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Lost Years

IT IS HARD to pin down Spenser’s exact movements in the years immediately before and after he left Cambridge. This is certainly the case before April 1578 when John Young became bishop of Rochester and Spenser became his secretary. It used to be thought that Spenser must have travelled north, probably to Lancashire, where he fell in love with Rosalind, a country lass who bewitched him before leaving him for another man. The only evidence we have that he did travel north is E. K.’s gloss to line 18 of the June eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, a passage which does require some further analysis, as E. K.’s notes encourage the reader to see the poem in terms of Spenser’s life. The eclogue consists of a dialogue between Colin and Hobbinol, figures we know invariably stand for Spenser and Gabriel Harvey. Hobbinol is content where they are, but Colin is eager to move away:

COLIN

O happy Hobbinoll, I blesse thy state,
That Paradise hast found, whych Adam lost.
Here wander may thy flock early or late,
Withouten dreade of Wolues to bene ytost:
Thy louely layes here mayst thou freely boste.
But I vnhappy man, whom cruell fate,
And angry Gods pursue from coste to coste,
Can nowhere fynd, to shroude my lucklesse pate.

HOBBINOLL

Then if by me thou list aduised be,
Forsake the soyle, that so doth thee bewitch:
Leave me those hilles, where harbrough [refuge] nis to see,
Nor holybush, nor brere, nor winding witche [witch elm]:
And to the dales resort, where shepheardes ritch,
And fruictifull flocks bene euery where to see.
Here no night Rauens lodge more black than pitche,
Nor eluish ghosts, nor gastly owles doe flee.¹

We learn that Colin’s restlessness has been caused by his troubled suit for Rosalind, who has betrayed him for Menalcas, misleading her into inappropriately flighty behaviour, so that ‘she the truest shepheardes hart made bleede’ (line 111).

E. K.’s notes to the poem explicitly direct the reader towards a biographical reading of the eclogue. Commenting on the words, ‘Forsake the soyle’ (line 18), E. K. asserts that ‘This is no poetical fiction, but vnfeynedly spoken of the Poete selfe, who for speciall occasion of priuate affayres (as I haue bene partly of himselfe informed) and for his more preferment remouing out of the Northparts came into the South, as Hobbinol indeede aduised him priuately.’² In the note to ‘The Dales’ (line 21), E. K. is more specific still, referring to them as ‘The Southpartes, where he nowe abydeth, which thoughe they be full of hylles and woodes (for Kent is very hylle and woodye; and therefore so called: for Kantish in the Saxons tongue signifeth woodie) yet in respecte of the Northpartes they be called dales. For indeede the North is counted the higher countrye.’³

That the June eclogue encourages us to relate its story to Spenser’s life is clear enough; exactly how we are to do this is not.⁴ What can be taken as a direct allusion to the poet’s life and what is a literary fiction needs to be unravelled by the reader, who is in part directed by ‘E. K.’, in part misled, making the poem an intricate series of riddles and overlapping mysteries. Indeed, the decoding process is one of the key features of this ambitious work.⁵ The long dedicatory epistle ‘To the most excellent and learned both Orator and Poete, Mayster Gabriell Haruey, his verie special and singular good friend E. K. commendeth the good lyking of this his labour, and the patronage of the new Poete’, does not seem to have prevented E. K. from failing to realize that Hobbinol is Harvey until relatively late in the sequence. In a note to line 176 of the September eclogue, in which Hobbinol names Colin Clout as Roffyn’s boy, E. K. comments:

Nowe I thinke no man doubteth but by Colin is ever meante the Authore selfe, whose especiall good friend Hobbinall sayth he is, or more rightly Master Gabriel Harvey: of whose speciall commendation, aswell in Poetry as Rhetoricke and other choyce learning, we have lately had a sufficient tryall in diverse of his workes, but specially in his Musarum Lachrymae, and his later Gratulationum Valdinensium which boke in the progresse at Audley in Essex, he dedicated in writing to her Majestie. Afterward presenting the same in print vnto her Highnesse at the worshipfull Maister Capells in Hertfordshire. Beside other his sundrye most rare and very notable writings, partely vnder vnknown Tytles, and partly vnder counterfayt names, as hys Tyrannomastix, his Ode Natalia, his Rameidos, and especially that parte of Philomusus, his diuine Anticosmpolita, and diuers other of lyke importance. As also by the names of other shepheardes, he couereth the persons of diuers other his familiar freendes and best acquayntaunce.⁶

This comment surely cannot be serious and meant to be taken at face value. The wealth of detail indicates that the author of the note cannot be who he says he is. If he knows this much about Harvey then how could he possibly only have realized at this late stage that Hobbinol was Harvey? And why the sense of discovery in the notes, as if E. K. was reading them for the first time, especially as the detail that Colin is now Roffyn’s boy (Spenser working for the bishop of Rochester) has already been revealed in the June eclogue? Here, the purpose is to provide a list of Harvey’s poetic achievements, a rhetorical ploy whose surface innocence draws attention to the elaborate joke, as well as reiterating the game that the reader has to play when reading the eclogues in the last sentence.⁷ While reading Spenser’s works, especially when searching for details that reveal deliberately placed information about his life, we must be aware of the need to pay careful attention to the apparatus and form of the work, and to cross-reference sections, ensuring that the work has to be read in whole rather than parts.⁸

Therefore, June can be read, like January, as an exploration of Virgil’s first eclogue, the second eclogue qualifying our understanding of the first and showing that the sequence evolves and changes as it develops.⁹ In Virgil, the old man, Tityrus, is envied by the young shepherd, Meliboeus, because he has to leave the pastoral idyll and ‘be dispersed— | To Scythia, bone-dry Africa, the chalky spate of the Oxus, | Even to Britain—that place cut off at the very world’s end.’¹⁰ This literary context is crucial to a decoding of the biographical information combined in the text and notes of the Calender. The June eclogue witnesses Hobbinol/Harvey staying put and Spenser/Colin leaving for the south. The most plausible explanation is that this tells us that Colin eventually had to move away from the Cambridge area, where Harvey spent his whole academic life, in part because he had found a new job, in part because of his personal life, something that is corroborated elsewhere in his published work but which is not quite what it seems to be.¹¹ The stubborn detail that does not fit this explanation is the note from E. K. which appears to indicate that Spenser and Harvey were living in the north of England. But surely this is another joke, suggesting that, for a Londoner like Spenser, Cambridge, and the counties immediately north of the capital, did indeed seem like the north. The lack of hills and rugged country in East Anglia, the flattest area of England, would then be part of a related personal joke, or simply a warning to the reader that not everything can be taken as read. Yet again, ‘Northparts’ may be a reference to Spenser visiting family in Northamptonshire. Harvey was certainly keen to refer to the queen’s quip that he looked Italian, and perhaps E. K./Spenser/Harvey are playing with the idea of his being rooted far from his own intellectual home in southern Europe.¹² There may be further humour in the representation of Harvey as a man besotted with and rooted in the country, given his eagerness to be perceived as a modern man sweeping away stale and outdated traditions.¹³ Moreover, the etymology that E. K. produces for Kent meaning ‘woody’ is wrong, which indicates a further deliberate confusion of identities and places. William Lambarde (1536–1601), the great expert on Kent and someone Spenser possibly encountered in this period, traces the root of the county’s name, via Julius Caesar, as British not Saxon.¹⁴

There is no evidence that Harvey and Spenser ever made a journey to the north of England, something that would have been unusual and eccentric unless it had a specific purpose.¹⁵ What the Calender does suggest is that leaving the Cambridge area at some point in the later 1570s was a significant wrench for Spenser, one he was eager to highlight in the January and June eclogues, casting himself as the exiled, dispossessed, and unhappy shepherd, rejected in love and, like Virgil’s Meliboeus, afraid that he will end up cut off from all the world. There is, of course, deliberate and self-parodic exaggeration in these inflated claims—especially given what looks like Harvey’s deserved reputation, noted by Nashe and others as well as providing a mainspring of the plot in Pedantius, for making ridiculous advances to women.¹⁶ But they also contain an important grain of truth in letting the reader know how painful it was for Spenser to leave the company and influence of Harvey. In the January eclogue Colin represents his new-found love for Rosalind as a definitive break with his mentor, one that the slightly older man fails to accept:

It is not Hobbinol, wherefore I plaine,
Albee my love he seeke with dayly suit:
His clowinish gifts and curtsies I disdaine,
His kiddes [toys?], his cracknelles [light biscuits], and his early fruit.
Ah foolish Hobbinol, thy gifts bene vayne:
Colin them gives to Rosalind againe.

I loue thilke lasse, (alas why doe I loue?)
And am forlorne, (alas why am I lorne?)
Shee deignes not my good will, but doth reproue,
And of my rurall musick holdeth scorne.
Shepheardes deuise she hateth as the snake,
And laughes the songes, that Colin Clout doth make. (‘Januarye’, lines 55–66)

The poem represents Colin/Spenser’s exile as a puberty rite. Colin has traded the security of male–male relationships for the insecurity of life in the marriage market.¹⁷ He finds himself bitten by a female snake, perhaps a reversal of the gender roles and phallic norms that he expected; Hobbinol/Harvey, immediately deflated from his exalted role as patron in E. K.’s dedicatory epistle, is left bereft as Colin rejects his suit and, as he admits, cynically uses Hobbinol’s gifts to court Rosalind.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a richly comic episode, especially if we remember that Spenser was at least 26 when the Calender was published, a rather advanced age to be experiencing the rites of passage into the adult world. But it was also the age at which most men got married and the eclogue charts, in a manner that is more humorous than has often been realized, Spenser’s entry into the adult world and the state of matrimony.¹⁸ What the eclogue also deliberately reveals is how close Spenser was to Harvey in the period before his marriage (1574–9), a time of his life about which we know virtually nothing.

It is likely that Spenser spent much of those years employed in a variety of tasks for different patrons—probably introduced to him by Harvey—and working away on the Calender, an astonishingly erudite and sophisticated poem which must have taken years to research and write given the range of its references and the number of poetic traditions that the poet has read, absorbed, and imitated. Such a work, clearly designed to transform the nature and culture of English verse, would have taken a long time to plan. Furthermore, 26 was also a relatively advanced age to produce a first work, however major: indeed, it is a sign of Spenser’s immense confidence and ambition that he started his literary career in earnest with such a groundbreaking literary achievement. The generation of English poets writing immediately before Spenser usually started writing younger and certainly did not venture into print with a first work anything like as ambitious as the Calender. Barnabe Googe (1540–94) produced a translation of Marcello Palingenius Stellato’s Zodiac of Life at the age of 21 in 1561 and his Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets two years later, each important sources for the Calender.¹⁹ George Turbervile (1540?–1610?) produced three works in 1567 when he was about 23 or 24: Heroycall Epistles, a translation of Ovid’s Heroides; a translation of Mantuan’s Eglogs; and, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, a collection that owed much to Googe’s pioneering work. This last book, like Googe’s collection, was a direct source for the Calender, as was the translation of Mantuan.²⁰ Nicholas Breton (1554/5–c.1626) published his miscellany, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers (1575), when he was 21.²¹ Poets who had pursued military careers, such as Thomas Churchyard and George Gascoigne (1540–77), often started to publish, if not to write, a bit later and it is possible that Gascoigne’s publication of his major collection of diverse works, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, in 1573 was an inspiration to Spenser, showing him what sorts of writing could be achieved by an English writer, and what a diverse range of poetic forms could be included in a volume. Certainly he is praised by E. K. in the Calender as a precursor to its author, although there is a clear attempt to indicate the superiority of the later writer. In a note to the November eclogue on the fate of Philomela, who was transformed into a nightingale after she had been raped and had her tongue cut out by Tereus, E. K. refers the reader to Gascoigne’s Complaint of Phylomene, included in his later collection, The Steele Glass (1576), commenting that

[The Nightingale’s] complaintes be very well set forth of Ma. George Gaskin a wittie gentleman, and the very chefe of our late rymers, who and if some partes of learning wanted not (albee it is well knowen he altogyther wanted not learning) no doubt would haue attained to the excellencye of those famous Poets. For gifts of wit and naturall promptnesse appeare in hym aboundantly.²²

Gascoigne is an important poet, but Spenser is far better, superseding Gascoigne’s native wit and learning, and transforming what the earlier poet had written into much more authoritative and significant verse.

The point is that Spenser’s early career appears to have been carefully planned, a further indication that, as the Calender clearly states, especially when read in terms of the Harvey–Spenser Letters, Spenser worked closely with Harvey in the years after his graduation. Their separation when Spenser became secretary to John Young and got married in the year immediately before the publication of the Calender (1578–9), signalled an irrevocable break for both men. Harvey, as his Letter-Book demonstrates, appears to have changed various letters that were written to Spenser, probably planned as public letters in the manner of their published correspondence, readdressing them to John Wood, Sir Thomas Smith’s nephew.²³ However, Harvey failed to establish a friendship that compensated for the loss of that with Spenser—at least, in terms of its public impact—and he drifted out of academic life in the early 1590s and by 1593, after his quarrel with Thomas Nashe, permanently retired to Saffron Walden.²⁴ Spenser still wrote poems with Harvey in mind, both as Hobbinol (although we need to be careful in assuming that the two can always be straightforwardly equated) and directly addressed to him, notably the Spenserian sonnet, ‘To the right worshipfull, my singular good frend, M. Gabriell Harvey, Doctor of the Lawes’, which was dated from Dublin, 18 July 1586, and published as a commendatory sonnet at the end of Harvey’s Fovre Letters and certaine Sonnets (1592).²⁵ It is also likely that Spenser visited Harvey in his extended trips back to England in 1589–90 and 1596. But they were clearly never as close again, even though they would surely have corresponded frequently, and both men were acutely aware that Spenser moving to Kent signalled the end of an era.

Immediately after leaving Cambridge, Spenser probably spent a great deal of time with Harvey, as the close friendship advertised in the Letters suggests.²⁶ As these were published in 1580, it is clear that Harvey and Spenser were close throughout the 1570s. It is most likely that, at least intermittently, Spenser lived with Harvey in Saffron Walden, where the family owned a number of houses, as well as some in the nearby village, Wimbush. John Harvey, Gabriel’s father, had risen to prominence in the town as a prosperous rope-maker and became the treasurer of the council.²⁷ The most likely location is a substantial town house in what is now Market Street, which later became a pub, the Bell, although Harvey could have lived in another house in Gold (formerly Gowle) Street (Plate 6).²⁸ Sir Thomas Smith’s house in the town was only two doors away on the main square. The Harvey house was demolished in the nineteenth century to make way for a cattle market, before a building belonging to Saffron Walden Building Society was erected on the site. There is a splendid fireplace with a mantelpiece displaying the art of rope-making, which was removed from this property and which is now in the town museum (Plate 7). This impressive piece of furniture could have been commissioned by Harvey for his father during his lifetime, or after his death as a memorial. John Harvey’s trade was celebrated by his son, in part to emphasize his own social progress through education, as well as his father’s success, although his pride was cruelly mocked by Thomas Nashe.²⁹ The intricate designs on the chimney-piece make ‘a moral statement about the value of labour and effort’ rather than celebrating the family’s name and genealogy.³⁰ The style of the artefact is clearly based on the fashionable emblems of Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), whose work had a major impact on English emblem books in the second half of the sixteenth century and influenced Spenser’s emblematic style of poetry in the Complaints and the Amoretti.³¹ The pictures derive from his work; the mottoes are variations on ‘Sic Vos Non Vobis’ (‘Thus do you (but) not for yourselves’), ‘an anaphoric verse attributed to Virgil … well known to sixteenth-century Continental and English impressa writers’, further increasing the likelihood that Harvey commissioned the fireplace, as he was probably recalling what he had learned at Saffron Walden Grammar School.³² The fireplace provides circumstantial evidence that this was the house that the family valued most, so would have been where Harvey probably lived and where he would have kept his large library. The family also owned a house in Hill Street—mentioned in a chancery case of 1608—just off the town square, which, with the house in Gold Street, may have been part of the same complex of buildings (a carved beam displays the initials of John and Alice Harvey over the doorway).³³ Somewhere the family would have owned buildings to contain a ‘rope-walk,’ which had to be 1,000–1,400 feet long, providing workers with the necessary space to wind and twist hemp bundles into a strong rope.³⁴ No trace of this has survived.

Spenser would undoubtedly also have known a number of Harvey’s friends, including Arthur Capel of Hadham Hall, Hertfordshire, to whom Harvey loaned books and who is mentioned in the Calender, and, more importantly, George Gascoigne, where the recollection of him as ‘a wittie gentleman, and the very chefe of our late rymers’, suggests familiarity with his conversation as well as his writing.³⁵ Most significantly still, Spenser would have met Sir Thomas Smith, whose house in Saffron Walden he would have visited, perhaps a number of times in the 1570s before Smith’s death in 1577 (Spenser probably attended the funeral with Harvey).³⁶ Hill Hall was the most important example of a purpose-built French-humanist house in Elizabethan England. Smith transformed the medieval building into a Renaissance palace in a series of stages, the most important of which was probably after his return from France in 1567, where he had been Elizabeth’s ambassador. Smith was clearly influenced by his stay at a number of French chateaux, as he followed the court of Charles IX around the country, able to pursue his intellectual and cultural interests because there was little for him to do after the Treaty of Troyes (April 1564) had reconfirmed the standing agreement that both England and France had rights to Calais.³⁷ There are significant echoes of the architectural designs of the Chateau of Bournazal and the Hôtel d’Assézat in Toulouse, where Smith, whose library contained six editions of the works of the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius, spent a long time recovering from a serious illness, as well as of Fontainbleau.³⁸ He also appears to have been influenced by the Castle of Écouen in Paris, built for Anne de Montmorency and his wife Madeleine de Savoie (1538–50), which was notable for its spectacular series of wall paintings and tapestries, as well as containing a series of windows depicting the story of Cupid and Psyche. The palace was a favourite haunt of Charles IX, and the court stayed there while Smith was part of the entourage.³⁹

Smith was keen to recreate the neoclassical Renaissance splendour of the French court in Essex, establishing his home as a centre for culture and learning. Accordingly, he covered every possible space of Hill Hall with a series of magnificent wall paintings and tapestries, as well as commissioning an expensive collection of stained glass and floor tiles, all designed to narrate a series of important moral stories which would influence the considerable number of people who viewed them.⁴⁰ These ambitious sequences were unique in England in the 1560s and 1570s, and would have had a considerable impact on Spenser, the most visual of all Elizabethan poets, who had no opportunity to see any Renaissance art outside the British Isles (although he would undoubtedly later see the wall paintings representing the story of Jeroboam from 1 Kings 13 which appeared at the Drydens’ home at Canons Ashby in the 1580s or 1590s, which closely resemble those of Hezekiah at Hill Hall).⁴¹ Smith had a series of wall paintings and painted glass panels erected in 1568–9, with allegorical Protestant scenes.⁴² The paintings preserved represent a variety of allegorical themes; one sequence tells the well-known story of Cupid and Psyche (Plate 8), who overcame the jealousy of Cupid’s mother, Venus, to marry, a common theme in Renaissance literature and a work that demonstrated Smith’s interest in Neoplatonism; another narrates the story of King Hezekiah, the religious reformer who helped unite the Israelites and who resisted the Assyrian tyrant King Sennacherib (2 Kings 18–19); as well as a figure of Magnanimity, part of a lost longer sequence on the cardinal virtues.⁴³ The stained glass has an image of superbia or pride, part of a sequence of the seven deadly sins.⁴⁴ The Faerie Queene, which also tells the story of Cupid and Psyche (III.vi.50–2), who produce a daughter, Pleasure, has a number of key moments which rely on the impact of carefully coded lavish visual material, often representing astonished figures who enter grand halls covered with a variety of pictures: the House of Pride (I.iv), Acrasia’s Bower (II.xii), the Garden of Adonis (III.vi), and the Castle of Busirane (III.xi–xii) being only the most obvious examples.⁴⁵ Furthermore, the poem includes a masque of the seven deadly sins, who are paraded in the House of Pride (I.iv.20–36).⁴⁶ These are largely passages from sections of the poem that Spenser was probably working on relatively early in the poem’s history, and may well have been influenced by what Spenser saw at Hill Hall, which would probably have been the most spectacular visual encounter of his early life.⁴⁷ Few poets have been as interested in tapestries as Spenser, whose visual imagination was undoubtedly also stimulated by his time at Leicester House in the same decade, as Leicester had an outstanding collection of pictures and wall hangings.⁴⁸ Moreover, if, as has been suggested, Lucas de Heere was the artist who painted the Hezekiah and Cupid and Psyche sequences, it is possible that there is a direct link to Spenser’s work, as de Heere almost certainly produced the woodcuts for van der Noot’s Theatre.⁴⁹

What Spenser actually did after leaving Cambridge is as hard to determine as his movements and locations. We know that he was in Leicester House in 1579, but there is some circumstantial evidence that Spenser worked for Leicester rather earlier than has generally been assumed, information which may well change how we conceive his problematic relationship with Elizabeth’s favourite. Spenser was friendly with Robert Salter, chaplain to Edmund Sheffield, third Baron Sheffield and first earl of Musgrave (1565–1646). Salter comments in a printed marginal note in his eccentric study of the Book of Daniel, Wonderfull Prophecies (1627): ‘Mr Edmund Spenser. The great contentment I sometimes enioyed by his Sweete society, suffreth not this to passe me, without Respectiue mention of so trew a friend.’⁵⁰ We do not know when or for how long this friendship lasted, and it is likely, as the book was published nearly thirty years after Spenser’s death, to have been rather later than the 1570s unless Salter was in his seventies or eighties, a considerable age in this period.⁵¹ But Salter’s comments do, nevertheless, provide us with a link between Spenser and the Sheffield family.

Sheffield’s mother, Douglas, née Howard (1542/3–1608), had been abandoned by Leicester after they had an affair in the late 1560s and early 1570s, as the anonymous Catholic libel Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) detailed with considerable glee.⁵² The story was then repeated in Thomas Roger’s poem, Leicester’s Ghost (c.1604).⁵³ As late as the mid-eighteenth century an expanded version of the story appeared in Arthur Collins’s study of noble families. Collins, repeating a commonly understood version of the story, stated that Douglas was debauched by Leicester, who then planned to poison her husband. Unfortunately for him, the letter in which he stated his plan fell into the hands of her sister, who, understandably enough, passed it on to Lord Sheffield, who then threatened to do the same to the adulterous couple.⁵⁴ It is also possible that what was seen to have been a seduction was the basis for the plot of George Gascoigne’s prose fiction, The Adventures of Master, F. J. (1573).⁵⁵ Lady Sheffield later claimed under oath that she had married Leicester secretly at some point between 11 November and 25 December 1573, their son, Sir Robert Dudley (1574–1649), being born on 7 August 1574. This had not prevented Leicester from marrying Lettice Knollys and Douglas marrying Sir Edward Stafford.⁵⁶

Salter’s comments provide evidence that Spenser probably worked for Leicester in the 1570s when Leicester and Sheffield were a couple and, most importantly, it might help to explain the slighting reference to Lettice Knollys in the Calender, as she had taken Douglas Sheffield’s place. The dedicatory sonnets to The Faerie Queene include two with Sheffield connections: one is dedicated to Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond, the husband of Douglas’s daughter, Elizabeth, and another to Douglas’s brother, Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham.⁵⁷ Spenser appears to have felt far more loyalty to the Sheffields than to the Dudleys, and, given the Sheffield family’s understandable resentment at Leicester’s behaviour, he may have weighed in to support them in the Calender.⁵⁸

Another acquaintance of Spenser’s at this time was the prolific poet Nicholas Breton, who dedicated what was probably his first collection to Lady Sheffield, A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers (1575).⁵⁹ Breton later wrote an elegy for Spenser, the only poem for a named person published in his volume, Melancholike Humours (1600), perhaps one of the poems that Camden described being thrown into Spenser’s grave, which appears to be based on personal affection for the best of his peer group.⁶⁰ Even more intriguing is the possibility that Spenser’s link with Breton provides us with evidence of one of his lost works. BL Add. MS 34064, an undated poetic miscellany in a series of hands, contains a large number of Breton’s poems.⁶¹ A section in a distinct hand, however, contains extracts from The Ruines of Time—the sections relating to Leicester—and Mother Hubberds Tale—mainly the satires of the church.⁶² Some of these extracts look as if they might have come from a separate manuscript from that used by Ponsonby to print the Complaints, which then raises the question of whether the opening section of this manuscript (fos. 1–4), in another hand, contains original unpublished works by Spenser. One poem, ‘Ffrom the heavenes there hath descended’ (sig. 4^v), is attributed to ‘Edward Spencer’ (like Axiochus), but does not look at all authentic. However, two sonnets in alexandrines (sig. 3^v) may possibly be experiments from the early 1570s and part of the lost The Dying Pelican, which, if so, would then have been a sonnet sequence:

The pretie Turtle dove, that with no little moane
When she hath lost her make, sitts moorninge all alone
The swanne that always sings an houre before her deathe
Whose deadlie gryves do give the grones that drawe awaie her breathe
The Pellican that pecks the blud out of her brest
And by her deathe doth onlie feed her younge ones in the nest
The harte emparked cloase: within a plot of grounde
Who dare not overlook the pale for feare of hunters hounde
The hounde in kennel tyed that heares the chase goe by
And bootles wishing foote abroade, in vaine doth howle and crye
The tree with withered top, that hath his braunches deade
And hangeth downe his highest bowes, while other hould upp heade
Endure not half the deathe, the sorrowe nor disgrace
That my poore wretched mind abids, where none can waile my case.

Ffor truth hath lost his trust, more dere than turtle dove
And what a death to suche a life; that such a paine doth prove
The swan for sorrow singes, to see her deathe so nye
I die because I see my deathe, and yet I can not dye.
The Pelican doth feed her younge ones with her bludd
I bleed to death to feede desires yt doe me never good
My hart emparked rounde within the grounde of greif
Is so beset with houndes of hate: yt lookes for no relief
And swete desire my dogg is clogged so with care
He cries and dies to here delightes and come not wher they are
My tree of true delight, is rokde with sorrow soe
As but the heavenes do soon helpe, wil be his overthrowe
In summe my dole, my deathe, and my disgrace is such
As never that ever lyvde knewe ever halfe so muche.

It is hard to judge whether these are authentic, but it does seem a strange coincidence that The Dying Pelican should be mentioned as a lost work by Ponsonby in his preface to the Complaints, when extracts from that collection also appear in this miscellany. The sonnets contain verbal and intellectual quibbles that may be Spenserian, especially the extended metaphoric use of the dog as a frustrated component of the hunt, a clever variation on the standard conceit of hunting the hart/heart. The central conceit, that the deluded speaker suffers more in love than the pelican who pecks her own breast to feed her children and then bleeds to death, would also seem to be characteristic of Spenser’s ability to produce ironic dramatic monologues.⁶³ Moreover, it would also be odd if Spenser had not attempted to produce some sonnets in the 1570s, given the central importance of the form for Elizabethan poets.⁶⁴

Another writer connected to the Sheffield family was Thomas Rogers of Bryanston (1574–1609), an eccentric poet and the uncle of John Donne through marriage.⁶⁵ Rogers was a lawyer, a graduate of the Inns of Court, and an MP in the 1590s.⁶⁶ He dedicated a number of mythological poems to the memory of the recently deceased Frances Howard, countess of Hertford, which appeared in his volume, Celestial Elegies (1598).⁶⁷ Frances was the sister of Douglas and it was in defence of her that he produced his manuscript poem, Leicester’s Ghost, soon after the accession of James. The work was based on the libel, Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584), but it owes a conspicuous debt to Spenser’s Complaints, especially The Ruines of Time and The Ruines of Rome.⁶⁸ Such evidence only shows that Rogers knew and was influenced by Spenser’s work, but, given their mutual connections to the different branches of the Effingham family, a connection that Spenser acknowledged and used when producing the dedicatory sonnets to The Faerie Queene, it is possible that they were acquainted in the 1570s.

We know from evidence in Spenser’s first major publications that he started work on a number of poems and plays in the 1570s, many of which have not survived, or which are probably incorporated into other published works. In the epistle to Harvey which prefaces the Calender, E. K. hopes that ‘Immerito’ (Spenser) will be persuaded to publish ‘divers other excellent works of his, which slepe in silence, as his Dreames, his Legendes, his Court of Cupide, and sondry others’.⁶⁹ In the preface to the October eclogue E. K. claims to have a ‘booke called the English Poete, which booke being lately come to my hands’; and in a note to line 90 he refers to a sonnet which contains the lines, ‘The siluer swanne doth sing before her dying day | As shee that feeles the deepe delight that is in death &c.’.⁷⁰ In the Letters Spenser refers to ‘My Slomber, and the other Pamphlets’, which he may dedicate to Edward Dyer, My Slomber perhaps being the same as ‘Dreams’, and which is surely the work referred to as ‘A senights slumber’ in Ponsonby’s prefatory letter to the Complaints.⁷¹ The Letters also contain references to a book, Epithalamion Thamesis, which undoubtedly became the marriage of the Thames and the Medway in The Faerie Queene, Book IV, canto xi, and the Stemmata Dudleiana, all indications that Spenser was constantly writing and that he refigured, rethought, and rearranged his poetry throughout his life. Harvey also provides evidence of lost works when he refers to Spenser’s ‘nine Englishe Commodies’ in the Letters, supporting Ponsonby’s list in the preface to the Complaints, probably an attempt to create intrigue and drum up business for his charge.⁷² It is likely that Spenser did produce partial or complete translated versions of the biblical Ecclesiastes and Canticum Canticorum; religious poems such as Purgatory (is this a sly reference to Dante, and evidence that Spenser did know the great Italian poet’s work?), The Howers of the Lord, and The Seven Psalms; The Hell of Lovers (perhaps refigured as the masque of Busirane at the end of The Faerie Queene, Book III).

The comedies—assuming they were plays—may have been performed at college while he was a student, Spenser planning to revise them but never managing to complete the task.⁷³ But there is an impressive range of material in the ‘lost works’ that signals—and advertises—serious literary ambition: poetry, ranging from sonnets to capacious historical and topographical works; pamphlets; translations; and a treatise on poetry, perhaps one to rival Sidney’s, which was circulating in manuscript but which had not yet been published. It is impossible to imagine that a man who had not spent a great deal of time reading, experimenting, and writing could have produced an incredibly complicated work such as the Calender by the time he was 26. Moreover, to write so much, Spenser needed access to significant supplies of paper, which was expensive in this period, costing between 2s. and 7s. a ream.⁷⁴ When he worked as a secretary in Ireland Spenser was granted £15 per year for supplies, including paper, a sum that a provincial parson would have earned in the same time.⁷⁵ Some of the money needed he may well have earned himself, but it is likely that he had another source, probably Harvey’s access to the relevant materials as a Cambridge tutor. Furthermore, the Calender, as well as Spenser’s later works, is informed by the books that were contained in Harvey’s library, exactly what might be expected given Harvey’s eagerness to assemble a significant collection of relevant books that would equip a scholar for an active life, and his desire to direct the reading habits and practices of those he taught and those he served.⁷⁶

Harvey’s library, which he told his students in 1576 was kept in his ‘Tusculan villa’ in Walden, was a mixture of ancient and modern books.⁷⁷ Harvey’s collection, which he apparently boasted had cost him £200 at some point in the 1590s, was much more wide-ranging in subject matter than the inventories of books that survive in the wills of Cambridge tutors and students from the 1560s and 1570s.⁷⁸ These reveal a variety of libraries for different purposes, some working libraries for busy teachers, others much more comprehensive and capacious, such as the famous library of John Caius, now in his old college. However, even the extensive library of William Lyffe, who died in 1569 when Spenser started his Cambridge studies, contains mainly works of rhetoric, classical literature, history, and philosophy, including Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Sallust, Hesiod, Euripides, the one modern author being Rudolf Agricola’s works on dialectic; and theology and biblical commentary, notably Calvin (who appears in almost all inventories of books), Melanchthon, and Peter Martyr. Other libraries generally contained works by major authors such as Erasmus, Quintilian, Augustine, Josephus, Terence, Virgil, Cicero, Homer, Aesop, Bede, Lucan, and others, all authors that Spenser would have read in this period if he had not already done so.

Harvey’s library was different because it contained so many modern works in French, Italian, as well as English, and because his works were so heavily annotated, which would have further helped to define Spenser’s own reading habits. Harvey also had a keen interest in what seemed to many to be obscure subjects, such as Scottish literature. He established connections with Thomas Vautrollier, an Anglo-Huguenot printer who dominated the Anglo-Scottish book trade and was largely responsible for James VI’s supply of French books.⁷⁹ Vautrollier’s daughter married his apprentice, Richard Field, who later printed Fowre Hymnes for William Ponsonby, and who took over his business in 1588, indicating that the connections between authors and printers were sustained.⁸⁰ Moreover, he had published both Mulcaster’s educational treatises, Positions and The First Part of the Elementarie. Harvey’s link to Vautrollier provided him with knowledge of Scottish politics and culture. He was especially interested in the works of James VI, and was surely the source of Spenser’s knowledge of Scottish political developments and his particular fear of the accession of James as king of England in the late 1590s.⁸¹

In addition to works which were in the libraries of many of his contemporaries and their Cambridge colleges, from surviving copies and evidence in other books, we know that Harvey possessed modern works of English literature, such as A Mirror for Magistrates, Gascoigne’s poetry, and Sidney’s Arcadia; Italian works, one of the largest collections in the library, including Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, in Italian and English, Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation, Guicciardini’s reflections on modern political practice, and, crucially, those of Machiavelli, John Florio’s Italian dictionary, William Thomas’s History of Italy, and Tasso’s works; a large collection of works of French literature and politics, including works detailing the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre such as Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the poems of Sylvester Du Bartas; key historical works such as Olaus Magnus’s History of the Northern Peoples; topical works such as George Buchanan’s political treatises against Mary Queen of Scots, and John Cheke’s Hurt of Sedition; a host of topographical and geographical works, including Humphrey Lhuyd’s Breviary of Britayne, translated by Thomas Twyne; up-to-date works on science; and, of course, a number of Peter Ramus’ works, as well as Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric and his influential Discourse upon Usury.⁸² These are only the works the details of which have survived, as Harvey possessed far more volumes, calculating himself that he had nearly four thousand.⁸³ A library of a few hundred volumes was unusual in this period, and the university library at Cambridge estimated that it had about 451 books and manuscripts in 1582. John Dee was one of the few bibliophiles who possessed a more extensive private collection of books than Harvey, although many of his were volumes of special scientific interest.⁸⁴ Harvey was probably inspired by the library of Sir Thomas Smith, kept at Hill Hall: the partially preserved inventory for Smith’s library reveals a similar mixture of ancient and modern books, including works by Ramus, Machiavelli, and Castiglione, as well as Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, Olaus Magnus’s History, and the literary works of Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Dante.⁸⁵

That Spenser made extensive use of particular volumes in Harvey’s library can be demonstrated, even if specific examples cannot be proved. Guazzo’s Civil Conversation undoubtedly had a major impact on Spenser’s intellectual horizons, and the opening stanza of Book VI of The Faerie Queene defines courtesy as the ‘roote of ciull conuersation’ (line 6).⁸⁶ We also know that Spenser made extensive use of Olaus Magnus’ History in writing a View, and that George Buchanan’s hostile portraits of Mary Queen of Scots played an important role in the representation of Duessa in Book V of The Faerie Queene.⁸⁷ It is likely that Spenser learned a great deal about close and careful reading from Harvey’s habit of systematic and directed annotation, shown in such heavily annotated works as his copies of Livy and Castiglione.⁸⁸ Harvey also undoubtedly continued to develop Spenser’s interest in the study of modern foreign languages, given his own keen interest in reading widely in ancient and modern works not written in English.⁸⁹ Spenser’s education clearly went beyond what was provided for him at Cambridge.

From the published evidence of the Letters and surviving annotations in books, we know that Spenser and Harvey also exchanged and discussed particular books, a sign of their intimacy, as well as an indication that Spenser had the means to acquire books of his own. Such actions were not simply a means of sharing ideas—although they were that—but part of an elaborate game which explored their master–student relationship. The annotations and comments that survive also provide a wealth of information about Spenser’s life in this period.

The most extensive evidence of this practice occurs in Harvey’s copy of Howleglas, which suggests the growing independence of the student from the master, but is also a fond record—at least on Harvey’s part—of their friendship.⁹⁰ The annotation tells us that Spenser and Harvey met in London after Spenser had started work as secretary for John Young in Rochester, presumably during the Christmas holiday, a further sign that their relationship had continued throughout the 1570s. We cannot know whether Spenser finally felt able to make some subtle digs at Harvey—which, in fact, corroborate the portrait of Harvey in Pedantius—because he now had an independent position; whether their relationship had always had this element of give-and-take; and whether Harvey was slightly irritated by Spenser’s attitude or took it in good part.

What the annotation also makes clear is that Spenser was exploring the relationship between high and low forms of culture, and thinking about types of humour. Harvey compares Spenser to Ariosto:

To be plaine, I am voyde of al iudgement, if your Nine Comedies, wherevnto in imitation of Herodotus, you giue the names of the Nine Muses, (and in one mans fansie not unworthily) come not neerer Ariostos Comoedies, eyther for the finenesse of plausible Elocution, or the rarenesse of Poetical Inuention, than that Eluish Queene doth to his Orlando Furioso, which notwithstanding, you wil needes seeme to emulate, and hope to ouergo, as you flatly professed your self in one of your last Letters.⁹¹

The comment suggests that The Faerie Queene quickly evolved into a hybrid form that adapted Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso rather than simply imitated it, a sign that Spenser was experimenting with poetic styles and genres from the very start of his literary career. The mention of Ariosto and comedy may well be a direct reference to George Gascoigne’s adaptation of Ariosto, Supposes, written in 1566, and staged at Gray’s Inn, so it is possible that Spenser saw a performance of the play, or, at least, heard an account of it.⁹² Spenser, according to Harvey, was also writing works that adapted comic forms in new and unusual ways, producing a (now lost) work that combined a study of the nine muses with material from Herodotus’ History, in essence, every form of literature (epic, lyric, tragic, dance, and so on) with the foundational text of Western historical writing.⁹³ Harvey’s judgement—confirmed by his marginalia to his copies of Gascoigne’s play, which was published in the collection A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres in 1573.⁹⁴

At the same time Spenser also gave Harvey a copy of Jerome (Hieronymus) Turler’s The traueiler (1575), a translation of the popular manual of advice for travellers by William How.⁹⁵ Harvey’s copy bears the Latin inscription ‘Gabrielis Harveij.’ ‘ex dono Edmundi Spenserii Episcopi Roffensis Secretarii. 1578’ (a gift from Edmund Spenser, secretary of the bishop of Rochester). The inscription on the last page, ‘Lege pridie Cal. Decembris. 1578. Gabriel Harvey’, shows that it was probably received with the jest books.⁹⁶ Turler’s work was a manual of instruction for the would-be traveller, the first, longer, book describing what he would need to consider and know; the second, a description of his own visit to Naples. Turler’s opening chapter defines travel, following Cicero, and distinguishes between citizens and strangers (p. 2), before asking the key question, ‘whether traueyling do a man more good or harme?’ (p. 4). Turler concludes that travel is a positive experience and outlines why:

Traueill is nothing else but a paine taking to see and searche forreine landes, not to bee taken in hande by all sorts of persons, or vnaduisedly, but such as are meete thereto, eyther to the ende that they may attayne to suche artes and knowledge as they are desirous to learne or exercise: or else to see, learne, and diligently to marke suche things in strange Countries, as they shall haue neede to vse in the common trade of lyfe, wherby they maye profite themselues, their freindes, and Countrey if needed require. (p. 5)⁹⁷

The passage stands out in italic script in a book mainly in black-letter typeface. Travel, according to Turler, serves a serious purpose and travellers acquire real knowledge of great use to themselves, their immediate circle, and their country. In a later chapter Turler states and answers common objections to travel, citing Claudian (as well as Horace and Ovid) on the unhappiness of exile and the envy the displaced feel towards the settled:

O Happie hee that spent his daies
In natiue soyles delight,
Whom one self house hath seene a child,
And eke an aged wight.
Who limping with his staffe wher once
He played the little Mouse:
Can count the manie yeeres which hee
Hath past in one poore house. (p. 92)⁹⁸

Turler makes the obvious point that what ‘they call Deportation or exile is one thing, and traueill an other’ (p. 93). Nevertheless, it is interesting that Turler spends so much time refuting the fear that travel will become exile. In doing so he was surely highlighting the connection between the two after the wave of religious exiles in the wake of Mary’s accession in 1553 and Pope Pius V’s bull against Elizabeth, ‘Regnans in Excelsis’ (25 February 1570), stating that Elizabeth was a heretic and those Catholics who obeyed her would be excommunicated.⁹⁹ Given the strict restrictions on travel in the sixteenth century, with travellers requiring a licence to leave the country, many travellers were exiles, and the two forms of journeying were closely linked in the public imagination.¹⁰⁰

Why did Spenser give this particular book to Harvey? The answer must surely be that Spenser had been on or was planning a journey; that Harvey was in the same situation; or that both of them had travel on their minds. This last situation was indeed the case. Early in 1578 Harvey was due to take part in an English deputation to the conference of Protestant princes at Schmalkalden in Germany, through the intervention of the ubiquitous Daniel Rogers, but the plan came to nothing.¹⁰¹ Spenser himself may well have already travelled to Ireland if we can take the account that Irenius provides of the execution of Murrogh O’Brien in a View as an accurate testimony. The rhetoric of the ‘I’ witness lends credence to a point about the ancestors of the Irish (the Gauls), marking them out as a primitive people with ancient, primitive urges:

Allsoe the Gaules vsed to drinke theire enemies blodd and to painte themselues therewith So allsoe they write that the owlde Irish weare wonte And so haue I sene some of the Irishe doe but not theire enemyes but friendes blodd as namelye at the execution of a notable Taitour at Limericke Called murrogh Obrien I saw an old woman, which was his foster mother, take up his head, whilst he was quartered, and sucked up all the blood that runne thereout, saying, that the earth was not worthy to drinke it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast, and tore her haire, crying out and shrieking most terribly.¹⁰²

Here, the fact that the event was witnessed is central to the argument, which differentiates the Irish from other savage peoples, suggesting that here we are justified in assuming that Irenius was Spenser and that he was present at the execution which took place in Limerick on 1 July 1577. The execution is also described in a letter from Sir William Drury to Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. Drury compares O’Brien to James Fitzmaurice, the cousin of Gerald Fitz James Fitzgerald, earl of Desmond, the leader of the serious uprising in Munster which began in 1569, and which Sir Henry Sidney was struggling to suppress. He describes him as ‘a second pillar of James FitzMorisch’s late rebellion and a practiser of this new combination [i.e., rebellion], a man of no less fame than James himself’, and comments that he was ‘orderly indicted, arraigned, condemned, and judged for late offences … He was amongst the people in great estimation; he was holden the best and forwardest horseman of Ireland; he was greatly of the good feared. His death was far better than his life, and he confessed he had deserved death’, the ideal end for a traitor.¹⁰³

The execution was clearly a major event and would have made a significant impression on any young English observer, given O’Brien’s status and the setting among his own people hostile to English law, who saw him as a martyr.¹⁰⁴ It is probable that Spenser was in Limerick in July 1577, given his connections with Leicester through Harvey in the 1570s.¹⁰⁵ There may also have been another connection to the Lord Justice, Sir William Pelham (d. 1587), who refers frequently to his brother, Spenser, in the State Papers.¹⁰⁶ Pelham’s brother was his brother-in-law, Captain James Spenser (d. 1590), who had been Master of Ordnance in the Northern Rebellion (1569–70) and then provost marshal in the Tower of London, and was married to his sister, Mary. He may have been a relation of Edmund’s, although more likely he was related to the Spencers of Althorp, especially as Pelham’s second wife, Dorothy, was the daughter of Dorothy Spencer, herself the daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorp.¹⁰⁷ More significant still, Pelham named the only son from this marriage Peregrine, the same name that Edmund gave to the only son of his second marriage to Elizabeth Boyle (herself related to the Spencers of Althorp by marriage).¹⁰⁸ Clearly Spenser had a series of connections, however loose, that would have proved further reasons for him being in Ireland before he actually settled there.

Indeed, Spenser may have been the bearer of the letter cited above, from Sir William Drury (1527–79), the President of Munster and, later, the Lord Justice of Ireland, to Leicester, dated 8 July. Drury also sent a ‘cast of falcons of the best eyrie in this province’ for Leicester.¹⁰⁹ Great attention was paid to the post system after Shane O’Neill’s Rebellion in 1565, as officials in London sought to ensure that they received news quickly from the most exposed part of the territories ruled by the English monarch.¹¹⁰ Spenser, as a servant of Leicester in the late 1570s, might have been sent as part of this process of improvement and the desire to control the circulation of information.¹¹¹ Even at this early date Spenser could have realized that his skills as a secretary would lead him to a life of exile in the Irish civil service.

Travel was evidently on the minds of both Harvey and Spenser in the late 1570s. As his published collection Gratulationes Valdinensium demonstrates, Harvey was especially eager to enter Leicester’s service in the late 1570s, and the Harvey–Spenser Letters witness him openly discussing travelling abroad for the earl.¹¹² In the last section of his first letter (15 October 1579), dated from Leicester House, Spenser states that he is about to travel abroad in Leicester’s service, which is why he has not been able to send Harvey some poetry, as he had hoped:

I was minded to haue sent you some English verses: or Rymes, for a farewell: but by my Troth, I haue no spare time in the world, to thinke on such Toyes, that you knowe will demaund a freer head, than mine is presently. I beseeche you by all your Curtsies, and Graces, let me be answered, ere I goe: which will be, (I hope, I feare, I thinke) the next weeke, if I can be dispatched of my Lorde. I goe thither, as sent by him, and maintained most what of him: and there to employ my time, my body. My minde, to his Honours seruice.¹¹³

Spenser is using language that Harvey will understand and appreciate, that of the deserved rewards of loyal service to a public ideal, catapulting the intellectual into an exciting public world. Whether Spenser really thought that such opportunities were as exciting as he appears to suggest here is debatable, but his scarcely contained enthusiasm is deliberately set against his neglect of his poetry.¹¹⁴ The journey he is referring to must have been to France, an anticipated return visit in Leicester’s entourage to secure the marriage of the queen and François, duc d’Alençon, who had departed for France on 25 August after a long stay, involving a great deal of public celebrations, which had begun on 5 January.¹¹⁵ Unfortunately, Alençon’s visit also attracted a great deal of criticism, principally from courtiers and subjects anxious about their monarch being made subservient to the French, most spectacularly in the form of John Stubbes’s The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf (1579), as well as Sir Philip Sidney’s open letter to the queen, and, of course, The Shepheardes Calender.¹¹⁶ All were closely associated with Leicester.¹¹⁷ In the face of opposition from the Privy Council, outlined by Burghley in a minute dated 6 October entitled ‘Cause of misliking of the marriage’, the possibility of marriage fizzled out, principally due to opposition orchestrated by Leicester.¹¹⁸ Unsurprisingly, the visit abroad that Spenser refers to never took place, given the state of the negotiations in the autumn of 1579 and the key role of Spenser’s own patron—evidence, if any were needed, of his and Harvey’s distance from the corridors of power.

(a)

(b)

Figure 3. Spenser’s annotations in his copy of Petrus Lotichius Secundus and Georgius Sabinus, Poemata (1576). Reproduced with kind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

We also have evidence of books that Spenser acquired himself, such as the copy of the work of the German humanist poets Petrus Lotichius Secundus (1528–60) and Georgius Sabinus (1508–60), which were bound together and published as one volume in 1563.¹¹⁹ The book is inscribed ‘Immerito’, and contains a number of markings and underlinings, but no annotations, although some might have been destroyed when the book was later cropped. On the flyleaf Spenser has copied out a letter about Lotichius by Erhard Stibar, a student of Sabinus, as well as two poems in praise of Lotichius’ poetry (Figure 3).¹²⁰ As Lee Piepho has argued, while we cannot be sure exactly when Spenser had the volumes, most likely he ‘acquired them at a time when he was still learning the craft of poetry’.¹²¹ The two collections were probably bound together in 1576, so Spenser probably obtained them in the late 1570s when he was working on the Calender.

The volumes are wide-ranging works by poets with major European reputations, containing a diverse collection of skilfully written poems, elegies, songs, and eclogues. In itself the book demonstrates just how capacious and catholic Spenser’s literary taste was, especially when placed alongside his interest in Turler’s Traueiler and the jest books.¹²² They also demonstrate that German neo-Latin literature was important for English readers, German poets corresponding with their contemporaries throughout Europe.¹²³ It is quite likely that Lotichius in particular had an influence on Spenser, given the number of eclogues he wrote describing his suffering in love, and his invention of a number of fictitious women, devices, tropes, and modes that are on obvious display in the Calender.¹²⁴

Spenser’s interest in neo-Latin poets such as Sabinus (who was rumoured to have responded to Ovid’s Heroides, a work that also attracted Spenser) probably tells us a great deal about early modern English intellectual culture and the range of interests of poets eager to establish poetry of European significance in the vernacular, one of the key aims of the Letters.¹²⁵ Indeed, Spenser was writing Latin poetry at the same time as he was preparing the Calender for publication, as his earliest letter to Harvey, dated 5 October 1579, demonstrates. Included here is a poem of 123 lines ‘Ad Ornatissimum Virum’, a partly tongue-in-cheek praise of his tutor written as he thought he was about to sail to France. The poem can be related to a number of verse epistles in praise of friends, patrons, and scholars written by humanist poets like Lotichius and Sabinus and was obviously influenced by Spenser’s reading (he probably shared his copies of their books with Harvey, who would have seen no reason to use his resources on buying duplicates).¹²⁶ Spenser writes to Harvey as one poet to another (‘Poëta Poëtam’), praising him because he values true fame above worldly success.¹²⁷ He argues that Harvey has triumphed over scorn and mockery, but that he ought not to neglect life’s pleasures, which might include obtaining a wife (line 70), as well as offers of gold (line 72), suggesting that Spenser had in mind his own impending nuptials three weeks later and the separation of the friends after many years together.¹²⁸ He then refers to the journey that he thought he would have to take, wishing that he had Harvey’s ability to understand what is useful as well as what is delightful, concluding: ‘Ibimus ergo statim: (quis eunti fausta precetur?) | Et pede Clivosas fesso calcabimus Alpes’ (We shall go then at once (who wishes me Godspeed at going?); | We shall press our worn feet up the jagged defiles of the Alps’) (lines 98–9). As John Hale notes, ‘It is difficult to exaggerate the broad sense in which the Alps were felt to divide a northern, transalpine world from a southern, temperamentally and culturally conditioned Mediterranean one’, so Spenser’s sense of the significance of the journey is easy to understand.¹²⁹ He never travelled outside the British Isles.

Presumably Spenser brought forward the date of his wedding when he learned that he was not going abroad to France: perhaps the opportunity to go to Ireland in 1580 had already arisen. The poem concludes with a lament that the two friends will not be able to exchange letters as easily in the future, and a confirmation of their lasting friendship:

Harueiusque bonus, (charus licet omnibus vnus,)
Angelus & Gabriel, (quamuis comitatus amicis
Innumeris, geniûmque choro stipatus amæno)
Immerito tamen vnum absentem sæpe requiret,
Optabitque, Vtinam meus hîc Edmundus adesset,
Qui noua scripsisset, nec Amores conticuisset,
Ipse suos, & sæpe animo, verbisque benignis
Fausta precaretur, Deus illum aliquando reducat, &c. (lines 105–12)

[My good Harvey (howbeit equally dear to us all,
And with reason, since alone almost sweeter than all of the rest),
Angel and Gabriel both,—though surrounded by friends

Who are countless, attended by a gracious circle of talents,
Yet for Immerito, the only one absent, will often inquire
And murmur the wish, ‘Would Heaven my Edmund were here.
He would have written me news, nor himself have been silent
Regarding his love, and often, in his heart and with words
Of the kindest, would bless me. May God guide him hither once more.’ Etc.]

Spenser’s poem values and celebrates the enduring friendship between the two men and is a public record of his gratitude to Harvey. It is also—as there is throughout the interrelated volumes the Letters and the Calender—a recognition of the end of its most intimate stage, as the lives of the two men are about to change. Male friendship was often represented in terms of marriage, and the two relationships were explored together in a number of influential treatises.¹³⁰ Accordingly, Spenser imagines Harvey pining for him even when immersed in the good fellowship of other close friends.

Books of neo-Latin literature, which circulated among the tightly knit circles of poets and learned societies, and their reflections on how to transform the poor state of literature in English owed much to a desire to emulate the sophistication of European poetry in Latin. Spenser, as we know from the Letters, claimed to be a member of a group called the Areopagus who held such discussions. In the letter to Harvey dated 15 October Spenser stated that

The twoo worthy Gentlemen, Master Sidney, and Master Dyer, they haue me, I thanke them, in some vse of familiarity: of whom, and to whome, what speache passeth for youre credite and estimation, I leaue your selfe to conceive, hauing always so well conceiued of my vnfained affection, and zeale towards you. Ane nowe they haue proclaimed in their ἀρ∈íω πά∈ω, a general surceasing and silence of balde Rymers, and also of the verie beste to: in steade whereof, they haue by authoritie of their whole Senate, prescribed certaine Lawes and rules of Quantities of English syllables, for English Verse: hauing had thereof already greate practise, and drawen mee to their faction.¹³¹

The description is characterized by the familiar, intimate tone of the letters, designed to please and flatter Harvey, and with a considerable element of exaggeration. No one could imagine that the small band of poets discussing matters really had a ‘whole Senate’ whose advice they sought, especially as only two poets are mentioned—although claims have been made that others, notably Sir John Conway (d. 1603), occasional poet, and father of John Donne’s friend, Sir Edward Conway (c.1564–1631) played a part in the group.¹³² Furthermore, it is likely that Spenser is exaggerating his relationship with Sidney, especially given the following sentences: ‘Newe Bookes I heare of none, but only of one, that writing a certaine Booke, called The Schoole of Abuse, and dedicating it to Maister Sidney, was for hys labor scorned: if at leaste it be in the goodnesse of that nature to scorne. Suche follie is it, not to regarde aforehande the inclination and qualitie of him, to whome wee dedicate oure Bookes.’¹³³ This allusion to Sidney’s anger at Stephen Gosson’s foolish dedication, the ostensible reason for writing the Apologie for Poetry, has the appearance of personal knowledge—which may, of course, be real—and the link between the two sections of the letter is indeed the figure of Sidney.¹³⁴ But the letter, which is our only real knowledge of the existence of the Areopagus, might perhaps be read best as a mirror image of Harvey’s efforts to ingratiate himself into the favours of the good and the great, or, more likely still, a gentle parody of Harvey’s behaviour, Spenser realizing that discussions between poets were nowhere near the formal level of a classical society.

It is true, however, that both Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer (1543–1607), a courtier poet central to the Leicester circle and close to Sidney and Fulke Greville, were present at Audley End on 26–7 July 1578 when the queen made her progress, where she was entertained by her subjects.¹³⁵ Prominent among them was Gabriel Harvey, who did already know Sidney, having read through three books of Livy with him, so he must have been the link between Spenser and the courtier poet.¹³⁶ Harvey made the most of his opportunity at Audley End, taking part in two philosophical disputations in Latin and presenting four manuscripts of his Latin verse to a series of powerful figures. Book I is addressed to Elizabeth; Book II to Leicester; Book III to Burghley; and Book IV to Oxford, Hatton, and Sidney. The volume was published as Gartulationes Valdinenses in September by Henry Bynemann, who had published the Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings nine years earlier, as well as a host of other works by Harvey.¹³⁷ It is therefore likely that Spenser did have some conversations about poetry with Sidney and Dyer, as he states later in his second letter to Harvey of 2 April 1580:

I would hartily wish, you would either send me the Rules and Precepts of Arte, which you obserue in Quantities, or else followe mine, that M. Philip Sidney gaue me, being the very same which M. Drant deuised, but enlarged with M. Sidneys own iudgement, and augmented with my Obseruations, that we might both accorde and agree in one: leatse we ouerthrowe one an other, and be ouerthrown of the rest. Truste me, you will hardly beleeue what greate good liking and estimation Maister Dyer had of youre Satiricall Verses, and I, since the viewe thereof, hauing before of my selfe had speciall liking of Englishe Versifying, am euen nowe aboute to giue you some token, what, and howe well therein I am able to doe: for, to tell you trueth, I minde shortely at conuenient leysure, to sette forth a Booke in this kinde, whyche I entitle, Epithalamion Thamesis, whyche Booke I dare vndertake wil be very profitable for the knowledge, and rare for the Inuention, and manner of handling.¹³⁸

Spenser openly advertises his connections to Sidney and Dyer, emphasizing their close relationship. The comment about Harvey’s satirical verse receiving praise from Dyer again reads as if the pupil is showing the master that he is in charge. The praise of Harvey needs to be read in terms of Spenser’s claim that he received Sidney’s copy of Thomas Drant’s work on art and quantitative metre, annotated by Sidney himself, an exchange of books that mirrors the Harvey–Spenser exchanges.¹³⁹ Perhaps this was Drant’s well-known translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry, Satires, and Verse Epistles published in 1567; more likely it is a lost work.¹⁴⁰

It is hard to read the evidence and to assume that there was a close-knit circle of writers given the ways in which we need to read the public pronouncements of both Spenser and Harvey. The situation is made more complex because there was a group called the Areopagus in Florence earlier in the sixteenth century, referred to by William Thomas and cited by Harvey.¹⁴¹ Therefore, it is possible that this group of English writers did meet on occasions in 1579—and perhaps earlier—probably as a result of their first meeting at Audley End. On 14 January 1579 Daniel Rogers, who may again have played a key role in facilitating this group, sent a poem to Sidney describing Sidney’s friends as ‘a happy band of like-minded fellows’, perhaps seeking admission to the group.¹⁴²

The group was probably a casual symposium of individuals that Spenser made seem more formal, perhaps even leading to its dissolution by making it public in the Letters, or acknowledging that its work was done, although possibly the term was used facetiously to mean ‘any group of persons which exercised judiciary authority’.¹⁴³ What seems to have united the group is an interest in avant-garde verse, a desire to move English literature forward particularly through experiments with quantitative metre.¹⁴⁴ Certainly the Letters had a significant impact in terms of this mode of writing poetry, because in his pioneering translation of Virgil in quantitative metre, Richard Stanihurst refers the reader to Harvey’s comments, having read them, even though he does not know who Harvey is.¹⁴⁵ Again, this might suggest that the Areopagus really existed in the terms exchanged between Spenser and Harvey.

Spenser’s earliest letter to Harvey contains Spenser’s only known poem in quantitative verse, ‘Iambicum Trimetrum’, a work which advertises its experimental function and which can be scanned as follows:

Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
    
  Make thy selfe flutt[e]ring wings of thy fast flying
    
   Thought, and fly forth unto my Love, wheresoever she be:
    
Whether lying reastlesse in heavy bedde, or else
    Playing alone carelesse on hir heauenlie Virginals.
If in Bed, tell hir, that my eyes can take no reste:
    If at Boorde, tell hir, that my mouth can eate no meate:
    If at hir Virginals, tel hir, I can heare no mirth.¹⁴⁶

Derek Attridge notes that this is the sole poem in quantitative metre by either Harvey or Spenser that ‘is of any value … perhaps because … it imposes less severe restraints than most quantitative metres’.¹⁴⁷ Even so, the lyric, which consists of twenty-one unrhymed lines, is much less sophisticated than poetry Spenser had published a decade previously, and it is hard to believe that he saw this poem as an important work or anything other than a formal exercise. The verse, with its conspicuous and rather clumsy rhetorical patterning, employing the device of anaphora (repeating the sequence of words at the beginning of clause), reads like the parodic rhetoric employed by Thomas Kyd, another of Mulcaster’s famous pupils, at key points in The Spanish Tragedy (c.1589). Responding to the terrible news of his son’s death, Hieronimo laments:

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confus’d and fill’d with murder and misdeeds;
O sacred heavens! If this unhallow’d deed,
If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,
If this incomparable murder thus
Of mine, but now no more my son,
Shall unreveal’d and unrevenged pass,
How should we term your dealings to be just,
If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?¹⁴⁸

If there is any link between these two passages, perhaps they each originate in a common education in rhetorical practice, as well as dramatic performance, both of which were particular interests of Mulcaster.¹⁴⁹ Perhaps Spenser’s poem is far less serious than has been realized, even a cheeky tilt at the principles of the master, although it was reproduced in full in Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588), one of the earliest serious studies of Spenser’s poetry by a member of the Sidney circle.¹⁵⁰ Fraunce, who seems to have had access to a manuscript copy of The Faerie Queene in 1586–7, was eager to show how English poetry was in line with and reproduced the principles of Ramist logic.¹⁵¹ According to Fraunce, Spenser’s poem illustrates the combination of iambic and spondaic metre.¹⁵²

Distinct signs in the Letters suggest that neither writer any longer believes in the quantitative verse project. In his reply, Harvey subjects Spenser’s poem to a long critique, starting with the unpromising opening comment, ‘Your Englishe Trimetra I lyke better, than perhappes you will easily beleeue’, which indicates that neither student nor master was confident that they were producing fascinating, significant literature. Harvey’s critique is based on his understanding that the metre is faulty: ‘I finde not your warrant so sufficiently good, and substauntiall in Lawe, that it can persuade me, they are all, so precisely perfect for the Feete, as your selfe ouer-partially weene, and ouer-confidently auoche.’¹⁵³ Harvey concludes that, unfortunately, proper poetry runs like ‘A good horse, that trippeth not once in a iourney’, and quantitative metre cannot work like this, so ‘perhappes the Errour may rather proceede of his Master, M. Drantes Rule, than of himselfe [i.e., Immerito]’.¹⁵⁴ The signs are that the quantitative verse movement was a serious discussion in the late 1570s, especially in the wake of the commitment to the reform of orthography and the correct teaching of ancient languages proposed by Smith and Mulcaster, the two most influential intellectual influences on Harvey and Spenser.¹⁵⁵ Indeed, Smith and Mulcaster possibly knew each other and argued about the merits of the preservation of custom versus programmatic reform of spelling. It is likely that Stubborn, the good-natured but wrong-headed disputant who defends customary usage in Smith’s De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anbglicae Scriptione (A Dialogue of the Correct and Improved Writing of English) (1568), is a representation of Mulcaster, who would therefore have been debating with Smith while teaching Spenser.¹⁵⁶

The most successful quantitative verse experiments are those of Sidney, because he had such a keen interest in the pronunciation of Latin and its effect on metre.¹⁵⁷ But it was also clear—perhaps less so to Stanihurst—that the movement had run out of steam before 1580 and that other ways of writing English verse had to be tried if English literature was to move forward and rival the ancients and other European countries with more established poetic traditions and reputations, such as France and Italy, and, to a lesser extent, Spain and Germany. Straightforward imitation and direct reproduction of style and metre would not translate easily from one language to another. In any case, even if the loosely affiliated group had wished to continue discussing matters, events were about to intervene that broke them up, as they undoubtedly realized would be the case with a number of ambitious and restless men with an eye open for an opportunity, as well as the simple need to make a living.

Indeed, whilst these debates were taking place Spenser’s life changed. He probably moved to north Kent to work for John Young at some point in 1578, perhaps joining his new employer when he was consecrated as bishop of Rochester on 16 March 1578.¹⁵⁸ Spenser remained in the bishop’s service until the middle of the following year when the correspondence with Harvey indicates that he had entered—or returned to—the service of Leicester, signing his address as ‘Leycester House’.¹⁵⁹ This marks out the period of employment as especially important for Spenser, who was at work on the Calender while he was in Young’s service. The work could even have been written and conceived in the year or so that he worked for Young: certainly it bears the stamp of that experience.¹⁶⁰ The two works are designed to be read together, part of a literary game that works through the pretence that they were independent when they were nothing of the sort.

Young’s official residence was in Bromley, the nearest town to London in the diocese of Rochester, the second oldest diocese in England after Canterbury, chosen to give the bishop access to the capital as well as his parishioners (Plate 9).¹⁶¹ In Tudor times Bromley was a small town surrounded by woods and countryside only ten miles from London with a population of about 700, which as late as 1797 could be described as a ‘pleasant market town’ with ‘two principal streets’.¹⁶² Young also held other benefices, including a prebend in Westminster (a position which would have provided him with an income from the cathedral estates but did not involve onerous duties), and the income from the rectory at St Magnus the Martyr church in London, a building Spenser would have known, as it is near the Tower of London. Acting as a secretary to a bishop was a relatively good job—certainly Spenser was able to move on to another lucrative secretarial position soon afterwards. A cathedral, even one that was relatively small like Rochester, would have supported a community of clerics, administrative staff, and other employees, and working and living in one would have resembled living in an Oxbridge college.¹⁶³

It is possible that Spenser may have considered a career in the church, like his college friend, Edward Kirk, and he later received a prebend in Ireland, which may have been more than a sinecure.¹⁶⁴ If so, he must have either changed his mind or found that a better opportunity presented itself when he had the chance to work as a secretary in Ireland. But, given the tone and style of the Letters in particular, it is more likely that Spenser was simply following a career at a time when means of support were few and far between and had to be taken when the opportunity arose, and that his real desire was for a literary career. Harvey, in Rhetor, assumed that his audience of Cambridge students would serve the goddess Eloquence as ‘secretaries, scribes, priests, ambassadors, councillors, and in other noble and honored positions’.¹⁶⁵ The career of Anthony Harison (1563–1638), a well-documented case of an ecclesiastical secretary, for example, suggests that ordination was often the reward for good service, not the result of a vocation.¹⁶⁶ With limited career opportunities, joining the church would always be an option for anyone with a degree, if not necessarily a vocation, as the career choices of John Donne demonstrate.¹⁶⁷ Spenser certainly had an impressive knowledge of theology, church government, ecclesiology, and the practical importance of Christian ethics and practical living, but this probably came in part from his employment as well as his education, and it does not mark him out as different from many other highly educated writers, or suggest that he was a frustrated cleric.

As a bishop’s secretary Spenser would have had to deal with civil law, derived from the Roman code of Justinian, which had largely replaced canon law after the Reformation, although civil lawyers were often the targets of attacks from puritans as administrators of ‘Catholic’ law.¹⁶⁸ The aim of civil law was always to provide a means of settling disputes through the formulation of general principles, rather than the study of previous cases, which was the basis of the common law. After 1545 doctors of civil law could exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction.¹⁶⁹ Many senior ecclesiastical figures were, unsurprisingly, qualified civil lawyers.¹⁷⁰ Under Elizabeth, as had been the case in Henry’s reign, the bishops were able to administer the ecclesiastical courts as long as they provided judgements in line with the royal supremacy.¹⁷¹ The bishop would run a Consistory court for his diocese, which his secretary would help administer. The Consistory court dealt mainly with routine ecclesiastical matters, such as ordination, consecration, and the distribution of ecclesiastical property; questions of legitimate religious belief, and offences against religion, principally heresy; and offences against morals, which might include ‘adultery, procuration, incontinency, incest, defamation, sorcery, witchcraft, misbehaviour in church, neglect to attend church, swearing, profaning the Sabbath, blasphemy, drunkenness, haunting taverns, heretical opinions, profaning the church, usury, ploughing up the church path’.¹⁷² For many of these reasons ecclesiastical courts were frequently known as ‘bawdy courts’. Prosecutions proceeded through inquisition and denunciation, and Spenser would have been directly involved in a number of such cases, giving him detailed knowledge of other peoples’ behaviour, as well as marriage, inheritance, and legitimacy.¹⁷³

It is unlikely that Spenser studied for a higher degree in civil law, which would have been time-consuming, and he probably acquired expertise in civil law as he worked. Such experience would have been of great benefit when he went to Ireland and might well have been an important reason why he was offered the post of secretary to Lord Grey. It also helps to explain why he was able to work for a number of different courts—including church courts—in Dublin, and why he took the lead role in his second wife’s legal affairs in the 1590s. Trials in ecclesiastical courts, like Chancery, and unlike the general administration of the common law, were heavily based on the delivery of testimony. Spenser would have become used to hearing pleas and would therefore have learned how to present, as well as assess, the merits of a case himself, as is obvious from the legal documents with which he is associated and, more pertinently, his writing.¹⁷⁴ He would also have become familiar with the issues surrounding inheritance disputes, something that would concern his family in the 1590s.¹⁷⁵ Kent was one of the most organized and ordered counties in England and its legal officers had an acute understanding of their roles, not least because of the influence of William Lambarde, who became a justice of the peace in 1579.¹⁷⁶ The experience of working in the county would have provided Spenser with a thorough legal knowledge and understanding of local government.

Spenser never states where he lived in this period, but the fact that he returned to London to meet Harvey in December 1578 suggests that he was probably based mainly in Bromley. But he would also have spent some time in Rochester, about twenty-five miles away, especially in the magnificent Norman cathedral (Plate 10), and the castle, opposite, built as a defence of the Medway towns by Bishop Gundulf, who was also responsible for the plans for the Tower of London, in 1080.¹⁷⁷ The lost work Epithalamion Thamesis must have been begun in this period, inspired by the sense of the national and strategic importance of the two rivers joining as their estuaries opened out into the North Sea, just east of the capital.¹⁷⁸ The imposing estuary of the Medway as it opens out into the North Sea dominates the view of anyone looking north from the cathedral or castle at Rochester. Spenser refers to the Medway in the July eclogue of the Calender, a poem with a number of allusions to north Kent.¹⁷⁹ Furthermore, it is worth noting that the estate of Penshurst, the Sidney family home, went up to the Medway, something acknowledged in Ben Jonson’s poem, ‘To Penshurst’ and noted by Camden in Britannia.¹⁸⁰ Spenser dedicated the Calender to Sir Philip, a sign that he was looking to the Sidney family for support in the late 1570s.¹⁸¹

In the July eclogue Spenser represents the river as the younger brother of the Thames (lines 81–4), but in The Faerie Queene the river has changed sex and has become a bride, the nuptials celebrated in a river-marriage poem, a genre established by William Camden in his Latin work De Connubio Tamae et Isis, ultimately derived from the use of lists in epic poetry.¹⁸² The Medway’s forthcoming union is an event which symbolizes the establishment of a world order with England at the centre:

It fortun’d then, a solemne feast was there
To all the Sea-gods and their fruitfull seede,
In honour of the spousalls, which then were
Betwixt the Medway and the Thames agreed.
Long had the Thames (as we in records reed)
Before that day her wooed to his bed;
But the proud Nymph would for no worldly meed,
Nor no entreatie to his loue be led;
Till now at last relenting, she to him was wed.

So both agreed, that this their bridale feast
Should for the Gods in Proteus house be made;
To which they all repayr’d, both most and least,
Aswell which in the mightie Ocean trade,
As that in riuers swim, or brookes doe wade.
All which not if an hundred tongues to tell,
And hundred mouthes, and voice of brasse I had,
And endlesse memorie, that mote excell,
In order as they came, could I recount them well. (8–9)

When published in 1596 the apparent harmony of the marriage was shrouded with fraught anxiety and ironies: England might have seemed the centre of the world to many, but it was under siege from hostile Catholic enemies; its own future was uncertain because of the queen’s refusal to marry; holding the feast in Proteus’ house connoted terrifying, uncontrolled change rather than a positive transformation, given that Proteus was the endlessly mutable sea-god who was impossible to pin down; and, perhaps most pointedly, the numerous tongues that the narrator conjures up seem to suggest a celebration but might also indicate cacophony and an absence of unity and harmony, at odds with the purpose of the ceremony. Certainly, when Spenser provides us with images of multi-tongued creatures elsewhere in his work they are hostile creatures eager to undermine established order, like the barking mouths of the Blatant Beast which first slanders Artegall, the Knight of Justice in Book V of The Faerie Queene, and later threatens to engulf the poet’s words with a plethora of lies.¹⁸³ How the first version of the poem looked we cannot, of course, know, but it is unlikely to have been a straightforward celebration of England’s glorious geography, given the tone and style of the Calender. Nevertheless, it is clear that Spenser, like most poets, made use of the immediate world around him, using the English landscape as he was later to use the Irish and, as in this example, often combining his observations of the two.¹⁸⁴

During his time as Young’s secretary Spenser would have made some new acquaintances. He may possibly have met Stephen Bateman (c.1542–84), the son of Dutch immigrants, who became the librarian for Mathew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury from 1558 until his death, when Edmund Grindal succeeded him.¹⁸⁵ Parker and Spenser’s employer were closely allied within the church hierarchy. Bateman lived in Parker’s household in Lambeth Palace and claimed that he had collected some 6,700 books for Parker, perhaps another library to which Spenser had access in this period.¹⁸⁶ Bateman was also the author of The Trauayled Pylgrime (1569), an allegorical religious romance of the life of a good Christian adapted to an English setting from the French of Olivier de La Marche (c.1426–1502), which concludes with the author’s own death, once he has seen Elizabeth established as the champion of Protestantism against the papist Antichrist.¹⁸⁷ Bateman’s work was the only ‘significant nondramatic Protestant quest allegory before Spenser’, and a work which had an obvious impact on The Faerie Queene.¹⁸⁸

Family connections may also have been important. A case has been made that Spenser could have been related to another branch of the Spenser family, those at Wroughton in Wiltshire, one of whom was a cleric. A contemporary Spenser was Thomas Spenser, archdeacon of Chichester from 1559 until the 1570s, who was ordained by Grindal after he returned from exile, and who would have had a number of acquaintances in common with Edmund, notably Thomas Drant and Alexander Nowell. In a letter of 19 November 1567, Grindal recommended Thomas Spenser to Cecil as a possible bishop of Armagh.¹⁸⁹

Thomas Spenser would have had considerable dealings with another key figure in Edmund Spenser’s early career, Thomas Watts.¹⁹⁰ Watts had taken part in the visitations of the Merchant Taylors’ School at least twice between 1562 and 1565.¹⁹¹ He took a similar ecclesiastical line to Grindal, opposing the imposition of cape and surplice, but believed that church unity was more important than doctrinal belief, arguing that obedience to the crown had to come before individual conscience in this case.¹⁹² He was also important as the benefactor who established the Watts Greek Scholarships financing the university careers of Spenser’s fellow pupils, Lancelot Andrewes and Thomas Dove, probably through his close relationship to Grindal and Young.¹⁹³ Watts appointed Grindal as executor of his will with his wife, Grace, which he made on 23 May 1577, just before he died. Alexander Nowell was to be one of the overseers.¹⁹⁴ Watts cemented his close links to Pembroke by leaving the college his impressive library of Hebrew, Greek, and books in other languages, as well as copies of Erasmus’ complete works, and histories by Polydore Vergil and Richard Grafton.¹⁹⁵

In March 1578, soon after Watts’s death, Grace married Young, a union that coincided with his consecration as bishop of Rochester, a relatively poor bishopric overshadowed by its neighbour, Canterbury.¹⁹⁶ Spenser, therefore, had a number of links to Young through his school and university friendship with Harvey, and, possibly, family connections.¹⁹⁷ He may even have attended the wedding. While the exact links that led to Spenser’s appointment are probably impossible to untangle with any precision, it is clear that a tightly knit group anchored in educational and ecclesiastical institutions worked to procure a placement for one of their own when a position became available, exactly what we should expect in early modern England.¹⁹⁸

It is hard to estimate how close Spenser was to Young. The published correspondence with Harvey indicates that both Spenser and Harvey knew a number of prominent academics. However, many of these were not a great deal older than either of them, whereas Young was about twenty years older than both, halfway between Harvey and Spenser and Sir Thomas Smith, and he had been master of Pembroke while Spenser was an undergraduate. It is hard to imagine that they were very close, and Spenser’s representation of Young as Roffy in the Calender would appear to indicate, at best, qualified respect for an older man rather than warm friendship. In the September eclogue, Diggon Davie, a poor honest shepherd who has just returned from further afield where he lost his flock to rapacious ‘Popish prelates’, offers to tell Hobbinol what he has learned of Roffyn’s recent adventures.¹⁹⁹ Hobbinol describes Roffyn as ‘meeke, wise, and merciable’ (line 174), but the anecdote suggests a more complex picture:

Thilk same shepheard mought I well marke:
He has a Dogge to byte or to barke,
Neuer had shepheard so kene a kurre,
That waketh, and if but a leafe sturre.
Whilome there wonned a wicked Wolfe,
That with many a Lambe had glutted his gulfe.
And euer at night wont to repayre
Vnto the flocke, when the Welkin shone faire,
Ycladde in clothing of seely sheepe,
When the good old man vsed to sleepe.
Tho at midnight he would barke and ball,
(For he had eft learned a curres call.)
As if a Woolfe were emong the sheepe.
With that the shepheard would breake his sleepe,
And send out Lowder (for so his dog hote)
To raunge the fields with wide oppen throte.
Tho when as Lowder was farre awaye,
This Woluish sheepe would catchen his pray,
A Lambe, or a Kidde, or a weanell wast:
With that to the wood would he speede him fast.
Long time he vsed this slippery pranck,
Ere Roffy could for his laboure him thanck.
At end the shepheard his practise spyed,
(For Roffy is wise, and as Argus eyed)
And when at euen he came to the flocke,
Fast in theyr folds he did them locke,
And tooke out the Woolfe in his counterfect cote,
And let out the sheepes bloud at his throte. (lines 180–207)

This praise of Roffyn is perhaps more double-edged than has been noted, and Diggon Davie’s description of the relationship between Roffyn and his dog, Lowder, certainly makes them sound rather like Artegall and Talus in The Faerie Queene, Book V, rooting out dissent and opposition with ruthless efficiency.²⁰⁰ Lowder was probably a reference to a real figure, most likely a chancellor or an archdeacon, the two church officers most closely related to the bishop and responsible for implementing his policies in the diocese, although the records for the Rochester diocese are poor for this period.²⁰¹ The episode perhaps refers to Spenser’s experience of the ecclesiastical courts in Rochester.

The final line cited here seems ambiguous, suggesting that Roffyn cuts the wolf’s throat, which then sprays out sheep’s blood. It recalls an incident early on in The History of Reynard the Fox, a book Spenser would have known, as it was one of the sources for Mother Hubberds Tale, when Reynard, disguised as a priest, seizes Cuwart the Cat by the throat, while pretending to teach him the Credo.²⁰² On the one hand Spenser’s tale might be read as triumphalist Protestant rhetoric, gloating over the fate of the true church’s enemies.²⁰³ This reading would certainly be in line with Young’s own unqualified support of the queen’s ecclesiastical settlement.²⁰⁴ But on the other, the episode might suggest that even wolves are part sheep, indicating the complex post-Reformation world which so many people found hard to understand and negotiate, unsure who they could trust, which of their former neighbours and friends were now heretics and, worst of all, what was the truth and what was heresy.²⁰⁵ The wolves are not quite what they seem, even when stripped bare.²⁰⁶

Neither is a shepherd who lets a dog with ‘wide oppen throte’ roam the fields at night hunting out those who threaten his flock. The description of Roffyn as ‘Argus eyed’ and prepared to do whatever it takes to root out heresy does not make him an obviously attractive character, despite the apparently positive description of him as a ‘good old man’. It is also hard to square the final line cited above with Hobbinol’s judgement that Roffyn is ‘meeke, wise, and merciable’, when he tears open the throat of the disguised wolf himself. The truth may be that perilous times demanded a vigilance that not everyone would understand or appreciate, and Spenser worked for Young nearly a decade after Pius’ ‘Regnans in Excelsis’ had demanded violent opposition to Elizabeth. The Northern Rebellion (1569–70), the Ridolfi Plot (1570), and the execution of Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk (2 June 1572), had been followed by the first entry of Catholic missionaries into England in 1574, a campaign that was to become more concerted and threatening in the 1580s after the arrival of the first Jesuits.²⁰⁷

Perhaps a knowledge of and desire to suppress Catholic activity in Kent and the south-east of England, one of the more literate and obviously Protestant regions of England, lie behind Spenser’s lines.²⁰⁸ Another possibility is that Spenser is referring to Young’s hostile comments on the Family of Love, published as a series of notes at the start of William Wilkinson’s A Confutation of Certaine Articles deliuered unto the Familye of Loue.²⁰⁹ Wilkinson’s work appeared in 1579, the same year as the Calender, when Spenser left the Bishop’s service. It was published by John Day and announced Young’s contribution on the title page: ‘Herunto are prefixed By the right reverend Father in God I. Y. Byshop of Rochester, certaine notes collected out of their Gospell, and answered by the Fam.’ Young’s comments had been written earlier and answered by a Familist, then reprinted by Wilkinson. Wilkinson (c.1551–1613), who had been a student at St John’s College, Cambridge, while Spenser was at Pembroke (Wilkinson matriculated in 1571), was now a schoolteacher in Cambridge and fellow of his college.²¹⁰ He was clearly determined to root out what he saw as the dangerous heresy of the Family of Love because the sect undermined Christian doctrine through its belief in human perfectibility and toleration of Catholicism. English Familists mainly flourished in Cambridgeshire, but they also had a significant presence in many other parts of south-east England.²¹¹

Young’s particular objection to the Familists was that they failed to make proper distinctions and so blurred and confused established boundaries: worst of all, they tolerated Catholics and did not perceive the real danger that the papacy posed to English religion.²¹² In his comments Wilkinson makes a series of more sustained objections: the Familists believe that everyone can be a preacher whereas only a small number of the godly were called to serve Christ; they fail to distinguish between true and false brethren and so are prepared to tolerate heretics such as Anabaptists as well as Catholics; they insist on regarding marriage as a sacrament even though it was no longer an official belief of the reformed church; they disguise their true beliefs and so are untrustworthy; and they think that Adam committed no sin in eating the apple from the tree of knowledge, only Eve, which means that mankind can be perfected without God’s intervention.²¹³ Young is particularly critical of the opinion that the Church of Rome is not Satanic:

First, he calleth the Church of Rome, the communion of all Christians, whereas it is but a particular Church fallen away from the universall Church of Christ …

But most plainly the Author showeth him selfe a frend to the Church of Rome, saying: that many, through contention and discorde did cast of the Church of Rome, and dyd blaspheme her with her ministeries, and of their owne, pretendyng the Scriptures haue brought in other ministeries and Religion: they spoke much of the word of God. Who doubteth that this is the voice and iudgement of Papistes against Protestauntes and true Christians.²¹⁴

For Young, the Familists represent a real danger to Protestant England, and it is a priority to stop them infecting the nation’s social fabric.

Others voiced this opinion throughout Elizabeth’s reign—notably Hatton and Leicester—but no action was ever really taken against the Family of Love, even though many agreed that Familists held heretical views and were rather too close to Catholics in their beliefs.²¹⁵ The truth is that they simply never posed a real threat and there were far too many other aggressively oppositional groups to worry about—from Jesuits to puritans. Instead, the Family were left alone, and many of its members became respectable, often relatively affluent members of provincial society.²¹⁶ It is hard to imagine that Spenser does not have Young’s comments on the Family of Love in mind for the September eclogue given when they were published (which may not, of course, tell the whole story). However, his representation of the bishop is far more nuanced than has generally been realized.²¹⁷ This suggests that despite the common background that Spenser, Harvey, and Young shared, or, even, the close friendship between Harvey and Spenser, they did not necessarily agree on everything, as the Harvey–Spenser Letters indicate. Spenser had known a number of Familists in London, and may have felt that Young’s attack was harsh, misconceived, or even unwarranted. The image of the bishop as a shepherd with an aggressive dog, whose open jaws he imitates when killing the wolf in sheep’s clothing, is not a comfortable one for the reader to appreciate and does not tally with the description of the bishop as meek and full of mercy. It also specifies how the Calender is a nuanced and provocative ecclesiastical work presenting the difficult nature of argument without providing easy answers—yet another reason why its publication was such a momentous event in the history of English literature, and why it needs to be read carefully and cautiously as evidence for Spenser’s life in these lost years.