Abraham Cowley (; 161828 July 1667) was an English poet and essayist born in the City of London late in 1618. He was one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, with 14 printings of his Works published between 1668 and 1721.
Early life and career
Cowley's father, a wealthy Londoner, who died shortly before his birth, was a stationer. His mother was wholly given to works of devotion, but it happened that there lay in her parlour a copy of The Faerie Queene. This became the favourite reading of her son, and he had read it twice before he was sent to school.
As early as 1628, when he was only ten years old, he composed his Tragicall Historie of Piramus and Thisbe, an epic romance written in a six-line stanza, a style of his own invention. It has been considered to be a most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order. Two years later, Cowley wrote another and still more ambitious poem, Constantia and Philetus; around this time he was sent to Westminster School. At Westminster he displayed extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, writing when he was just thirteen the Elegy on the Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton. These three lengthy poems, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and published in a volume entitled Poeticall Blossomes, dedicated to Lambert Osbaldeston, the headmaster of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows.
Cowley at once became famous, although he was only fifteen years old. His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitled Loves Riddle, a marvellous production for a boy of sixteen, airy, correct and harmonious in language, and rapid in movement. The style is not without resemblance to that of the poet Thomas Randolph, whose earliest works had only just been printed.
In 1637 Cowley went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he "betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholar". Portraits of Cowley, attributed to William Faithorne and Stephen Slaughter, are in Trinity College's collection. It was about this time that he composed his scriptural epic on the history of King David, one book of which still exists in the Latin original. An English version of the epic in four books, called the Davideis, was published after his death. The epic deals with the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul, where it abruptly closes.
In 1638 Loves Riddle and a Latin comedy, the Naufragium Joculare, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles (later to be King Charles II) through Cambridge led to the production of another dramatic work, The Guardian, which was performed before the royal visitor with much success. During the civil war this play was privately performed at Dublin, but it was not printed till 1650. It is bright and amusing, in the style common to the "sons" of Ben Jonson, the university wits who wrote more for the closet than the public stage.
Royalist in exile
The learned quiet of the young poet's life was disrupted by the Civil War in 1642 as he warmly espoused the royalist side. He became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, but was ejected by the Parliamentarians in 1643. He made his way to Oxford, where he enjoyed the friendship of Lord Falkland, and gained the personal confidence of the royal family. Around this time, he published two anti-Puritan satires: A Satyre Against Separatists (attribution sometimes disputed), printed in 1642, and The Puritan and the Papist (1643).
After the Battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, where his exile lasted twelve years. This period was spent almost entirely in the royal service, "bearing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or labouring in their affairs. To this purpose he performed several dangerous journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, the Netherlands, or wherever else the king's troubles required his attendance. But the chief testimony of his fidelity was the laborious service he underwent in maintaining the constant correspondence between the late king and the queen his wife. In that weighty trust he behaved himself with indefatigable integrity and unsuspected secrecy; for he ciphered and deciphered with his own hand the greatest part of all the letters that passed between their majesties, and managed a vast intelligence in many other parts, which for some years together took up all his days, and two or three nights every week."