Suckling, SIR JOHN, poet, was born at Whitton in Middlesex, and baptised February 10, 1609. He was of good family on both sides, and his maternal uncle, Sir Lionel Cranfield, became Earl of Middlesex; his father held office as a secretary of state and comptroller of the household under James I., and was made privy-councillor by Charles I. Suckling may have been at Westminster, as Aubrey says, but certain it is that in 1623 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, five years later went on his travels abroad, and served for some time in Germany under Gustavus Adolphus. He returned about 1632, and soon became 'the darling of the court,' distinguished before all by his wit and prodigality. An inveterate gambler, he spent his days and nights at cards and bowls, his intervals divided betwixt gallantry and verse-making. In April 1635 he appeared before the Star-chamber for breaking the statute passed in the eighth year of Charles to require all land-owners to spend some time on their estates. To aid the king against the Scots he raised a troop of 100 horse, and equipped them so handsomely that it is said to have cost him about £12,000. They rode north with the king, but shared the shame of the rout before the Scots at Duns. The lampoon by Sir John Mennes has commemorated the cowardice of Suckling and his gay cavaliers, but in reality they behaved no worse than the rest of the royal army. Suckling was returned to the Long Parliament for Brander, joined in the abortive plot to rescue Strafford from the Tower, and in more desperate plots still against the liberties of the kingdom by means of French and Irish troops, and his schemes being discovered he fled for safety to the Continent. Impoverished and disgraced, it is almost certain that he poisoned himself at Paris before the close of 1642. The works of Suckling consist of four plays, Aylaura, The Goblins, Brennomoral, and The Sad One, now utterly forgotten; a prose treatise entitled An Account of Religion by Reason; a few Letters, written in an artificial style; and a series of miscellaneous poems, beginning with A Sessions of the Poets, published in 1637, which is original in style, and happily descriptive of the author's contemporaries. But the fame of Suckling rests on his songs and ballads, which at their best are inimitable for ease, gaiety, and grace. The well-known Ballad upon a Wedding is an exquisite masterpiece of sparkling gaiety and felicity of phrase; and his lyrics 'I prithee send me back my heart,' 'Why so pale and wan, fond lover?' are amongst the triumphs of English verse.
See the Rev. Alfred Suckling's Selections, with a Life (1836), reproduced by W. C. Hazlitt, with the addition of a few gross poems and portions of poems, poor beyond most of their kind (2 vols. 1874); also the Memoir prefixed to F. A. Stokes's edition (New York, 1885).