Background
Churchill was born in 1731, in London, United Kingdom. His father, rector of Rainham, Essex, held the curacy and lectureship of St Johns, Westminster, from 1733.
Churchill was born in 1731, in London, United Kingdom. His father, rector of Rainham, Essex, held the curacy and lectureship of St Johns, Westminster, from 1733.
Charles was educated at Westminster School, where he became a good classical scholar, and formed a close and lasting friendship with Robert Lloyd. He was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge on 8 July 1748.
Kept from the university by an imprudent early marriage, Churchill suffered great privation in minor clerical offices until in 1761 he suddenly sprang into fame and fortune with The Rosciad. This poem is still of real interest, dealing as it does with acting in one of the greatest periods of the English stage, although partisan zeal for David Garrick's "natural" manner leads the poet to depreciate James Quin and Spranger Barry unfairly. Emboldened by success, Churchill immediately engaged his supposed critic Smollett so savagely in An Apology as to drive his opponent temporarily from the field and soon afterward expressed in his poem Night sentiments in politics and morality that accorded well with those of the libertine demagogue John Wilkes. The two became intimate and concerted an attack upon the government which culminated in Wilkes's North Briton, No. 45, published April 23, 1763, for which Wilkes had to flee to France, and in Churchill's Prophecy of Famine, a scathing satire directed against the Scots. Never fully aware of the unscrupulousness of his friend, Churchill continued to risk himself in bitter attacks upon Wilkes's enemies, and at the same time poured out a series of powerful but carelessly written personal and reflective epistles. He died suddenly of typhoid fever on November 4, 1764, at Boulogne, where he had gone to visit Wilkes.
(The Druzes and the Maronites Under the Turkish Rule from ...)
Churchill contracted a marriage within the rules of the Fleet in his eighteenth year, and never lived at Cambridge; the young couple lived in his father's house, and Churchill was afterwards sent to the north of England to prepare for holy orders. He was separated from his wife in 1761, and would have been imprisoned for debt but for the timely help of Lloyd's father, who had been an usher and was now a master at Westminster.