Drummond of Hawthornden

William Drummond (13 December 1585 – 4 December 1649), called "of Hawthornden", was a Scottish poet.

Drummond was born at Hawthornden Castle, Midlothian, to John Drummond, the first laird of Hawthornden, and Susannah Fowler, sister of the poet and courtier William Fowler. Sir Robert Drummond of Carnock, one-time Master of Work to the Crown of Scotland, was his grandfather.

Drummond received his early education at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, and graduated in July 1605 as M.A. of the recently founded University of Edinburgh. His father was a gentleman usher at the English court (as he had been at the Scottish court from 1590) and William, in a visit to London in 1606, describes the festivities in connection with the visit of the king of Denmark. Drummond spent two years at Bourges and Paris in the study of law; and, in 1609, he was again in Scotland, where, by the death of his father in the following year, he became laird of Hawthornden at the early age of 24.

The list of books he read up to this time is preserved in his own handwriting. It indicates a strong preference for imaginative literature, and shows that he was keenly interested in contemporary verse. His collection (now in the library of the university of Edinburgh) contains many first editions of the most famous productions of the age. On finding himself his own master, Drummond naturally abandoned law for the muses; "for," says his biographer in 1711, "the delicacy of his wit always run on the pleasantness and usefulness of history, and on the fame and softness of poetry". In 1612 began his correspondence with Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, afterwards Earl of Stirling, which ripened into a lifelong friendship after Drummond's visit to Menstrie in 1614.

Drummond's first publication appeared in 1613, an elegy on the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, called Teares on the Death of Meliades (Moeliades, 3rd edit. 1614). The poem shows the influence of Spenser's and Sidney's pastoralism. In the same year he published an anthology of the elegies of Chapman, Wither and others, entitled Mausoleum, or The Choisest Flowres of the Epitaphs. In 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, appeared Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall: in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, being substantially the story of his love for Mary Cunningham of Barns, who was about to become his wife when she died in 1615.

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