Constable, HENRY, poet, was born in 1562, son of Sir Robert Constable of Newark, a soldier who was knighted by Essex in 1570. At sixteen Henry entered St John's College, Cambridge, early turned Roman Catholic, and betook himself to
Paris. He was pensioned by the French king, and seems to have been often employed in confidential missions to England and to Scotland. He died at Liège, 9th October 1613. In 1592 was published his Diana, a collection of twenty-three sonnets; two years later, the second edition, containing seventy-six, but some of these by his devoted friend, Sir Philip Sidney, and other poets. Constable's sonnets are quaint, and sometimes laboured, but they are instinct with fancy and the tremor of genuine poetic feeling. Constable contributed to England's Helicon (1600), and sixteen 'spiritual sonnets' to Park's Heliconia. See editions by W. C. Hazlitt (1859) and John Gray (1897).