George Wither (11 June 1588 O.S. (21 June 1588 NS) – 2 May 1667 O.S. (12 May 1667 NS)) was a prolific English poet, pamphleteer, satirist, and writer of hymns.Hyamson, Albert M., A Dictionary of Universal Biography: Of All Ages and of All Peoples, page 725 Wither's life spanned one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of England, during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, the Civil War, the Parliamentary period, and the Restoration period.
Biography Early life Wither was born in Bentworth, near Alton, in the heart of Hampshire, the son of George Wither Senior and his wife, Mary. His grandfather, Richard Wither, lived at Manydown in Wootton St Lawrence, where the family had resided since at least 1344. His early schooling took place under Rev. John Greaves, the father of John, Sir Edward and Thomas Greaves. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. Despite his neighbours' advice that his father put him to some mechanic trade, Wither was sent to one of the Inns of Chancery, eventually obtaining an introduction at Court.
It is thought that Wither spent some time in Ireland, perhaps with Adam Loftus at Rathfarnham Castle. He wrote what amounted to a masque for a wedding that took place there in 1610, of the parents of Francis Willughby.Andrew Carpenter, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003), p. 135.
Wither wrote a 1612 elegy on the death of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and a 1613 volume of congratulatory poems on the marriage of the princess Elizabeth.
Imprisonment and release
Some time between 1611 and 1613, Wither wrote Abuses Stript and Whipt, twenty satires directed against the concepts of revenge, ambition, and lust. These satires, aimed at exposing "th'abuses of these wicked Times", achieved some popular success and had seven printings from 1613 to 1617.Peltonen, Markku, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640, Cambridge University Press, 1995, , , page 165. The volume included a poem called "The Scourge", in which the Lord Chancellor was attacked, and a series of epigrams. Despite the fact that the satires referenced nobody by name and that Wither had published them a year before with no trouble, he was arrested for libel "on or about 20 March 1614" and held in the Marshalsea prison for four months before being released.
In A Satyre: Dedicated to His Most Excellent Majestie, Wither made a bold appeal to King James for his release, claiming that he had "not sought to scandalize the state, nor sowne sedition." The cause for his initial imprisonment is somewhat unclear, as the Abuses were very general and had not satirized anyone by name.
Charles Lamb commented:
that a man should be convicted of libel when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful is arraigned for having 'railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious'.
This view has been held by most later critics and scholars, in addition to the possibility of earlier editions containing text which was erased in later editions. Several scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also claimed that Wither had offended Lord Chancellor Ellesmere with one of the verses in Abuses. This claim, however, was rejected by Allan Pritchard, who argued that it stemmed from a misreading of the verses.
Pritchard makes the case that the reason for Wither's imprisonment was that he angered Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton, by accusing him and others of colluding with the Spanish and Catholic government. Pritchard mentions that Northampton was at the height of his power when Wither was arrested and notes that Wither was not able to secure his release until after Northampton's death in June 1614.The view is shared by Jonathan F. S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (1999), p. 69.
After his release from prison, Wither was admitted, in 1615, to Lincoln's Inn.
In 1621, Wither's satirical Wither's Motto: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo (Latin for "I have not, I want not, I care not") sold over 30,000 copies within a few months, according to his own account. Like his earlier invective, it was said to be libellous, and Wither was again imprisoned, but shortly afterwards released without formal trial on the plea that the book had been duly licensed.
Ben Jonson turned satire back on Wither, portrayed as the Chronomastix of the masque Time Vindicated. Wither avenged himself by a reference to Jonson's drunken conclave. He was obliged to print this book with his own hand, as a result of his quarrel with the Stationers Company.
Under Charles I
Wither was in London during the plague of 1625, and in 1628 published Britain's Remembrancer, a voluminous poem on the subject, interspersed with denunciations of the wickedness of the times and prophecies of the disasters about to fall upon England. It reflects on the nature of poetry and prophecy, explores the fault lines in politics, and rejects tyranny of the sort the king was denounced for fostering.Andrew McRae, "Remembering 1625: George Wither's Britain's Remembrancer and the Condition of Early Caroline England" English Literary Renaissance 46.3 (2016): 433-455.
In 1635, Wither was employed by Henry Taunton, a London publisher, to write English verses illustrative of the allegorical plates of Crispijn van de Passe, originally designed for the emblem book by Gabriel Rollenhagen,"Nucleus emblematum selectissimorum" (1610–1613). The book was published as a Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, of which the only perfect copy known is held in the British Museum.A collection of emblemes, ancient and moderne in Internet Archive In 1636, he translated The Nature of Man by Nemesius.
Civil War soldier Wither served as captain of horse in 1639 in the expedition of Charles I against the Scottish Covenanters. His religious convictions explain the fact that, three years after the Scottish expedition, at the outbreak of the English Civil War, he sided with Parliament. He sold his estate to raise a troop of horse, and was placed by a parliamentary committee in command of Farnham Castle. After a few days' occupation, he left the place undefended and marched to London. His own house near Farnham was plundered, and he was captured by a troop of Royalist horse, owing his life to the intervention of Sir John Denham on the ground that so long as Wither lived Denham himself could not be considered the worst poet in England.John Aubrey, Brief Lives (ed. Andrew Clark), Volume I (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898), at page 221
A reported episode from 1642 or 1643 has Wither with Henry Marten mocking the coronation regalia. At this time, in any case, Wither's views were converging with those of the advocates of true popular sovereignty, and his political poem Vox Pacifica called for a purge of Parliament.David Wootton, Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (2003), p. 53.
Wither was promoted to the rank of major. He was present at the 1643 siege of Gloucester and at the 1645 Battle of Naseby. He was deprived in 1643 of his nominal command and commission as justice of the peace because of an attack upon Sir Richard Onslow, who Wither maintained had been responsible for the Farnham disaster. In the same year, Parliament made him a grant of £2000 for the loss of his property, but he apparently never received the full amount, and complained from time to time of his embarrassments and the slight rewards he received for his services. An order was made to settle a yearly income of £150 on Wither, chargeable on Sir John Denham's sequestrated estate, but there is no evidence that he ever received it.
Commonwealth and Restoration Wither became a political and religious writer, using verse as his medium. He is considered to stand out as a supporter of the Commonwealth who also proposed a more egalitarian social vision.David Loewenstein, Janel M. Mueller (editors), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002), p. 650. His Respublica Anglicana (1650) was a reply to the Anarchia Anglicana (1649) of Clement Walker, a Presbyterian opponent of the Independents. It defended engagement, the notion that recognition of the Parliamentary regime should be required.Quentin Skinner, Conquest and Consent, p. 91, in G. E. Aylmer, editor, The Interregnum (1972).
Wither was a trustee of the Committee for the Sale of the Late King's Goods and was paid £100 in March 1650 for his work making inventories of the former royal palaces.Allan Pritchard, 'George Wither and the Sale of the Estate of Charles I', Modern Philology, 77:4 (May 1980), pp. 370-381. A small place given him by the Protector was forfeited after Wither expressed criticism of Cromwell. He was involved in 11 court cases from 1643 to 1661, including Onslow's libel suit over the poem Justiarius Justificatus.Dorothy Auchter, Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England (2001), p. 362. At the Restoration he was arrested, and remained in prison for three years.
Wither was a conforming Anglican, but by the Restoration he had moved closer to the Quakers. In Parallelogrammaton (1662), he compared the Quakers to the prophets Ezekiel and Habakkuk as predecessors.Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution (1993), p. 262 and p. 201.
Death Wither died in London on 2 May 1667.
Works Wither's extant writings number over a hundred, as noted by Thomas Park in Brydges's British Bibliographer.Park's biography, online textBiography by Brydges Wither generally wrote in a pure English idiom, and preferred the reputation of "rusticity". According to Alexander Pope's poem The Dunciad, "Withers, Ward, and Gildon rest" together "Safe, where no Critics damn, no duns molest".Book I, lines 295-6, e.g. David Fairer, Christine Gerrard, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2004), pp. 176-7.
Pastoral and later satires Wither was known in the pastoral genre. He had figured as one of the interlocutors, Roget, in his friend William Browne's Shepherds Pipe, with which were bound up eclogues by other poets, among them one by Wither. During his imprisonment, Wither wrote what may be regarded as a continuation of Browne's work, The Shepherd's Hunting (printed 1615), eclogues in which the two poets appear as Willie and Roget (in later editions Philarete). It is largely allegorical. The fourth of these eclogues contains a famous passage in praise of poetry; the poets are explicit in their belief that pastoral writing is just a preliminary to other work.James Doelman, Early Stuart Pastoral: The Shepherd's Pipe by William Browne and Others and the Shepherd's Hunting by George Wither (1999), p. 7.
In 1615, the year of his release from prison and admission to Lincoln's Inn, Wither privately printed Fidelia, a love elegy, of which there is a single extant copy held by the Bodleian Library. Other editions of this book, which contained the lyric "Shall I, wasting in despair", appeared in 1617 and 1619.
In 1621, Wither returned to the satiric vein with Wither's Motto: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo (Latin for "I have not, I want not, I care not"). It was said to be libellous, and Wither was imprisoned for the second time, but was released shortly afterwards.
In 1622, Wither wrote Faire-Virtue, The Mistresse of Phil Arete, a long panegyric of a mistress, partly real, partly allegorical, written chiefly in seven-syllable verse.
Psalmody and hymnody