Peter Cunningham (priest)

Following his ordination, Cunningham was appointed as curate at the Yorkshire village of Almondbury, which he left after a while to take up a tutorship which turned out badly.

He wrote an ode that was sung during celebrations in Chesterfield of the 1788 centenary of the 'Glorious Revolution'[6] and in the following year published A sermon preached at Eyam, Derbyshire, on Thursday the 23d of April, 1789, being the day appointed for a general thanksgiving for His Majesty's happy recovery.

Reduced once more to the utmost poverty, he set out to walk back to Britain across Turkish territory, until he discovered a timely gift of money left in a book of poems with which he had been presented on leaving.

His lines, though generally graceful, and not unfrequently polished to excellence, are occasionally cumbrous and sluggish from an excess of epithet…As a poet he had many beauties, checkered with a considerable proportion of defect.

[12] The latter was written in commemoration of Admiral Rodney’s victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Saintes in 1782 and published in what Cunningham described in his letter to the Reverend Thomas Wilson (1788) as ‘an incorrect and mutilated edition’.

[14] The poem describes the great mansion and surrounding landscape, linking the history of its Cavendish owners with the patriotic themes of martial honour and freedom.

A further political forecast was written in 1785 (but not published until two years later): The Russian prophecy, a poem occasioned by a remarkable phenomenon in the heavens, observed in Russia, February 19, 1785.

[15] The title page bears the inscription ‘Sacred to the glory and imperial virtues of Catharine the Great, Empress of all the Russias’, and the author arranged for several copies to be sent by the Russian ambassador to St Petersburg.

[17] Fox had withdrawn from Parliament at the time and party opponents had made his place of retirement their butt in such satires as “Imitation of Bion written at St Anne’s Hill”[18] and “The Shade of Alexander Pope on the banks of the Thames” (1799).