Richard Lovelace (, homophone of "loveless"; 9 December 1617 – 1657) was an English poet in the seventeenth century. He was a cavalier poet who fought on behalf of Charles I during the English Civil War. His best known works are "To Althea, from Prison", and "To Lucasta, Going to the Warres".
Biography
Early life and family
Richard Lovelace was born on 9 December 1617. His exact birthplace is unknown, and may have been Woolwich, Kent, or Holland. He was the oldest son of Sir William Lovelace and Anne Barne Lovelace. He had four brothers and three sisters. His father was from a distinguished military and legal family; the Lovelace family owned a considerable amount of property in Kent.
His father, Sir William Lovelace, was a member of the Virginia Company and an incorporator in the second Virginia Company in 1609. He was a soldier and died during the war with Spain and the Dutch Republic in the Siege of Groenlo (1627) a few days before the town fell. Richard was nine years old when his father died.
Lovelace's father was the son of Sir William Lovelace and Elizabeth Aucher, who was the daughter of Mabel Wroths and Edward Aucher, who inherited, under his father's will, the manors of Bishopsbourne and Hautsborne. Elizabeth's nephew was Sir Anthony Aucher (1614 – 31 May 1692) an English politician and Cavalier during the English Civil War. He was the son of her brother Sir Anthony Aucher and his wife Hester Collett.
Lovelace's mother, Anne Barne (1587–1633), was the daughter of Sir William Barne and the granddaughter of Sir George Barne III (1532–1593), the Lord Mayor of London and a prominent merchant and public official from London during the reign of Elizabeth I and Anne Gerrard, daughter of Sir William Garrard, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1555.
Lovelace's maternal grandmother was Anne Sandys. His great-grandmother was Cicely Wilford and his great-grandfather Most Reverend Dr Edwin Sandys, an Anglican church leader who successively held the posts of Bishop of Worcester (1559–1570), Bishop of London (1570–1576), and Archbishop of York (1576–1588) and was one of the translators of the Bishops' Bible.
His mother, Anne Barne Lovelace, married as her second husband, on 20 January 1630, at Greenwich, England, the Very Rev Dr Jonathan Browne. They were the parents of one child, Anne Browne, Richard's half-sister, who married Herbert Croft, later Bishop of Hereford, and was the mother of Sir Herbert Croft, the first of the Croft baronets.
Lovelace's brother, Francis Lovelace (1621–1675), was the second governor of the New York Colony appointed by the Duke of York, later King James II of England. They were also great nephews of both George Sandys (2 March 1577 – March 1644), an English traveller, colonist and poet; and of Sir Edwin Sandys (9 December 1561 – October 1629), an English statesman and one of the founders of the London Company.
In 1629, when Lovelace was eleven, he went to Sutton's Foundation at Charterhouse School, then in London. as "the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; 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".
While at college, he tried to portray himself more as a social connoisseur than as a scholar, continuing his image of being a Cavalier. Being a Cavalier poet, Lovelace wrote to praise a friend or fellow poet, to give advice in grief or love, to define a relationship, to articulate the precise amount of attention a man owes a woman, to celebrate beauty, and to persuade to love. In 1639 Lovelace joined the regiment of Lord Goring, serving first as a senior ensign and later as a captain in the Bishops' Wars. This experience inspired "Sonnet. To Generall Goring", the poem "To Lucasta, Going to the Warres" and the tragedy The Soldier. On his return to his home in Kent in 1640, Lovelace served as a country gentleman and a justice of the peace, encountering civil turmoil over religion and politics.