Richard Lovelace  was a Royalist soldier during the English Civil War, an adventurer, poet and playwright . His elegant writing and active career give him the ideal image of a CavalierLovelace was actually born in the Netherlands, where his father was in military service but he was well educated; attending Charterhouse and then Oxford. As a teenager he wrote “The Scholars”, a comedic play performed at Whitefriars. The prologue and epilogue still survive. The play however drew him to the attention of the King and he took part in expeditions to Scotland in his early twenties at the time of the rebellions against Charles I. It is at this time he is alleged to have written a tragedy called “The Soldier”, but there is no real confirmation of this.

On returning to his properties in Kent, Lovelace was chosen in 1642 to present a petition on behalf of the Royalist faction to a hostile House of Commons for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Gatehouse prison in London. Whilst incarcerated he wrote “To Althea, from Prison,” which contains his most famous lines: “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage.” Upon release he spent much of the next four years abroad and he was wounded whilst fighting for the French against the Spaniards at Dunkerque in 1646.

 In 1648 he was again imprisoned. During his imprisonment, Lovelace prepared Lucasta for publication in 1649.

It is claimed that Lovelace died in misery and poverty in 1658 although an elegy for him was printed the year before in 1657 by which point it is known he had had to sell much of his estates.

After his death his only other publication, a companion to the earlier Lucasta entitled “Lucasta; Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace, Esq (1659)” was edited by his brother Dudley to include Elegies, and published circa 1660. JS