ABSTRACT
Field Marshal Wavell to Basil Liddell-Hart In the summer of 1639 Richard Lovelace had everything a young man of 20 could wish for, ‘being then accounted’, wrote the contemporary historian, Anthony Wood, ‘the most amiable and beautiful person that eye ever beheld…much adored and admired by the female sex’.1 Lovelace was the eldest son of a large, wealthy and ancient Kentish family. Both his father and grandfather had been distinguished soldiers. He had the double blessing of a Cambridge education and an Oxford MA, while his excellent connections at court obtained him an ensign’s commission in the First Bishops’ War and a captain’s in the Second. In the well-known lines Lovelace explained to his Lucasta the excitement that he-like so many other innocent young men before and since-felt about going to the wars:
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, To war and arms I flee.
