Lord Brooke Fulke Greville

Fulke Greville was born October 5, 1554, in Warwickshire, England, to Ann Neville, daughter of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, and to Sir Fulke senior, an influential landowner of Warwick Castle. In 1564, Greville entered Shrewsbury School and began an important companionship with fellow poet Philip Sidney.

In Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke 1554–1628: A Critical Biography (University of California Press, 1971), biographer Joan Rees claims, “Greville writes of having been brought up with Sidney and he was evidently on close terms with the family as a whole. It was probably Sir Henry Sidney who sponsored Greville’s first appearance at Court, and he who by his recommendation made the first opening for him in the Welsh Council.” In addition to being a courtier close to Queen Elizabeth, Fulke Greville had experience as a soldier, serving in Navarre in 1587 and Tilbury in 1588, in expectation of a Spanish invasion. He spent many years as a sailor, commanding a small fleet of ships in 1580 along the Irish coast to prevent Spanish aid from entering.

Greville’s most important work was Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (1652), written after Philip Sidney’s early death in 1586. It includes themes of Elizabethan politics and philosophies of governance that he also wrote about in the his verse treatises on monarchy, published posthumously, of which Joan Rees explains:

The poem is divided into fifteen sections, the first five treating of the origins of monarchy and the dangers of too strong, or too weak, rule. The last three compare monarchy with government by aristocracy or democracy. In between Greville gives a section each to church, laws, nobility, commerce, crown revenue, peace, and war. He analyses, prescribes, and exemplifies, sometimes drawing his illustrations from ancient history, sometimes from myth, and sometimes from the contemporary world.

Greville’s collection of poems, Caelica (1633), consists of one hundred and nine poems in a variety of forms. Rees writes:

Many of them are structures built of sonnet units, quatrains and six-lined stanzas, but there is also an example of rhymed sapphics, as well as ottava rima, poulter’s measure, dactyls, and trochaics. In time, the composition of the sequence ranges from early days when Greville, Sidney, and their friend, Sir Edward Dyer, were ‘a happy blessed Trinitie’ [sic] writing poetry together in gay and friendly rivalry to a later period when Sidney was dead and Greville’s interests and the colouring of his imagination had grown more sombre.

Greville lived to the age of seventy-four and died after being stabbed by his servant, Ralph Haywood on September 1, 1628, in London.