The Swan of Usk

"Here lie I, Henry Vaughan, an unprofitable servant and the worst of sinners."

Henry Vaughan, Welsh Royalist soldier, country physician, mystic, and poet, wrote his own sad epitaph convinced that his life had been a colossal failure. Although his lyrics have become classics since then, Miss Ashton is the first person to gather the unpublished material that reveals the life of this distinguished and sensitive poet.

Henry and his twin brother Tom were born in 1622 in a Welsh manor house near the River Usk. On both sides the family was aristocratic and prosperous, and the boys spent a happy childhood in the Welsh Marshes and at sixteen were sent to Oxford. The law, however, which Henry as the elder twin and heir to the estates was obliged to study, did not attract him; he devoted most of his spare time to the secret study of medicine.

When the difficulties between Charles I and Parliament came to a head, Henry and Tom left their studies to fight for the King. Miss Ashton tells of their heartbreaks and disappointments, their meetings with King Charles, their return home to poverty and hard new conditions which reduced Henry to setting up practice as a physician, without a license.

There follow marriage, children, poetry, and Henry's long years as a respected country doctor, ending with his death, unaware of the fame that was to come to him.