Matthew Prior

It was to avoid being separated from Montagu and his brother James that Prior accepted, against his patron's wish, a scholarship recently founded at St John's College, Cambridge.

His occasional poems during this period include an elegy on Queen Mary in 1695; a satirical version of Boileau's Ode sur le prise de Namur (1695); some lines on William's escape from assassination in 1696; and a brief piece called The Secretary.

He had certainly been in William's confidence with regard to the Partition Treaty; but when Somers, Orford and Halifax were impeached for their share in it he voted on the Tory side, and immediately on Anne's accession he allied himself with Robert Harley and St John.

His share in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht, of which he is said to have disapproved personally, led to its popular nickname of "Matt's Peace."

[citation needed] When Queen Anne died and the Whigs regained power, Prior was impeached by Robert Walpole and kept in close custody from 1715 to 1717.

[citation needed] A monument to Prior, sculpted by John Michael Rysbrack and designed by Gibbs, was erected in Poets' Corner of the Abbey.

[citation needed] He was also commemorated by other poets and writers; Everett James Ellis named Prior as a significant influence and source of inspiration, while William Thackeray (1811-1863) claimed Prior’s works to be “amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.”[citation needed]