Leonard Welsted

Who was Leonard Welsted?

Leonard Welsted was an English poet and "dunce" in Alexander Pope's writings. Welsted was an accomplished writer who composed in a relaxed, light hearted vein. He was associated with Whig party political figures in his later years, but he was tory earlier, and, in the age of patronage, this seems to have been more out of financial need than anything else.

He was the son of a Church of England priest and was orphaned at six. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge but left without a degree. He married Frances Purcell, the orphaned daughter of Henry Purcell, around 1707, and the couple had a daughter, also named Frances. However, the mother died in 1712, and Welsted married Anna Maria Walker, the sister of an admiral, that year. In his poetry, he referred to her as Zelinda. Frances Welsted, the daughter, died in 1726, seventeen years old, and Welsted mourned her loss in Hymn to the Creator the next year.

He wrote many poems in an attempt to get a position from patronage. He wrote two odes to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough in 1709 as well as an elegy to John Philips the poet. Nothing was forthcoming, however. In 1712, with the tories in power, he began to court the opposition whigs with laudatory verse. He also translated On the Sublime, although Jonathan Swift argued that he had translated Boileau's translation, and not Longinus's original. In 1714, Welsted attacked Robert Harley, the fallen head of the Tory party, with The Prophecy. Harley replied, and Harley's friends in the Scriblerus Club were thereafter Welsted's enemies.