Upon the retirement of the queen to
Paris, he was one of her suite, and as secretary to Viscount St. Albans he
conducted the correspondence in cipher between the queen and her
unfortunate husband.
He remained abroad during the civil war and the protectorate, returning
with Charles II. in 1660. "The Blessed Restoration" he celebrated in an
ode with that title, and would seem to have thus established a claim to
the king's gratitude and bounty. But he was mistaken. Perhaps this led him
to write a comedy, entitled _The Cutter of Coleman Street_, in which he
severely censured the license and debaucheries of the court: this made the
arch-debauchee, the king himself, cold toward the poet, who at once issued
_A Complaint_; but neither satire nor complaint helped him to the desired
preferment. He quitted London a disappointed man, and retired to the
country, where he died on the 28th of July, 1667.
His poems bear the impress of the age in a remarkable degree. His
_Mistress, or, Love Verses_, and his other Anacreontics or paraphrases of
Anacreon's odes, were eminently to the taste of the luxurious and immoral
court of Charles II.
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