Savage, RICHARD, a minor English poet, who loudly claimed to be the illegitimate child of Lord Rivers and the Countess of Macclesfield—a story for which he himself was the only original authority. His alleged mother married in 1683, but lived unhappily with her husband, and separated from him in March 1685. She bore two children to Richard Savage, fourth and last Lord Rivers, during the period of separation; the one, christened Ann Savage, was born in 1695, and died in infancy; the other, whom Richard Savage afterward claimed to be, was born January 16, 1697, was baptised and registered as Richard Smith, and most probably died also at nurse. The Earl of Macclesfield raised proceedings against his wife in the Arches Court in 1697, and obtained a divorce in the House of Lords in 1698, but some extenuation seems to have been found in the husband's conduct, for the whole of the wife's fortune was restored to her. Two years later she married Colonel Henry Brett, who died in 1724, apparently before the startling story was made fully public. Meantime the disreputable claimant, having no profession, had become by necessity an author, and had assumed the name of Savage at least as early as 1717 in the title to a pamphlet on the Bangorian controversy. In the title-page and dedication to Love in a Veil (1718) he first claims the parentage openly, but in Curll's Poetical Register, or Lives of the Poets, edited by Giles Jacob (1719), the story is for the first time fully given, no doubt by his own pen. Aaron Hill befriended him, and in June 1724 published in The Plain Dealer a brief outline of his story. Further letters and allusions followed, together with significant hints of pecuniary distress, which brought subscribers for his Miscellanies (1726). A Life appeared in 1727, from the pen of Beckingham and another, and undoubtedly helped to get him off the sentence of death for murder in a tavern brawl. His insulting attacks upon Mrs
Brett now became louder and more bitter—in a 'Preface' (1728) to the Life of the year before; in his poem, The Bastard (1728). Mrs Brett herself took not the slightest notice of the claim; but her nephew, Lord Tyrconnell, seems to have laboured privately to procure Savage's pardon, and after the publication of The Bastard to have silenced him with a bribe. The Wanderer was dedicated to him in 1729, but his bounty soon ceased, and Savage was again thrown upon the world. His disreputable habits brought with them misery and hunger, and the pension of £50 which the queen allowed him in return for a birthday ode was usually dissipated in a week's debauchery. On the queen's death Pope set agoing a subscription to find him the means of living quietly at Swansea, but after about a year of impatient exile he went over to Bristol, where he wearied out the benevolence of the most long-suffering sympathising friends, was flung into gaol for debt, and there languished till he died, July 31, 1743.
Neither to his poetry nor yet to his remarkable story does Savage owe his enduring reputation, but solely to the noble and touching Apology in which Samuel Johnson immortalised his ill-fated friend (1744). He knew Savage in his own years of hunger in London, had walked round St James's Square with him all night for want of a lodging, warmed only by the resolution to stand by their country, and out of the profound pity of his heart for a dead friend's sufferings wrote what is perhaps the most perfect shorter Life in English literature. He had heard Savage's story from his own lips, and the natural strength and shrewdness of his own intelligence was betrayed by the partiality of friendship. Yet Savage had not been communicative of the facts of his early life, and he never furnished the world with the proofs he boasted in 1724 that he possessed. All Johnson's authorities were traceable to Savage himself, and the story remains imperishably enshrined in literature, although marked, as Mr Moy Thomas has proved, by 'inherent improbabilities, cautious vagueness, inconsistencies, and proved falsehoods.' But even so stout a friend as Johnson should have paused for proof of such startling and unnatural charges as that Mrs Brett kept the child out of a death-bed legacy (1712) of six thousand pounds by giving Lord Rivers a false assurance of his death, and still further that she tried to kidnap him to the American plantations, and even laboured to prevent his obtaining a pardon when lying under sentence of death.
See the five papers by W. Moy Thomas in Notes and Queries, November 6 to December 4, 1858.