Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/112

 calling themselves the ‘monks of Medmenham Abbey,’ and he was appointed secretary and steward of their order of ill fame. He had to suffer severely in consequence, for the scalp-hunting satire of Churchill found in him a victim entirely to its taste. In three of Churchill's satires he was branded as a ‘disgrace on manhood’ (The Conference, 1763), as ‘the aged Paul’ who chalks the score of the blasphemous revellers behind the door (The Candidate, 1764), and as the type of the ‘kept bard’ (Independence, 1764). The times were not squeamish, and Churchill's testimony was not respected; but the charges were unanswerable, and Whitehead is remembered for little else. He had, however, at the time, been rewarded for his services by being appointed, through Sir Francis Dashwood, probably during his chancellorship of the exchequer in Lord Bute's ministry (1762–3), to a ‘deputy treasurership of the chamber,’ as one of his biographers calls it, worth 800l. a year. This enabled him to enlarge the cottage on Twickenham Common where he had for some years resided (in 1755 Horace Walpole mentions him as one of the celebrities of the locality; see Letters, ii. 447). In his ‘Epistle to Dr. Thompson’ he describes, quite in Pope's Horatian vein, the modest comforts of his retirement, and he appears to have been popular both in the country, where he was known for his kindliness, and in London society, where among his friends were Hogarth and Hayman, and the actor and dramatist [q. v.] Sir John Hawkins, however, says that ‘in his conversation there was little to praise; it was desultory, vociferous, and profane. He had contracted a habit of swearing in his younger years, which he retained to his latest.’ He published very little in his later years—a pamphlet on Covent Garden stage disputes is mentioned in 1768—but he wrote a few songs for his friend the actor Beard and others. On 20 Dec. 1774 he died in his lodgings in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, having during the course of a protracted illness burnt all his manuscripts within his reach. In his will he left his heart to his patron, Lord Le Despenser, by whose orders it was buried in the mausoleum at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, amid solemnities which under the circumstances might, like the bequest itself, have been pretermitted. A collection of his ‘Poems and Miscellaneous Compositions,’ with a life by Captain Edward Thompson, which is dedicated to Lord Le Despenser, and written in a strain of turgid and senseless flattery, appeared at London in 1777 (4to). His portrait, painted by Gainsborough, was engraved by Collyer in 1776, and prefixed to the 1777 edition of Whitehead's ‘Poems’ (, p. 896).



WHITEHEAD, WILLIAM (1715–1785), poet-laureate, was born at Cambridge early in 1715. He was baptised on 12 Feb. at St. Botolph's, in which parish his father carried on the trade of a baker, serving Pembroke Hall in that capacity. The elder Whitehead, while bestowing a liberal education on both his sons, is said to have been inclined to extravagance, and to have chiefly employed his time in ornamenting a plot of land near Grantchester, which long went under the name of Whitehead's Folly. Two years before his death his second son William, when fourteen years of age, through the patronage of Henry Bromley (afterwards Lord Montfort, and high steward of the university of Cambridge), obtained a nomination to Winchester College, where he remained till 1735. It was the period, as Whitehead afterwards sang (see his stanzas to the Rev. Dr. Lowth, in his Life of William of Wykeham), ‘when Bigg presided and when Burton taught.’ He is said to have acted the parts of Marcia in ‘Cato’ and of one of the women in the ‘Andria,’ and in 1733 to have gained one of the guinea prizes offered by Peterborough, on a visit to the school, for the best poem on a subject to be given out by his companion Pope, who chose Peterborough himself as the theme. This led to his being employed by Pope to translate into Latin the first epistle of the ‘Essay on Man;’ but this effort was not published, and Whitehead, although a competent scholar, never attained to distinction as a writer of Latin verse. In 1735, not commanding sufficient interest to secure election to New College, Oxford, he entered as a sizar at Clare Hall, Cambridge, with the aid of a small scholarship open to the orphan sons of tradesmen of the town. He graduated B.A. in 1739 and M.A. in 1743, and in 1742 was elected a fellow of his college. His irreproachable conduct, amiable manners, and growing reputation as a poet secured to him at Cambridge the friendship of many young men of a rank superior to his own, conspicuous among whom was (1725–1767) [q. v.], to whom two of his early poems are addressed (ii. 171, 173). In his lines ‘On Friendship’ (ii. 129), justly praised by his biographer and according to him highly com-