Many men of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were best known for the knowledge and literary expertise, Francis Quarles was no different. He used that knowledge to not only voice his opinion both politically and religiously, but he created masterful art through prose and poetry. His literature was successful and allowed him to travel with important people such as James Ussher, a church historian and archbishop of Armagh. Quarles was a dedicated family man, a well-to-do European, whom loved his country as if it too, were family. He had several turbulent times throughout his life as a poet, but his troubles led him to be recognized as one of the greatest poets of his time.
Francis Quarles was born in 1592 in the family’s home at Romford, Essex. He was the third of four sons and four daughters to James Quarles and Joan Dalton. James made his wealth from, “accumulating the posts of clerk of the royal kitchen, clerk of the green cloth, and surveyor-general of victualing for the navy” (Höltgen). His mother, an heiress of Eldred Dalton, of Moor Place, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, was a woman who devoted herself to the practices of Puritanism. Francis Quarles was orphaned at a young age, his father died in 1599, and soon after, his mother in 1606. Despite this turbulent time, he began his education at an “schoole in the Countrey and afterwards at Christ’s College, Cambridge” (Höltgen). He attended Christ’s College in Cambridge between 1605 and his experience at college, and the atmosphere it created, was explained as, “Ramism and puritanism were widespread, but government pressure gradually reduced the strength of the latter” (Höltgen). After graduation in 1609, Quarles attended Oriel College in Oxford as well as law school at Lincoln’s Inn. He did not begin publishing in his educational years, but he began to network and befriend those who did, like George Chapman and Inigo Jones. Quarles married Ursely Woodgate, of St Andrew’s, Holborn, Spinster in 1618. The couple would go on to have eighteen children, including John Quarles, who many hailed as an, “heir to his father’s genius” (Horden). After he married Ursely and started a family, he devoted all of his time and effort into his literature, as it was an escape from financial and personal matters.
Quarles’s first important book, dedicated to Robert Sidney, the earl of Leicester, was named A Feast for Wormes; which is a twist on the biblical story of Jonah. It is described as a paraphrase in verse, “which Quarles augmented with pious verse-meditations and weighty moral poems of his own” (Butler). Quarles used this first book to springboard biblically referenced books such as Esther (1621), Job (1624), Jeremiah (1624), Psalms (1625), and Samson (1631). These works, “emphasized suffering, pain, anguish and general despondency as their themes, interspersed with moralizing passaged in verse and prose” (Butler). Quarles then began his long-verse romance out of Phillip Sydney’s Arcadia, Argalus and Parthenia. This romance received warm reviews and foreshadowed the success of his next work, “his best-selling Emblems (1635), lavishly-illustrated and containing five books of meditative verse. The poems are introduced by scriptural motto, then a commentary based on quotations from various sources, and at the end closure is achieved with a short didactic epigram” (Butler). Emblems attracted both Catholic and protestant readers because the work focused on a proper Christian lifestyle rather than doctrines within one or the other. The work was so successful that a second edition was requested. So, a year later, a second edition was published followed by many different versions and renditions in the years to follow like Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man, which was a lot less successful than its predecessor. This phase in Francis Quarles’s poetic career was also the pinnacle of his life.
After 1637, Francis Quarles shifted his literature and devoted most of his time to political pamphlets and books. He wrote Enchiridion in 1640 and it began his politically driven agenda. In this work, “Quarles brings together timeless wisdom tersely expressed, and political advice for king threatened by civil war” (Höltgen). During these publications, Quarles’s reputation suffered due to his desire to be a “literary apologist for Charles I” in the primarily puritan and sectarian town of Terling, an Essex village, “His advocacy of King Charles I’s cause in the pamphlets The Loyall Convert (1644), The Whipper Whipt (1644), and The New Distemper 91645) led to the taking of his property, the burning of his manuscripts, and the assassination of his character” (Roberts). Quarles also lost the plates and copy of Emblems and Hieroglyphikes due to his lack payment on a loan from Eglesfield and Williams. After the two obtained ownership of this notable work, they attempted to reimburse themselves by producing new editions of his work. The last of Quarles’s books published during his lifetime was Barnabas and Boanerges (1644), “an ingenious combination of meditation and character essay, and was much in demand” (Höltgen). Scarce information has survived to tell about Quarles’s last years of life, but on September eight 1644, at the age of fifty-five, he died a penniless poet; whom left behind a treasure chest full of English literary treasure.
Posthumously, Quarles’s wife Ursely attempted to get his work published such as The Virgin Widow (1649); which grasped the attention of its readers by using political and religious allegories. Francis Quarles’s work, though scarcely accessible, has been used by other poets and scholars. Elizabeth Newell, a female poet of the seventeenth century, transcribed Quarles’s poem about Christ, justice, and the sinner almost fifty years after his death. Emblems and Hieroglyphikes remained one of Quarles’s most popular collections for many centuries because it was “rewarding in recent studies of the interaction of word and image”(Höltgen). Quarles’s reputation may have suffered due to his passionate dedication to the royalist party and puritanism in his latter years of life, but he created memorable literature that made him known as one of the best poets in the early seventeenth century.
Butler, John. “The Life of Francis Quarles (1592-1644).” Accessed Novemeber 19, 2015. http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/quarles/quarlesbio.htm
Höltgen, Karl Josef. “Quarles, Francis (1592–1644).” Karl Josef Höltgen In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman, January 2008. Accessed October 19, 2015. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22945
Horden, John. “Quarles, John (1624/5–1665).” John Horden In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Accessed October 20, 2015. http://www.oxforddnb.com.argo.library.okstate.edu/view/article/22946
Roberts, Lorraine M. “Francis Quarles (1592-8 September 1644).” Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets: Second Series. Ed. M. Thomas Hester. Vol. 126. Detroit: Gale, 1993. 227-238. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 126. Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online. Accessed October 19, 2015.