Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/176

 some property at Smarden in Kent (Archæol. Cantiana, x. 211), and shortly afterwards he again appears to have taken up arms on behalf of the king. In the autumn of this year Thomas Willys, a clerk of the crown in chancery, was taken prisoner by a Captain Lovelace, presumably the poet (Hist. MSS. Comm. 6th Rep. App. p. 107). Lovelace subsequently joined Charles in Oxford, and after the surrender of that city in 1646 left England (probably in the train of Prince Rupert who sailed in July), raised a regiment for the service of the French king, then at war with Spain, became its colonel, and received a wound at Dunkirk when that town was captured by Condé in October 1646. Returning to England in 1648, he and his brother Dudley, who had served as a captain under him, were committed to Petre House in Aldersgate (cf., Troubles, 1681, p. 568), having very possibly aggravated their political offence by taking some share in the riots and ‘distempers’ of Kent in the June of this year. Lovelace beguiled his second confinement by ‘framing for the press’ his ‘Lucasta; Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, &c. To which is added Aramantha, a Pastoral, by Richard Lovelace, Esq., London … to be sold by Thos. Evvster at the Gun in Ivie Lane, 1649.’ The volume is dedicated to Lady Anne Lovelace, the wife of his distant kinsman, the second Lord Lovelace of Hurley, and has commendatory verses by, among others, Francis Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, and Francis Lenton. Prefixed is a portrait of a lady engraved by Faithorne, after Sir Peter Lely. The name ‘Lucasta’ is supposed to be a contraction of ‘Lux Casta,’ and was possibly an imaginary personage, after whom, in accordance with the familiar practice of the time, he called his poems. Robert Heath [q. v.] named a volume of his miscellaneous poems ‘Clara Stella’ in the following year. Wood, however, identifies ‘Lucasta’ with a certain Lucy Sacheverell, who ‘upon a stray report that Lovelace was dead of his wound received at Dunkirk, soon after married.’ Hunter surmises, not improbably, that she was a daughter of Ferdinando (aged 20 in 1619), a natural son of Henry Sacheverell of Warwickshire, by Lucy, daughter of Sir Henry Hastings of Newark (cf. Harl. MS. 1167, fol. 160).

Among the varied contents of ‘Lucasta’ are ‘To Lucasta, going to the Warres,’ set by John Laniere, ‘To Aramantha, that she would dishevell her haire,’ set by Henry Lawes, ‘The Scrutinie,’ set by Thomas Charles, and reprinted in Cotgrave's ‘Wit's Interpreter,’ 1662, ‘The Grasshopper,’ and ‘To Althea, from Prison,’ set by John Wilson. The last-mentioned was considered by contemporaries a masterpiece. In a seventeenth-century manuscript anthology, which belonged to Dr. Bliss, it is followed by an unsigned ‘Answer’ (Add. MS. 22603, f. 16); it was closely imitated and expanded in an ‘excellent old song’ entitled ‘Loyalty Confined,’ originally printed in ‘Lloyd's Memoires’ (1668, p. 96), and traditionally ascribed to Sir Roger L'Estrange, though attributed in the ‘British Museum Catalogue’ to Lovelace himself (the internal evidence favours L'Estrange's authorship; see also, Reliques, 1845, p. 172, and Recollections); and it clearly inspired the fine lines written by Pellison-Fontanier in the Bastile in 1662. ‘To Althea’ began a new lease of life when reprinted in his ‘Reliques’ by Percy, who made several conjectural emendations, which have since been universally condemned. From Percy's time the lyrics of ‘Lucasta’ have been twice edited, familiarised in numerous authologies, frequently set to music, and occasionally borrowed from, notably by Campbell, who owed the fine phrase ‘sentinel stars set their watch in the sky’ to Lovelace, and by Byron, whose ‘music breathing from the face’ is clearly under obligation to Lovelace's ‘Song of Orpheus.’

Lovelace was released by warrant issued from the council of state on 10 Dec. 1649 (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1649, p. 529). In the same year the manor of Lovelace-Bethersden passed by purchase to Richard Hulse. He had now ‘consumed his whole patrimony in useless attempts to serve his sovereign.’ Whereupon ‘he grew,’ says Wood, ‘very melancholy (which brought him at length into a consumption), became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged cloaths (whereas when he was in his glory he wore cloth of gold and silver) and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants.’ Alms were conveyed to him from Charles Cotton and others, but he sank and died in 1658 in a mean lodging in Gunpowder Alley, between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane, close to the spot where a little more than a hundred years later Chatterton was given a pauper's funeral. He was buried at the west end of St. Bride's, one of the churches burnt in the fire of 1666.

Mr. Hazlitt has questioned the truth of Wood's picture of Lovelace's penury on the erroneous assumptions that ‘Lovelace's daughter Margaret’ conveyed an estate at Kingsdown to her husband, Mr. Henry Coke, and that Gunpowder Alley was not a mean locality. The Margaret Lovelace in question was not the poet's daughter, but a cousin of