John Riley

Edmund Waller (1606-1687) was an English lyric poet and politician of wavering allegiance. He entered Parliament at the age of eighteen, representing Ilchester, Chipping Wycombe, and Amersham in the House of Commons between 1624 and 1629. Later, he became a Royalist, and in 1643 led a conspiracy against Parliament - now known as 'Waller's Plot' - to allow Charles I's army into London and seize it as a stronghold for the King. Questioned in prison after his arrest on 31 May that year, it is recorded that Waller "confessed whatsoever he had said, heard, thought, or seen, all that he knew of himself, and all that he suspected of others."¹ Through recantation and implication, Waller spared his own life, was committed to the Tower of London, called on to pay a fine of £10,000 and then banished from the kingdom until 1651.

Upon his return, he sought and won favour with Cromwell, later writing A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector, in 1655, which deploys a series of classical and biblical analogies to present England as 'the seat of Empire' and Cromwell as a new Augustus. Just five years later, Waller produced the poem, To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return, and on being challenged by Charles II as to why this eulogy was inferior to the latter, Waller purportedly replied: "Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction."² John Dryden, a great admirer of Waller, claimed that "the well-placing of words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it"³, though when neo-classical poetic conventions fell from fashion in the nineteenth century, so too did Waller's verses. A renewed interest in court culture and the relationship between literature and history has led to a modest Waller revival in the late twentieth century.

A version of this portrait, after Riley, is held in the National Portrait Gallery, London (inv. no. NPG 144).

1. E. Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England, London 1888, vol. IV, Book VII, p. 67.

2. E. Gosse, in Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition, Cambridge and New York 1911, p. 282.

3. J. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and other critical essays, George Watson (ed.), London 1962, vol. I, p. 175.