Edward Sherburne

Sir Edward Sherburne (1618-1702) was an English poet, translator, and royalist of the seventeenth century.

Sherburne was born 18 September 1618 in Goldsmith Rents, Cripplegate, London, the son of another Sir Edward Sherburne (1578–1641), a civil servant and secretary of the East India Company, and his wife, Frances (1588-1673), a daughter of John Stanley of Roydon Hall, Essex. His father, a descendant of the Sherburnes of Stonyhurst, had moved from Oxford to London to be employed as agent to Sir Dudley Carleton (later Viscount Dorchester), then from 1617-21 as secretary to Bacon, lord keeper, as secretary of the East India Company from 1621, and finally as Clerk of the Ordnance of the Tower of London from 1626.

The younger Edward was tutored first under Thomas Farnaby and later Charles Alleyn, until the latter's death in 1640. Thereupon he attempted an abortive tour of France and Italy, returning in late 1641 upon the news of the grave illness of his father, who died in December 1641. He succeeded his father as Clerk of the Ordnance, having obtained the reversion of that office in 1637-1638.

Due to his staunch royalist and Roman Catholic views, Sherburne was removed as Clerk of the Ordnance by order of the House of Lords at the outbreak of the civil war. For the following months he was prisoner in the custody of the usher of the black rod until his release in October of that year, whereupon he joined the forces of the king at Oxford. On the surrender of Oxford, in June 1646, he moved to London to live in Middle Temple with his kinsman Thomas Povey.

Now living in near poverty--due to the seizure of his estate and considerable library--he obtained the acquaintance of several notable literary figures of the day, including his kinsman the author Thomas Stanley, the dramatist James Shirley, and latterly of the collector and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane. It was at this stage that he began the truly literary portion of his life, devoting a great deal of time to scholarship of the classics and publishing his first independent published works in 1648, both translations in verse of Seneca the Younger: "Medea, a Tragedie, written in Latine, by Lucius Annæus Seneca" and "Seneca's Answer to Lucius his Quære: Why Good Men suffer Misfortunes, seeing there is a Divine Providence". The latter contained a dedication to the 'King of Sorrows' Charles I, then captive on the Isle of Wight, who may detect‘a glympse of Your own invincible Patience and inimitable Magnanimity; in bearing and ever-mastering Mis-fortunes’ carefully omitting the continuing line ‘being a Stoicall Exhortation to the Anticipation of Death’.

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