‘There was a great concourse of noblemen and gentlemen’, and in among ‘the extreme press and thronging’, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled.
Word went out: wherever he was, people came flocking, often in their thousands, to hear him speak.
That morning he was not preaching in his own church, but fifteen minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, where a new chapel was being consecrated. His words, they said, could ‘charm the soul’. He often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him. His congregation – merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city – came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. He had been appointed the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral two years before: he was fifty-one, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured for himself celebrity, for- tune and a captive audience. The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man.
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