Henry Peacham
Henry Peacham was an English author and educator born around 1578 in Hertfordshire. He was the second son of a local minister and pursued his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned his B.A. in 1595 and M.A. in 1598. Despite a distaste for teaching, he worked at Kimbolton School and produced significant writings, including "Graphice," a treatise on drawing and limning published in 1606. Peacham's literary contributions also include emblematic works, which were visual and textual combinations intended for moral reflection, and he sought recognition at the court of James I.
In 1612, he published "Minerva Britanna," and later, in 1622, he released his most renowned work, "The Compleat Gentleman," which offered guidance on etiquette and influenced Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Throughout his life, Peacham traveled extensively, teaching in various locations, and authored numerous pamphlets, some of which served as commercial ventures. While the exact date of his death remains unknown, Peacham's diverse body of work reflects the cultural and artistic currents of early seventeenth-century England.
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Henry Peacham
Author
- Born: 1576
- Birthplace: North Mimms, Hertfordshire, England
- Died: c. 1644
Biography
Henry Peacham was born in 1578 or thereabouts in the parish of North Mimms, Hertfordshire, England. He was the second son of the similarly named local minister—the author of a noted book on rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence—and Anne, née Fairclough. He went to school in St. Albans and London before going to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1592, obtaining his B.A. in 1595 and his M.A. in 1598. By 1600, he was teaching at Kimbolton School in Huntingdonshire; he disliked the work, but was repeatedly driven back to it for financial support.
While he was at Kimbolton, Peacham produced a treatise on The Art of Drawing with the Pen, and Limming in Water Colours that was published as Graphice in 1606 and further expanded for reprinting in 1634 and 1661 as The Gentleman’s Exercise. In 1603, he composed a four-part madrigal, but it was never published; Peacham is, however, unusual among early seventeenth century writers in that much of his work survives in manuscript, largely because it was closely integrated with illustrative designs that were obviously precious. His manuscripts are mostly books of emblems: pictures combined with mottoes or verses intended to serve as morals for the purpose of meditation. He presented several samples of that work to James I, and based many of his texts on a book of advice the king had written for his son, Prince Henry, but never secured the position at court hat he craved.
In 1607, Peacham moved to London; no record of his marriage survived. One of his two daughters, Sarah, was baptized at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in 1612. In that year, he published Minerva Britanna: Or, A Garden of Heraldic Devices, containing 204 emblems, many of them reproduced from earlier manuscripts but with devices in English rather than Latin. Prince Henry died in the same year, prompting a flood of elegiac writing, to which Peacham contributed with The Period of Mourning.
Peacham left England to travel on the Continent, journeying to Utrecht, where he befriended the governor, Sir John Ogle. He accompanied Ogle’s regiment on a campaign in 1614, publishing an account of it the following year when he returned to England. He taught in Norfolk until 1620, when he published a book of epigrams, Thalia’s Banquet. He returned to London in 1621, publishing his best-known work, The Compleat Gentleman in 1622. Although primarily a guide to etiquette, it was the source of all the heraldic definitions in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary.
By 1624, Peacham was teaching in East Anglia again, and from 1632 to 1635 he was at Heighington Free School in Lincolnshire. Between 1636 and 1642, he published some twenty comic or polemical pamphlets, presumably produced as commercial hackwork, and wrote texts to accompany illustrations by the Dutch engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. The date of his death is unknown, but he was probably still alive when his last collaboration with Hollar was published in 1644. One of his pamphlets, the deeply embittered The Truth of Our Times, is interesting in retrospect, but The Worth of a Penny, a fashionable exhortation to thrift, was far more popular at the time.