John Suckling

English courtier, poet, and playwright

• Born: February 10, 1609
• Birthplace: Whitton, Twickenham, Middlesex, England
• Died: 1642
• Place of death: Paris, France

In addition to being a noteworthy playwright and a poet of the Cavalier tradition, Suckling was a staunch supporter of King Charles I. He helped to fund Royalist military ventures and participated directly in the events leading up to the onset of the English Civil War.

Early Life

Little is known of the early life of Sir John Suckling. The second of five siblings, he was born into an old, landed Norfolk family that traced its ancestry back to Anglo-Saxon times. His mother, Martha Cranfield, from whom Suckling was said to have inherited his wit, was the daughter of a London merchant and the sister of Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex, a celebrated lord treasurer to James I . Suckling’s father, John Suckling, after whom he was named, was a member of Parliament for Dunwich, and principal secretary of state and comptroller of the household of King James I. In the reign of Charles I , John senior became a privy councillor.

John’s mother died at Norwich on October 28, 1613, when he was not yet five years old. Soon thereafter, Suckling was sent to boarding school, possibly at Westminster. His father remarried two years later. John, the son, may have grown up at either the Suckling home, Dorset Court, near Fleet Street, in London, or at Whitton, the place of his birth. There is a tradition that Suckling learned Latin at the precociously early age of five, but this is probably because of an error in determining his birth date.

Suckling went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1623, and he remained there until at least 1627 or 1628, for there is a record of him speaking the prologue in the comedy Paria (pr. c. 1628) by Thomas Vincent, which was performed before the king. Suckling was admitted to Grays’ Inn in February, 1627, but his stay there may have been short. Little else is known about these early years, except that he maintained a youthful attachment to Mary Cranfield, daughter of Elizabeth Sheppard, the first wife of his uncle Lionel Cranfield. This attachment survived until 1632.

Life’s Work

Suckling’s father died on March 27, 1627, leaving behind an estate of between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand pounds, with most of his properties eventually going to his son John. John, however, was debarred in the will from inheriting anything until he was twenty-six years old, reflecting his father’s estimate of his son’s profligacy.

Suckling embarked upon the Grand Tour in 1628, proceeding to France and Italy, but he was back in England by September 19, 1630, when he was knighted by the king at Theobald’s. In July of 1631, he was part of a force of six thousand men under the marquis of Hamilton who were to reinforce the army of Gustavus II Adolphus , king of Sweden and a Protestant champion in the Thirty Years’ War. Suckling is said to have been present at the defeat of Johan Tserclaes, count of Tilly, the imperial general, at Leipzig, in September, 1631, and to have been present at several other sieges as well. Back in England by 1632, he embarked upon a course of extravagance and self-indulgence at court, where he was notorious for his obsession with gambling. John Aubrey (1626-1697) describes the young man sitting up in bed at night, cards strewn on the sheets, working out winning strategies. Aubrey also relates that Suckling’s sisters appeared one day at the Piccadily bowling green, fearful that he was about to gamble away their dowries.

In 1634, Suckling, now approaching the age of twenty-five, entered into his inheritance, which he squandered with such rapidity that he decided he needed to marry an heiress to repair the damage. He became a suitor of Anne Willoughby, daughter of Sir Henry Willoughby. Sir Henry, however, was determined that Anne should marry Sir John Digby, brother of Sir Kenelm Digby, and not to a man like Suckling, whom he regarded as a wastrel. Charles I, who greatly liked Suckling, supported his pursuit of Anne Willoughby, who was maneuvered into signing a statement promising that she would marry him. The document was later repudiated; Suckling was involved in a brawl with the Digbys, and his prospects for the Willoughby estate vanished. He never married.

The courtier, wit, and poet now embarked upon a career as a playwright with Aglaura (pr., pb. 1638), produced at Blackfriars and at the Cockpit Theatre in 1638. Anxious that his new play should be staged well, he paid for all stage expenses, including extravagant costuming. In the same year, Suckling was appointed gentleman of the king’s privy chamber extraordinary and possibly wrote his well-known poem, “A Ballad upon a Wedding” (pb. 1646).

By this time, the shadow of the English Civil Wars was beginning to cast gloom over Charles I’s court. In 1639, disturbances in Scotland that became the First Bishops’ War gave Suckling an opportunity to display his loyalty as well as his extravagance. He raised for the king a troop of one hundred horses and paid all their expenses, including their gear and clothing, which cost about twelve thousand pounds. Suckling’s men in scarlet and white rode north with the king’s army, but the campaign was a disaster, and the royal army, with Suckling’s troop, was soon disbanded.

Suckling was commissioned in February, 1640, as a captain of the Carabineers. Also that year, he wrote the first draft of Brennoralt (pr. 1646), then titled The Discontented Colonel, and returned to Parliament as a member for Bramber, Sussex. More dangerously, Suckling wrote a letter to the king in the form of a communication to the queen’s confidante, Sir Henry Jermyn, urging him to take the initiative against the Parliamentary opposition. By the beginning of March, Suckling was advising the king to undertake a coup de main against Parliament. He urged the king to secure control of the army, but the various promoters of this plan, which may not have originated with Suckling, fell out. His friend George Goring revealed the plan to the opposition. A parliamentary committee investigated the plot to take control of the army and was especially irritated with Suckling, who was assumed to have been attempting to enlist mercenaries from Portugal.

On May 2, supporters of the king attempted to break into the Tower of London, supposedly to liberate the king’s imprisoned first minister, Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford . On the same day, Suckling had assembled sixty armed men in a tavern for some presumably related illicit purpose, for which he and his companions were charged before the House of Lords. They failed to appear, and on May 8, a proclamation was issued against them. Charles promised Parliament that these unruly courtiers would be detained, but Suckling had already fled abroad, and his friends had gone into hiding. Suckling never returned to England. Penniless and with no prospects, he committed suicide in Paris in 1642, possibly in May or June, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. What remained of his estates passed to his father’s half brother, Charles Suckling, whose great-grandson was the father of Maurice and Catherine Suckling, the patron and mother of Lord Nelson.

Significance

The life of Sir John Suckling exemplified extremes of both the brilliance and the tragedy of a young courtier who showed immense promise, who inherited a great fortune, who was learned, charming, witty—a favorite of Charles I—but who, through profligacy, ended up alone, without hope, in Paris, taking his own life. Suckling, “the greatest gallant of his time and the greatest gamester for bowling and cards,” as Aubrey noted, was also a devoted Stuart loyalist who, in his person and in his wit, may have posthumously served Restoration courtiers as a model. As a writer, Suckling challenged prevailing poetic models of courtliness. With the Caroline order giving way to the approach of civil war, his ironic wit heralded the nervous impulses of a more somber age.

The Cavalier wit, Stuart loyalist, and soldier—“natural, easy Suckling,” as he was dubbed by Millamant in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (pr., pb. 1700)—is remembered today for his small corpus of poems, which combine brilliance in language and a satirical and cynical stance with a seriousness that cuts through the brittle surface, challenging the images of conventional contemporary love poetry. Among his best-known are “The Wits” (1646), “A Ballad upon a Wedding”(1646), “Why So Pale and Wan” (1646), “When, Dearest, I but Think of Thee” (1646), and “Out upon It! I Have Loved” (1646).

Suckling’s dramatic works—Aglaura, The Goblins (pr. 1638), Brennoralt, and the unfinished The Sad One—were few, and although they were admired in his time, they are scarcely read or performed today. His prose works, read as examples of the purity of seventeenth century diction as well as for their subject matter, include some fifty-four letters and An Account of Religion by Reason (wr. 1637, pb. 1646). His collected works first appeared as Fragmenta Aurea (1646, revised 1648, 1658, 1661-1662, and 1672); a later collection, The Last Remains of Sir John Suckling (1659), collects all of his previously unpublished poems and letters.

Bibliography

Clayton, Thomas, and L. A. Beaurline, eds. The Works of Sir John Suckling. 2 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971. The definitive edition of Suckling’s works.

Gibson, Cheryl M. “’’Tis Not the Meat, but ’tis the Appetite’: The Destruction of Woman in the Poetry of Sir John Suckling.” In Explorations in Renaissance Culture 20 (1994): 41-59. An examination of gender and the gendering of desire in Suckling’s work.

Henderson, Fletcher Orpin. “Traditions of Précieux and Libertain in Suckling’s Poetry.” English Literary History 4, no. 4 (December, 1937): 274-298. Contextualizes Suckling’s work by comparing it to his French influences.

Squier, Charles L. Sir John Suckling. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Accessible treatment of Suckling’s life and works, with good bibliography.

Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds. Renaissance Discourses of Desire. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Contains several useful articles on Suckling.