John Tournay, and in the passionate poetic study of
the Virgin Mother and Christ Child”. Sabine asserts that as a result of his
Marian devotion and Catholic sensibilities, “In expressing his Christian
love for all men, even the archenemy of his father and most English
Protestants, Crashaw began to feel what it was like for Christ to be a stranger
in his own land.”
He depicts women, the most notably the Virgin Mary, but also Teresa and Mary Magdalene, as the embodiment of virtue, purity and salvation. Indeed, Crashaw’s three poems in honour of the Saint Teresa of Avila “A Hymn to Sainte Teresa,” “An Apologie for the fore-going Hymne,” and “The Flaming Heart” are considered his most sublime works. According to Sabine,
“In his finest contemplative verse, he would reach out
from the evening stillness of the sanctuary to an embattled world that was deaf
to the soothing sound of Jesus, the name which, to his mind, cradled the cosmos”.
According to Husain, Crashaw is not a mystic and not by
traditional definitions of mysticism; he is simply a devotee who had a mystic
temperament because he “often appears to us as an ecstatic poet writing about
the mystical experiences of a great saint as St. Teresa rather than conveying
the richness of his own mystical experience”. Husain continued to categorise
Crashaw’s poems into four topic areas:
(1) poems on Christ’s life and His miracles;
(2) poems on the Catholic Church and its ceremonies;
(3) poems on the saints and martyrs of the Church; and
(4) poems on several sacred themes such as the translation
of the Psalms, and letters to the Countess of Denbigh, and “On Mr. George
Herbert’s book intituled, The Temple of Sacred Poems sent to a Gentlewoman,”
which contain Crashaw’s reflections on the problem of conversion and on the
efficacy of prayer”.
While he is categorised as one of the metaphysical poets,
his poetry differs from those of the other metaphysical poets by its
cosmopolitan and continental influences. As a result of this eclectic mix of
influences, Sabine states that Crashaw is usually “regarded as the incongruous
younger brother of the Metaphysical who weakens the ‘strong line’ of their
verse or the prodigal son who ‘took his journey into a far country’, namely the
Continent and Catholicism”. Lorraine M. Roberts writes Crashaw “happily set out
to follow in the steps of George Herbert” with the influence of The Temple
(1633), and that “confidence in God’s love prevails in his poetry and marks his
voice as distinctly different from that of Donne in relation to sin and death
and from that of Herbert in his struggle to submit his will to that of God”. While
Crashaw is categorised as one of the metaphysical poets, his poetry differs
from those of the other metaphysical poets by its cosmopolitan and continental
influences.
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