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Born in Bread Street, London, England to a Roman Catholic family. His father, John Donne, was a well-to-do ironmonger who died in 1576, leaving his three children to be raised by their mother. John's mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of epigrammatist and playwright John Heywood and was a relative of Sir Thomas More.
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At the age of 11, John and his younger brother Henry were entered at Hart Hall, University of Oxford where he studied for three years.
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After Oxford, he spen three years studying in Cambridge but took no degrees at either university because he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required at graduation.
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He was admitted to study law at Thavies Inn
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He was admitted to study law as a member of Lincoln's Inn. It seemed natural that Donne should embark upon a legal or diplomatic career.
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His younger brother Henry dies of a fever in prison after being arrested for giving sanctuary to a prescribed Catholic priest. John begins to question his faith.
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He joined the naval expedition that Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain.
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He joined an expedition to the Azores, where he wrote "The Calm".
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Upon his return to England in 1598, he was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere.
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He became MP for Brackley, and sat in Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament.
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He secretly married Lady Egerton's niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and effectively committed career suicide.
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King James persisted, finally announcing that Donne would receive no post or preferment from the King, unless in the church.
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A reconciliation was effected between Jack and his father-in-law, and Sir George More was finally induced to pay his daughter's dowry.
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First anti-Catholic poem. It held that English Catholics could pledge an oath of allegiance to James I, King of England, without compromising their religious loyalty to the Pope, it won Donne the favor of the King.
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In return for patronage from Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, he wrote A Funerall Elegie (1610), on the death of Sir Robert's 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth.
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Second anti-Catholic poem.
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He reluctantly entered the ministry and was appointed a Royal Chaplain later that year.
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He was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn (Cambridge had conferred the degree of Doctor of Divinity on him two years earlier).
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Just as things were once again improving, his wife goes and dies, aged 35. She dies just after giving birth to their twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their children survived their mother's death.
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Died aged 57, allegedly of stomach cancer. Is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, London.
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