Sheffield, John

(1648-1721)

   He succeeded his father in 1658 as the third Earl of Mulgrave and later was created Duke of Buckingham and Normanby. He was gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II and in 1680 he commanded an expedition for the relief of Tangier, besieged by the Moors. From 1682 to 1684 he was banished from court for making overtures to the future Queen Anne. He was in favor with James II, out of favor under William and Mary, in favor with Queen Anne and out of favor with George I, who removed him from all his posts. He was seen as a plotter, creating tensions between various people and heads of state. Samuel Johnson says of him: "His character is not to be proposed as worthy of imitation ... he was censured as covetous." He died at Buckingham House (now Buckingham Palace), St. James's Park, which he had built in 1703 on land granted by the crown. He is buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Some of his poems: "A Letter from Sea," "An Essay Upon Satire," "Essay on Poetry," "Love's Slavery," "The Nine," "The Rapture," "The Warning."

   Sources: 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. Chadwyck-Healey 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). Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). 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 Home Book of Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953. The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. New edition, revised and enlarged, Oxford University Press, 1939. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poetical Works of Dryden. George R. Noyes, ed. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1950. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).