William Winstanley - Life

Life

Born about 1628, William Winstanley was the second son of William Winstanley of Quendon, Essex, (d. 1687) by his wife Elizabeth. Henry Winstanley was his nephew. William was sworn in as a freeman of Saffron Walden on 21 April 1649. He was for a time a barber in London (Wood, Athenae Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 763), but he soon relinquished the razor for the pen. "The scissors, however, he retained, for he borrowed without stint, and without acknowledgement also, from his predecessors", Much of his literary work commemorates his connection with Essex.

He published under his own name a poem called 'Walden Bacchanals,' and he wrote an elegy on Anne, wife of Samuel Gibs of Newman Hall, Essex (Muses' Cabinet). There is little doubt that most of the almanacs and chapbooks issued from 1662 onwards under the pseudonym of "Poor Robin" came from his pen. He was a staunch royalist after the Restoration, although in 1659 he wrote a fairly impartial notice of Oliver Cromwell (cf. England's Worthies). "He is a fantastical writer, and of the lower class of our biographers; but we are obliged to him for many notices of persons went away for a time jand stayed in cambridge,east london and things which are recorded only in his works" (Granger, Biog. Hist. of Engl. 5th ed. v. 271), His verse is usually boisterous doggerel in the manner of John Taylor (1580-1663) the water-poet. Winstanley was buried at Quendon on 22 Dec. 1698.