• Source: Martin Lluelyn

Martin Lluelyn (1616–1682) (alias Llewellin), an English-language and Latin poet, Royalist officer, college President at Oxford, royal Physician Extraordinary and Mayor of High Wycombe, was born in London but became associated with Oxford and Buckinghamshire.




Origins


He was born 12 December 1616, one of the many sons of Martin Llewellin of London, and christened at St Bartholomew-the-Less, Smithfield, on 22 December following. His identity as the son of Martin Llewellin the Steward of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London (in office 1599-1634) is confirmed by the entry in the Donor's Book of Christ Church, Oxford, recording the donation in 1634 by William and Martin Lluellin of an Atlas of the East Indies made around 1598 by their father Martin, citizen of London, based on observations taken during the maritime expedition of Cornelis de Houtman in 1595-1597. The atlas is drawn in the same hand as various plans relating to the Hospital in the stewardship period, with documented requisitions. Martin Llewellin the cartographer and steward died in 1634.




Education


Martin the poet and physician attended Westminster School; he matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford in July 1636, and received the degree of BA in July 1640 and MA in May 1643.




Civil War and Commonwealth period


While Lluelyn was a student in Oxford the Civil War broke out, during which the king removed from London and made Christ Church, Oxford the base of his operations. Oxford was besieged three times by the Parliamentary forces, in 1644, 1645 and 1646. Lluelyn's sympathies were with the Royalists, and he took up arms on the king's behalf, as his memorial inscription at High Wycombe described:"Sæviente civili bellis incendio (dum Oxonium præsidio muniebatur) cohorti academicorum fideli præfectus erat adversus ingruentem rebellium ferociam.""In the fierce conflagration of the civil wars, when Oxford was garrisoned, he was captain of the loyal company of academics against the ferocious onset of the rebels."
During the king's midwinter stays at Oxford in 1643 to 1645 Lluelyn wrote carols ("Sacred poems") which were sung before the king at Christmas, New Year (Circumcision (feast day)) and Twelfth Day (Epiphany). It was in 1646 that his principal collection of poems, Men-Miracles. With Other Poemes, was first printed. The title-poem, "Men-Miracles", is a satire in Hudibrastic vein and metre upon the traveller's tales of Mandeville and others, but especially of Tom Coryate. It is followed by a group of shorter comic pieces, several of which were sufficiently popular to be included among the additions to Wit's Recreations (1640), in Sir John Mennes's Facetiae (1656). There are also various serious elegies, occasional poems dedicated to dignitaries, a satire against the rebels, and the group of carols sung before the king at Oxford. It carried a dedicatory epistle "To the Most Illustrious James Duke of Yorke", who spent most of the period 1642 to 1646 in Oxford. The work is explicitly Royalist, not merely in tone but in content, as de Groot's study usefully demonstrates.
On 5 May 1646 the last dramatic production in Oxford before the city surrendered to the Roundheads was the play, The King found at Southwell, which survived anonymously in a unique copy but is evidently by Lluelyn. In 1648 Lluelyn was ejected from his studentship by the Parliamentarian Visitors. He then removed to London, where he practised as a physician. At about this time he made his first marriage, and a son and daughter were born to him. In 1653 the University of Oxford awarded him the degree of MD, and in 1659 he was elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians.




Restoration


Following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 he composed poetry in honour of King Charles II (1660–1685), by whom he was appointed his personal Physician Extraordinary. In 1660 he was appointed principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford. The king also appointed him one of the commissioners for the regulation of the university. Now a widower, in August 1662 he made his second marriage taking a 24-year-old bride from Penn, Buckinghamshire, who brought him three further sons and two more daughters. In 1664 he moved his residence to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, resumed his practice as a physician. He entered civic life as mayor of that town (1671): somewhat dramatically, at the mayor's feast at the end of his term his elected successor died suddenly before leaving the inn. He served as a JP for the county, "in which office he behaved himself severe against the fanatics".




Literary career


As a student at Christ Church, Oxford he wrote various plays including one staged in 1661 during a visit to the university by King Charles II. However all his surviving published works are of poetry.




= List of works

=
Lluelyn contributed a poem Reginarum optima, ignoscas tandem agresti Lucinae to the 1638 Oxford collection Musarum Oxoniensium Charisteria, and his friend Edward Gray also contributed.
His Elegie on the death of Sir Bevile Grenville appeared first in the 1643 Oxford volume of verses in honour of the Royalist commander Sir Bevil Grenville (died 1643) slain at the Battle of Lansdown, and then among the elegies in Men-Miracles in 1646. In the London reprint of the Oxford Verses of 1684 only the final 8 lines of the poem appeared (p. 16), but the full elegy also appeared in Alexander Brome's 1662 collection Rump. The short extract from the poem is inscribed on Grenville's mural monument erected in 1714 at Kilkhampton, Cornwall.

Men-Miracles, with other Poems ("By M. Ll. St. of Christ Church in Oxon") (1646), a volume of his poems, was reprinted in 1656, in 1661 and in 1679, (sometimes titled "Lluellin's Marrow of the Muses").
Ode to Celia appeared in the collections of Ellis and Neale. Prefixed are commendatory verses by Edward Gray, William Cartwright and others.
Verses on the Return of King Charles II, James, Duke of York, and Henry, Duke of Gloucester (London, 1660, folio)
Elegy on the Death of Henry, Duke of Gloucester (London, 1660, folio)
Wickham Wakened; or, the Quaker's Madrigall in Rime Doggrel (1672, quarto). a diatribe against a rival practitioner of Wycombe, who was a Quaker.
There is a copy of verses by him prefixed to Cartwright's Plays and Poems (1651), and he seems to have taken a leading part in the presentation of plays at Christ Church, as in the minor poems appended to his ‘Men Miracles’ (p. 80) is one addressed "to Dr. F[ell], Deane of Ch. Ch. ... when I presented him a Play". Another poem, probably written about 1640 and published with Men Miracles is addressed to "Lord B. on presenting him with a play". It is, however, argued that these dramatic compositions were a customary part of the completion of a degree, were possibly never performed, but were presented in written form to a respected dedicatee. Several such examples of "degree plays" survive in manuscript from St John's College, Oxford in this period.




Marriage and children


Lluelyn married twice:

First, c. 1649, to a lady of unrecorded name, by whom he had children:
Martin Lluelyn (1652–1729), an officer of horse under King James II, was appointed Commissary-General of the Provisions to the Forces in Portugal by Queen Anne in November 1703. He married Elizabeth, daughter and coheir of Charles Halford (1623-1676) of South Witham and of Edith Weston, co. Rutland, and his wife Elizabeth Mitchell, according to the Lincolnshire Visitations.
Laetitia Lluelyn, living in 1682.
Secondly on 5 August 1662 to Martha Long (c1638-1728), daughter of George Long of Penn, Buckinghamshire, by whom he had children:
Richard Lluelyn, a King's Scholar at Westminster School in 1687 (aged 13), he was elected to, and matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1690, and was a student at the Inner Temple in 1693. He married twice, the second time to Elizabeth Bromwich of St Martin-in-the-Fields on 14 February 1715/16.
George Lluelyn was the "Jacobitical, musical, mad Welsh parson" of that name, rector of Condover and Pulverbatch, Shropshire, from 1705, described by Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814), who as a child knew him personally. Page of the Backstairs to Charles II, he was sent to University by James II. George Llewellyn the son of Martin of Agmondesham (Amersham), Bucks (deceased), matriculated from Merton College in 1685 aged 16 and graduated BA in 1690. Taking MA at Christ Church in 1693, he was ordained deacon at Oxford, and priest in 1695, and is recorded as chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford from 7 September 1693 to 11 March 1703. George's character described by Burney is enlarged in a manuscript account made by the Jaundrell family of Pulverbatch: he was a most versatile musician, a friend of Henry Purcell, a collector of paintings, a Tory of strongly Jacobite sympathies, and an extraordinary topiarist.
Maurice Lluelyn, son of Martin Lluelyn, Doctor of Physic of High Wickham (deceased), was bound apprentice for 7 years to the London citizen and Mercer John Shergold, on 24 February 1687/88.
Martha Lluelyn, was first married to a husband named Searjant, but was already widowed in 1716 when mentioned in her mother's will. The will was not proved until 1728: Martha remarried to a husband named Cross, under which name she is mentioned in the Jaundrell description of her brother George. She died on 1 February 1767 aged 93, and was buried (as "Martha Cross") at High Wycombe beneath her father's stone, with a short additional inscription.
Maria Lluelyn, living 1716, married a husband named Waller who was also living at that date.




Death and burial


He died on 17 March 1681/2 and was buried in the north aisle of the chancel of High Wycombe parish church. His grave was covered with a black marble stone inscribed with a Latin epitaph written by his friend the Revd. Isaac Milles (1638–1720), vicar of High Wycombe. This is mentioned in Milles's Life, where it is written, "there was none that he kept a fairer and more intimate Correspondence with, than with an eminent and very learned Physitian, Dr Martin LLuellyn, who lived in Wiccomb all the time Mr Milles was Vicar of it... He was a Man of singular Integrity of Life and Manners, and of the most comely and decent Gravity and Deportment..." When Milles left Wycombe in 1681, "with none did Mr. Milles part with more Reluctancy, or was parted with, with greater Regret, than with Dr. LLuellyn and his family, from whom Mr. Milles had found all the Friendship and Respect that he could expect."




References






Sources


National Library of Wales, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, LLUELYN (or LLEWELLIN ), MARTIN ( 1616–1682 )
Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, Volume 33, Lluelyn, Martin, by Thomas Seccombe (quoted verbatim in parts, out of copyright)

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Martin Lluelyn
• 1646 in literature
• Richard Grenville
• Oxford period poetry anthologies
• Physician to the King
• 1616
• 1610s
• 1631 in poetry
• 1646 in poetry
• Isaac Milles