Whitehead, WILLIAM

Whitehead, WILLIAM, Colley Cibber's successor as poet-laureate, was born a baker's son at Cambridge in 1715. He was helped to an education at Winchester and Clare Hall, Cambridge, and was elected fellow of his college in 1742. He made the grand tour as tutor to Lord Jersey's son, and by the family influence became in 1755 secretary and registrar of the Order of the Bath, and in 1757 poet-laureate. He died April 14, 1785. He wrote tragedies, elegies, comedies, farces, epistles, and all manner of other poems long quite forgotten, and deservedly. His poems were collected in 1754, and in 1774 in two volumes—a third volume, with a memoir by W. Mason, followed in 1788.