William Winstanley

William Winstanley (c.1628–1698) was an English poet and compiler of biographies.

Born about 1628, William Winstanley was the second son of William Winstanley of Quendon, Essex, (d. 1687) by his wife Elizabeth. Henry Winstanley was his nephew. William was sworn in as a freeman of Saffron Walden on 21 April 1649. He was for a time a barber in London (Wood, Athenae Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 763), but he soon relinquished the razor for the pen. "The scissors, however, he retained, for he borrowed without stint, and without acknowledgement also, from his predecessors", Much of his literary work commemorates his connection with Essex.

He published under his own name a poem called 'Walden Bacchanals,' and he wrote an elegy on Anne, wife of Samuel Gibs of Newman Hall, Essex (Muses' Cabinet). There is little doubt that most of the almanacs and chapbooks issued from 1662 onwards under the pseudonym of "Poor Robin" came from his pen. He was a staunch royalist after the Restoration, although in 1659 he wrote a fairly impartial notice of Oliver Cromwell (cf. England's Worthies). "He is a fantastical writer, and of the lower class of our biographers; but we are obliged to him for many notices of persons went away for a time and stayed in cambridge, east london and things which are recorded only in his works" (Granger, Biog. Hist. of Engl. 5th ed. v. 271), His verse is usually boisterous doggerel in the manner of John Taylor (1580-1663) the water-poet. Winstanley was buried at Quendon on 22 Dec. 1698.

He was twice married; he published an elegy on his first wife Martha, who died in January 1653 (Muses' Cabinet, p. 35). His second wife, Anne, was buried at Quendon on 29 Sept.

His compilations, some of which are now rare books, were:

1. The Muses Cabinet, stored with Variety of Poems, London, 1655, 12mo, dedicated to William Holgate; there are prefatory verses by John Vaughan. One epigram deals with John Taylor the water-poet, and there are lines on Sir Fleetwood Sheppard's Epigrams (see Brydges, Censura Literaria, v. 129-31).

2. England's Worthiest select lives of most eminent persons [including Flavius Julius Constantine and Cromwell], 1660, 8vo, "principally stolen from Lloyd," although free from signs of a partisan spirit (Brydges); 2nd ed., with the omission of the lives of the parliamentarians and substitution of others, 1684.

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