This edition of some 500 recently discovered poems by Mildmay Fane, 2nd Earl of Westmorland represents the largest collection of "new" 17th-century poetry since Traherne's poems were published almost a century ago. Until the rediscovery of these manuscripts, written between 1625 and 1665, Fane was known only as a patron of Robert Herrick, and as the author of a slim volume of poems, Otia Sacra (1648). This important body of manuscript poetry establishes him as a significant early modern poet. From his privileged position near the very centre of the conflict, he confronted one of the most climactic and influential sequences of events in European history: the Personal Rule of Charles I, the Great Rebellion of the 1640s, the execution of the King, the establishment of a republic, and, with its failure, the restoration of the monarchy.