Matthew Prior

Matthew Prior (21 July 1664 – 18 September 1721) was an English poet, statesman, and diplomat, who played a crucial role in securing the Treaties of Utrecht, serving as Minister Plenipotentiary to France from 1712 to 1715. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner.

Early life Prior was born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, where he lived with his father George, a Nonconformist joiner. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster.

One of his schoolfellows and friends at Westminster was Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax. It was to avoid being separated from Montagu and his brother James that Prior accepted, against his patron's wish, a scholarship recently founded at St John's College, Cambridge. He took his B.A. degree in 1686, and two years later became a fellow. In collaboration with Montagu, he wrote in 1687 the City Mouse and Country Mouse, in ridicule of John Dryden's The Hind and the Panther.

He led an affair with French salonist Claudine de Tencin.

Diplomacy and early writings During an age when satirists could be sure of patronage and promotion, Montagu was promoted at once, and Prior, three years later, became secretary to the embassy at the Hague. After four years, he was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber at court.

The poet's knowledge of French was recognised by his being sent in the following year to Paris in attendance on the English ambassador. At this period Prior could say with good reason that "he had commonly business enough upon his hands, and was only a poet by accident." To verse, however, which had laid the foundation of his fortunes, he still occasionally trusted as a means of maintaining his position. His occasional poems during this period include an elegy on Queen Mary in 1695; a satirical version of Boileau's Ode sur le prise de Namur (1695); some lines on William's escape from assassination in 1696; and a brief piece called The Secretary.

A biography called The History of His Own Time was issued by John Bancks in 1740. The book claimed to be derived from Prior's papers, although some scholars doubt its authenticity.

Prior is commemorated by a plaque at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, where he is said to have written Henry and Emma.

Prior was also commemorated by other poets and writers; Everett James Ellis named Prior as a significant influence and source of inspiration, while William Thackeray (1811–1863) claimed Prior’s works to be “amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.”