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English diplomat and poet

Matthew Prior (21 July 1664 – 18 September 1721) was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner.

Prior was born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, where he lived with his father George, a Nonconformist joiner. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster. One of his schoolfellows and friends at Westminster was Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax. It was to avoid being separated from Montagu and his brother James that Prior accepted, against his patron's wish, a scholarship recently founded at St John's College, Cambridge. He took his B. A. degree in 1686, and two years later became a fellow. In collaboration with Montagu, he wrote in 1687 the City Mouse and Country Mouse, in ridicule of John Dryden's The Hind and the Panther.

During an age when satirists could be sure of patronage and promotion, Montagu was promoted at once, and Prior, three years later, became secretary to the embassy at the Hague. After four years, he was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber at court. Apparently, he acted as one of the King's secretaries, and in 1697 he was secretary to the plenipotentiaries who concluded the Peace of Ryswick. Prior's talent for affairs was doubted by Alexander Pope, who admittedly had little experience in diplomatic affairs, but it is not likely that King William would have employed in this important business a man who had not given proof of diplomatic skill and grasp of details. The poet's knowledge of French was recognised by his being sent in the following year to Paris in attendance on the English ambassador. At this period Prior could say with good reason that "he had commonly business enough upon his hands, and was only a poet by accident." To verse, however, which had laid the foundation of his fortunes, he still occasionally trusted as a means of maintaining his position. His occasional poems during this period include an elegy on Queen Mary in 1695; a satirical version of Boileau's Ode sur le prise de Namur (1695); some lines on William's escape from assassination in 1696; and a brief piece called The Secretary. After his return from France, Prior became under secretary of state and succeeded John Locke as a commissioner of trade. In 1701 he sat in Parliament for East Grinstead. He had certainly been in William's confidence with regard to the Partition Treaty; but when Somers, Orford and Halifax were impeached for their share in it he voted on the Tory side, and immediately on Anne's accession he allied himself with Robert Harley and St John. Perhaps as a consequence of this; there is no mention of his name in connection with any public transaction for nine years. But when the Tories came into power in 1710, Prior's diplomatic abilities were again called into action, and until the death of Anne he held a prominent place in all negotiations with the French court, sometimes as secret agent, sometimes in an equivocal position as ambassador's companion and sometimes as fully accredited but very unpunctually paid ambassador. His share in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht, of which he is said to have disapproved personally, led to its popular nickname of "Matt's Peace." Prior is also known as a contributor to The Examiner newspaper.

When Queen Anne died and the Whigs regained power, Prior was impeached by Robert Walpole and kept in close custody from 1715 to 1717. By this time he had already published a collection of verse, written in 1709. During his imprisonment, he wrote his longest humorous poem, Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind. It was published by subscription in 1718, along with Poems on Several Occasions. The sum received for this volume (4000 guineas), with a present of £4000 from Lord Harley, enabled him to live in some comfort.

Prior died in 1721 at Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. A monument to Prior, sculpted by John Michael Rysbrack and designed by Gibbs, was erected in Poets' Corner of the Abbey. A biography called The History of His Own Time was issued by John Bancks in 1740. The book claimed to be derived from Prior's papers, although some scholars doubt its authenticity. Prior is commemorated by a plaque at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, where he is said to have written Henry and Emma. He was also commemorated by other poets and writers; Everett James Ellis named Prior as a significant influence and source of inspiration, while William Thackeray (1811 1863) claimed Prior’s works to be “amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.”