Owen Felltham | Biography

The place and date of birth of Owen Felltham are uncertain, but he was probably born around 1602 as the second son of Thomas Felltham, a gentleman and landowner in the village of Mutford, Suffolk. It has been surmised that he received his creditable education, including thorough knowledge of Latin and classical literature, from a private tutor.

Felltham first enters the public record with his marriage to Mary Clopton of Melford, Suffolk, in London on 10 October 1621; their daughter Mary was born in August 1622. Barbara E. Bergquist believes that around this time Felltham was a merchant in London.

In the 1661 edition of his Resolves, Divine, Morall, Politicall, Felltham says that he wrote what became the first edition of the work when he was eighteen; but this claim may not be accurate, and there is no indication what--if any--interval occurred between the writing and the publication of the first edition in 1623. Other significant events that presumably occurred in the early 1620s were the deaths of Felltham's wife and daughter and the trip to the Netherlands that would result in the publication of his only other book.

The one hundred "resolves" in the 1623 edition are short, aphoristic commentaries on aspects of the three realms delineated by the title: divine, ethical, and political. As Ted-Larry Pebworth says, they concern in equal measure the private and public realms of middle-class English life: "the great squirearchical and merchant classes: in short, the work was for people very much like Felltham himself." The 1623 title page shows the author's hand writing from his heart, under the protective sanction of God and friends; columns and a foundation represent the stage of human life, whereon classical and Christian virtues play out the human condition by their presence or absence.

The notion of acting on the basis of meditated resolutions and the form--short prose pieces evolving associatively from an initial concept--derive from diverse literary traditions. The classical epigram developed, on the one hand, into the "character" and, on the other hand, into the more loosely conceived "meditation"; prototypes of these forms were provided for seventeenth-century English writers by Joseph Hall in his Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) and his Meditations and Vowes, Divine and Moral (1606), respectively. The true originator of Felltham's form in the Renaissance was Michel de Montaigne, whose influence is shown in the personal, though not intimate, references in Felltham's pieces. Another tradition, of which too little has been made in regard to Felltham's work, is that of the Christian meditation; Pebworth notes that "The resolve and the vow, its close relative, developed out of the concluding statements of religious meditations, but they soon overshadowed the meditations to which they were attached." Akin to Felltham's resolves are the meditations in John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which fuse secular and spiritual concerns. Felltham works toward a similar fusion of his three realms--the divine, the moral, and the political--achieving it most fully in the 1661 edition of the Resolves.

The 1623 collection, like its successors, seems to be arranged according to no particular principle--unless it be that of the constantly shifting mind, active in all three realms by turns. The 1623 resolves also vary widely in length. The main question addressed is how to live well as a Christian in this life--not how to be assured of salvation in the next. More specifically, Felltham is concerned with the acceptance of conditions that cannot be changed; he sees the origin of sins--and of their secular equivalents, violations of order--in futile acts of rebellion against what the world has dealt one. The title of Resolve 66, for example, is "Content[ment] Makes [One] Rich."

For the 1628 edition Felltham added a new century of resolves that is longer than the original one, and he placed the new century first. He also added more specific and secular subjects than those treated in the first edition, such as dreams, poetry, and war. Pebworth notes the importance of the name excogitations that Felltham gives these pieces: they are workings out by the mind of issues that do not lend themselves to simple resolution. Not only is the style in these new pieces looser and less "Senecan" but they also contain more quotations and topical allusions. Many of them are, as well, less specifically defined, providing the author with a broader field on which to play verbally; for example, Resolve 92 in the original century has the title "Of the Minde of man after the conquest of a strong Temptation"; but, with few exceptions, those of the new century follow the formula "Of Fate," "Of Censure," "Of Scandall," and so on.

The printer of the 1628 volume apologizes for its errata on the basis of the author's "absence," but one cannot know the nature of this absence. It was in this period that Felltham met not only some of the literary celebrities of his time, such as Ben Jonson and Thomas Randolph, but also Barnabas O'Brien, who in 1639 would succeed to his brother's title as earl of Thomond. Around 1628 Felltham became steward of O'Brien's manor in Great Billing, Northamptonshire; he spent the rest of his life in the position, serving Barnabas's son Henry when he succeeded to the title in 1657. During the civil war the manor, although it was in hostile territory, became a favorite Royalist gathering place. The 1661 edition of the Resolves celebrates the Restoration.

For the 1661 edition Felltham made radical changes in his original 1623 resolves; he left the century added in the 1628 edition untouched, but because of what he calls their "young weaknesses," the earlier ones were rewritten, omitted, or substituted for throughout, and the revised ones were retitled. For example, the original fifth resolve, "Three things aggravate a Miserie," is omitted in 1661; the fourth, "Of Lyes, and Untruths," is revised and retitled "Of Truth and Lying"; and a new fifth resolve, "Of Preparing Against Death," is inserted. To Pebworth the key change in 1661 is "the expansion of aphorisms into statements that approach conversation." This loosening of style corresponds to a loosening of attitude, a more tolerant humanism. In number 51, "Against Compulsion," Felltham says, "The noblest weapon wherewith Man can conquer, is love"; in number 76, "Of Moderation," he says, "Nothing makes Greatness last, like the Moderate use of Authority"; in number 85, "Of Marriage and Single Life," he says, "A wise wife comprehends both sexes: she is a woman for her body, and she is a man within: for her soul is like her Husbands.... It is a Crown of blessings, when in one woman a man findeth both a wife and a friend." The 1661 edition also includes "Lusoria," a collection of Felltham's poems; a series of letters, some addressed to individuals, others to generic ladies; two biblical commentaries; and "Three Weeks Observation of the Low Countries, Especially Holland," a reprint of a work that was first officially published in 1652 as A brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States. In this sense the 1661 Resolves becomes Felltham's "collected works."

Felltham's only other independently printed work, A brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States, exists in diverse manuscript copies dating from the early 1630s. Filled with biting cultural commentary, it was pirated without the author's permission in 1648. Pebworth points out that Felltham had probably refused to print it because of the political amity between England and the Low Countries under the Stuarts, but "in 1652, when war broke out between England and Holland, a good market for anti-Dutch books was created in London."

"Characters" of other countries published in England in the seventeenth century were almost always critical, and Felltham's is no exception; but it excels in its colorful language and focuses on the "moral character" of the Dutch: "They are seldom deceived; for they trust nobody." They are boorish, materialistic, and warlike. Dutch houses reflect the national character: "every door seems studded with diamonds." Felltham observes that "The Soyl is all fat, though wanting the colour to shew it so; for indeed it is the buttock of the World, full of veines and bloud, but no bones in't." Some of his strongest political commentary comes in his condemnation of Dutch democracy, which he sees as subversive of the social order that mirrors the divinely governed world.

Felltham died on 23 February 1668 in the London house of O'Brien's widow. His will reveals more of his true individuality than all of his works; speaking of his tomb he says, "When the Jewell is gone wee use not to be solicitous about the Case." That he then authorizes thirty pounds to pay for the "Case" demonstrates how paradoxical this paragon of moderation could be.