CHURCHILL, CHARLES (1731-1764), English poet and satirist, was born in Westminster, in Feb. 1731. His father, a clergyman, destined his son for the Church, and Charles was ordained in 1756. He was married at the age of 18, but his married life was unhappy and in 1761 he separated from his wife. He had lived a poverty-stricken life until that year, when he published, anonymously and without advertisement, the Rosciad at the price of a shilling. This brilliant but merciless satire de scribed one by one the faults and eccentricities of the leading actors and actresses of the London stage, David Garrick almost alone escaping censure. It lay but a few days unnoticed in the bookshops; it was soon taken up with enthusiasm and the secret of its authorship publicly debated. It was attributed to Robert Lloyd, an amiable Welsh poet who, on Churchill's acknowledging the authorship, became his great friend. Churchill followed up the Rosciad with the Apology, in which his strictures were re peated and even Garrick was threatened. The actor sent through Lloyd an anxious and alarmed letter which flattered the poet by showing the fear which he already inspired. More, perhaps, even than his new-found power, Churchill enjoyed the wealth which his poems brought him. He paid his debts, made an allowance to his wife and started on a career of loose living and dandiacal dressing, which led, in 1763, after protests from his parishioners and his bishop, to his being forced to resign his living. He de fended in 1761 his method of life in a poem called Night, of which Smollett's Critical Review said in Dec. 1761, not un fairly, "This Night, like many others at this time of the year, is very cold, long, dark and dirty." With Sir Francis Dashwood and John Wilkes (qq.v.) he drank wine in the globe at the top of West Wycombe church, and indulged in even less seemly pranks; he may even have been one of the famous Medmenham monks.
He became, in 1762, along with Lloyd, a close ally of Wilkes and assistant editor of the North Briton throughout its career, assisting its furious political campaign by rhymed satires which were almost equally feared: The Prophecy of Famine (1763), an attack on Lord Bute and the Scots, an Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), a reply to Hogarth's attack on Temple and Pitt ; The Duellist (1763), an attack on Samuel Martin, M.P., who had attempted to kill Wilkes, and The Candidate (1764), an exposure of "Jemmy Twitcher," Lord Sandwich, Wilkes' chief enemy. His other completed works are The Ghost, The Conference, The Author (1763), The Farewell, Independence, The Times and Gotham (1764), of which the last is perhaps the best. He died of a fever on a visit to Wilkes in exile at Boulogne on Nov. 4, 1764.
Churchill was elephantine in figure : he has drawn his own pic ture in Independence:- Vast were his bones, his muscles twisted strong; His face was short, but broader than 'twas long; His features, though by nature they were large, Contentment had contrived to overcharge, And bury meaning, save that we might spy Sense lowering in the penthouse of his eye; His arms were two twin oaks ; his legs so stout That they might bear a Mansion House about ; Nor were they, look but at his body there, Designed by fate a much less weight to bear.
Churchill excelled in invective and malicious portraiture, as of Warburton, the pedantic and ambitious bishop of Gloucester:— Who was so proud, that should he meet The Twelve Apostles in the street, He'd turn his nose up at them all And shove his Saviour from the wall.
(The Duellist.) In his lifetime he was grossly overpraised and his death was lamented as a privation equal to the loss of Hogarth. Since then he has suffered an almost total eclipse. But he possesses great merits : his English is clear and vigorous, his wit and talent for invective are undoubted, and his poetic genius, of a Juvenalian character, much above the average. But it requires a great knowl edge of i8th century politics and an equally great interest to ap preciate his merits, and for that reason he is never again likely to be widely read.
See his Collected Poems, edited by W. Tooke with a biography and letters (1804) , and re-edited by J. L. Hannay (1892) , and the books cited under WILKES. (R. W. P.)