Anne Dowriche
Anne Dowriche, born Anne Edgcumbe in the mid-1550s in Cornwall, was a notable figure in early modern English literature and a prominent voice in the Protestant community. She was the daughter of Sir Richard Edgcumbe, a poet and local gentleman, and married Hugh Dowriche, a Protestant minister, in 1580. The couple had at least six children and lived primarily in Devon, where Hugh served as rector in two small towns. Dowriche is best known for her poem *The French Historie*, published in 1589, which is a polemical narrative that examines the challenges faced by Protestants in France, culminating in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. This work is thought to reflect the tumultuous religious landscape of the time and may have influenced contemporaneous writers like Christopher Marlowe. Additionally, Dowriche contributed a poem to her husband's 1596 work, *The Jaylor's Conversion*, which underscores their commitment to Puritan beliefs. While the details of her later life remain scarce, Anne Dowriche's literary contributions provide valuable insight into the intersections of gender, religion, and literature during her era.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Anne Dowriche
Writer
- Born: c. mid-1550’s
- Birthplace: Mount Edgcumbe, Cornwall
- Died: 1613
Biography
Anne Dowriche was born Anne Edgcumbe in the mid-1550’s at Mount Edgcumbe in Cornwall, in a house built by her father Sir Richard Edgcumbe (1528-1562), an eminent man and a poet of some note. Her mother, born Elizabeth Tregian, was also Cornish. In 1580, Anne Edgcumbe married the Protestant minister Hugh Dowriche, who had been educated at Hart Hall, Oxford. He too was the son of an eminent local man, Sir Richard Dowriche, and had been born in 1552 or 1553. From 1583 to 1587, Hugh Dowriche served as rector of Lapford. From 1587 to 1598, he was rector of Honiton. Both locations were (and still are) small market towns in Devon. The couple had at least six children.
Anne Dowriche is known to have written two poems for certain, although others have been tentatively attributed to her; by far the more important is The French Historie; That Is, a Lamentable Discourse of Three Bloodie Broiles in France for the Gospell of Jesus Christ, printed in 1589, at a time when English Protestantism was racked by arguments generated by the Puritan propagandising of the martyrologist John Foxe and the Calvinist John Field. The French Historie is a polemical narrative poem, in alternating iambic heptameters and hexameters, which highlights three key moments in the struggle for Protestant recognition in France, climaxing with the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. The author appears to have drawn her information from Thomas Tymme’s translation of Jean de Serras’s Commentariorum du statuu religionis et replublicae in regno Galliase libri (1572-1575), but the narrative voice is her own.
The French Historie is thought by some commentators to have influenced Christopher Marlowe, although the suggestion that the Dowriches were personally acquainted with Marlowe has no firm evidence to support it. Anne’s brother, Pearce Edgcumbe—to whom the French Historie is dedicated—was a member of six Elizabethan parliaments, however, and might well have known Marlowe. Her preface is humbly apologetic in tone, as was customary in women’s writings of the period.
The other poem signed by Anne Dowriche was an attachment to her husband’s book The Jaylor’s Conversion, printed in 1596. The main text is an expansion of a sermon with a strongly Calvinist message; the added verses comprise a homiletic poem of forty-four lines. The implication of the composite work is that the Dowriches were both Puritan activists, but little evidence of their work in that cause survives—unsurprisingly, given that they spent the bulk of their lives in rural Devon. Anne Dowriche is known to have died in or shortly after 1613, but no further details of her life can be established with certainty.