Born: 1 January 1631 or 1632, United Kingdom
Died: 22 June 1664
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Catherine Philips, Katherine Fowler, The Matchless Orinda
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Philips, Katherine (1632–64), poet, known as ‘the matchless Orinda’, was born 1 January 1632 in the parish of St Mary Woolchurch, London, daughter of John Fowler (d. 1642), prosperous cloth merchant and strong puritan, and Katherine Fowler, daughter of Dr Daniel Oxenbridge of the Royal College of Physicians. Katherine attended Mrs Salmon’s presbyterian boarding school in Hackney and was said to be precocious. After her father’s death her mother married George Henley, and then (1646) Sir Richard Phillipps (d. 1648) of Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Katherine moved with her mother to Wales and on 24 August 1648, at St Gabriel Fenchurch, London, she married Col. James Philips (c.1624–1674) of Tregibby, kinsman of her stepfather and substantial landowner. By June 1649 the couple had settled at the Priory, Cardigan, Wales, where they lived the rest of their lives, with one interlude in Dublin and frequent visits to London for parliamentary sittings, as James Philips was MP in successive parliaments between 1653 and 1662.
Though her family was puritan and she married a prominent commonwealth politician, Philips’s sympathies were royalist and in London she was a member of a group of cavalier writers and musicians. Her first published poem was in a 1651 volume, dedicated to the cavalier poet and anglican divine William Cartwright (1611–43). It was a rare public outing; in general Philips wrote only for private circulation. Her theme was friendship, of which she had an exalted idea, conceiving of it as the virtuous and Platonic unity of soul mates. Her friends were given pastoral sobriquets — she herself was ‘Orinda’ — and were addressed in delicate, complimentary verse which pleaded for harmony in the discordant times. The recipient of her most passionate verse was initially her friend Mary Aubrey (‘Rosania’), but her marriage in 1652 disappointed Philips, who adopted Anne Owen (‘Lucasia’) as her muse.
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 enabled Philips to be more open about her loyalties, and she addressed a series of poems to members of the royal family. In this she was partly motivated by a desire to help her husband, who was regarded with suspicion by the new regime. She befriended Sir Charles Cotterell, master of ceremonies, who not only supported her husband, but as ‘Poliarchus’ became her most faithful correspondent and a suitor of her friend ‘Lucasia’, who married, however, Col. Marcus Trevor, Lord Dungannon. Philips felt betrayed, but in June 1662 accompanied the newly-weds on their honeymoon to the Dungannon estates in Co. Down. Her stay was brief and unhappy and she proceeded to Dublin in order to press claim on 1,000 acres in Ulster, which her father had acquired in 1642 for £200.
In Dublin Philips spent the happiest, most successful year of her life and returned to London a famous writer. She was a member of the dynamic circle of James Butler, duke of Ormond and lord lieutenant of Ireland, to which she introduced her ideal of the ‘society of friendship’. Ormonde’s daughter Lady Mary Cavendish became ‘the bright Policrite’, Lady Anne Boyle, daughter of the earl of Cork, was ‘the adored Valeria’ and Sir Edward Dering was ‘the noble Silvaster’. On the urging of Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery and the capital’s most prominent literary figure, she began translating Corneille’s Mort de Pompée. Finished about November 1662, it was judged excellent, especially her five original songs, which she wrote for the entr’actes. Boyle determined to have it performed at the very recently inaugurated Smock Alley theatre, and personally advanced £100 towards expenses. Philips involved her friends, obtaining a prologue from Wentworth Dillon, earl of Roscommon, and an epilogue from Dering. The premiere (10 February 1663) met with great applause and marked the first in a long succession of restoration performances of French plays in English. The play was immediately printed by John Crooke, king’s printer in Ireland, who also printed the London edition. Both sold out.
Philips was in Dublin in May 1663, at the time of the failed uprising of Colonel Thomas Blood against the government, and wrote for this occasion, ‘To my lord duke of Ormonde, upon the late plot’, which typically exalts the subject’s heroic character. A month later (10 June 1663) two of her land claims were settled, largely in her favour. On 15 July she therefore left Ireland for Cardigan, where she spent a quiet and solitary nine months, greatly missing the social life of Dublin. Her reputation was now so great that in January 1664 a pirated edition of her poems appeared in London. Careful always to keep her poetry private, she was incensed and, through Cotterell, had the books withdrawn four days after they appeared. Two months later she went up to London where she again enjoyed a brilliant social life but soon succumbed to smallpox and died at her brother-in-law’s residence in Fleet St. on 22 June 1664. She was buried with her father, grandparents, and infant son in St Benet-Sherhog, Syth’s Lane, London. Her husband survived her, as did her daughter.
Cotterell published a folio edition of her works in 1667, and this secured her reputation. She was the ‘matchless Orinda’, the prototype of female poet for the next three generations, as much admired for her sensitive and refined character as for her verse. She later fell into neglect, but became the subject of much critical attention in the twentieth century.
The following is excerpted from Woman: Her Position, Influence and Achievement Throughout the Civilized World. Designed and Arranged by William C. King. Published in 1900 by The King-Richardson Co. Copyright 1903 The King-Richardson Co.
Catharine Philips, Earliest English Sentimental Writer, 1631-1664
Catharine Philips, “the matchless Orinda,” was born the daughter of a respectable Presbyterian London merchant, on January 1, 1631. A precocious child, she early became strongly royalist in feeling, and in her seventeenth year she married a worthy Welsh gentleman, James Philips of Cardigan Priory.
Her earliest poem was an address to Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, on the apearance of his Olor Isanus. About the time she seems to have assumed her melodious nom de plume of Orinda, having formed among her neighbors of either sex a society of Friendship, the members of which must needs be re-baptized – the ladies as Lucasia, Rosania, Regina, Valeria, Polycrite; the gentlemen as Palaemon, Sylvander, Antenor (her own husband), and Polirchus (Sir Charles Cotterel, her greatest friend to whom her forty-eight Letters were published in 1705).
Orinda is the earliest English sentimental writer, and she has tears at will even for the marriages of the lady members, which she resents as outrages of the sufficiency of friendship. Yet she was a worthy woman and a good wife, despite her overstrained sentimentality, to whom Jeremy Taylor dedicated his Measures and Offices of Friendship. She went to Dublin in 1662, and here Roger, Earl of Onery, and the rest gave her a flattering reception. On a visit to London she caught smallpox, and died June 22, 1964.
At Dublin she translated Corneille’s Pompey, and, in her last year, the greater part of his Horace. Her poems were surreptitiously printed at London in 1663, but an authoritative edition was issued on 1667. The matchless Orinda’s poetry has long since faded into forgetfulness, despite the chorus of contemporary praise from Cowley and every poet of note. Keats found her poems in 1817 while writing Endymion, and in a letter to Reynolds speaks of them as showing “a most delicate fancy of the Flether kind.” Her daughter, Joan, was also a talented writer of verse, according to Mr. Gosse.