JOHN DONNE (1573-1631)      

Like John Milton, John Donne was born on Bread Street (top left), near Cheapside. As a young man he frequented the famous Mermaid Tavern on the same street. Later, he and Ann More were secretly married in a little church behind the Savoy hotel on Savoy Way (bottom left) in 1601. The immediate effect on Donne's career was quite catastrophic. At the instigation of the bride's father, who disapproved of the marriage, the young poet was dismissed from his position as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Queen Elizabeth's attorney general,and imprisoned for a short time in the Fleet prison near the entrance to Fleet Lane in Farringdon Street. He and his wife spent the next few years in abject poverty. He summed up the episode with a characteristic pun: "John Donne, Ann Donne, undone"..
A few years after Queen Elizabeth's death, Donne won the favor of King James I by composing a tract defending the monarch's authority over his catholic as well as his protestant subjects. After taking holy orders in 1615, he was appointed by James as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1621. A marble statue of him by Nicholas Stone (based on a painted portrait for which Donne posed wearing a shroud) was erected soon after his death, and when the original building burned down in the great fire of London in 1666,it fell into the crypt and survived the flames. It now stands in the new cathedral designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Scorch marks from the fire are clearly visible on the urn at the base.