 |
Home
Textile painting workshops
Edmund Waller, Poet and Politician
Music rehearsal
Flower arranging workshops
IT Workshops
Poetry reading rehearsal
Quilters making the wall hangings
|
|
|
|
Edmund Waller, Poet and Politician
Location: Buckinghamshire
A celebration of the quad centenary of the birth of Edmund Waller, poet and politician, is being held at St. Mary and All Saints Church in Beaconsfield from 8th - 10th September 2006.
Who was Edmund Waller?
Edmund Waller is famed for his poetry, and also his political activity. He became the member of parliament for Amersham at the age of 18. No other poet in our history was actively involved in politics for so long a time. In his own day and for a hundred years after his death he was one of England’s most admired poets.
He later gained a reputation as a sycophant to both the Stuart kings and to Cromwell, of which he cannot be wholly acquitted, but he was a consistent supporter of moderation in politics and toleration in religion - qualities which we mostly admire.
His life spanned the years of greatest turbulence in English history since the early Middle Ages - the Civil War, the execution of the King in 1649, the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate, the Restoration of 1660 when Charles II was welcomed back.
Waller’s family had owned land in and around Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire and lived there at least since the 15th century. In 1624 his mother and Edmund jointly bought the old Hall Barn Manor House and other property in the parish. Waller and his family, including two of his sisters and their children, continued to live there until he built the present Hall Barn in the late 1650s.
It was during the 1630s that he spent most time in Beaconsfield; this was the only time when he was a JP. That was what any wealthy young man with an interest in public affairs would normally expect in those days.
His name appears on a list compiled by the Sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1634 as among the dozen richest landowners in the county, with an income of £2,000 a year. Sets of accounts from local Overseers of the Poor signed by him as a JP still survive in the County Record Office in Aylesbury.
Of his poetry, Waller’s lyrics of the 1630s, his poems to his loves or would-be loves, Celia, Phyllis, Chloris, and particularly his Sacharissa (Lady Dorothy Sidney) became famous and many of them were set to music by Henry Lawes and other composers of the day.
A few of them still appear in modern anthologies - for example “Go lovely rose / Tell her that wastes her time and me..”, and “The Girdle”. But there was never any chance that Waller, no matter how witty and charming and rich he was, could as a mere esquire ever be allowed to marry Lady Dorothy. She was the eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester and one of the bright young things at the Court of Charles I and his lively French queen Henrietta Maria.
Secondly he wrote panegyrics - poems in praise of Kings and Queens and
other great men and women. Panegyrics were an established literary genre of the time.
He was an early and accomplished writer of heroic couplets, self-contained rhyming couplets usually with a caesura or pause in the middle of each line - a very severe discipline on any poet.
Heroic couplets became the most widely used verse form in England until the late 18th century when the Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and later Byron and Shelley , transformed English poetry, and heroic
couplets, like panegyrics before them, went out of fashion.
He was always a middle-of -the-road politician. In the early days of the Long Parliament which ultimately brought on civil war, he was one of a small group of clever young men (including Edward Hyde, the future Lord Clarendon) who worked together for moderate reform.
After the Civil War had started, Waller stayed on in London, with the King’s permission and at considerable risk to himself. As Clarendon later admitted, he remained the boldest and most active advocate of further peace negotiations.
It was early in the summer of 1643 that he was arrested and falsely accused of plotting to seize London for the King and to arrest leading men in Parliament and the City. He had only planned to raise a "middle party" to bring pressure on the King and Parliament to stop the war and return to
negotiations"
When faced with possible hanging, drawing and quartering for “treason” against Parliament - Waller completely collapsed. In the end he was allowed to plead his case before the House of Commons. In his speech, in the best ‘canting Puritan’ style, he acknowledged the justice of God and Parliament in bringing calamity upon him. He warned the Members of the dangers of allowing a military tribunal to try him: it might be used as a precedent against other MPs.
They sent him to the Tower. Ten months later Sir William Waller (possibly a very distant cousin), the general of one of two essentially rival Parliamentary armies, presented his petition to the Commons. It asked for him to be allowed to pay a fine and then be banished abroad. A further six months later the House agreed, the fine being set at £10,000 - perhaps the equivalent of £7 million now.
To pay the fine he had to sell off nearly half of the family estate at the rock bottom prices to which land had fallen by the autumn of 1644, and borrow large sums of money from his mother and other members of the family. He then spent the next seven years abroad, mainly in France.
In the Tower he also secretly married Mary Bressy, a girl some 15 years or more younger than himself, who was a friend of those helping to arrange his release from prison.
After the total collapse of the Royalist cause in 1651 he was allowed with many other Royalists to return to England' and back in Parliament'. By 1660, the restoration of the monarchy was the obvious solution to the political problem, and Waller was soon in his element at the Court of Charles II.
His wife died in 1677 when he was 71, and soon he began to complain of ill health. He bought back Stocks Place, the house where he had been born, saying “a stag when he is hunted and near spent always returns home”.
He reserved for himself a parlour with a room over it, a coach house and stabling for two horses, leaving the previous owner as tenant of the rest. Not long before he died, in ‘Of the Last Verses in the Book’, he wrote perhaps the most personally moving of his poems:
The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed
Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made,
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
He died at his London house in St James’s Street, on 21 October 1687. His body was brought down to Beaconsfield and buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s and All Saints Church where his tomb is now awaiting restoration'.
©. John Safford 20.5.05
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
