Francis Quarles Biography Quotes 27 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Francis Quarles was born around 1592 in or near Romford, Essex, into an English milieu that valued learning and public service. He was educated at Cambridge, commonly associated with Christ's College, and later entered Lincoln's Inn to study law. The legal training honed his taste for order, aphorism, and structure, while his reading in Scripture and the classics formed a devotional and literary sensibility that would shape his career as a poet.

Service and Court Connections
As a young man, Quarles found employment connected with the royal household. He served for a time in the orbit of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, who became the Queen of Bohemia upon her marriage to Frederick V, Elector Palatine. The Protestant courtly culture surrounding Elizabeth provided Quarles with a view of European religious politics and the rhetoric of princely virtue, themes that later animated his devotional writing. Returning to the British Isles, he entered ecclesiastical service as secretary to James Ussher, the learned Archbishop of Armagh, and spent significant time in Ireland assisting with correspondence and scholarly matters. Ussher's rigorous piety and historical scholarship reinforced Quarles's own devotion and the scriptural cast of his poetry.

Emergence as Author and Poet
Quarles began publishing in the 1620s, issuing paraphrases and meditative treatments of biblical narratives alongside moral and romantic works. He was not only a writer of sacred verse; he also produced a popular prose romance, Argalus and Parthenia, refashioned from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which showed his ability to adapt admired sources for a wider readership. These early publications established him as a versatile author who could move between courtly narrative, scriptural theme, and moral reflection.

Emblems and the Art of Devotion
His strongest claim to lasting fame rests on Emblems (1635), a collection that joined short, meditative poems to emblematic images. Quarles adapted both the spirit and, in part, the visual program from the Jesuit Herman Hugo's Pia Desideria, transforming continental Catholic emblem piety into an English Protestant devotional idiom. The pairing of image and verse invited readers to contemplate sin, grace, repentance, and perseverance. The book's popularity was considerable, and it circulated widely in England, with readers responding to its accessible meditations and memorable imagery. A companion volume, Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), extended the emblematic method, presenting life as a pilgrimage beset by temptations but guided by providence.

City Office and Aphoristic Style
By the late 1630s Quarles held the post of chronologer to the City of London, a role aligned with his taste for ordering events and extracting moral lessons. Around the same time he published the Enchiridion, a collection of concise maxims and reflections on conduct, faith, and prudence. This aphoristic book distilled his ethical outlook and circulated among readers who valued pithy counsel as much as extended verse.

Faith, Politics, and Conflict
Quarles's religious and political loyalties were staunchly royalist and episcopal. He supported the authority of Charles I and defended a vision of the English church anchored in Scripture, liturgy, and learned clergy such as Archbishop Ussher. As the tensions of the 1640s deepened into the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, his writings and associations placed him at odds with Parliamentarian authorities. During the upheavals, his papers were searched and seized, an ordeal contemporaries described as a heavy blow to his spirit as well as to his livelihood. The episode illustrates how a devotional poet could be caught in the crosscurrents of censorship, propaganda, and confessional politics.

Family and Personal Life
Quarles married and had a large family; sources consistently note several children, among them John Quarles, who followed his father as a poet. The household's fortunes rose and fell with the father's literary success and with the instability of the times. His wife, remembered in records as Ursula, appears in the background of his later career as both anchor and survivor, seeing some of his writings into print after his death. The tone of Quarles's work suggests a man attentive to domestic piety as well as public duty, and his devotion to Scripture appears not only in his subject matter but in the consolatory purpose of his books.

Final Years and Death
The outbreak of civil war in 1642 intensified scrutiny of writers tied to the royalist cause. Quarles, already weakened by the strain of searches and the suppression of his manuscripts, died in 1644, reportedly in London. Accounts from his contemporaries stress the anxiety and deprivation brought on by the political situation. He was buried in a London parish church, and several works appeared posthumously, preserving the voice of a poet who had aimed to edify a nation even as it fractured.

Reputation and Legacy
Quarles's Emblems remained in print for generations and secured his reputation as the leading English practitioner of the emblem book. His appropriation and transformation of Herman Hugo's model helped naturalize a continental form within English devotional culture, appealing to readers across confessional lines who were drawn to vivid images and succinct spiritual counsel. The Enchiridion continued to be mined for maxims, while Argalus and Parthenia kept his name before a broader audience beyond strictly religious circles. Although tastes shifted in later centuries, his work offers a window into the moral imagination of early Stuart England, the devotional strategies of a poet shaped by the scholarship of James Ussher and the ceremonial ideals of the Caroline court, and the price paid by authors who tried to sustain faith and order during an age of war.

Our collection contains 27 quotes who is written by Francis, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Love - Writing.

• 1638 Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (Book)
• 1635 Emblemes, Divine and Moral (Book)