Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/182

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Lover
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Lover

ments celebrating the creation of Prince Henry Duke of York, and in 1500 he accompanied the king at his meeting with the Archduke Philip near Calais. In 1502 he became treasurer of the household and president of the council. In 1503 he was made K.G. About 1504 he appears to have been high steward of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He acted as an executor for Cecilia, duchess of York (d. 1494), Lady Margaret, countess of Richmond, and foundress of St. John's College, Cambridge, Henry VII, Sir Thomas Brandon [q. v.], John, earl of Oxford (d. 1512), and Sir Robert Sheffield, lord mayor of London, who died about 1514.

Henry VIII continued to employ Lovell. He was reappointed chancellor of the exchequer, was made constable of the Tower in 1509, and surveyor of the court of wards, and steward and marshal of the household. On 3 Sept. 1513 he was commissioned to levy men in the midlands for service against the Scots, and on 12 May 1514 either he or his nephew Thomas, who was knighted in 1513, landed at Calais with a hundred men, and was shortly afterwards joined by three hundred more.

The rise of Wolsey's power seems to have affected his position. Giustiniani wrote on 17 July 1516 that Lovell had withdrawn himself from public affairs. On Ascension day 1516 Margaret [q. v.], queen-dowager of Scotland, visited him at Elsing, near Enfield, in Middlesex, a house he had inherited from his brother-in-law, Edmund, lord Rous, in 1508. On 14 May 1523 he was reported to be very ill, and he died at Elsing on 25 May 1524. He was buried in a chantry chapel he had built at Halliwell, or Holywell, nunnery in Shoreditch, a house of which he was regarded as a second founder. His funeral was very magnificent (cf. Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 12462, parts of which are printed in Robinson's Hist. of Enfield, i. 126). His portrait was formerly in a stained-glass window in Malvern Church. Lovell contributed towards the building of Caius College, Cambridge, and built a gateway for Lincoln's Inn. He also built a manor-house at Harling in Norfolk.

Lovell married, first, Eleanor, daughter of Jeffrey Ratcliffe; and, secondly, Isabel, daughter of Edward, lord Rous, of Hamlake, a widow, but left no issue. By the numerous grants which he had from Henry VIII he died very rich. The greater part of his estates passed to his nephew Francis, whom he calls in his will his cousin. Francis was succeeded by his son, Sir Thomas Lovell (d. 1567), and had another son, Gregory Lovell (1522–1597), who was cofferer to the household, and received a lease of Merton Abbey, Surrey, from Elizabeth in 1586–7.

[Ford's Hist. of Enfield, pp. 68 and sq.; Ellis's Hist. of Shoreditch, pp. 193 and sq.; Manning and Bray's Surrey, pp. 254, 259, 517; Lodge's Illustr. of Brit. Hist. i. 13; Robinson's Hist. of Enfield, i. 128 and sq.; Blomefield's Norfolk, i. 323, vii. 273; Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. i. 30, 526; Campbell's Materials for a Hist. of … Hen. VII (Rolls Ser.), vols. i. ii. passim; Gairdner's Letters and Papers Illustr. of the Reign of Henry VII (Rolls Ser.), i. 181, 403, 414, ii. 88; Brewer's Reign of Henry VIII, i. 53, 195, 258, 479; Rotuli Scotiæ, ii. 473, 476; Cal. of Letters and Papers Hen. VIII, pp. 1509–1523 passim; Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, iii. 392; Chron. of Calais (Camd. Soc.), pp. 6, 15, 32, 81; Metcalfe's Knights, pp. 5, 15, 16, 27, 28, 51; Latimer's Works (Parker Soc.), ii. 295; Willis and Clark's Arch. Hist. of the Univ. of Cambr. i. 169; Nicolas's Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York, p. 110; Testamenta Vetusta passim (p. 640, Lovell's will); Weever's Funerall Monuments; Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 12463 (account of Lovell's estates at his death); Addit. MS. 19140 (Davy's Suff. Coll. vol. lxiv.) has a pedigree showing that Ralph Lovell of Beachamwell was Lovell's great-uncle, not his father.]

W. A. J. A.

LOVER, SAMUEL (1797–1868), song-writer, novelist, and painter, born in Dublin on 24 Feb. 1797, was the eldest son of a Dublin stockbroker, and was educated privately in his native city. As a child of extraordinary precocity of talent, which he showed chiefly in his aptitude for music, he was until his nineteenth year the idol of his father. But after he entered his father's office he found the occupation very uncongenial. Frequent quarrels with his father led to a complete rupture, and at the age of seventeen Lover determined to earn his livelihood as a painter. His natural and acquired capacity for art was already considerable, and the judgment of one of his eulogists, after his death, ascribes to him higher artistic than literary talent (Temple Bar, vol. xxiv.) Applying himself industriously to portraiture, especially to miniature-painting, he achieved sufficient success to secure in 1828 election to the Royal Hibernian Academy, a body to which, two years later, he became secretary.

Meantime Lover gave the first evidence of his powers as song-writer and reciter, when, on the occasion of the Moore banquet in 1818, he produced a lively eulogy on Moore, which won for him the friendship of the poet, and the entrée into the liveliest social circles in Dublin. His first effort at prose literature, a paper on ‘Ballads and Singers,’