(Lucius), Lord viscount Falkland, was born in Oxfordshire, about the year 1610; a young nobleman of great abilities and accomplishments. About the time of his father's death in 1633, he was made gentleman of the privy chamber to king Charles I. and afterwards secretary of state. Before the assembling of the long parliament, he had devoted himself to literature, and every pleasure which a fine genius, a generous disposition, and an opulent fortune, could afford: when called into public life, he stood foremost in all attacks on the high prerogatives of the crown; but when civil convulsions came to an extremity, and it was necessary to choose a side, he tempered his zeal, and defended the limited powers that remained to monarchy. Still anxious however for his country, he seems to have dreaded equally the prosperity of the royal party, or that of the parliament; and among his intimate friends, often sadly reiterated the word peace. This excellent nobleman freely exposed his person for the king in all hazardous enterprises, and was killed in the 34th year of his age at the battle of Newberry. In Welwood's memoirs we are told, that whilst he was with the king at Oxford, his majesty went one day to see the public library, where he was shown among other books a Virgil, nobly printed, and exquisitely bound. The lord Falkland, to divert the king, would have his majesty make a trial of his fortune by the Sortes Virgilianae, an usual kind of divination in ages past, made by opening a Virgil. The king opening the book, the passage which happened to come up, was that part of Dido's imprecation against Æneas, iv. 615, &c. which is thus translated by Dryden.
"Opprest'd with numbers in th' unequal field, "His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd; "Lest him for succour sue from place to place, "Torn from his subjects and his son's embrace," &c.
King Charles seeming concerned at this accident, the lord Falkland, who observed it, would likewise try his own fortune in the same manner; hoping he might fall upon some passage that could have no relation to his case, and thereby divert the king's thoughts from any impression the other might make upon him: but the place lord Falkland stumbled upon was yet more suited to his destiny than the other had been to the king's; being the following expressions of Evander, upon the untimely death of his son Pallas, Æn. xi. 152.
"O Pallas! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word. "To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword, "I warn'd thee, but in vain: for well I knew "What perils youthful ardour would pursue; "That boiling blood would carry thee too far; "Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war. "O curst essay of arms, disfavour doom, "Prelude of bloody fields and fights to come!"
He wrote several things, both poetical and political; and in some of the king's declarations, supposed to be penned by lord Falkland, we find the first regular definition of the English constitution that occurs in any composition published by authority. His predecessor, the first viscount Cary, was ennobled for being the first who gave king James an account of queen Elizabeth's death.
(Robert), a learned English chronologer, born in Devonshire about the year 1615. On the restoration, he was preferred to the archdeaconry of Exeter; but on some pretext was ejected in 1664, and spent the rest of his days at his rectory of Portlemouth, where he died in 1688. He published Paleologia Chronica, a chronology of ancient times, in three parts, didactic, apodeictical, and canonical; and translated the hymns of the church into Latin verse.