Charles Churchill (poet)

Rev. Charles Churchill (February 1731 - 4 November 1764), was an English poet and satirist.

Charles Churchill (1732-1764). From The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, 1844. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Life

Overview

Churchill, son of a clergyman, was educated at Westminster School, and while still a schoolboy made a clandestine marriage. He entered the Church, and on the death of his father in 1758 succeeded him in the curacy and lectureship of St. John's, Westminster. In 1761 he published the Rosciad, in which he severely satirised the players and managers of the day. It at once brought him both fame and money; but he fell into dissipated habits, separated from his wife, and outraged the proprieties of his profession to such an extent that he was compelled to resign his preferments. He also incurred the enmity of those whom he had attacked, which led to the publication of 2 other satirical pieces, The Apology and Night. He also attacked Dr. Johnson and his circle in The Ghost, and the Scots in The Prophecy of Famine. He attached himself to John Wilkes, on a visit to whom, at Boulogne, he died of fever.

Youth and education

Churchill was born in Vine Street, Westminster, in February 1731. His father, Charles Churchill, was rector of Rainham, Essex, and from 1733 curate and lecturer of St. John's, Westminster. His mother is said by Cole to have been Scotch. The son was sent to Westminster School in 1739, and elected on the foundation in 1745 (Welch, Alumni Westm. p. 333). He was contemporary with George Colman, Cowper, Cumberland, Warren Hastings, and Elijah Impey. Another school-fellow with whom he formed a close intimacy was Robert Lloyd, his junior by a year, son of Pierson Lloyd, then usher in the school.

Churchill did not proceed either to Christ Church, Oxford or Trinity College, Cambridge. He was entered at the last in 1749, but never resided. He seems to have been rejected on some occasion at Oxford. According to Tooke, he stood for a fellowship at Merton at the age of 18. Want of classical knowledge was reported to be the ground of the rejection. His friends declared in reply that he had been guilty only of impertinence, and had affected ignorance to show his contempt for the "trifling questions proposed to him" (Genuine Memoirs). The whole story is unintelligible. Churchill was not likely to fail in the tests, if any, likely to be applied. He had been 1st in his election; he impressed his schoolfellows by his ability, while his masters had alternately to commend and reproach him.

The probability is that he was really disqualified for entering Oxford or Cambridge by the discovery that he had made a Fleet marriage at the age of 17 with a Westminster girl named Scot. His father took the young couple to live with him, and desired his son to prepare for orders. Some family connections probably recommended this career.

Churchill is said to have retired for a time to the north of England, and in 1753 he returned to London to take possession (as Tooke says) of a small property inherited by his wife.

Early career

On reaching the canonical age he was ordained by Bishop Willis of Bath and Wells to the curacy of South Cadbury in Somersetshire, under Bailey, a friend of his father. It was said by his early biographers that he had a curacy in Wales, and there eked out an income of £30. a year by opening a cider cellar. The speculation, it is added, caused "a sort of rural bankruptcy." In the Author he says that he had been condemned to "pray and starve on £40. a year." The whole story is at least doubtful.

In 1756 he was ordained priest by Sherlock, and took his father's curacy at Rainham. In 1758 the father died, and the parishioners of St. John showed their respect for him by electing the son as his successor in the curacy and lectureship.

Churchill was now the father of 2 children. His income was only £100. a year, and he tried to eke out his means by opening a school (at Westminster or at Rainham), and by teaching in a ladies' school kept by a Mrs. Dennis. At Westminster he renewed his old friendship with Robert Lloy, who had succeeded his father as usher. The father, Pierson Lloyd, had been promoted to the 2nd mastership of Westminster (1748). He was generous to his son's friend, probably with some view to indirectly helping his son, and not only persuaded Churchill's creditors to accept 5s., in the pound, but lent the necessary funds. Robert Lloyd was now giving up his ushership in order to try a literary career.

Churchill had been a clergyman "through need not choice" (Dedication to Sermons). Conscientious biographers alone have read the published sermons attributed to him, and they pronounce them to be unreadable. Churchill himself says that "sleep, at his bidding, crept from pew to pew." His early biographers say that he discharged his duties well, which probably means that he had as yet caused no scandal.

His marriage was now coming to the usual end of such alliances. His wife was as 'imprudent' as himself (Biog. Brit.), if nothing worse; and in February 1761 a formal separation took place. Churchill's references to her imply that he was heartily tired of her.

The Rosciad

Churchill was meanwhile trying the booksellers. He had published some scraps in a periodical called the Library, edited by Kippis. A poem called "The Bard," in Hudibrastic verse, was rejected by a bookseller named Waller. Another called "The Conclave," a satire upon the dean and chapter of Westminster, would have been accepted but for dread of legal consequences. Churchill perceived the true direction of his powers. His friend Lloyd had just gained some success by the Actor,' a didactic performance of the usual kind, and Churchill now composed the Rosciad. He had long been familiar with the theatres, and frequented them closely for 2 months to prepare his poem.

He offered the copyright for 20 guineas to the booksellers, and, on their refusal to give more than 5, published the poem at his own risk in March 1761. It won almost immediately a success not equalled by any satire between Pope's Dunciad and Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

The success was due in part to a genuine vigour, which showed Churchill to be a not unworthy disciple of Dryden, whom he admired and imitated, and partly to the more transitory effect of its personalities. Garrick and the leading actresses, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Gibber, and Mrs. Clive, were warmly eulogised, but all the best-known actors of the day were the subjects of graphic and uncomplimentary portraits, now often their best surviving titles to recollection. The effect produced is vividly described by Davies in his life of Garrick, who was himself, according to Boswell and Johnson (Life of Johnson, 20 March 1778), driven from the stage by the verse,

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

The Critical Review (xi. 209-12), then in Smollett's hands, criticised the poem, and, though paying it some compliments, attributed it to Lloyd, jointly inspired by Colman and Bonnell Thornton, the 3 being regarded as a mutual admiration society. Both Lloyd and Colman publicly contradicted the report, and Churchill then claimed the authorship, at the same time announcing the speedy appearance of an Apology addressed to the Critical Reviewers. The Apology contains a savage attack upon Smollett, and a rough warning to Garrick. Garrick had rashly suggested that he had been praised in the Rosciad because its author desired the freedom of his theatre. He professed to be so delighted with the Apology as to forget in reading it that he ought to be alarmed. But he took the warning, wrote a polite letter to Lloyd (printed in the Aldine edition from a copy belonging to Pickering) anxiously deprecating Churchill's displeasure, and for the future cultivated Churchill's acquaintance with scrupulous civility.

Churchill carefully guarded himself, according to Davies, from accepting any obligations. Other victims attempted retaliation, and Churchill became the terror of the theatre. The expression of his face was anxiously watched both by Davies and Garrick. Churchill gained £750. or £1,000. (according to various reports) for the 2 poems. He now paid his debts in full (Kippis in Biog. Brit. from his own knowledge), and he made an allowance to his wife. He appeared in a "blue coat with metal buttons," and gold lace on his hat and waistcoat. Pearce, then dean of Westminster, remonstrated against his improprieties, but it was not till January 1763 that the protests of his parishioners drove him to resign his lectureship.

Literary fame

Churchill now became famous in all literary circles. He wrote little until the end of 1762, but during the rest of his life he poured out a rapid series of satires with extraordinary rapidity, often poor and clumsy enough, but with occasional passages of remarkable power.

His next (very common-place) production, Night: An epistle to Robert Lloyd, contains an attack upon the Day of John Armstrong. Armstrong's poem (written before Churchill had published a line) contains no reference to him, and therefore gave no intentional provocation. Wilkes had published the poem during Armstrong's absence abroad, and in the summer of 1763 quarrelled with the author, whom he had complimented, in common with Churchill, in his dedication of Mortimer (North Briton, 16 March 1763). The statement that he formed an acquaintance with Churchill by apologising for Armstrong's attack must be inaccurate.

But in any case Churchill became an enthusiastic friend and admirer of Wilkes, who was just about to become a popular hero. Churchill took a share in his political warfare. Wilkes was publishing the North Briton, directed against the Briton, started by the common enemy, Smollett, under Bute's patronage. Churchill helped Wilkes regularly, as appears by the correspondence now in the British Museum. It was stated by Kearsley the printer that the profits were given to Churchill.

Churchill turned a paper, originally written for the North Briton, into his next poem, The Prophecy of Famine. It was published in January 1763. Boswell and Thomas Campbell have condoned its extravagant ridicule of the Scotch in consideration of its unmistakable vigour. It fell in with the popular sentiment, and had a great success. Churchill dressed his little boy in highland costume, the child explaining to inquirers, "My father hates the Scotch, and does it to plague them."

The famous No. 45 of the North Briton appeared on 23 April. Wilkes was arrested under the general warrant. Churchill accidentally entered Wilkes's room while the king's messenger was with him. "Good morrow, Mr. Thomson," said Wilkes. "How does Mrs. Thomson to-day? Does she dine in the country?" Churchill took the hint, secured his papers at once, and retired for the time (Collection of Papers … on the Case of Wilkes (1767), p. 174).

He was present, however, at the hearing of the case before Pratt in the following week. Hogarth was also present, drawing a caricature of Wilkes. He had been known both to Wilkes and Churchill. In September 1762 he had caricatured Pitt and Temple in a print called The Times. Hogarth was attacked for it in the North Briton, and Churchill already contemplated an 'epistle' (see letter in Forster's Essays, ii. 262). His Epistle to Hogarth appeared in answer to Hogarth's new provocation in July 1763. Hogarth retaliated by a caricature of Churchill as a bear in clerical bands, and with a pot of porter and a club marked Lies and North Britons. Churchill's abuse is vigorous enough, but it is needless to refute the statement insinuated by his friends that it shortened Hogarth's days. Johnson told Boswell (1 July 1763) that he had always thought Churchill 'a blockhead,' and thought so still Churchill, however, had shown more fertility than was to be expected, and a tree which produced many crabs was better than a tree which only produced a few. Cowper gives a fine criticism of his old schoolfellow in Table Talk, and speaks of him enthusiastically, calling him "the great Churchill" in a letter to Unwin in 1781 (Southey, Cowper, vi. 9-11).

Last days

On 15 November 1763 parliament met, and Wilkes was assailed in the House of Lords for the Essay on Woman. On the 16th he was wounded in the duel with Samuel Martin. Churchill took his friend's part by publishing the Duellist (for which he received £450.), containing satire of excessive bitterness upon Sandwich, Warburton, and Mansfield, the most conspicuous assailants of Wilkes in the upper house. This poem and the Ghost, in which Johnson is ridiculed on occasion of the Cock Lane story, are in octosyllabic meter. Churchill when following Butler is less happy than when following Dryden. His rhetoric is cramped by the shorter measure. But the satire upon Warburton at least is pungent, though too indiscriminate for the highest efficiency. Johnson had pronounced Churchill to be a "shallow fellow," and the knowledge of this prompted the portrait of "Don Pomposo."

Churchill had meanwhile published other poems. The Conference had appeared in November 1763, and the Author — which was met with critical approval at the time — in the following month. Both of them are spirited treatments of the old theme of satirists, their own independence and love of virtue. The Conference, however, contains a remarkable confession of remorse for a private sin. Churchill had seduced the daughter of a tradesman (a "stone-cutter" according to Horace Walpole). She had repented, but the reproaches of an elder sister drove her back to Churchill, who protected her till his death. He was with her in Wales during the summer of 1763, and was also present at the Oxford commemoration of that year (Nichols, Anecd. viii. 236).

Churchill's immorality was not incompatible with much generosity and manliness. A story is told in Chrysal (by Charles Johnson) of his generous rescue of a girl in distress and her family, which seems to rest upon some foundation of fact (Chrysal, vol. iv. bk. i. ch. xzi. and following), and which at any rate gives the contemporary view of his character. Robert Lloyd fell into difficulties in the autumn of 1763. Churchill allowed a guinea a week to support Lloyd in the Fleet prison, and promoted a subscription for his permanent release.

Wilkes was driven to Paris by the prosecutions. Churchill's fame had reached France. Horace Walpole tells us (letter to Mann, 16 Nov. 1764) that a Frenchman asked Churchill (husband of Lady Maria, Walpole's half-sister) whether he was "Le fameux poete.—Non.—Ma foi, monsieur, tant pis pour vous." Churchill, however, stayed in England for the present. He resided for a time at Richmond, and afterwards took a house on Acton Common, furnished (according to the Genuine Memoirs) with elegance and provided with horses and carriages.

In 1764 he published Gotham, his most carefully elaborated performance, and greatly admired by Cowper. It is an exposition of his political philosophy, compared by Forster to Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King. The absence of personal satire prevented its attaining popularity, or having much permanent value; for Churchill is at his best in satire. In the Candidate he again attacked Sandwich, who was now standing for the high-stewardship of Cambridge, and presenting an irresistibly tempting mark for a satirist. Grey tried his hand at satire on the same occasion in the Candidate; or, The Cambridge courtship.

The Farewell, The Times (upon a revolting subject), and Independence (remarkable for a vivid portrait of his own appearance, recalling Hogarth's caricature) followed rapidly; 2 other poems, the unfinished Journey, which contains a curious anticipation of his approaching end, and a satirical dedication of his sermons to Warburton, appeared posthumously. The last seems to suggest some private cause of quarrel, though Churchill's antipathy may be sufficiently explained by Warburton's attack upon Wilkes. Churchill, it may be added, had, as appears in his letters to Wilkes, a special antipathy to Warburton's friend. Pope, partly perhaps because he was Warburton's friend.

Churchill went to meet Wilkes at Boulogne in October. He was seized by a fever on the 29th. He dictated a note, leaving annuities of £60. to his wife, and of £50. to his mistress. It seems, however, that he left no property to supply these annuities, a fact which he may have been too ill to remember. Cole gives a rumour, obviously exaggerated, that his copyrights were worth £3,000. He left all his property to his 2 boys, subject to these annuities; his executors were John Churchill, his brother, and Humphrey Cotes; and his papers were left to Wilkes. He died 4 November 1764, Wilkes having some trouble in preventing a disturbance of his last moments by officious priests.

Robert Lloyd heard the news when sitting down to dinner. He sent away his plate, saying, "I shall follow Churchill," and took to bed, from which he never rose.

Writing

Critical introduction

by E.J. Payne

The celebrity of the smart versemaking of Churchill marks a low point in English taste. It nearly secured him a poet’s monument in Westminster Abbey; and it actually secured a poet’s rank for a petulant rhymer without a spark of the poet’s imagination, of cold heart, natural bad taste, and very little knowledge of that narrow world which he so impudently lampooned. Nothing in Churchill reveals a gleam of genial feeling, or justifies the suspicion that he could take any pleasure in what refines or elevates.

If we may believe his own account of himself, nature had given him little enough, beyond an ugly face, a sour temperament, and a bitter tongue. Yet he was not dissatisfied. He was very willing to be taken for what he was: and if he could not win liking and respect, he was content to be feared. In all this there must have been something of affectation. Yet it is only too clear that the coarse texture of his mind was impermeable to the kindlier and worthier influences of his time. What it most readily absorbed was that hatred of authority in general which keen observers saw widely spread in England long before it convulsed society in France: and poverty, obscurity, and habits of monotonous toil, sadly evinced by the industry with which he practised his new-found trade, had even in youth embittered a sour nature, and made him a Jacobin at heart. At all aristocracy, social, political, and intellectual, Churchill railed with vicious delight.

The artificiality of his times revolted him with better reason. But with all his boasting of nature and originality, few writers have less of the true spirit of either. The nature which he really followed was the coarse and narrow nature within him; and his originality consisted mainly in ostentatiously abandoning proportion and propriety. His success was due to his capacity of absorption and imitation. He had studied Dryden and Pope minutely, and learnt the trick of octosyllabic singsong from Butler and Swift. But the knowledge of man, the power of burlesque, the skilful play of jest and earnest, which are the essentials of true satire, were denied to Churchill. His whole stock in trade was his volubility, his bitterness of soul, and his knack of rhyme: and he cast over what he wrote something of the ungenial seriousness of his clerical calling. His address to Truth suggests that he knew where his strength and his weakness lay.

  ‘But come not with that easy mien
By which you won the lively Dean,
Nor yet assume that strumpet air
Which Rabelais taught thee first to wear,
Nor yet that arch ambiguous face
With which Cervantes gave thee grace:
But come in sacred vesture clad,
Solemnly dull, and truly sad.
Far from thy seemly matron train
Be idiot mirth, and laughter vain!
For wit and humour, which pretend
At once to please us and amend,
They are not for my present turn,
Let them remain in France with Sterne.’
The Ghost, Book II.

The description of his muse, with which the following selection commences, is truthful enough. The neglect of his style was no studied air, but arose from natural slovenliness, from imperfect command over brain and pen, and no doubt from unwillingness to strike out lines which produced him half-a-crown a copy when the total of a sheet was made up. The poverty of Churchill’s mind is curiously illustrated by the poem on the Cock Lane Ghost, a subject which might perhaps have supplied Dryden with materials for a hundred lines. Churchill spins it out to over four thousand.

His field was limited to the narrow topics of the town: and his ambition was to be the censor of its manners and the scourge of its vices. But he failed to become the Dryden or the Juvenal of his age. All interest in his writings has disappeared with their ephemeral incidents and conditions: and that which has redeemed him from oblivion is his boisterous energy, his brazen effrontery, his extraordinary command of common pedestrian English, and the sharp relief in which he stands out among the formal poetasters of his day, and which perhaps entitles him to be regarded as a precursor of the better school of poetry which arose with Burns, Cowper, and Wordsworth. Cowper, we know, had a real admiration for him.

His earliest work, the Rosciad, is his best, because in it he most adhered to good models. His later works will serve the student as a rich mine of all sorts of errors in taste and judgment. In proportion as he abandoned himself to his own guidance, his work degenerated, and the poverty of his thought appeared; and in three years he had literally written himself out. But in all that he wrote there is a certain fierce manliness which wins attention, and even sympathy for his untutored brain and unsoftened heart, and this effect is heightened by the story of his life and death.

No writer requires to be read with more caution by those who seek in literature a reflection of history and politics. The exaggerated Whiggism of Churchill betrays a want of political knowledge and judgment, and it did not save him from being deceived by the gross imposture of The Patriot King. His adulation of Pitt was part of the cant of the day: but Wilkes, the idol of the mob, was the object of his real sympathies, and Wilkes repaid him with patronage. The pair were well matched, and Churchill might be described as the Wilkes of poetry.

Miscellaneous

His works are:

'The Rosciad,' March I 1761 (0th edition in 1766). 'The Apology; addressed to the Critic«d Reviewers,' April 1761. 'Night; an Epistle to Robert Lloyd,' January 1762. 'The Ghost,' 1st 2 books March 1762, 3rd September 1762, 4th November 1763. 'The Prophecy of Famine; a Scots Pastoral, inscribed to John Wilkes, Esq.,' Januarv 1763. 'An Epistle to W. Hogarth,' July 1763. 'The Conference,' November 1763. 'The Duellist,' in three books, November 1763. 'The Author,' December 1763. 'Gotham,' three books, bks. i. and ii. February 1764, bk. iii. September 1764. 'The Candidate,' June 1764. 'The Times,' September 1764. 'Independence,' September 1764. 'The Farewell,' 1764. 'The Journey' (in posthumous collections). Sermons, with dedication to Warburton, 1766.

It is suggested that the sermons were probably found in his father's desk. A collective edition of Churchill's poems appeared in a handsome quarto volume in 1763. The poems published in 1764 form a second volume. A 'third' edition, in two volumes, 8vo (printed for John Churchill, executor), inducing all the poems, appeared in 1766, and a 'fifth' edition, in four volumes, the last including the sermons and dedication to Warburton, in 1774. Churchill's poems are included in Anderson's, Chalmers's, and other collections.

A partial collection of Churchill's poems appeared in 1763.

Recognition

Churchill's gravesite. Courtesy Find a Grave.

Churchill's body was brought to Dover and buried in the old churchyard of St. Martin. It is marked by a slab and the line taken from the 'Candidate'—

Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.

A monument is also erected to him in the church. Byron visited the grave when leaving England for the last time, and has recorded his impression in lines dated Diodati, 1816.

A portrait of Churchill, by Schaak, is engraved as a frontispiece to his works in various editions. Another is mentioned by Mr. Forster as presented to Lord Northampton's Hospital at Greenwich in 1837 by Mr. Tatham, the warden.

Publications

Poetry

• The Rosciad. London: privately published, 1761
• The Apology: Addressed to the critical reviewers. London: privately published, 1761.
• Poems. London: privately published, 1763.
• The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots pastoral. London: privately published, 1763.
• Poems. (2 volumes), John Churchill, 1765. Volume I, Volume II
• The Poetical Works. Edinburgh: Apollo Press, by the Martins, 1779.
• The Poetical Works (with Life by William Tooke). (3 volumes), London: William Pickering, 1844. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III
• The Poetical Works (edited by George Gilfillan). Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1855; New York: Appleton, 1855.
• The Rosciad / The Apology. London: Lawrence & Bullen 1891.
• The Poetical Works (edited by Douglas Grant). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Non-fiction

• Sermons. London: 1764; Dublin: A. Leathley, J. Hoey, sen. P Wilson, J. Exshaw, H. Bradley, et al, 1765.
• Genuine Memoirs of Mr. Charles Churchill. London: J. Cooke, 1765.

Collected editions

• The Works of Charles Churchill. (4 volumes), Dublin: Peter Wilson, 1765.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

• Sambrook, James. “Churchill, Charles (1732-1764).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
•  Stephen, Leslie (1887) "Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 10 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 309-313  Wikisource, Web, Dec. 24, 2017.}}

External links

Poems

• Churchill, Charles (1731-1764) (2 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Rev. Charles Churchill (1731-1764) info & 3 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830.
• Churchill in The English Poets: An anthology: Description of His Muse (from The Prophecy of Famine), Characters of Actors (from The Rosciad, Description of Johnson (from The Ghost), Charles the First (from Gotham)
• Charles Churchill at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive
• Charles Churchill at PoemHunter (23 poems)
• Charles Churchill at Poetry Nook (45 poems)

Books

• Works by Charles Churchill at Project Gutenberg
• “The Dedication to the Sermons” A commentary by John Fraser
• Charles Churchill at Amazon.com

About

• Charles Churchill in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Charles Churchill at NNDB
• Churchill, Charles in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Charles Churchill: poet, rake, and rebel by Wallace Cable Brown (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1953). 240 page, illustrated biography. Open access full-text PDF file available from the University of Kansas.
• Charles Churchill at Find a Grave

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Churchill, Chrles (1731-1764)