Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace, together with Robert Herrick, the subject of a separate essay, frequently have been seen by the critical tradition to constitute a group, often termed 'Cavalier' poets. The configuration is of considerable antiquity, and some points of association between some of them were sometimes recognized in the mid seventeenth century, shortly after the death of Carew (in 1640?) and Suckling (in 1641?). The perception that they are in some senses a group persists, reinforced by modern anthologists as well as critics. The agenda of this essay is to explain and thus dismantle the origins of that critical orthodoxy and to distinguish the characteristics not only of individual poets but also of the Caroline court culture before and after the inception of the Civil War, though paradoxically the mere title works to confirm that which I would set aside.

Carew (born c.1594) and Herrick (born 1591) reached creative maturity in the 1620s and early 1630s and Suckling (born 1609) flourished throughout the 1630s, yet very little of their poetry appeared in print before 1640. Their poems lived, rather, in the song settings of court musicians and in manuscript circulation, at first, no doubt, within the court coterie and among friends, and later in a widening circle of manuscript anthologies. When their pre-1640 works were delivered into print it was into a radically changed political and cultural world from that in which they were conceived. Lovelace and Herrick, publishing their major collections in 1648 and 1649, had the opportunity to revise and organize their works in the light of the dispersal of the Caroline court and the eclipse of the royalist cause, and they could and did write works in the 1640s which engaged both their personal catastrophes and those of the cause they espoused. For Carew and Suckling, their work was absorbed into that process of royalist lamentation as if through a process of retrospective revision.