The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 9. Thomas Carew
Thomas Carew, who came of the Cornish branch of the Carew family, was the younger son of Sir Matthew Carew, master in Chancery, and of Alice, daughter of Sir John Rivers, a lord mayor of London. The date of his birth is uncertain, but 1598 is the generally accepted year. He was educated at Corpus Christi college, Oxford, but left the university without a degree, and, in 1614, was reading law in the Middle Temple. A little later, he became secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton, British ambassador at Venice. In 1616, Carleton was sent as ambassador to The Hague, and was accompanied by his secretary; but, after a few months’ service there, Carew, for reasons not fully known, threw up his post and returned to England. In the October of the same year, he is described by his father as “wandering idly about without employment.” In 1619, he was with lord Herbert of Cherbury at the French court, and, soon after the accession of Charles I, he won the king’s favour, who made him his sewer in ordinary, and a gentleman of his privy chamber; he also bestowed upon him the royal domain of Sunninghill, near Windsor.
The following years of his life seem to have been spent chiefly among the courtiers of Whitehall and the wits of the town. He was “of the tribe of Ben,” and numbered Suckling, D’Avenant, George Sandys and Aurelian Townsend among his friends and acquaintances. Anthony à Wood bears witness to his “delicacy of wit and poetic fancy,” and Clarendon describes him as “a person of pleasant and facetious wit”; from Suckling’s well-known reference to him in A Session of the Poets, it would seem as though he were looked upon as the poet laureate of the court, though the official laureate at this time was Ben Jonson.
In 1634, he wrote his elaborate masque; Coelum Britannicum; it was undertaken at the royal command, and was performed at Whitehall on the Shrove Tuesday of that year. Other poems followed, but, in 1638, his life came suddenly to an end. Two years after his death, his poems were collected and published: insufficient care was taken with this edition; for, while some of Carew’s poems were omitted from it, other poems which were not his—including Ben Jonson’s famous “Come, my Celia, let us prove,” and two of Herrick’s lyrics—found a place in it.
The right of Carew to stand next to Herrick among the Caroline lyrists can scarcely be questioned, and the two poets have a good deal in common. Had Herrick not been transported, in the year 1629, from the gilded chambers of Whitehall to the thatched cottages of Dean Prior, the resemblance between them, doubtless, would have been still greater. For, up to that date, in spite of a certain inequality in age and breeding, they must have come under very much the same influences, and moved in the same social circles. They never mention one another, but they can hardly have failed to meet, if not in the precincts of the court, then in the society of their tribal lord, Ben Jonson, whose intellectual sovereignty they alike acknowledge. In both, the artistic sense was strong, and the atmosphere of Carew’s lyrics to Celia is curiously like that of many of Herrick’s to Julia. Finally, both poets render the homage of complimentary verse to the king, to the duke of Buckingham, to John Crofts, the king’s cup-bearer, and to Lucy Hay, countess of Carlisle, whose beauty is the theme of many a cavalier lyrist, and who, two centuries after her death, became the heroine of Browning’s Strafford. But residence in Devonshire widened immeasurably the horizon of Herrick’s poetic vision, and enabled him to find, in festooned maypoles and primrose glades, new themes for song of which Carew remained throughout his life wholly ignorant.
Carew resembles Herrick, again, in the fact that his poems furnish us with an easy transition from the Elizabethan lyric to that of the seventeenth century; but, whereas Herrick approaches nearest to the earlier manner in those poems in which he reproduces the youthfulness and romantic glow of the best miscellany-lyrics—for example, Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love—Carew’s sympathy is with the more artificial lyricism of the sonnet. In his Elegy upon the Death of Dr. Donne, he rightly estimates the achievement of the great lyric reformer in purging the muses’ garden of “pedantic weeds” and “the lazy seeds of servile imitation”; yet, in such a poem as the following, he keeps very closely to the Petrarchian manner of the sonneteers, against which Donne declared open warfare:
Carew has been described as the founder of the school of courtly amorous poetry; but it seems probable that, if we could place the Hesperides poems in their due chronological order, the prestige of priority would rightly belong to Herrick. Yet it seems natural to regard Carew as the leader of that school, because, unlike Herrick, he is, from first to last, a cavalier, and rarely strays far from the precincts of Whitehall. Once or twice, it is true, we find him removed from court, and engaged in praising, after the manner of Jonson’s Penshurst, and Martial’s verses To Bassus, on the Country-House of Faustinus, the lavish hospitality practised by Stewart courtiers while residing at their country-seats; and, on one occasion, too, we find him singing the glories of an English spring. The verses entitled The Spring are graceful and harmonious; but the extent of his acquaintance with the ways of nature may be judged by the fact that he represents the “drowsy cuckoo” hibernating, along with the humble-bee, in some hollow tree! Carew’s true place of abode is the city and the court, where, polishing and re-polishing his elegant verses, he renders homage to his royal master, pays amorous suit to his Celia, celebrates with wedding-song or epitaph the marriage or decease of noble lords and ladies and wins from his contemporaries the fitting title of the laureate of the court. Invited by his friend, Aurelian Townsend, to commemorate in verse the death of the great Gustavus Adolphus, he finds his laureate muse unfit for the heroic strain which the occasion demanded, and, declaring that he must leave the hero of Leipzig, Wurtzburg and the Rhine to some prose chronicler, he bids his friend join with him in extolling the joys of tourneys, masques and theatres: