John Hoskins

John Hoskins (1566-1638). Miniature by John Hoskins (1589-1644). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

John Hoskins (also spelled Hoskyns) (1566 - August 7, 1638) was a scholar, lawyer, and a minor English poet.

Life

Youth and education

Hoskins was born in 1566 at Monton or Monkton (now known as Monnington-upon-Wye), in the parish of Llanwarne, Herefordshire, (an estate of which his family had long possessed the leasehold interest). He was the son of John Hoskins, who married Margery, daughter of Thomas Jones of Llanwarne.

He was at initially intended for trade, but his desire for learning was so keen that his father complied with his wish that he should be taught Greek. For a year he was educated at Westminster School, but when his father discovered that his family was akin to that of William of Wykeham, the boy was, in order to obtain the advantages of the relationship, admitted as a scholar at Winchester College in 1579.

He matriculated at New College, Oxford, on 5 March 1584–5, having obtained a scholarship there 22 June 1584, and after 2 years became a full fellow on 22 June 1586. He earned a B.A. on 6 May 1588; and an M.A. 26 February 1591–2, when he also served as terræ filius, but with such bitterness of satire that he was forced to resign his fellowship, and was driven from the university.

Career

Hoskins withdrew into Somerset, and supported himself by teaching. For a year he taught in a school at Ilchester, where he compiled a Greek lexicon as far as the letter M, and was probably engaged afterwards in a similar position at Bath.

His fortune was made when, on 1 August 1601, he married in Bath Abbey Benedicta, commonly called Bennet, daughter of Robert Moyle of Buckwell, Kent, and the rich widow of Francis Bourne of Sutton St. Clere, Somersetshire. The couple would have a son, Bennet, and a daughter, Benedicta.

Bourne, who was buried in Bath Abbey on 24 February 1600, had left his widow for her lifetime the manor of Sutton and other lands in the same county, and as their only son, Walter Bourne, was buried in the abbey on 17 April 1601, and their daughter Frances married the younger brother of her mother's 2nd husband, (also John Hoskins), the family of Hoskins obtained complete control over the property (Fred. Brown, Somerset Wills, 1st ser. p. 29).

Hoskins now entered himself as a student at the Middle Temple, and was in due course called to the bar. On 6 March 1603–4 he was returned to parliament for the city of Hereford, and was re-elected in 1614 and in 1628. During a debate in the 2nd of these parliaments an allusion made by Hoskins to Scottish favourites and to the possibility of a repetition of the Sicilian vespers led to his committal to the Tower of London on 7 July 1614 (Gardiner, Hist. of England, ii. 246, 249).

A Latin poem, in which he appealed to James I for liberty after he had been confined in prison for more than 200 days, is among the Balfour MSS., Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, and was printed in the Abbotsford Club Miscellany, i. 131–2. Several more sets of Latin verses by him (1), on his committal to prison, 8 July 1614, (2) after his liberation, 8 July 1615, and (3) de seipso, 1634, belong to Miss Conway Griffith of Carreglwyd, Anglesey (Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. p. 409).

After a year's restraint he was set at liberty, but in February 1616 he was again in trouble through a "rhyme or libel" made a year and a half previously (Court and Times of James I, i. 390).

He became Lent reader of his inn in 1619, and was created serjeant-at-law on 26 June 1623. At a later date he was appointed justice itinerant of Wales and a member of the council of marches, and composed, in conjunction with Dr. Sharpe, some courtly lines "on the appearance of a star (6 June 1630) in the sermon-tyme at Paules-cross," when the king was there and a prince was born (Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep. p. 409).

Hoskins was a wit, and lived in the company of wits. Anthony à Wood possessed a volume of his epigrams and epitaphs. Many of his pieces are scattered among the Ashmolean and other collections, and some of his manuscript writings are reported to be in the possession of the present head of his family. His memory was considered the strongest in that age, and among his works was a treatise on the art of memory.

He revised, according to tradition, the History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom he became close during his confinement in the Tower, and "polished" the verses of Ben Jonson so zealously as to be called Ben's father. Such writers as Sir John Davies, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Samuel DanielDaniel]] were among his chief friends. John Owen addressed some of his Latin epigrams to him, and Hoskins in return sent 4 Latin lines to be prefixed to his friend's printed collection, and as many more to be added to the 3rd edition.

Much information transmitted through him was embodied in Aubrey's Lives, and Rev. J.E. Jackson, on the authority of a letter by that antiquary, claims for the serjeant the authorship, while at Winchester School, of the familiar lines on the "Trusty Servant" (Notes and Queries, 1st ser. vi. 495). He was among the wits who ridiculed the travels of Coryat of Odcombe.

The meeting of veteran morris-dancers at Hereford races in 1609, which is described in the rare tract of Old Meg of Herefordshire, is said by Fuller to have been arranged by "the ingenious Serjeant Hoskins;" but the tradition that James I was then on a visit to the serjeant and attended the show does not rest on any foundation (Nichols, Progresses of James I, pp. xix–xx). The Latin verses on the monument in the Temple Church to Richard Martin, recorder of London, were by him, and he is said to have fought a duel with Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, who was wounded in the knee. Hoskins and Rudyerd were afterwards close friends.

Death

Hoskins died on 27 August 1638 at Morehampton in the parish of Abbey Dore, Herefordshire (which he had purchased about 1621), and was buried on the south side of the choir in the church, under an altar-monument on which had been engraved 24 verses by Thomas Bonham.

His wife died in October 1625, aged 50, and was buried at Vowchurch, Herefordshire, where a monument in the church was erected to her memory.

Writing

The poem Absence, Hear thou my Protestation (Printed anonymously in Francis Davison's Poetical rhapsody containing diverse sonnets, odes, [etc.] (V. S. for J. Baily, 1602)) was for a time attributed to John Donne. However Herbert Grierson has argued persuasively that it should be attributed to Hoskins.

See also

• List of British poets

References

• David Colclough, "'The Muses Recreation': John Hoskyns and the Manuscript Culture of the Seventeenth Century," Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 61, nos. 3-4, 2000, pp. 369-400.
•  Courtney, William Prideaux (1891) "Hoskins, John (1566-1638)" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 27 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 397-399  . Wikisource, Web, July 12, 2020.
• Gary R. Grund, John Hoskyns, Elizabethan Rhetoric, and the Development of English Prose, New York: Garland, 1987.
• Brent L. Nelson, "John Hoskyns," The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660, Second Series, Detroit: Gale, 2003, pp. 154-166.
• Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566-1638, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937.
• Baird W. Whitlock, John Hoskyns, Sergeant-at-Law, Washington, D.C.: University of America Press, 1982.
• Lives of Eminent Serjeants-At-Law of the English Bar By Humphry William Woolrych, Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1869

External links

Poems

• Hoskyns, John (1566-1638) (1 poem) at Representative Poetry Online

About

• Hoskyns, John (1566-1638) in the Encyclopedia of Literature

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Hoskins, John (1566-1638)