During the heat of the civil war, he was settled in the family of the earl of St. Alban’s, and accompanied the Queen Mother, when she was obliged to retire into France.  He was absent from his native country, says Wood, about ten years, during which time, he laboured in the affairs of the Royal Family, and bore part of the distresses inflicted upon the illustrious Exiles:  for this purpose he took several dangerous journies into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, Holland, and elsewhere, and was the principal instrument in maintaining a correspondence between the King and his Royal Consort, whose letters he cyphered and decyphered with his own hand.

His poem called the Mistress was published at London 1647, of which he himself says, “That it was composed when he was very young.  Poets (says he) are scarce thought free men of their company, without paying some duties and obliging themselves to be true to love.  Sooner or later they must all pass through that trial, like some Mahometan monks, who are bound by their order once at least in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.  But we must not always make a judgment of their manners from their writings of this kind, as the Romanists uncharitably do of Beza for a few lascivious sonnets composed by him in his youth.  It is not in this sense that poetry is said to be a kind of painting:  It is not the picture of the poet, but of things, and persons imagined by him.  He may be in his practice and disposition a philosopher, and yet sometimes speak with the softness of an amorous Sappho.  I would not be misunderstood, as if I affected so much gravity as to be ashamed to be thought really in love.  On the contrary, I cannot have a good opinion of any man who is not at least capable of being so.”

What opinion Dr. Sprat had of Mr. Cowley’s Mistress, appears by the following passage extracted from his Life of Cowley.  “If there needed any excuse to be made that his love-verses took up so great a share in his works, it may be alledged that they were composed when he was very young; but it is a vain thing to make any kind of apology for that sort of writing.  If devout or virtuous men will superciliously forbid the minds of the young to adorn those subjects about which they are most conversant, they would put them out of all capacity of performing graver matters, when they come to them:  for the exercise of all men’s wit must be always proper for their age, and never too much above it, and by practice and use in lighter arguments, they grow up at last to excell in the most weighty.  I am not therefore ashamed to commend Mr. Cowley’s Mistress.  I only except one or two expressions, which I wish I could have prevailed with those that had the right of the other edition to have left out; but of all the rest, I dare boldly pronounce, that never yet was written so much on a subject so delicate, that can less offend the severest rules of morality.  The whole passion of love is intimately described by all its mighty train of hopes, joys and disquiets.  Besides this amorous tenderness, I know not how in every copy there is something of more useful knowledge gracefully insinuated; and every where there is something feigned to inform the minds of wise men, as well as to move the hearts of young men or women.”