The only real clues to the authorship of the poem are the biographical details of the preface and the signature initials "T.W." following the author's epistle of PC—either or both of which may of course result from a conscious intention to deceive. Surprisingly, both seem to be relevant to the history of Thomas Ward, the author of the hudibrastic anti-protestant satire, England's Reformation (1719), who is known to have left England at roughly the time suggested as that of the poem's composition. In the life of Ward prefixed to An Interesting Controversy with Mr. Ritschel, Vicar of Hexham (1819), which appears to be based at an unknown degree of removal on a personal memoir, he is said to have been born on 13 April 1652, and to have returned to England in the thirty-fourth year of his age after at least "five or six years" abroad, a figure which may just be reconciled with a departure date in January 1680/1. However, other details of the case do not fit so well. To start with, it is hard to see how a man of twenty-eight could refer, as the author does in both epistles, to his "want of years, and a necessary Experience in the Ages humour." Nor is it easy to reconcile Ward's fervent Catholicism with a satiric allusion in PC to non-preaching bishops—a favorite topic of Puritan polemic—or with a reference to the Pope as "Rome's great Idol." Ward is said in the Life to have been a Catholic before his departure, and writes movingly in England's Reformation of his friendship with the Yorkshire anchorite Father Posket, executed in March 1679. The matter is further complicated by the appearance of the initials "T.W." together with the dateline "Rome, June 10. 79. Stilo Novo." on a broadsheet of 1679, A letter from Rome to a Friend in London in Relation to the Jesuits Executed, and those that are to be Executed in the Countryes, which is in fact an anti-Catholic tract vigorously supporting the executions. For this to have been the work of Ward we would have to assume that he had set out for Rome at least two years before the departure of the Poeta and then suffered a violent relapse into Puritanism. On the other hand, if the pamphlet, as is quite probable, was really the work of one of Shaftesbury's propagandists in London, there would have been excellent reasons for attaching the initials of a known Catholic exile. As the year 1679 is also within the stated date-range of Ward's departure, the existence of the broadsheet must count marginally against his being the author of PdT.
I can cast no further light on this mystery beyond proposing that if the story of the exiled poet is in fact a fabrication, the poem may have been the work of a younger (b. 1661) and Protestant "T.W." in the person of Thomas Wood, Anthony à Wood's nephew, later celebrated as a legal writer, poet, and controversialist and for his fondness for anonymous and pseudonymous publication. Two of Wood's poems, Juvenalis Redivivus (published anonymously in 1683) and an elegy on the death of Oldham (included with Dryden's lines in the Remains of 1684), are satires on the poets of a similar kind to PdT, while the second has a striking structural similarity to its opening canto. Neither PdT nor PC is included in Wood's list of his writings sent to his uncle in 1692 for inclusion in Athenae Oxonienses (Bodl. MS. Wood F.45, f.#229), nor do they appear in A Catalogue of Part of the Library of the Reverend Dr. Wood (London, 1723); however, neither omission need be significant. A third possibility is Thomas Walters, claimed by Anthony à Wood as the true author of William Bedloe's tragedy, The Excommunicated Prince (1679); but I have found nothing beyond the fact he was an author to connect him with PdT, nor any evidence that either he or Thomas Wood spent the years 1681-1682 otherwise than accumulating time for their degrees at Oxford.
Monash University
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This facsimile of Poeta de Tristibus (1682) is reproduced from a copy (*PR3291/P795) in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
POETA DE TRISTIBUS:
OR, THE
Poet's Complaint.