The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read by Stuart Kelly

Author:Stuart Kelly [Kelly, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Bibliographies & Indexes, Nonfiction, Reference
ISBN: 9780307432001
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Abraham Cowley

{1618–1667}

LIKE MANY A child prodigy, Abraham Cowley found his middle age to be fraught with the dark memories of dashed hopes. The seventh son of a posthumous father, he had certainly flourished quickly. Before the age of ten he had found, and read, a copy of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in his mother’s chamber, a fortuitous discovery, since the bulk of her books were theological treatises. Enthusiasm soon turned to imitation, and by the age of eleven he had composed and published two poems. By 1633, he had written sufficient verses for them to be collected together as PoeticalBlossoms. The teenage writer went on to produce a pastoral play, Love’s Riddle, and a Latin comedy, Naufragium Joculare, while at Cambridge. The stage seemed set for his erudition, wit, and gentle amiability to secure for him the position of foremost writer of the age.

The Civil War, however, intervened. With his “heart set wholly upon letters, I went to the university, but was soon torn from thence by that violent public storm, which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedar to me, the hyssop.” As an adherent of the monarchy and Charles I, Cowley moved from Parliamentarian Cambridge to Royalist Oxford, dashing off a satire on the king’s foes entitled The Puritan and the Papist. But, as he would later recollect in biting understatement, “a warlike, various and a tragical age is the best to write of but the worst to write in.”

Between 1644 and 1654, Cowley was based on the Continent, predominantly in the service of Lord Jermyn, the secretary to Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. He continued to publish, with The Mistress in 1647 and another comedy, The Guardian, in 1650; most of his time, however, was taken up with coding and deciphering documents for his master and correspondence between Henrietta Maria and Charles, as the pitched battles on English soil were superseded by espionage and intrigue. Between continents, Cowley undertook several undercover missions, to the Netherlands, Jersey, and Scotland. In 1655, he returned to England, apparently to live in semiretirement and discreetly provide occasional reports on the state of the nation to the exiled court. He was arrested as a Royalist spy, in London, and released on bail of £1,000.

It has been suspected that Cowley struck a deal with the establishment of the day. The seventeenth-century academic gossip Antony à Wood maintained there was an encomium by Cowley on Cromwell, though these lines have never surfaced. What is certain is that Cowley did retire, eventually to Kent, where he seems to have been held in slight suspicion after the Restoration of Charles II (despite an enthusiastic ode welcoming the king back). He became a doctor of physic, and spent the last years of his life composing a Latin poem in six books on herbs, flowers, and fruit trees: from poetical blossoms to botany.

What caused Cowley’s change, from debonair poet at the heart of the political system

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