Sackville, Charles, Sixth Earl Of Dorset

(1638-1706)

   The son of the fifth earl (he succeeded to the title in 1677), he was elected to Parliament for East Grinstead, Sussex, in 1660. In 1662, he, with four others, was indicted for killing and robbing a tanner named Hoppy. Their defense was that they mistook him for a highwayman. He served under the Duke of York at the naval battle off Harwich, Essex, against the Dutch in 1665, and wrote the song "To All You Ladies Now at Land." Nell Gynne and he were friends and when she became the mistress of Charles II, Sackville was sent to France. William of Orange made him Lord Chamberlain (1689) and knight of the Garter (1692). He died at Bath and was interred in the family vault at Withyham, Sussex. His poems, together with those of Sir Charles Sedley (see entry), appeared in a New Miscellany (1701) and in The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (1749). Some of his other poems: "A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies," "A Song on Black Bess," "On the Countess of Dorchester," "The Duel of the Crabs."

   Sources: An Uninhibited Treasury of Erotic Poetry. Louis Untermeyer, ed. Dial Press, 1963. Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714. George de F. Lord, ed. Yale University Press, 1975. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. ChadwyckHealey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, 1779-1781 (http://www2.hn.psu.edu/Faculty/ KKemmerer/poets/preface.htm). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of English History in Verse. Kenneth Baker, ed. Faber and Faber, 1988. The Faber Book of Useful Verse. Simon Brett, ed. Faber and Faber, 1981. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poems of Sir George Etherege. James Thorpe, ed. Princeton University Press, 1963. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).