As Poet Laureate to George III, Dr Thomas Warton (1728-1729) had an unusual problem. He earned his bread — and wine too, as it happens — by writing odes to order in praise of his sovereign; then, all of a sudden, his sovereign went stark, staring mad. Luckily for him he was saved from embarrassment when the usual New Year’s Day court ceremonies were cancelled in 1789 — so no ode was needed; and six months later the king appeared to be completely recovered — so Dr Warton wrote a poem for his birthday on June 4 comparing his illness to a brief summer storm and rejoicing at how “the reddening Sun regains his golden sway”. Dr Warton — sometimes called Thomas Warton the younger to distinguish him from his father who, like him, was a Professor of Poetry at Oxford — became Poet Laureate in 1785 in succession to William Whitehead (1715-1785) — who had spent much of his life as a guest of Lord Jersey at Middleton Stoney and whose main claim to fame was his send-up of the job called A Pathetic Apology for all Laureatates, past, present, and to come.

Warton was born in Basingstoke, where his father was vicar. He was something of a child prodigy, writing well-disciplined poems before he was ten. He went up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1744 and three years later (when he was still only 19) published The Pleasures of Melancholy, a blank-verse poem inspired by Milton and Spenser.

Like that later Laureate, John Betjeman, Warton had a huge interest in architecture, championing styles that in the 18th century were completely out of fashion — medieval Gothic, for example. Indeed, Nick Russell, writing in his excellent Poets by Appointment (Blandford, 1981) maintains that he was an influential forerunner of the whole Romantic movement.

In 1749, he published his Triumph of Isis in praise of Oxford and its architecture as a reply to Cambridge graduate William Mason’s poem, Isis, which had appeared in 1746 (a year after Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempted coup in Scotland) and had been none too complimentary about Oxford university and its alleged Jacobite leanings.

He was ordained in 1747 and became a Fellow of Trinity in 1751; and in 1771 he became vicar of Kiddington, not far from Woodstock, where he wrote The History and Antiquities of Kiddington.

In his day, Trinity was well-known for its idleness and dissipation, and Warton was well able to drink and carouse with the best of them — but, unlike many, he also found time to produce a lot of original work too. While still a member of the junior common room he initiated a scheme for the election of a ‘poet laureate’ whose job it was to sing the praises of some ‘lady patroness’.

All in all, I can’t help feeling that had Warton been born into the age of television he would have had the same kind of success that Betjeman achieved. In 1760, he published A Companion to the Guide and a Guide to the Companion, which was essentially a send-up of Oxford guide books; and in 1764 The Oxford Sausage appeared; it performed a like service for university poetry. But all he wrote was set in a well-informed historical context, knowledge of which was gained from his monumental work, The History of English Poetry.

Despite being Poet Laureate to the Hanoverian George III, Warton probably was a Stuart supporter at heart, as was his father who published a satire in verse about George I which did anything but glorify that German king. It was called The Turnip Hoer.

As it happens the job of Poet Laureate can trace its early roots back to Oxford even though the first poet to be given that job description officially, in 1668, was Cambridge man John Dryden (1631-1700).

This is because already in 1638 Oxford poet John Davenant had been awarded an annual Royal pension for his work, in succession to Ben Jonson who was Royal poet to James I. As for that wine (which the present Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy received earlier this year), it was written into Dryden’s contract that he receive a butt of the best Canary wine — or about 126 gallons of the stuff! — in addition to his £200 stipend. And as for Warton’s ongoing problem of having to praise a madman, it was again decided in 1790 to cancel the New Year’s Day court celebrations, and later that year Warton himself died after suffering a stroke in Trinity College senior common room.