11 Facts About Ambrose Philips

Ambrose Philips was an English poet and politician.

Ambrose Philips was born in Shropshire of a Leicestershire family.

Ambrose Philips was educated at Shrewsbury School and St John's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1699.

Ambrose Philips seems to have lived chiefly at Cambridge until he resigned his fellowship in 1708, and his pastorals were probably written in this period.

Ambrose Philips worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellanies, which contained the pastorals of Alexander Pope.

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Ambrose Philips was a staunch Whig, and a friend of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison.

Ambrose Philips is said to have threatened to hit Pope with a rod he kept hung up at Button's coffee house for the purpose.

Pope lost no opportunity of mocking Ambrose Philips, who figured in the Bathos and the Dunciad, as Macer in the Characters; and in the instructions to a porter how to find Edmund Curll's authors, Ambrose Philips is a Pindaric writer in red stockings.

In 1718, Ambrose Philips started a Whig paper, The Free-Thinker, in conjunction with Hugh Boulter, then vicar of St Olave's, Southwark.

Ambrose Philips had been made justice of the peace for Westminster, and in 1717 a commissioner for the lottery, and when Boulter was made Archbishop of Armagh, Ambrose Philips accompanied him as secretary.

Ambrose Philips's works include an abridgment of Bishop John Hacket's Life of John Williams ; The Thousand and One Days: Persian Tales, from the French of F Petis de la Croix; three plays: The Distrest Mother, an adaptation of Racine's Andromaque; The Briton ; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester .