A popular label for many poets in seventeenth-century Britain has been "Cavalier," and the person who usually comes first to mind is Sir John Suckling. The classification implies an allegiance to Charles I in his political and military battles against various Parliamentarian or religious groups during the later 1620s through his execution on 30 January 1649. Included thus are the poets Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Suckling, and Edmund Waller. "Cavalier" also implies that these poets were of a gentlemanly social class, that they bore arms and indeed rode horses in battle when the civil wars raged from 1641 to 1648 (cavalier derives from the French word for horse, cheval), and that they were carefree gallants. Suckling, at least, was of the aristocratic class and often a part of the courtly world of the précieuse life ushered in by Charles's queen, Henrietta Maria, and her French retinue; he was a soldier...