Edmund Waller, 3 March 1606 to 21 October 1687, was a poet and politician from Buckinghamshire. He sat as MP for various constituencies between 1624 and 1687, and was one of the longest serving members of the English House of Commons. Although considered a major poet by contemporaries, his literary reputation declined after his death, and he is now rarely read.
Waller first entered Parliament in 1624, although he played little part in the political struggles prior to the outbreak of the First English Civil War in 1642. Unlike his relatives William and Hardress Waller, he was Royalist in sympathy. In 1643, he was accused of plotting to seize London for Charles I, and allegedly escaped execution by paying a large bribe.
After his sentence was commuted to banishment, he lived in France and Switzerland until allowed home in 1651 by Oliver Cromwell, a distant relative. He returned to Parliament after the 1660 Stuart Restoration, but retired from active politics in 1677, and died of oedema in October 1687.
Personal details
Edmund Waller was born on 3 March 1606 at Stocks Place, Coleshill, Buckinghamshire, eldest son of Robert Waller (1560–1616) and Anne Hampden (1589–1658). He came from a family of 15, many of whom survived to adulthood, including Elizabeth (1601–?), Anne (1602–1642), Cecilia (1603–?), Robert (1606–1641), Mary (1608–1660), Ursula (1610–1692) and John (1616–1667). Cecilia married Nathaniel Tomkins, executed by Parliament in 1643, while Mary married Adrian Scrope, executed after the 1660 Stuart Restoration as a regicide.
thumb|left|upright=0.8|[[Hall Barn, circa 1898; Waller family home near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire]]
Through his mother, Waller was distantly connected to Oliver Cromwell, while he and John Hampden were grandchildren of Griffith Hampden (1543–1591). On his father's side, he was related to the Parliamentarian generals Hardress and William Waller.
In 1631, he married Anne Banks, orphaned heiress of a wealthy merchant; contracted in defiance of the Privy Council of England, the marriage was eventually approved by Charles I. Anne died in childbirth in 1634, leaving two children, Robert (1633–1652?) and Elizabeth (1634–1683).
In 1644, he re-married, this time to Mary Bracey (died 1677) and they had numerous children; since their eldest son, Benjamin, was mentally disabled, he was succeeded by Edmund Waller (1652–1700), MP for Amersham from 1689 to 1698. His youngest son, Stephen Waller (1676–1708), was one of the Commissioners who negotiated the 1707 Treaty of Union.
Career
thumb|right|upright=0.8|[[Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland|Viscount Falkland, killed fighting for the Royalists in 1643; Waller was deeply influenced by his moderation and tolerance]]
Waller attended Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, followed by Eton and King's College, Cambridge. He left without a degree, and as was common in this period did a course in law at Lincoln's Inn, graduating in 1622. He was first elected in 1624 as MP for Ilchester, when he was the youngest person in the Commons, then for Chepping Wycombe in 1626. On coming of age in 1627, he inherited an estate worth up to £2,500 a year, making him one of the wealthiest men in Buckinghamshire.
Returned for Amersham in 1628, he made virtually no impact on Parliament before it was dissolved in 1629, when Charles I instituted eleven years of Personal Rule. During this period, he became friends with George Morley, later Bishop of Worcester, who guided his reading and provided advice on writing, while Waller apparently paid his debts. Morley also introduced Waller to Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland; he became a member of the Great Tew Circle, which included Edward Hyde, and was greatly influenced by Falkland's moderation and tolerance.
Nineteenth-century biographers dated his earliest work to the 1620s, largely because they commemorate events occurring in that period, but modern scholars suggest they were actually written in the mid to late 1630s in an attempt to build a career at court. As well as Charles himself, many of his works are addressed to members of the extended Percy family, such as the Countess of Carlisle, the Countess of Sunderland and the Earl of Northumberland. Hyde recorded Waller became a poet at the age of thirty, "when other Men give over writing Verses".
When Charles recalled Parliament in April 1640 to approve taxes for the Bishops' Wars, Waller was re-elected for Amersham, then for St Ives in November. Despite general consensus attempts by Charles to govern without Parliament had gone too far, moderates like Hyde and Falkland were also wary of changing the balance too much the other way. John Pym, who headed the Parliamentary opposition to Charles, gave Waller responsibility for the impeachment of Sir Francis Crawley, one of the Ship Money judges, but he confirmed his Royalist sympathies by voting against the execution of Strafford in April 1641, and the removal of bishops from the House of Lords.
Unlike Hyde and Falkland who joined the king when the First English Civil War began in August 1642, Waller remained in London, apparently with Charles' permission, where he continued to support moderates like Denzil Holles who wanted a negotiated peace. In May 1643 a plot was uncovered, allegedly organised by Waller along with his brother-in-law Nathaniel Tomkins, and wealthy merchant Richard Chaloner; what apparently began as a plan to force Parliament into negotiations by withholding taxes turned into an armed conspiracy intended to allow the Royalist army to take control of London.
thumb|left|upright=1.2|Execution of [[Nathaniel Tomkins and Chaloner, July 1643; an episode that permanently damaged Waller's reputation]]
After Waller was arrested, he made a full confession, implicating a number of co-conspirators, along with a number of men who had no relation to the conspiracy. He escaped the death penalty, allegedly by paying bribes, while Chaloner and Tomkins were executed on 5 July 1643. Simonds d'Ewes documented Waller's trial in his diary, with great disdain for what he saw as Waller's cowardice and duplicity.
In the 1766 edition of the Biographia Britannica, Waller was described as "the most celebrated Lyric Poet that England ever produced,"