sisters, of whom the youngest, Joane, married Robert Cesar, and had three daughters, on whom their uncle wrote ‘Paris's Second Judgment.’
The poet, who was the eldest of his family, was born at his father's house in Woolwich in 1618. He was educated at the Charterhouse and at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, where he matriculated 27 June 1634, ‘being then accounted the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld’ (Wood), 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 1636 when the king and queen were for some days at Oxford, he was ‘at the request of a great lady belonging to the queen, made to the Archbishop of Canterbury, then chancellor of the university, created, among other persons of quality, master of arts, though but of two years' standing; at which time his conversation being made public, and consequently his ingenuity and generous soul discovered, he became as much admired by the male as before by the female sex.’ He was incorporated at Cambridge in the following year. Lovelace had already written ‘The Scholar, a Comedy,’ which was acted with applause during his residence at Gloucester Hall (1636), and afterwards repeated at the Whitefriars, Salisbury Court; he had also commenced writing occasional poetry, contributing verses to the ‘Musarum Oxoniensium Charisteria’ (1638), and commendatory verses to Anthony H[odges]'s English version of ‘The Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe’ (1638).
Leaving Oxford, Lovelace ‘repaired in great splendour to the court,’ but soon sought active employment in the field. He was appointed ensign in the regiment of his patron George, lord Goring (Peacock, Army Lists, p. 76), in the first Scottish expedition of 1639; in the second expedition ‘he was commissionated a captain in the same regiment, and in that time wrote a tragedy called ‘The Soldier,’ but never acted because the stage was soon after suppressed’ (Wood). Neither of his plays appears to be extant. After the pacification of Berwick, being then over twenty-one years of age, Lovelace returned to Kent and took possession of his family property at Bethersden, Chart, Halden, Shadoxhurst, and Canterbury, worth at least 500l. per annum. He was put on the commission of the peace for the county, and in April 1642 was chosen at the Maidstone assizes to deliver to the parliament the famous Kentish petition in the king's behalf framed by Sir Edward Dering [q. v.] and other royalists. On 29 April a great meeting was held on Blackheath to back the petition, which Lovelace had the temerity to present to the Houses on the following day, though he was aware of its resemblance to a previous petition from Kent presented in March on behalf of the bishops and liturgy, and ordered by parliament to be burnt by the common hangman on 7 April. When questioned before the House, he was unable to expressly deny a knowledge of the fate of the earlier document. He was accordingly, on 30 April 1642, committed to the Gatehouse at Westminster (D'Ewes, Journals in Harl. MS. 163, f. 489; Verney Papers (Camd. Soc.), 1845, p. 175; Parliaments and Councils of England, 1839, p. 384). There ‘he wrote that celebrated song called “Stone Walls do not a Prison make.”’ On 17 June 1642, his companion in misfortune, Sir William Boteler, having already petitioned and been set at liberty, he prayed for discharge upon bail ‘in order that he might serve against the rebels in Ireland’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 6th Rep. App. p. 29; his petition, curiously worded, is quoted in full, Notes and Queries, 5th ser. vi. 122). His request was promptly complied with, and he was bailed on the security of William Clarke of Rotham (Wrotham) and Thomas Flood of Ottom (Otham), the principal in the sum of 10,000l. the sureties in 5,000l. apiece, his bail being accepted 21 June 1642 (Commons' Journals, ii. 629, 635).
Lovelace was thus enlarged after about seven weeks' imprisonment on condition of not stirring out of the lines of communication without a pass from the speaker. He, nevertheless, furnished his brothers, Francis and William, with men and money for the king's cause, and his youngest brother Dudley with means to study tactics and fortifications in Holland. In the meantime he lived expensively in London, and seems to have been on terms of intimacy with many of the wits of the day. Among his associates were Lawes and Gamble the musicians, before whose volumes of ‘Ayres’ he wrote verses; Gideon Ashwell, Glapthorne, who dedicated his ‘Whitehall, a Poem with Elegies,’ to his ‘noble friend and gossip Captaine Lovelace;’ Lenton and his friend Cockain, Rawlins, Hall, the Cottons, Sir Peter Lely, on whose portrait of Charles I he wrote some of his best lines; Tatham, the city poet, who wrote ‘an invitation to his lov'd Adonis (Lovelace) being then in Holland’ (Ostella, 1650, 4to); Andrew Marvell and most probably Suckling, who is supposed to have apostrophised him in his famous ‘I tell thee, Dick, where I have been’ (Hazlitt, xxxii. n.)
On 4 Aug. 1645 he seems to have purchased
