This chapter focuses on the English poet and frequent member of parliament Edmund Waller (1606–87), who earned his considerable reputation for cowardice on two counts. Many commentators have blamed him for saving his own life, in ways deemed discreditable, when threatened with death after the unraveling of “Waller’s ‘Plot’” (1643), an obscure episode dating from early in the English Civil War. Many commentators have also convicted him of exhibiting a comparable level of cowardice whenever he behaved as if he had no guiding principles besides spineless vacillation or shameless self-interest. Low estimates of his worth as a man have often influenced estimates of his worth as a poet.