Robert Herrick was born in London and may have attended the Westminster School. At age 16, he was apprenticed to his uncle, a goldsmith, but he terminated the apprenticeship after six years and went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he received a master’s degree. He greatly admired Ben Jonson and became part of the group known as the “Tribe of Ben.” Herrick never married; many of the women he addresses in the poem in his volume Hesperides may have been fictional.