James Howell

The son of a Welsh clergyman, he was for much of his life in the shadow of his elder brother Thomas Howell, who became Lord Bishop of Bristol.

On the eve of the English Civil War, he finally gained a secretaryship of the Privy Council, which according to one eminent critic, was "very close to the type of appointment that he had sought for 20 years".

The conflict meant that he never took up the position, and at about the same time, he wrote his first book, or "maiden Fancy", Dodona's Grove, which represented the history of England and Europe through the allegorical framework of a typology of trees.

[5][6] Howell was imprisoned in Fleet Prison in 1643, ostensibly as an insolvent debtor, although his political criticisms in Dodona's Grove may have also played a part.

[12][13] The memorial to James Howell in the Temple Church in London, for which he paid himself as mentioned in his will of 1666, was destroyed in World War II by German bombing.