495 



WALLER, EDMUND. 



WALLER, EDMUND. 



406 



daughter of Griffith Hampden of Hampden in Buckinghamshire, aud 

 aunt of the patriot, who was consequently the poet's cousin. The 

 relationship, if it is to be so called, of Edmund Waller to Cromwell, 

 about which there has been some controversy or misconception, con- 

 sisted in his uncle, William Hampden, the father of the patriot, 

 having married Cromwell's aunt, Elizabeth; BO that Hampden the 

 patriot was first cousin both to the poet and to the protector. 

 (Noble's ' Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell,' ii. 65-67, 

 where however Waller's estate is erroneously set down at 35,000 

 per annum, and his father is in one placo called Richard, instead of 

 Robert) 



Waller was educated at Eton, whence he proceeded to King's College, 

 Cambridge. His earliest biographer, the writer of a memoir prefixed 

 to the edition of his poems published in 1711, says that he obtained a 

 Beat iu the House of Commons, at the age of sixteen, for the borough 

 of Amersham. If so, he would appear to have been returned to the 

 third parliament of James I., which met in January 1621 , and to 

 which this borough of Atnershacn claimed the right of sending repre- 

 sentatives, after having ceased to do so ever since the second year of 

 Edward II. The claim was eventually allowed ; but it may be 

 doubted if Waller, although he may have been elected, was permitted 

 to take his seat, or at least was recognised as a member, although he 

 may have sat sub silentio, as was then sometimes done. No members 

 for Amersham, or for Wendover and Great Mario w, which were 

 similarly circumstanced, are given in the common lists of this parlia- 

 ment. Whether Waller was returned to the next, James's fourth and 

 last parliament, which met in February 1623, is not known ; but it is 

 probable that he was. In the first parliament of Charles I., which 

 met in 1625, he was returned for Chipping- Wycombe. It is not 

 certain that he sat iu the next, which was called together in the 

 following year; but he represented Amersham in Charles's third par- 

 liament, which sat from March 1627 to 1628, and also both in the 

 short parliament of April 1610, and in the Long Parliament which 

 assembled in November of the same year. 



The earliest of Waller's poems is commonly assumed to have been 

 produced towards the end of 1623, when the event which it celebrates 

 happened, the escape of the prince (afterwards Charles I.) from being 

 shipwrecked in the road of St. Andero, on his return from Spain. Yet 

 it certainly was not published till some years later ; and not only the 

 title, ' On the danger his Majesty (being Prince) escaped,' &c., but 

 even the verses themselves seem rather to imply that they were not 

 composed at the time of the escape. Be this as it may, it is remark- 

 able that the style and versification of this poem have quite as much 

 neatness and finish as those of his latest days ; so that, as has been 

 said by one of his editors, as quoted by Johnson, " were we to judge 

 only by the wording, we could not know what was wrote at twenty 

 and what at fourscore." Dryden has stated (in the preface to his 

 ' Fables ') that Waller himself attributed the polish and smoothness of 

 his versification to his diligent study of Fairfax's translation of Tasso. 

 Clarendon says expressly that " at the age when other men used to 

 give over writing verses (for he was near thirty years when he first 

 engaged himself in that exercise, at least that he was known to do so), 

 he surprised the town with two or three pieces of that kind ; as if a 

 tenth Muse had been newly born, to cherish drooping poetry." In 

 truth, there were only two or three of the poems that could have 

 been written before his twenty-fifth year. 



Some years before this date he had married Ann, daughter of 

 Edward Banks, Esq., a very wealthy citizen of London, having gained 

 the heart and hand of the lady against all the interest of the court 

 exerted in favour of a rival suitor. By this match he considerably 

 augmented his fortune. His wife, after bringing him a son, who died 

 young, and a daughter, who when she grew up married Mr. Dormer 

 of Oxfordshire, died in childbed, and " left him," as Johnson says, " a 

 widower of about five and twenty, gay and wealthy, to please himself 

 with another marriage." The older accounts make him to have lost 

 his wife in 1629 or 1630. 



It could hardly then have been, as is commonly represented, almost 

 immediately or very soon after this that he began to pay his addresses to 

 the Lady Dorothea Sidney, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester, 

 whom he has made famous in many of his love verses under the name 

 of Sacharissa. The high-born beauty rejected his suit, and in 1639 

 married Henry, lord Spencer, who, in 1643, was created Earl of 

 Sunderlaud, and was killed in September the same year, at the first 

 battle of Newbury. As Lord Spencer at the time of his marriage was 

 certainly not quite nineteen, it is not probable that his bride could 

 have been old enough to be sought hi marriage eight or nine years 

 before. Sacharissa, who, after the death of her first husband, married 

 Mr. Robert Smythe, survived till 1683. Another of Waller's tem- 

 porary attachments at this period of his life was to the Lady Sophia 

 Murray, whom he has celebrated under the poetical name of Amoret. 

 At last, soon after the marriage of Sacharissa, but in what year is not 

 precisely known, he married a Miss Mary Bresse, or Breaux, of whom 

 nothing is recorded, except that she brought him thirteen children, 

 five sons and eight daughters, and that she was, according to Aubrey, 

 the antiquary, distinguished both by her beauty and her good sense. 



When the government by parliaments was resumed, after an inter- 

 ruption of twelve years, in 1640, and Waller found himself again in 

 the House of Commons, he joined the party iu opposition to the court, 



where, although his fortune, wit, and poetical reputation had made 

 him a distinguished figure, he is said to have been always looked upon 

 with some suspicion as the near kinsman of Hampden. But his 

 temper aud position alike withheld him from going very far with the 

 reformers or revolutionists; and on the approach of the crisis he 

 seceded from his party, aud seems to have withdrawn from the House. 

 When the king set up his standard at Nottingham, in August, 1642, 

 Waller sent him a thousand broad pieces ; and, although he soon after 

 returned to his place in parliament, he is supposed to have done so by 

 his majesty's permission or direction. In the House he now spoke 

 openly on the royal side " with great sharpness and freedom," says 

 Clarendon, " which, now there was no danger of being outvoted, was 

 not restrained ; and therefore used, as an argument against those who 

 were gone upon pretence that they were not suffered to deliver their 

 opinion freely iu the House ; which could not be believed, when all 

 men knew what liberty Mr. Waller took, and spoke every day with 

 impunity against the sense and proceedings of the House." 



Waller was one of the commissioners sent by the parliament to the 

 king at Oxford, after the battle of Edgehill, in January 1643 ; and it 

 was soon after this, in the end of May, that the design known as 

 Waller's plot was discovered. It is difficult to say what was really 

 the object of the so-called plot or conspiracy. The parliament 

 denounced it as "a popish and traitorous plot for the subversion of 

 the true Protestant religion and liberty of the subject," &c. ; and 

 May, in his ' History of the Parliament,' gives a minute account of the 

 plans of the conspirators for taking into their own hands all the 

 powers of government, and arresting the chiefs of the parliamentary 

 party. On the other hand it is alleged that Waller and his friends had 

 really no further object than to ascertain the state of opinion in the 

 city of London, by making lists of the inhabitants, and dividing them 

 into royalists, parliamentarians, and moderate men opposed to the 

 excesses of either faction. There can be little doubt however that 

 this is very much of an understatement. Yet it may be questioned if 

 Waller's design really had anything to do with another which was 

 detected about the same time a project of a loyal London merchant, 

 Sir Nicholas Crispe, to raise an armed force, when a fit opportunity 

 should occur, to act against the parliament, for which purpose he had 

 obtained a commission of array from the king. Waller's chief con- 

 federate was his sister's husband, Mr. Tomkyns, who held the office of 

 clerk of the queen's council, and had an extensive connexion and 

 influence in the city ; aud their proceedings were discovered, according 

 to one account, by a servant of Tomkyns, who, while lurking behind 

 the hangings, overheard a conference between his master and Waller ; 

 according to another version of the story, by a sister of Waller, who 

 was married to a Mr. Price, " a great parliamentarian," and her chap- 

 lain Goode, who stole some of his papers. The commission of array 

 granted to Crispe was found in the possession of Tomkyns ; but this is 

 explained as having happened through an accident, and Waller always 

 denied that he knew anything of Crispe's scheme. In other respects 

 his confessions were ample enough. " Waller," says Clarendon, " was 

 so confounded with fear, that he confessed whatever he had heard, 

 said, thought, or seen; all that he knew of himself, and all that he 

 suspected of otheiv, without concealing any person, of what degree or 

 quality soever, or any discourse which he had ever upon any occasion 

 entertained with them." Various ladies of rank, to whose intimacy 

 he had been admitted, were implicated by his lavish revelations. In 

 the end Tomkyns, and another person named Challoner, who were 

 charged with having had a commission to raise money for the king, 

 were hanged at their own doors : Tomkyns in Holborn ; Challoner in 

 Cornhill. Alexander Hampden, another relation of Waller's, was kept 

 in prison till he died ; and some others had their estates confiscated, 

 aud were loug detained in confinement. Others made their escape to 

 the king at Oxford. As for Waller, undoubtedly the prime contriver 

 of the design, whatever it amounted to, his life was saved, but the 

 facts connected with his deliverance are variously related. In the 

 Life prefixed to his Works it is expressly asserted that he was 

 arraigned at Guildhall along with Tomkyns and the rest, and con- 

 demned to death. Lord Clarendon, on the contrary, states that 

 " Waller, though confessedly the most guilty, with incredible dissimu- 

 lation affected such a remorse of conscience, that his trial was put off, 

 out of Christian compassion, till he might recover his understanding." 

 After he appeared to be in a more composed state, he was brought to 

 the bar of the House of Commons, on the 4th of July, and there 

 delivered a speech, which is printed in his Works, and which certainly 

 indicates nothing like insanity, but is perhaps without a parallel for 

 servility aud baseness of spirit. He begged that he might not be 

 exposed to a trial by a council of war, and Clarendon says that he pre- 

 vailed in that request, and thereby saved his " dear-bought life ; " but, 

 according to Whitelocke, he was actually made over to the tribunal he 

 so much dreaded, and being tried aud condemned, was reprieved by 

 Essex. He lay in prison a year, and was then set at liberty on the, 

 understanding that he should leave the country. Of his property, all 

 that was exacted from him was a fine of 10,000/. ; but it is affirmed by 

 his first biographer, that he expended three times that sum besides in 

 bribes. Altogether, we are informed, he was obliged to sell estates to 

 the value of 1,000/. per annum on this occasion. 



On his release, Waller retired to France, and took up his residence 

 first at Rohan, afterwards iu Paris, where, we are told, he lived in 



