Richard Lovelace

English poet

• Born: 1618
• Birthplace: Woolwich, Kent, England, or Holland
• Died: 1656 or 1657
• Place of death: London, England

Remembered now for only a few lines of verse, Lovelace was the quintessential English Cavalier poet. A courtier and soldier under Charles I, his poetry celebrated love, loyalty to the Crown, and the companionship of kindred spirits, even as he sacrificed his estates and suffered imprisonment under the Parliamentary regime.

Early Life

Richard Lovelace came from an old Kentish family and was probably born in Woolwich in Kent, England. He may, however, have been born in Holland, where his mother joined his father during a military campaign. His date of birth is not known more precisely than the year, 1618. Lovelace’s father and paternal grandfather, both named William, were professional soldiers and were knighted in the course of their military careers. His father was killed in combat at Grolle, Holland, in 1627. Richard (the eldest son, then age nine), his four brothers, his three sisters, and their mother were left in reduced circumstances, which were then relieved by inheritance upon the death of Richard’s grandfather, who had amassed considerable property.

Lovelace was given the honorary court position of Gentleman Extraordinary Wayter to the King in 1631. He is believed to have attended the Charterhouse School in London from about 1629 until 1634, during three of which years poet Richard Crashaw was a fellow student. Lovelace went on to Oxford as a gentleman commoner in June, 1634. At Oxford, he was, according to Anthony à Wood in Athenae Oxoniensis (1691-1692), “accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him then, but especially after, when he retired to the great City much admired and adored by the female sex.”

In his first year at Oxford, Lovelace wrote a comedy, The Scholar(s) (pr. 1636?), which was performed but never printed except for the Prologue and Epilogue, both published later in Lucasta: Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace, Esq. (1659). In 1636, when King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria visited Oxford, Lovelace was awarded the degree of master of arts by special request of one of the queen’s ladies. The following year, he went for some months to Cambridge and then to London and the royal court.

Life’s Work

In 1639, Lovelace was commissioned an ensign under George, Lord Goring, the future earl of Norwich. He embarked upon the English expedition to Scotland during the bloodless First Bishops’ War. He served as a captain in the Second Bishops’ War in 1640, during which he found time to write a tragedy, never performed or published (the theaters shortly being closed), of which only the name remains: The Soldier (wr. 1640). Once the conflict ended, Lovelace being then of age, he settled on his family estates in Kent. The king, meanwhile, had called what came to be known as the Long Parliament , in order to pay war expenses. Parliament, however, began the process of diminishing royal power, and friction continued in the country at large, including Lovelace’s home county.

When the Kent Assizes (the county assembly) debated a counter-petition to one favoring the king, Lovelace led a group that clapped on their hats in protest and then seized the document and tore it up. In April, 1642, he and the other Royalists having prevailed in Kent, Lovelace and Sir William Boteler led a group to London to deliver to Parliament the famous Kentish Petition, which urged policies favoring the king. Lovelace and Boteler were quickly imprisoned. They were released seven weeks later on bonds of ten thousand pounds apiece. Lovelace is thought to have written “To Althea, from Prison” (pb. 1649) at this time. The often-quoted line “Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage” would have been drawn from this personal experience.

Lovelace also began heavily subsidizing two of his brothers and others in support of the Royalist cause. He is not known himself to have taken up arms in the English Civil War, perhaps because of the terms of his release from prison. Instead, he seems to have spent much of the next several years on the Continent, in Holland and France. Following the family tradition of soldiering abroad, Lovelace fought in the French army against the Spanish and was wounded at the Siege of Dunkirk in late 1646. Returning to England, now-Colonel Lovelace was able for a while to enjoy the lifestyle of a well-off gentleman and to keep acquaintance with such social figures as poet Andrew Marvell , courtier Endymion Porter, and painter Peter Lely.

Lovelace’s interest in visual art was sufficient that he was admitted to the Painters’ Company (guild) in 1647. Then, in 1648, Parliamentary troops searching for his brother Francis raided Lovelace’s house in Maidstone, Kent. Lovelace was present and protested and was then imprisoned again, this time for ten months. He spent the time preparing for publication a book of poems, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, &c. to Which Is Added Aramantha, a Pastorall (1649), which appeared a month after his release, in June, 1649. Shortly thereafter, Lovelace liquidated what remained of his property. Little is known of the rest of his life. Scholars today doubt Anthony à Wood’s description of his last years spent in extreme poverty, though his circumstances must have been considerably reduced from what they had once been. He probably died in 1656 or 1657. The posthumous volume of his poems, Lucasta: Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace, Esq., was published by his brother, Dudley Lovelace, dated 1659.

Though probably known in his own time more for political and military activities, as well as his social standing and personal attractiveness, Lovelace was also recognized by his contemporaries as a poet. He wrote chiefly brief lyrics, a number of which were set to music. Today his fame is as a poet, albeit a minor one in a century renowned for great poetry. Along with others of that cluster of seventeenth century English writers now sometimes called the Cavalier poets, Lovelace celebrated loyalty to the Crown, fellowship with kindred spirits, and love of women. His corpus is small, consisting almost entirely of the two Lucasta volumes, which contain just over one hundred poems. By far his best-known works are “To Althea, from Prison” and “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” (1649). The latter contains the famous declaration, “I could not love thee (Dear) so much,/ Lov’d I not Honour more.”

Of his several poems about small creatures, “The Grasshopper” (1649), wherein the insect serves as metaphor for a man in such troubled times as the Civil War, is the best known. Like other contemporaries, Lovelace followed a long tradition of giving the women in his poems classically inspired names. His general popularity with women is attested by Marvell, who speaks of “Lovelace that thaw’d the most congealed breast.” Though it seems clear that “Lucasta,” whom Lovelace commemorated in twenty-seven poems as well as the title of his collection, was a real woman, her identity is unknown, as Wood’s identification is discredited. “Althea,” to whom what has always been Lovelace’s most popular poem is addressed, also remains unidentified.

Significance

Only a few brief pieces of Lovelace’s poetry are much noted today, but they are known throughout the English-speaking world, even to many persons unaware of the author’s identity. The entirety of Lovelace’s extant corpus is embodied in the two slim volumes, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, &c. to Which Is Added Aramantha, a Pastorall and Lucasta: Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace, Esq. Even so, Lovelace’s reputation rests upon the thirty-two lines of “To Althea, from Prison” and the twelve lines of “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.” Both embody the loyalty, love, courage, and seemingly effortless beauty and wit that typify the best Cavalier poetry.

Bibliography

Bence-Jones, Mark. The Cavaliers. London: Constable, 1976. Sketches the English Civil War period, with emphasis on the lives of noteworthy Cavaliers, including a section on Lovelace.

Kelly, Erna. “Small Types of Great Ones.” In The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Analyzes Lovelace’s poems on small creatures in the political context of the Civil War period.

Lindsay, Philip. For King or Parliament. London: Evans Brothers, 1949. Contains journalistic biographies of Lovelace and three contemporaries, Buckingham, Strafford, and Hampden.

Miner, Earl. The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. Analyzes the works of Lovelace and the other Cavalier poets.

Schmidt, Michael. Lives of the Poets. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. The chapter titled “An End of Delicacy” smoothly summarizes Lovelace’s life and works in their political and literary context.

Weidhorn, Manfred. Richard Lovelace. New York: Twayne, 1970. After a biographical chapter, following chapters give the most extended available treatment of the poetry. Selective bibliography very useful.

Wilkinson, C. H., ed. The Poems of Lovelace. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1930. The commonly used complete edition. Contains all of Lovelace’s works, plus an authoritative biographical sketch and comments on the text. Omits the song settings and some other ancillary material contained in Wilkinson’s two-volume 1925 edition.