5
  
To Ireland I

ARTHUR, Lord Grey de Wilton (1536–93) was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland on 15 July 1580, with the explicit instruction that he establish government in Munster.¹ He was not, like many Lord Deputies, necessarily delighted by his appointment, which generally involved hard service and, in extreme cases, accusations of treason and even execution; the risk of illness; and inevitable penury, the crown often failing to remunerate the incumbent adequately, forcing the official to supplement military action through their own finances.² Certainly, Grey complained that he had not been given enough time to prepare for his demanding new role, and he had successfully avoided the job in the early 1570s when he was—or was pretending to be—ill.³ Nevertheless, he had powerful support from Ralegh, Walsingham, and Leicester, and received a long letter of advice from Sir Henry Sidney, Leicester’s brother-in-law, who had served as Lord Deputy three times in the 1560s and 1570s.⁴

Grey came from a military family. His father, William, had a reputation for ruthlessness and had played a prominent role in the bloody suppression of the 1549 rebellion in East Anglia.⁵ Grey was appointed specifically because of his extensive military experience in France and Scotland to counter a serious threat to Tudor rule in Ireland, the second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83).⁶ This particular revolt had broken out in part because the FitzGerald earls of Desmond had felt that their power and authority were threatened by the spread of Tudor rule and the attempt to make the ancient Irish lordships conform to English law, tenancy, and social expectation. Once the Act of the Irish parliament passed on 18 June 1541 had declared that Henry VIII was king rather than lord of Ireland and could command the unconditional obedience of his Irish subjects,⁷ Irish lords had to surrender their titles and have them regranted under new terms and conditions by the English crown. They had, understandably, often resented this change in status and seen crown attempts to regulate them as part of a much more sinister campaign.⁸ The revolt was also a result of the fractious rivalry between the Desmonds and the Ormonds, the two major dynasties in south-west Ireland, one that the Ormonds were always likely to win given their superior power at court and relationship to the queen.⁹

The revolt soon developed into a serious and well-supported rebellion that went beyond the last desperate actions of a dying dynasty.¹⁰ In 1580 the situation looked like the Tudor regime’s worst nightmare: the combination of local hostility with an international Catholic crusade, led by an impassioned zealot, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, eager to draw Irish resistance into a larger assault on the realms of the usurping heretic queen. Although Fitzmaurice was killed in a skirmish on 18 August 1579, his uncle, Gerald Fitzgerald, the fourteenth earl of Desmond (c.1533–83), now reluctantly assumed leadership of the rebellion, and was duly proclaimed a traitor on 2 November 1579.¹¹

Grey appointed Spenser as one of his secretaries immediately afterwards, with a salary of £10 per six months.¹² Spenser was probably recommended to Grey by Leicester and the Sidneys, who would have known him as a writer capable of acting as a secretary from his stay in Leicester House in 1579. It is possible that they had already met, given Grey’s proximity to Leicester and the Sidneys, or even through George Gascoigne, the soldier-poet who was a client of Grey’s and a friend of Gabriel Harvey’s.¹³ Presumably, Spenser was recommended as someone in need of work who was capable of performing secretarial tasks, especially scribal duties, and he had worked hard to represent himself as a capable writer for hire in his first two published works. Spenser probably worked as part of a larger team around the Lord Deputy, in the same way that other secretariats in England functioned, especially as it was the stated aim of many in the English Privy Council to reform Irish government and civil service and make them more like their English counterparts.¹⁴ He was not Grey’s only secretary, as by 1581 Grey also employed Timothy Reynolds, and undoubtedly had other clerks and secretaries in Dublin Castle working for him. Moreover, the consistent handwriting that survives in Grey’s letters to the Privy Council and major political figures in England indicates that Grey had at least another two secretaries copying out documents.¹⁵ Although no trace of his hand survives in any of Grey’s letters, one of these would have been Geoffrey Fenton, who came to Ireland at about the same time as Spenser, and whose life was connected to Spenser’s over the next few years (both were present at the Massacre at Smerwick and both married into the Boyle family), although Fenton soon moved on to higher office.¹⁶ The evidence of the surviving letters suggests that Spenser soon became Grey’s chief secretary and was trusted more than his other secretaries, often being the last to check and seal the Lord Deputy’s letters.¹⁷

We will probably never know whether this was a great opportunity for the newly married poet in need of gainful employment or an effective banishment as a result of offending too many people in his early work, most significantly Leicester rather than the usual suspect, Burghley.¹⁸ In fact, given Burghley’s extensive and well-attested interest in Ireland—he carried Nowell’s superb map of Ireland in his pocket—it is hard to see how Spenser could have obtained this position if he had incurred the hostility of the chief minister at this stage.¹⁹ A secretary was, in fact, an extremely good job, coveted by many, especially writers, scholars, and intellectuals; Henry Cuffe gave up his Oxford chair for a salary of £20 per annum, the same wage that Spenser received for working for Grey.²⁰ Henry Chettle received £25. 5s. from playwriting in 1601–2, probably as large an income as an experienced writer for hire might expect to receive in London at the time.²¹ In general professional salaries for schoolmasters, university lecturers, clergymen, the sort of professions that Spenser could have expected to pursue, ranged from about £10 to £20.²² Lower down the social scale, a good servant, capable of overseeing others, would only have received about £2 per annum in the 1590s.²³ A secretary was also of considerable influence, as many collaborated with their masters in producing letters and documents, often acting as co-authors.²⁴ The role could be seen as a natural continuation of Spenser’s relationship with Harvey, as well as entailing the sort of political influence that Harvey consistently argued that the intellectual deserved.

Spenser was probably made an offer he could not refuse, and, although it may not have been quite what he wanted, Ireland was a land in which fortunes large and small could be made, higher standards of living could be enjoyed, and there was access to property for those without any obvious means of obtaining it in England. Spenser’s Irish career illustrates these possibilities as well as any, given his ultimate acquisition of the Kilcolman estate and marriage into the phenomenally wealthy Boyle family.²⁵ His own writings suggest that he was preparing himself for such a career and using his access to print to advertise his range of skills and availability. As a secretary he would have been able to acquire significant supplies of paper and writing materials. A document written out in 1581 lists payments to the clerks and secretaries, including Bryskett, Reynolds, and Spenser. Spenser received an allowance of £15 a year for ‘paper, yncke and parchment’, a large sum, as it was nearly the same as his annual salary.²⁶ Paper, which had to be imported from Europe, mainly Italy and France, as English paper mills were extremely limited, was relatively expensive.²⁷ A ream (500 sheets) cost between 2s. and 7s. at the end of the sixteenth century, and about the same in Ireland, which suggests that even if Spenser had to buy some expensive paper to send official letters, as well as ink and parchment, he still had a generous amount to spend on rough paper for his own purposes. The cheapest white paper available was about 2s. 6d. a ream in London, and approximately the same in Ireland, according to the Bristol port books accounting for trade with the south-west.²⁸ Nevertheless, Spenser published nothing for the next ten years, a significant lacuna in a writing career that had started with such aplomb. This hiatus can partly be explained by the significant demands that his working life placed upon him, and would further indicate that his work had caused offence in 1579–80 and that only when he had freed himself of the need for dependence on patrons did Spenser feel able to place his work before the public once again.

Grey travelled to Ireland from Beaumaris, Anglesey, about 10 August 1580. He had already been on the Welsh island for about a month, partly delayed by unfavourable winds, a common problem. Grey was also waiting for his army from Berwick to arrive and his army from Wales to assemble so that they could join with an army that had marched the 225 miles from London. There was an understandable swell of ill feeling, especially as shelter and provisions were inadequate for the soldiers and their families who had travelled with them, as was often the case.²⁹ The company sailed in the Handmaid and arrived on 12 August in Dublin where Grey took up his residence in Dublin Castle (Plate 12). Spenser would have been among the Lord Deputy’s entourage and he would probably have started his new life taking rooms in the castle, just as he had lived in Leicester House when in the earl’s service. Whether Machabyas sailed with her husband we do not know, but she either came with him then, or joined him later, perhaps when he finally acquired a house.

An Act of the Privy Council (29 August) records that Grey’s wife was granted forty-two horses to help convey her belongings to port ready to travel to Ireland, so she clearly sailed after her husband, obviously in part due to the short notice of his appointment.³⁰ Moreover, there is a funeral monument in Christ Church Cathedral to two of Grey’s sons, who died while the family lived in Dublin.³¹ The Spensers’ first two children, Sylvanus and Katherine, appear to have made their adult lives in Ireland and so would have lived there as children, which they would probably not have done had the Spensers remained apart. Nevertheless, the fact that the couple only had two children who lived into adulthood may be of significance. Possibly some did not survive long or Machabyas suffered a number of spontaneous abortions, as would have been common. England had a relatively low fertility rate compared to the rest of Europe, owing to prolonged practices of breastfeeding, but even so women tended to conceive nearly every year. Moreover, London women tended to make more use of wet nurses and so conceive more frequently than their provincial counterparts. The evidence suggests that either the Spensers lived apart or that Machabyas was not especially healthy, which a move to Ireland, notorious for a damp climate that often had a fatal impact on English settlers, would not have helped.³²

Grey, noted for his decisive, often impetuous, style of commandment, decided to confront the rebel armies immediately. As his letters invariably reveal, he was a confident, straightforward man who saw the world in terms of black and white and who was unable to understand why anyone could see matters differently, reflecting his military training and outlook. As his later actions demonstrate, he had no time for opposition to the queen. Spenser saw the world in far more complex terms, but his loyalty to Grey probably reflects the fact that his employer was nothing if not consistent and was certainly keen to look after those in his employ whom he trusted, one of whom was Spenser.

Grey should probably have waited until he understood Irish conditions better before engaging the Irish in battle, but he decided that he should meet the threat of the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles to the south of Dublin in August.³³ Military campaigns were not like those fought against regular armies on the Continent, but messy skirmishes and ambushes. The Irish, used to raiding rather than fighting pitched battles, and less well equipped than their English counterparts, generally relied on speed and stealth to attack English forces. Irish armies largely consisted of kerns, on foot and on horse, lightly armed soldiers who fought without armour or helmets, and who were especially effective when their enemies had little room for manoeuvre, and gallowglasses, Scottish mercenaries, mainly from the Hebrides, also armed with axes, spears, and two-handed swords, who were especially effective against cavalry.³⁴ Sudden attacks took place in woods, which were especially dangerous places, and valleys. Grey’s first engagement with the Irish was the disastrous defeat at Glenmalure in the Wicklow Mountains on 25 August when, after a tiring climb in full armour, the regimented English were easily picked off in the narrow glen by the mobile Irish enemy led by Fiach MacHugh, elected chief of the O’Byrnes and the most dangerous military figure in the O’Byrne and O’Toole lordships.³⁵ Out of a force of about 2,000 men the English suffered more than 100 casualties before retreating to Dublin—hardly a decisive defeat, but a costly and embarrassing setback against a force that numbered no more than 700. The battle merited a prominent description in the Annals of the Four Masters.³⁶

Spenser undoubtedly accompanied Grey on his first military excursion. He refers directly to the defeat in his account of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway in The Faerie Queene, referring to the ‘balefull Oure, late staind with English blood’ (FQ IV.xi.44, line 5) (the river does look red because of the clay soil through which it flows) (Plate 13). In A View Spenser makes a characteristic quibble/pun, referring to ‘the strengthe and greate fastnes of Glan malour’, an evil place and an evil time, which the rebel Hugh McShane used to build up his power: ‘Adioyneth vnto his howsse of Ballinecorre drewe vnto him manye theves and Outlawes which fled vnto the succour of that glenne as to a Sanctuarye and broughte vnto him parte of that spoile of all the Countrie thoroughe which he grewe stronge and in shorte space got vnto himself a greate name therby amongst the Irishe.’³⁷ In the 1590s the enemy was the O’Neills so Spenser concentrates on their threat to the crown (Hugh McShane was the cousin of Hugh O’Neill). Nevertheless, the reference is also to Grey’s defeat, the word ‘balefull’ in the poem providing a gloss for ‘malour’ in A View, indicating that this first observation of Irish warfare imprinted itself on Spenser’s imagination.³⁸ Given his trenchant defence of Grey in A View, it is hardly surprising that he does not discuss the defeat, surviving as little more than a ghostly presence, a reminder of what could go wrong.

The first recorded acts of Spenser’s new job are copies of letters from Hugh Maginnis to the Lord Deputy complaining about the attacks on his lands in County Down by Turlough Luineach O’Neill and appealing for help, dated 29 August; and a letter dated 31 August containing similar appeals for help from Hugh O’Neill, Baron of Dungannon, warning that Turlough was planning to ‘invade the pale’ (Figure 5).³⁹ These apparently minor documents provide a sense of the murky and confused nature of Irish political life. Both O’Neill and Maginnis were clients of the crown who had sworn an oath of obedience to the queen and agreed to rule their tenants according to the English model, giving them established plots legally recorded, charging rents, and settling them in particular areas rather than permitting the more flexible Irish model of tenancy.⁴⁰ Here, they are also trying to exploit the crown forces in their own struggles with their neighbours, a tactic that must have been obvious to Grey. Spenser clearly worked as Grey’s copyist in this early period of his service, a role that was menial, as befitted a new secretary, but also intimate, one reason why he was undoubtedly required to accompany his master on his various expeditions around Ireland and acquired a personal knowledge of the country’s geography alongside his use of maps and other topographical aids.⁴¹

Spenser was trusted with the distribution of concordatum, ‘a special fund at the disposal of the Lord Lieutenant and Council for payment of extraordinary expenditure’.⁴² Between September 1580, soon after he arrived in Dublin, and August 1582, when his term as Grey’s secretary ended, Spenser appears to have been responsible for the payment of nearly £600 to messengers, a huge sum, which indicates that he inspired the trust of his superiors, was a relatively senior figure already among the civil servants working in Dublin, and became used early on to seeing large amounts of money change hands. The task would also have sharpened his awareness of the topography and navigable routes in Ireland. The same document also records a payment to Spenser of £20 per annum, necessary for a secretary attending the Lord Deputy and Council.⁴³ It is hard to believe that such money was simply for travel expenses, as it was another year’s salary. Probably Spenser had to buy clothes and conduct himself in a grander manner than he had been used to in provincial England, and the large sum was to enable him to fulfil his new status.

Grey had not yet been invested as Lord Deputy because his predecessor, Sir William Pelham, Lord Justice of Ireland, had not returned to Dublin from his ruthless campaign against the rebels in Munster. Pelham’s actions, hanging scores of rebels, destroying crops and villages, and massacring the inhabitants of Carrigafoyle Castle on 27 March, created the terrifying wilderness that was unable to support its considerable population described in one of the most memorable passages in A View.⁴⁴ The Annals of the Four Masters saw Pelham’s actions as a new departure in Irish warfare:

Figure 5. Hugh O’Neill to Lord Grey, 31 August 1580. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Archives.

The lord justice proceeded with all his forces … they gave no mercy to rich or poor that came in their way. It was not surprising to kill those who were able to make resistance, but they also slew the blind and infirm, women, sons, and daughters, the sick, the feeble, and the old; their wealth and properties were carried away to the camp where the lord justice was; great numbers of English fell by those who were endeavouring to recover their plundered property.⁴⁵

Pelham’s decision to refuse to let a rebel surrender unless he could produce evidence of having slain another rebel of higher rank became known as ‘Pelham’s Pardon’ and set the style for the rest of the protracted campaign in the south-west, although Pelham’s tactics were to be pushed to the limits by Lord Grey during his two-year deputyship.⁴⁶ Pelham eventually returned to Dublin on 6 September bringing the sword of state.⁴⁷ The day before he had complained that a letter written by Grey’s secretary—probably Spenser, given his role in Grey’s bureaucracy—was not ‘considerately written’, which was more likely a criticism of the Lord Deputy’s lack of deference than a comment on Spenser’s handwriting or his command of epistolatory etiquette.

The next day Grey was invested as Lord Deputy in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (Plate 14), an event Spenser would have attended. The sword of state was presented to Grey by Sir Henry Wallop, the under-treasurer, another figure to whom Spenser appears to have been especially close, and with whom he worked from the start of his time in Ireland.⁴⁸ Wallop was responsible for overseeing Spenser’s distribution of the concordata to official messengers.⁴⁹ Two days later, on 9 September, Grey set off on a second military excursion to the northern reaches of the Pale at Drogheda, to inspect the fortifications and to bring Turlough to heel, but he had retired by the time they reached the city. Spenser would also have attended the Lord Deputy on this journey. Meanwhile, Pelham was taken ill and returned to England in early October.⁵⁰

Campaigning in Ireland was invariably a brutal affair which took its toll on even experienced soldiers used to physical discomfort and harsh conditions.⁵¹ There was no standing army, so military forces depended on conscripts, levied by muster masters throughout the shires of England, which were each given a quota to recruit, and which they often made up by enlisting criminals, vagabonds, and masterless men.⁵² There was a strict and efficient command structure, the result of reforms made during Elizabeth’s reign, with the commander having under him a general of the foot and a lieutenant general of the horse. A marshal and provost-marshal (the position Barnabe Googe secured in Connaught and Thomond) determined the locations of camps and enforced discipline. Beneath them other soldiers performed specific tasks: the sergeant major-general assembled battle forces; the scout-master, reconnaissance operations; the forage-master, securing and distributing victuals; and the carriage-master, transport. But, despite this disciplined organization, transporting troops and equipment, especially large field guns for siege warfare, around a boggy, wet, and inhospitable country with a hostile population, was a major logistical problem. Artillery, which often proved ineffective in battle anyway, frequently sank and got stuck in the muddy Irish roads. Camps were primitive and uncomfortable, and it was invariably difficult to find food, the native population being sparse and exceptionally mobile. Pay, equipment, and supplies were invariably badly distributed, or purloined by corrupt officials, usually the captains in charge of each company, and impoverished soldiers tended to sell their uniforms for food. Although soldiers were supposed to be mainly English, and laws and ordinances were passed to allow only limited numbers to join the ranks, a large number of the English army were Irish. Desertion was a major problem, as was disease, the main cause of death for English soldiers unable to cope with the damp climate. Running even a relatively small-scale campaign in Ireland was incredibly expensive. While the crown complained of ever-increasing costs, the military felt that the army was not adequately supported, given the major tasks it was assigned.

In the autumn of 1580 the situation in Munster was reaching crisis point. Although ships had been sent to intercept them, a small armada carrying a force of perhaps as many as 800 Spanish and Italian papal troops landed in Smerwick Harbour in Dingle on 12–13 September, joining the Irish troops already there, who had established earthwork fortifications on a promontory on the west side of Smerwick Harbour, on the site known as Dunanoir, the Golden Fort.⁵³ Although protected from the elements and with good visibility, enabling the defenders to observe ships coming into the harbour as well as troops coming towards them using the only logical route over the Slieve Mish Mountains, the fort was conspicuously isolated and the expedition force was vulnerable if not supported by reinforcements from land or sea.⁵⁴ A contemporary Spanish map shows that its precarious position was well understood, the cartographer representing the fort as ‘virtually an island except for a narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland’.⁵⁵ An English map shows a similar picture with the fort vulnerable to a combined land and sea assault (Figure 6).⁵⁶ It had been noted earlier that year that the rebels were likely to try and establish a base there and Pelham had inspected the fort in early July. He found it, ominously for the later expeditionary force, ‘a vain toy, and of little importance, in which place no man could hide himself but that in the hill adjoining he was subject to all shot, small or great’.⁵⁷

Grey’s response was, as might have been expected, immediate. If the papal troops could join up with local rebels the situation in Ireland could become desperate for its English rulers, given the unrest in Ulster and Leinster which threatened the borders of the Pale. A month after he had been installed as Lord Deputy, Grey marched down to Cork, leaving Dublin on 6 October. We can be sure that Spenser was with him, as there are letters in his hand, which were written while on the campaign.⁵⁸ On 17 October the army left Cork, marched north to Limerick, and then on to Smerwick, arriving there on the 31st.⁵⁹ It must have been on this journey that Spenser first witnessed the effects of the wars on the local population in one of the key passages in A View written more than fifteen years later, although later he would have seen the even more terrifying effects of Grey’s scorched earth policies in 1581–2, as witnessed by Warham St Leger, who Spenser knew well.⁶⁰ Irenius predicts that the military action he suggests is necessary to end Tyrone’s latest challenge to crown authority will not last long because of the terrible effects of conflict:

Figure 6. Map of Smerwick Harbour, 1580. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Maritime Museum.

The profe whearof I sawe sufficientlye ensampled in | Those late wars of mounster, for notwithstandinge that the same was a moste ritche and plentifull Countrye ful of Corne and Cattell that ye woulde haue thoughte they Coulde haue bene able to stande longe yeat ere one yeare yeat ere one yeare and a haulfe they weare broughte to soe wonderfull wretchedness as that anie stonie harte would haue rewed the same. Out of euerie Corner of the woods and glinnes they Came Crepinge for the vppon theire handes for theire Legs Coulde not beare them, they loked lkike Anotomies of deathe, they spake like ghostes Cryinge out of theire graues, they did eate the dead Carrions, hapie wheare they Coulde finde them, Yea and one another sone after, in so muche as the verye carcasses of water Cresses or Shamarocks theare they flocked as to a feaste for the time, yeat not able longe to Continve therewithal, that in shorte space theare weare non allmoste lefte and a moste populous and plentifull Countrye sodenlye lefte voide of man or beaste, yeat sure in al that warr theare perished not manie by the sworde but al by the extremitye of famine which they themselves had wroughte.⁶¹

This is an extraordinary passage, a rhetorical tour de force, that still has the power to shock, as it was obviously designed to when written in the 1590s. Spenser has deliberately crafted a series of details that authenticate Irenius’ status as a privileged eyewitness to the terrible events: the crawling, the cannibalism, the desperate foraging for plants to sustain life in a once abundant and fertile area. And yet, even though he can accurately recall the carnage of the Desmond Rebellion, Irenius/Spenser defends the brutal tactics pursued by Pelham and Grey. The text is clear that the responsibility lies with the rebels themselves. Spenser was hardly the first to argue this way or to use terror to subdue the native population: Sir Humphrey Gilbert made visitors to his headquarters at Kilmallok approach him along a path marked by poles on which were placed the heads of rebels before they could surrender to him and John Derricke ended his defence of Sir Henry Sidney’s period as Lord Deputy, The Image of Ireland, with a long lament by the dead Rory Oge O’More warning others not to threaten the crown or they too would find their severed heads mounted on the walls of Dublin Castle.⁶² But Spenser is going a stage further than merely showing that it is important to take drastic measures pour encourager les autres. He is demonstrating the benefits of his humanist-inspired education, showing that he can think through serious, difficult, and disturbing problems. If England wants to maintain its hold over Ireland and to spread the benefits of its civilization to the Irish, then policies that might seem unthinkable to most English men and women will have to be pursued. In order to salvage the sa(l)vage island, a pun Spenser makes in both A View and The Faerie Queene, savage methods will prove necessary.⁶³ The longer-term benefits will outweigh the costs, but in the short term it might be hard to see the purpose of so much death or where the destruction will end.

Spenser had clearly read Erasmus’ adage, ‘Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’ (war is sweet to the ignorant) and here outlines the full horror of war in order to show that the apparent victims are the ones who have failed to understand its grim reality.⁶⁴ Accordingly, Irenius can support the terror tactics of Pelham, actions that also make those of Grey seem more plausible and reasonable in contrast. The adage appears to have been appropriated by those around Grey as a means of defending their behaviour and tactics.⁶⁵ Earlier, Gascoigne had appealed to Grey for patronage as one old soldier to another in his poem founded on the same adage, which recounted his experiences with Grey in the Netherlands (1572–4).⁶⁶ The poem was based on the assumption that both men shared a distaste for war, but realized what had to be done, praising Grey as ‘an universall patrone of all Souldiours’.⁶⁷ It opens with lines that claim that only those who know war can write about it with understanding, a deft appropriation of Erasmus’ rather more obviously pacifist argument, later followed by Spenser: ‘To write of Warre and wote not what it is, | Nor ever yet could march where War was made, | May well be thought a worke begonne amis’ (lines 1–3). Spenser would have read Gascoigne’s poem when it appeared in 1575, although Harvey noted in his copy of Gascoigne’s Poesies: ‘A sory resolution for owre Netherland Soldiours. A good pragmatique Discourse; but vnseasonable, & most vnfitt for a Captain, or professed Martialist.’⁶⁸

Spenser’s description of the massacre, especially if read alongside others in A View, further testifies to the profound impact that his first few months in Ireland had on his imagination.⁶⁹ Certainly the horror of the account of the famine is a world away from the irreverent banter of the Letters or the literary pyrotechnics of the Calender. Within three and a half months Spenser had been transported from the city of his birth, taken up residence in a foreign capital (at a time when few Englishmen outside the aristocracy and the military travelled at all), been present at a spectacular military disaster, and marched with an army some 300 miles through hostile territory laid waste, in which he had witnessed the terrible effects of early modern military operations. But worse was to come.

On 29 September an English naval detachment of nine ships led by Admiral William Winter set out for the Fort D’Oro.⁷⁰ The first ship of the flotilla, the Swiftsure, commanded by Richard Bingham, reached Smerwick Harbour on 7 November, the same day that Grey’s army arrived. Some minor skirmishes were fought while the Swiftsure fired at the fort. During one of these, John Cheke, son of the Greek scholar John Cheke, was killed, the only English casualty, according to both Grey and Geoffrey Fenton.⁷¹ The rest of the ships arrived on the 9th., and unloaded a number of heavy cannon. The fort was then bombarded from land and sea for a day.⁷² The garrison commander, Colonel Sebasiano di San Giuseppi, realized that his position was hopeless, as it had been for at least a month in the absence of major reinforcements, and he started to entreat Grey for favourable terms of surrender on the 10th. Grey accepted terms of unconditional surrender, which he clearly felt gave him the right to dispose of the inhabitants of the fort as he saw fit, whereas his enemies expected to be granted mercy and then imprisoned.⁷³ Grey’s own account of his actions, in his letter to the queen (12 November), copied out by Spenser in his best italic hand, leaves few questions unanswered (Figure 7). When he learned that the troops had been sent by the Pope for the defence of the Catholic faith, Grey was incensed, claiming that if they had been sent by a prince who had declared war on Elizabeth, he would have, at least, understood their reasons for being in Ireland, but they have obeyed the orders of ‘a detestable shaveling the right Antichriste & generall ambitious Tyrant ouer all right principalities, & patrone of the Diabolica fede’. Accordingly,

At my handes no condition of composition they were to expecte, other then that simply they should render me the forte, & yield theyr selues to my will for lyfe or death: with this answere he [‘Alexandro their CampMaster’] departed; after which there was one or twoo courses two and fro more to haue gotten a certainty for some of their liues, but fynding that yt would not bee, the Coronell him selfe about Sunne setting came forth, & requested respitt with surceasse of armes till the nexte morning, & then he would giue a resolute answere; fynding that to bee but a gayne of tyme for them & losse of the same for my self, I definitely answered I would not graunt yt, & therefore presently either that he tooke my offer or elles retourne & I would fall to my business. He then embraced my knees, simply putting him self to my mercy, onely he prayed that for the night hee might abyde in the Forte, and that in the morning all should be putt into my handes … Morning come I presented my companies in battaile before the Forte: the Coronell comes forth with x or xij of his chiefe ientlemen, trayling theyr ensigns roled vp, & presented them vnto mee with theyr liues & the Forte: I sent straight certain gentlemen in to see their weapons and armures layed downe & to gard the munition & victaile there lefte for spoile: Then putt I in to certeyn bandes, who straight fell to execution. There were 600 slayne.⁷⁴

‘Grey’s faith’, his betrayal of the prisoners in his charge who believed that he would spare their lives, became notorious throughout Catholic Europe, and the dead priests and Catholic gentlemen, whose bones were broken on a blacksmith’s forge before they were executed, were afforded the status of martyrs for the faith. For Philip O’Sullivan Beare, the act ‘became a proverb for monstrous and inhuman perfidy’, an indication of how the Protestant English treated the Catholic Irish.⁷⁵ There was a vigorous English defence of Grey’s actions in print, probably written by Anthony Munday, followed later by a more general defence of English actions against papal threats to England and Ireland by Burghley himself, the existence of this propaganda war indicating how controversial such massacres were.⁷⁶

Figure 7. Lord Grey to the queen, 12 November 1580. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Archives.

Grey’s explanation of his actions relies on three crucial points. First, did he ever really promise mercy to the occupants of the fort? Grey is quite clear that he did not and expected them to surrender on any terms. Certainly, his emphatic recall that he ‘definitely answered’ that he would not grant them mercy looks like an anticipation of future criticism, or a response to a condemnation already made. And, of course, it is possible that Grey is overly clarifying what was ambiguous at the time, although this is unlikely given the desperate surrender of Colonel San Giuseppi and the fact that there appears to have been serious opposition to his plan to trust to Grey’s mercy.⁷⁷ Second, what were the ‘one or twoo courses’ that would have saved at least some of the lives of the papal and Irish forces? No evidence can tell us whether such a possibility was really communicated to the colonel, or whether Grey was serious that some form of action on the part of the defenders might have changed his subsequent response. Third, and most important, was this a legitimate act of war under the circumstances or should we label it, as we would now, a ‘war crime’?⁷⁸

There had been appalling massacres before this point, notably the slaughter of the Ulster Scots by Walter Devereux, earl of Essex and Sir John Norris on Rathlin Island in July 1575; and at Mullaghmast, in 1577, when Rory Oge O’More’s supporters were lured into an ambush in County Kildare, an action celebrated in John Derricke’s The Image of Ireland.⁷⁹ The Rathlin Island massacre, in particular, forms an almost exact parallel to that at Smerwick. The constable on the island ‘came out, and made large requests, as their lives, their goods, and to be put into Scotland’. These were refused, the company surrendered unconditionally, and were then slaughtered, as were those found hiding in caves later.⁸⁰ Moreover, as David Edwards points out, Grey, despite his self-styled reputation as ‘chief executioner of Ireland’, had far less ‘rebel blood on his hands’ than Thomas Butler, tenth earl of Ormond (1531–1614), a cousin of the queen through the Boleyns, who was often at court, and, with the decline of the Geraldines, became unquestionably the most powerful magnate in Munster.⁸¹ Indeed, it was Ormond who oversaw the defeat of the rebellion and the fall of the House of Desmond in 1583, events he helped to engineer.⁸² Pelham, a ruthless commander himself, recommended Ormond as a suitable commander against Desmond.⁸³ Violence was becoming ever more endemic and pronounced in late sixteenth-century Irish society, as Spenser’s record of Pelham’s actions in Munster indicates, especially after the declaration of martial law in Munster on 11 January 1580.⁸⁴ This allowed crown officers to torture and execute suspected traitors without trial and to burn and destroy their lands.⁸⁵ One estimate of casualties in the wars in Munster between 1579 and 1583 puts them as high as 50,000, about a third of the Munster population and a tenth of the whole population of Ireland (Munster contained about a third of the population).⁸⁶ Grey’s actions, horrifying as they were, can be seen on the one hand as one of a number of atrocity stories that make up Irish history; and, on the other, as an element of the increasingly brutal religious conflict that was developing in the wake of the Reformation, ‘a deliberate act of exemplary terror, designed to discourage further incursions’.⁸⁷ The defence of and the attack on ‘Grey’s faith’ needs to be seen in terms of the growing irreconcilable differences between confessional allegiances in early modern Europe.⁸⁸

Spenser was certainly caught up in the verbal battles, and made vigorous public defences of his former employer in both A View and the second edition of The Faerie Queene. In the poem he represented Grey at times as Artegall, the Knight of Justice, distancing the Lord Deputy from his violent actions by portraying him restraining his loyal servant, the iron man, Talus; elsewhere as Zele, arguing for the death of Mary Queen of Scots, as Grey had done when serving as a commissioner for Mary’s trial in 1586.⁸⁹ However, it is noticeable that there is no defence of Grey’s actions at Smerwick in the poem, which may be an indication of how controversial these were still deemed to have been over fifteen years later. In A View, however, a work designed for manuscript circulation not publication, Spenser tackles the question directly in the passage immediately after the horrifying description of the Munster famine, which provides the crucial context for Grey’s behaviour in Ireland. Spenser’s description of the course of events tallies with that of the Lord Deputy, which is hardly surprising as Spenser wrote out Grey’s original letter. In Spenser’s account the colonel

Came forthe to entreate that they mighte parte with theire Armours like souldiours, at leaste with theire lives accordinge to the Customes of war and lawe of nacions, it was strongelye denied him and tolde him by the Lord deputye him self that they Coulde not iustlye pleade either Custome of war or lawe of nacions, for that they weare not anie lawfull enemyes, and if theye weare willed them to shewe by what Commission they | Came thither into another Princes dominions to war whether from the Pope or the kinge of Spaine or any other … whearevppon the saide Coronell did absolutelye yealde himselfe and the forte with all therein and Craved onely mercye, which it beinge not thoughte good to shewe them bothe for dauger of themselues if beinge saved, they shoulde afterwards ioyne with the Irishe … theare was no other waie but to make that shorte ende of them which was made.⁹⁰

Spenser’s euphemistic final line serves as a pointed contrast to his more explicit references elsewhere, notably of the effects of the Munster famine. But it is noticeable that, apart from some minor confusion about names, Spenser’s account tallies exactly with that of Grey.⁹¹ Irenius even repeats for emphasis the fact that the ‘adventurours’ appealed to their status as lawful enemies under the law of nations, a claim Grey had rejected on the logical grounds that no war had been declared between England and Italy or Spain. Spenser follows suit. The implication of Spenser’s defence is clear enough: however unpalatable Grey’s methods might seem, they are the right ones to use in times of crisis, and what Grey did in Munster in 1580 must be repeated against the even greater threat of Tyrone.⁹²

Irenius also argues that Grey was harshly criticized for his actions: ‘moste vntrewlye and malitiouslye do these evill tonges backebite and slaunder the sacred ashes of that most honourable personage’, echoing his earlier praise of Grey as a wise pilot of state in a tempestuous storm. Eudoxus is relieved that Grey has at last been properly valued, as he has ‘harde it often times maligned and his doinges depraved of some whom I perceaued did rather of malicious minde or private grevaunce seke to detract from the honour of his deds’.⁹³ The representation of Slander and Detraction attacking the Knight of Justice, Artegall, at the end of Book V of The Faerie Queene seems to echo this description of the maligned Lord Deputy.⁹⁴ Spenser is the earliest—perhaps the only—real source for our understanding that Grey was criticized and then recalled early from Ireland before his mission was finished, a claim later made more substantial by William Camden: ‘Neuerthelesse, the Queen, who from her heart detested to vse cruelty to those that yeelded, wished that the slaughter had not beene, and was with much difficultie appeased and satisfied about it.’⁹⁵ In fact, it is more likely that Grey’s office was terminated for reasons other than this particular incident in the campaign. When he was recalled, the queen made a point of thanking Grey for his services at Smerwick but expressing some concern over the financial wisdom of his tenure. And, it is more feasible that the number of executions he carried out after Smerwick would have caused her alarm as the queen was wary of her commanders assuming excessive executive power.⁹⁶ Grey’s relatively brief period as Lord Deputy witnessed the first attempt to establish systematic plantations in Ireland in Munster, a costly enterprise, the significance of which only emerged later, and it is likely that this policy, which produced no obvious short-term results, irritated his masters as much as the slaughter of the Irish. The Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, condemned Grey’s actions to Burghley, but, although Burghley, too, was critical of Grey in private, he stood by him in public.⁹⁷ It was the intervention of the most powerful figure in south-west Ireland that really undermined Grey’s reputation at court and afterwards.⁹⁸

The earl of Ormond had a long history of fractious relations with a succession of Lord Deputies, who were invariably eager to curb what they saw as his excessive power, but also resentful of his particular influence at court and with the queen.⁹⁹ Ormond wished to preserve ‘the principles of aristocratic delegation and devolution’, while the Deputies ‘were inclined to interfere in the running of his territory [the significant county of Kilkenny, as well as the Palatinate in Tipperary] in order to reveal it as a place where forces hostile to the crown lurked and plotted under the earl’s nose’.¹⁰⁰ Ormond’s greatest achievement was his success in keeping the Butlers’ vast lands in Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford, out of the conflict, and it is clear that he was prepared to act on behalf of the crown against his neighbours in order to secure peace and relative prosperity for his own people, the results of which are still visible today. The former Ormond lands still have their medieval village and land structures, in contrast to the rest of southern Ireland.¹⁰¹

Grey tried to undermine Ormond’s reputation with Elizabeth, deliberately failing to forward details of Ormond’s military successes so that the queen, as Ormond later complained, obtained ‘false reports … of my slackness in service’.¹⁰² The plan badly misfired. When Ormond eventually managed to reach the court he persuaded Elizabeth that he was the man to bring order to the province and that Grey’s financial mismanagement and his taste for apparently random summary executions was undermining the queen’s reputation for impartial justice.¹⁰³ The problem was that Ormond had such influence with the queen that he ‘could break the government of lord deputies’.¹⁰⁴ Spenser’s relationship with Ormond, expressed in his dedicatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene, was, predictably enough, somewhat wary.¹⁰⁵

Spenser’s defence of Grey is far more substantial and unequivocal than his defence of Bishop John Young, and forms a pointed contrast to his public pronouncements about Leicester and Burghley. Spenser, like many other New English settlers in Ireland, including his friend Lodowick Bryskett (c.1546–1609/12), was grateful to Grey as a Lord Deputy who defended their interests against more powerful lobbies at court—such as Ormond—and the encroachments of the native Irish. Another settler, Richard Beacon, praised Grey as a governor who forced the Irish to obey the English through his ‘rare skill and knowledge in military discipline’.¹⁰⁶ Grey was also a generous patron of and friend to a number of writers, including George Gascoigne, George Whetstone, and Richard Robinson. Gascoigne, in particular, appears to have been close to Grey, and he dedicated a poem to him, but Gascoigne was from a significantly higher social class than Spenser—and, indeed, than Gabriel Harvey, Richard Mulcaster, and Sir Thomas Smith. His father was a substantial landowner of the Home Counties, and had served as almoner at the coronation of Edward VI, just as his grandfather had done at the coronations of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.¹⁰⁷ Spenser was probably more of a trusted servant than an equal. Nevertheless, Grey appears to have been especially successful at inspiring loyalty from those who served with him and, certain failures apart, was usually a successful commander and at ease in the martial world.

Spenser’s defence appeared after Grey’s death (1593) and was dictated by the more specific purpose of A View, so that it does not reveal an intimate understanding of his master’s thoughts on any issue. We cannot infer from what Spenser writes that he personally liked Grey, or enjoyed his confidence, beyond his role as Grey’s official letter writer. Spenser was connected to many men who espoused Grey’s brand of ecclesiastical Protestantism, but it is not obvious from his writings that he adopted an identical religious position.¹⁰⁸ Moreover, his defence of Grey is careful to make no mention of religion. Certainly, Spenser’s respect for Grey looks markedly different from his publicly advertised friendship with Harvey.

In Book V of The Faerie Queene Spenser makes an explicit connection between the poet and the soldier.¹⁰⁹ Having just defeated Malengin, the shape-shifter who represents crafty and devious subversion, specifically in Ireland, Artegall and Talus return to the court of Mercilla where they are greeted by blank incomprehension from the courtiers there.¹¹⁰ They then encounter a particularly disturbing sight:

They [the courtiers] ceast their clamors vpon them to gaze;
Whom seeing all in armour bright as day,
Straunge there to see, it did them much amaze,
And with vnwonted terror halfe affray.
For neuer saw they there the like array.
Ne euer was the name of warre there spoken,
But ioyous peace and quietnesse alway,
Dealing iust iudgements, that mote not be broken
For any brybes, or threates of any to be wroken.

There as they entred at the Scriene, they saw
Some one, whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle
Nayld to a post, adiudged so by law:
For that therewith he falsely did reuyle,
And foule blaspheme that Queene for forged guyle,
Both with bold speaches, which he blazed had,
And with lewd poems, which he did compyle;
For the bold title of a Poet bad
He on himselfe had ta’en, and rayling rymes had sprad. (FQ V.ix.24–5)

Read superficially, these stanzas look like praise of the stability of the Elizabethan regime. But they are, of course, bitterly ironic. The courtiers are rendered speechless as the knights enter, obviously terrified of men in military uniform, and have no idea of who the knights are or what they do, not realizing that their safety depends on the actions of men like Artegall. They never speak about war, which enables them to imagine that it does not really exist, although the reader would have known that in 1596 a frightening and bloody war, the outcome of which was far from certain, was being fought in Ireland. Grey’s defence of his actions was that the troops who landed at Smerwick were not legitimate enemies but rebels against the crown, i.e., they were waging war in an underhand manner and so risked forfeiting their lives. Such distinctions, vital for the protection of the realm, are lost on those at the court itself, so it is little wonder that they condemn Grey, that the queen is badly advised, and that she therefore acts to undermine rather than secure the safety of her realms.

Spenser is articulating sentiments similar to those of Gascoigne in his poem on Erasmus’ adage where he asserts that soldiers do not wish to fight but recognize what has to be done; moreover, he is defining himself as an ‘at war’ poet, whose work is directly relevant to the current conflict.¹¹¹ The second half of the first stanza cited here is therefore openly sarcastic, representing the courtiers as self-interested creatures who take bribes and do not deal just judgements (how can they when they have no idea what really goes on in the world?). The contrast drawn between the useless indoor courtiers and the vigorous knights in the field, shows that the dangers suffered by the latter are exploited by the former. The ill-used knights find themselves caught between the ignorant Irish, who do not realize the perils of war, and the deluded courtiers, who do not even know what a war is.

The second stanza must surely be a self-representation, as Spenser had by this time been censured and censored for his publication of the Complaints.¹¹² In trying to tell the truth the fictionalized poet is seen as a figure of guile, like Malengin, whereas he is really a truth-teller trying to do the right thing. Courtiers are shown to be at odds with soldiers and poets, the former ruling without insight or reason, the latter united in their efforts to make their rulers see sense. Indeed, we also witness Mercilla/Elizabeth’s court as a centre in disarray that has lost touch with reality. The magnificent porch through which the knights enter is guarded by Awe, whose job is to ‘keepe out guyle, and malice, and despight’ (22, line 7), providing an exact verbal link to the first line of headnote to the canto which informs us that ‘Arthur and Artegall catch Guyle’. The court imagines that it is keeping out Guile but it fails to recognize or reward those who really do perform that difficult task. For Spenser, the court had no knowledge of war or understanding of literature, and he carefully links the two as activities that are treated with contempt by the court at a crucial allegorical point in his magnum opus. In his published work after he went to Ireland Spenser was always loyal to the military men with whom he worked, often seeing the world as they saw it, and setting his stall against powerful courtiers, aristocrats, and clerics. His Irish experiences changed his understanding of England and English society, and witnessing the Massacre at Smerwick—or, perhaps, having to defend it—played a pivotal role in his life.

Spenser would also have met Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618) at Smerwick, a figure who is usually assumed to have been a close friend and a major influence on Spenser’s life, rivalling that of Harvey.¹¹³ Ralegh was another military figure who, after a certain amount of experience in the Low Countries, had been placed in charge of carrying out the killing of Italian, Spanish, and Irish forces.¹¹⁴ He had taken a commission as a captain in the army after a fractious time at court and, like Spenser, had just come over to Ireland.¹¹⁵ Ralegh, from a family of seafarers and adventurers, was eager to obtain land in the Munster area, and later negotiated with Grey to receive confiscated lands there, although his wish was not granted until 1586 when he obtained the largest part of the confiscated Desmond lands.¹¹⁶ Ralegh and Spenser were almost the same age and they had a connection through Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s half-brother, who knew Harvey and Smith and had taken part in the Hill Hall debate in 1570/1.¹¹⁷ How well Spenser and Ralegh actually knew each other is hard to determine, although they did obviously have a number of common interests.¹¹⁸ Evidence of their relationship has largely been deduced from references made by Spenser in his printed works. However, it is significant that Ralegh makes no mention of Spenser in his published writings or in his surviving letters, although he did produce two dedicatory poems for the first edition of The Faerie Queene, the only author to write more than one poem, receiving one in return from Spenser.¹¹⁹ Even so, ‘literary familiarity of this kind does not of course confirm parallel processes of face-to-face conversation and debate’.¹²⁰ The answer may lie in Ralegh’s well-established reputation as a fair-weather friend, always following his own interests, and this problem could explain Spenser’s public disdain later.¹²¹ It is only after Ralegh’s death that we have evidence that Ralegh knew Spenser.¹²²

Grey’s army remained in south-west Ireland for another month, strengthening the garrisons at Limerick, Castelmain, Askeaton, Aherlow, and Kilmallock.¹²³ On 30 November they were still at Clonmel, Tipperary, reaching Dublin at some point in early December.¹²⁴ Spenser, when not on military expeditions, probably spent most of the next two years in the Dublin area, mainly in the capital itself, as nearly all of Grey’s letters in his hand were written in the city and were presumably dictated or copied in Dublin Castle. There is a record of Grey attending a ceremonial feast at Cullenswood just outside the city walls, provided by the mayor and sheriffs of the city on Easter Monday (27 March) 1581, and presumably Spenser, as Grey’s principal secretary, accompanied him as part of his household.¹²⁵ During this period he would have witnessed the arrest of the earl of Kildare and his son-in-law, Christopher Nugent, fourteenth Baron Devlin, in the Council Chamber, for treasonable contact with the rebels in the Pale on 23 December 1581.¹²⁶ The episode, which led to the imprisonment of both men and the execution of Christopher’s son, Nicholas, on 6 April 1581, occupies extensive correspondence in Spenser’s hand in the period between the two dates.¹²⁷ Spenser was able to watch the destruction of the noble family who had effectively ruled Ireland as viceroys from the mid-fifteenth century.¹²⁸ A member of the disgraced Nugent family, Richard, published a sonnet sequence, Cynthia, in 1604, a work that transposes the tradition of the sonnet sequence—including Spenser’s own Amoretti—to English Ireland. The lady who inspires the narrator’s affections is a combination of the queen and a ‘local Irishwoman’, implying ‘that Cynthia simultaneously allegorises the poet’s love of Ireland and his loyalty to the English crown’.¹²⁹

Spenser would have continued to accompany Grey on most, if not all, of his military expeditions, such as the one into the midland counties, Leix and Offaly, in January 1581, and into Connaught against the O’Connors the next month.¹³⁰ On this expedition, if he had not already done so, he would have travelled through or around the Bog of Allen, the largest in Ireland and a noted problem for soldiers, which dominates the Irish midlands to the west of Dublin, an area that provided one of the better known personal reflections in his poetry.¹³¹ Spenser compares the forces besieging the Castle of Alma to the insects that torment travellers in Ireland:

As when a swarme of Gnats at euentide
Out of the fennes of Allan do arise,
Their murmuring small trompets sounden wide,
Whiles in the aire their clustring army flies,
That as a cloud doth seeme to dim the skies;
Ne man nor beast may rest, or take repast,
For their sharpe wounds, and noyous iniuries,
Till the fierce Northerne wind with blustring blast
Doth blow them quite away, and in the Ocean cast. (FQ II.ix.16)

This is yet another passage based on his personal experience, at one level humorous in its mock-heroic style. However, as Ireland was notorious for the illness it spread among the English, especially those newly arrived who fell prey to the ‘country disease’, and as disease was believed to be airborne, the stanza is double-edged.¹³² Alma’s Castle, an image of the healthy, temperate body, is under serious threat and all the careful regulation that has been carried out may not save it from the perils of life in Ireland.¹³³

On 22 March Spenser was given another office when Bryskett was made controller of the customs on wines and passed on his position as the registrar or clerk for faculties in Chancery, a position he may only have held for a year before he was succeeded by Roland Cowyk.¹³⁴ Spenser would have worked for the new Lord Chancellor, Adam Loftus (1533/4–1605), archbishop of Dublin, puritan sympathizer, educational reformer, and first provost of Trinity College Dublin. Loftus was initially eager to make Dublin Protestant, although his enthusiasm soon waned and he was heavily criticized by Sir Henry Sidney for reducing the church to a lamentable state.¹³⁵ Loftus also had an unsavoury reputation for vigorously promoting his family’s own interests, and for falling out with other powerful figures.¹³⁶ Unsurprisingly, his family became the leading landowners in the Dublin area by the mid-seventeenth century.¹³⁷ It is likely that Spenser formed a low opinion of Loftus during his time in the court and satirized him in Mother Hubberds Tale, yet another instance of Spenser attacking those he had worked for in print.¹³⁸ Given that Spenser benefited substantially from his patrons, notably Grey and Wallop, it is not clear how far such attacks were really based on noble principles, but there was enough hostility towards Loftus for Barnaby Rich’s claims that Loftus was spectacularly corrupt to warrant an official enquiry in 1592.¹³⁹

It is also unclear how extensive Spenser’s duties in his new post would have been, or how many of them he actually performed, as it was common practice to regard offices as sinecures that could be passed on to more junior scribes for a lower fee, the officer pocketing the difference. Spenser was certainly allowed to employ a deputy, as his terms of employment stated.¹⁴⁰ The job was, however, a natural one for the Lord Deputy’s secretary to undertake, given the powerful role that the Chancellor played alongside the vice-regent, and the incumbent would have been assigned documents to copy out and process for the Chancellor, much as he did for the Lord Deputy. It was also a job that would have suited someone who had worked as a bishop’s secretary, with a knowledge of canon law.¹⁴¹ The Chancellor ‘had the custody of the Great Seal; all royal charters, letters patent and close and other public instruments issued out of the Chancery, and were enrolled there; his writs set in motion the courts of justice, and authorised the issue of money from the King’s Exchequer. Thus he was at first an executive rather than a judicial officer.’¹⁴² The clerk’s duties would have involved overseeing a number of ecclesiastical issues, establishing who had the right to which benefice and which title, sorting out any resulting quarrels, distributing titles, goods, and money after the death of an incumbent, and other related tasks.¹⁴³ A record does indeed show that Spenser, in his role as servant to Lord Grey, appeared in person in the Court of Exchequer on official business, suggesting that his duties may have been extensive.¹⁴⁴

Chancery was one of the principal courts of equity, but also oversaw some common law cases, causing friction with the common law courts.¹⁴⁵ It was notable also for making use of Brehon Law (native Irish law), despite the prohibition of its use in English areas in the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), most significantly the practice of ‘gavelkind’ (dividing lands between sons) in inheritance cases, because legal practice relied on close personal communication with the plaintiffs.¹⁴⁶ This experience contributed to Spenser’s comments on Brehon Law in A View.¹⁴⁷ The records for Chancery are—or, rather, were—among the most substantial historical archives for early modern Ireland, as they are in England. It is clear that plaintiffs involved in property disputes in particular sought redress in the Chancery courts because they felt they had little chance of success under the common law. The same is true in England in this period, as the extensive Chancery records in the National Archives demonstrate.¹⁴⁸ However, the problem was especially acute for the English in Ireland, not simply because of the number of disputed properties and land holdings, but because they had good reason to fear Irish juries. When the Munster Plantation was established in the mid-1580s, its architects managed to draft qualification rules for jurors that effectively excluded most English tenants. A juror had to be a 40s. freeholder for life and tenants on the Plantation were disqualified as they were simply tenants for twenty-one years. As a result most juries were Irish.¹⁴⁹ Spenser outlined what he saw as the issue in A View, where he complained that ‘theare are more attainted Landes concealed from her maiestie then shee now hathe possessions in all Irelande’, something he would have realized from his professional career. When it is objected that the honesty demanded by a fair trial would surely solve this problem, his mouthpiece, Irenius, explains that such assumptions cannot be made about the Irish because they are implacably opposed to the English:

Not onelye soe in theire verdites but allsoe in all other theare dealinges speciallye with the Englishe they are moste wilfullye bente for thoughte they will not seme manifestlye to doe it yeat will some one or other subtill headed fellow amongest them picke some quirke, or devise some evacion whereaof the rest will lightelye take houlde, and suffer them selves easelye to be led by him, to that themselues desired.¹⁵⁰

Irish jurors are master of deception and duplicity, working against the interest of the settlers and the crown, a defining—but hardly surprising—feature of English experience in Ireland, according to Spenser.

It is little wonder that legal issues feature so prominently in A View. Spenser had a privileged insight into the workings of executive and legal power—in this instance, the relationship between the office of the lawmaker and his ability to override the established practices of case law to correct injustices, which could mean to protect the integrity of the executive itself. This would have been especially pronounced, as the late sixteenth century was a period of significant law reform during which the crown sought to expand its power over Ireland through the spread of legal as well as military means. The chief legal figures in Ireland, the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, the two chief justices, and the Baron of the Exchequer, were all members of the Irish Privy Council, meaning that constitutional and legal power overlapped, a fact that would have been obvious to Spenser and undoubtedly influenced his conception of government.¹⁵¹ The drive was begun in particular by the Lord Deputy Henry Sidney in the 1570s, and one of Spenser’s key patrons, Sir Henry Wallop, who was known for his combative and partisan style of conducting himself, became a key figure in enhancing the power of legal institutions in Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s.¹⁵²

The Irish Chancery court also received a significant number of appeals from women, often cases brought against their husbands, which may have been relevant when Spenser helped his second wife bring a case against her stepfather in 1596.¹⁵³ However, the court had a reputation for applying legal principles more rigidly than its English counterpart, and was often in conflict with the Irish Star Chamber, the Court of Castle Chamber, as each court sought to uphold its judgements to be endorsed by the crown.¹⁵⁴ The Chancery court’s guiding principle, equity, its importance in defining sovereignty as well as its potential abuse, is a key concept in Spenser’s later work, especially the second part of The Faerie Queene, suggesting that his experience in the Dublin courts had a profound effect on his conception of the law and his literary imagination.¹⁵⁵

Dublin, in contrast to most of Ireland, had been successfully anglicized by 1580, and much of the surrounding area was dominated by old families, mainly Old English, the descendants of the Anglo-Norman colonists in Ireland who were being displaced by the Tudor settlers and gradually turning from loyalty to the crown and making common religious and political cause with the native Irish.¹⁵⁶ John Speed’s map of 1610 shows a carefully planned walled town that resembles any number of equivalent provincial English towns.¹⁵⁷ However, the capital was obviously more militarized than its English counterparts, as the dominating nature of the huge square castle, where Spenser probably lived at first, demonstrates.¹⁵⁸ John Derricke’s images of Sir Henry Sidney’s riding out from Dublin Castle and his triumphal return into Dublin, where he is received by the grateful aldermen of the city, gives the same impression of the capital, the heads on the walls perhaps reminding viewers that justice was dispensed in Ireland as it was in London.¹⁵⁹ The capital was, nevertheless, a conspicuously Catholic city, with only a few significant families leaning towards Protestantism.¹⁶⁰

Dublin was a city of about 6,000 people, slightly smaller than the populations of such major English provincial cities as Norwich, York, Bristol, Exeter, and Newcastle, which contained about 9,000–12,000 people. The city was run by a corporation consisting of a group of aldermen (jurés) who elected a mayor each year. Beneath them were a group of demi-jurés and a group of ‘numbers’, elected from the various trade guilds. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the administration of Dublin was dominated by merchants who had roughly the same concerns as their London counterparts: they were concerned to make trade flourish, and were eager to protect and promote their families. They did so through the promotion of a self-interested civic culture and calculated intermarriage. Overseas trade and the export of goods were important, but internal trade was probably the decisive factor in determining how successful any individual family was. The most important trades were wool and linen, as they were in England. Like London, Dublin suffered from serious epidemics and about 3,000 of its inhabitants died from the plague in 1575. Many aspects of Dublin life would not have seemed that much different from life in Westminster or Cambridge, especially if Spenser was staying in Dublin Castle as he had lived in Leicester House.¹⁶¹ Each street had a particular character and role, as in London: the High Street contained meat stalls, shops selling leather goods, and places to eat; the fish market was in Fishamble Street; sheep were sold in Ship (Sheep) Street; and wine and beer were sold in Winetavern Street.¹⁶² The Chancery courts were next to Christ Church Cathedral (Plate 15), so much of Spenser’s life in the city would have been spent between the three dominating institutions, the Castle, Christ Church Cathedral, and, to a lesser extent, St Patrick’s Cathedral, just outside the city walls.¹⁶³ Beyond the city there was relatively affluent farmland, which grew less wealthy the further one travelled from Dublin, but which was clearly able to support the large population of the Pale.¹⁶⁴

Dublin does not appear to have had a commercial theatre until the Werburgh Street Theatre was established in 1635.¹⁶⁵ The corporation did, however, sponsor a number of public pageants performed throughout the year on key dates, and there was the annual riding of the franchises, in which civic officers and important figures in trade guilds processed around the city’s boundaries, ‘an expression of community, a reassertion of hierarchy, and a proclamation of collective privilege’, very similar to the civic pageants in Elizabethan London.¹⁶⁶ These processions and public performances often expressed Dublin’s complex sense of itself, caught between Gaelic Ireland and imperial England, uneasily negotiating a sense of identity between the two. They also suggest that Dublin would have seemed more obviously connected to the past than many English cities, and it is not clear how vigorously medieval practices were swept away.¹⁶⁷ On St George’s Day (23 April) a pageant of the adopted English saint was performed, the actors processing through the streets, the event culminating with St George slaying the dragon.¹⁶⁸ We know that Spenser was at work on The Faerie Queene in the first few years after he came to Ireland. It may be that this pageant, the nature of its performance, and the overt or suppressed reactions to what Dubliners saw, representing the complicated and problematic relationship between the different communities of Old English, New English, and Gaelic Irish in Ireland, had an impact on his decision to write Book I, the story of the Red-Cross Knight, a section of the poem that was clearly not written first. Dublin also had a large number of musicians and the corporation sponsored frequent public events and spectacles, and there were a significant number of performances of plays and music in private houses.¹⁶⁹ Spenser, connected to the New English elite, even if not actually part of it, would have attended some of these. His cultural life in Dublin would have been almost as rich and varied as it had been in London, certainly more lively than it would have been had he lived in a number of substantial English provincial cities.

Even so, Dublin was a city acutely aware that it was under threat, not least because of the heavy taxes imposed on the citizens to maintain the army. These had become especially burdensome in the late 1570s, as Sir Henry Sidney had sought funds to pay for campaigns, most importantly in Connaught, and had levied a new tax, ‘composition’, without parliamentary authority. There were frequent delegations of Palesmen to the English court and parliament protesting against Sidney’s actions, the conflict actually helping to establish the colonial Old English identity of Dublin and the Pale caught between the crown and Gaelic Ireland.¹⁷⁰ Spenser, as his later published work demonstrates, especially Colin Clouts come home againe, was acutely aware of the nuances of colonial identities, an understanding that would have dated from his first years in Ireland.

Spenser’s acquaintances in this period would have been predominately other New English settlers, principally those working for the Dublin administration. We know that he was close to Lodowick Bryskett, who had first come to Ireland with Sir Henry Sidney and had subsequently worked for a number of Lord Deputies as clerk to the Council and clerk in Chancery, the position he passed on to Spenser.¹⁷¹ Although Bryskett accompanied Sir Philip Sidney on his grand tour (1572–4), probably as a language tutor, there is no evidence that he was ever considered a friend by Sidney, a pointed contrast to his relationship with Spenser.¹⁷² As he came from an Italian family and moved in Catholic circles, Bryskett also acted as a government spy, while his own extended family was extremely complicated in terms of its religious affiliations—rather like that of the next generation of Spenser’s, in fact.¹⁷³ Spenser later followed Bryskett down to Munster, after Bryskett was disappointed that he did not get the post of secretary of state for Ireland, which went to Geoffrey Fenton, a defeat registered in his Discourse of Civil Life.¹⁷⁴ Bryskett had been petitioning Burghley for the post, when it was clear that the incumbent, John Chaloner, was in failing health.¹⁷⁵ Spenser later represented Bryskett as Thestylis, a shepherd friend of Colin’s in Ireland, in Colin Clouts come home againe.¹⁷⁶ Spenser also addressed sonnet 33 of the Amoretti to his friend, lamenting his inability to finish off his magnum opus:

Great wrong I doe, I can it not deny,
to that most saced Empresse my dear dred,
not finishing her Queene of faëry,
that mote enlarge her liuing praises dead:
But lodwick, this of grace to me ared:
doe ye not thinck th’accomplishment of it,
sufficient worke for one mans simple head,
all were it as the rest but rudely writ.¹⁷⁷

The sonnet concludes that the poem is too much for one man, so he will stop work on it until his ‘proud loue’ grants him some rest, a public acknowledgement that The Faerie Queene cannot be finished. But, through the carefully ambiguous use of pronouns, the reader is left unsure whether the love who is keeping him from his rest is Elizabeth Boyle or Elizabeth Tudor, hinting that the completion of the poem depends on proper government.

The reason why this sonnet was addressed to Bryskett was undoubtedly because Bryskett had been involved in debates about the poem during their time in Dublin, as his A Discourse of Civill Life records. This adaptation of Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s Tre dialoghi della vita civile, the second part of De gli hecatommithi (1565), was not published until 1606 but was originally written in the early 1580s, probably 1582, and planned as a work for Lord Grey, to show off the intellectual culture that thrived under his leadership.¹⁷⁸ Spenser would have read the work in manuscript and it may have had a direct impact on The Faerie Queene.¹⁷⁹ The dialogue describes a real or imagined meeting of various intellectuals at Bryskett’s house about a mile and a half from Dublin, possibly in the village, Rathfarnham, now a Dublin suburb, where Bryskett and, probably, Spenser, lived.¹⁸⁰ As well as Spenser, described as ‘late your Lordship’s secretary’, the nine friends present were John Long, archbishop of Armagh (1547/8–89); Sir Robert Dillon (d. 1579), a judge, the only Old English member of the group, related to Bryskett by marriage; George Dormer, described as ‘the Queenes sollicitor’, probably working for the Irish judiciary under the Lord Justice; Sir William Pelham, the Lord Chief Justice, whose second wife was the widow of Sir William Dormer, clearly a relative of George; Captain Christopher Carleill (1551?–93), a naval commander, who travelled to Russia, saw action in the Low Countries, and served in Drake’s fleet in the West Indies; Sir Thomas Norris (1556–99), the fifth of the Norris brothers who, like Sir John Norris, spent considerable time in Ireland and later acted as Spenser’s superior in Munster; Warham St Leger (1525?–97), sometime president of Munster, colonial adventurer in Ireland, who later became a neighbour of Spenser’s on the Munster Plantation; Captain Thomas Dawtrey; and Thomas Smith, no relation to the owner of Hill Hall, an apothecary, and the first medical practitioner in Dublin, according to Nicholas Malby (presumably the first English one).¹⁸¹ All of this group either definitely were or could have been in Dublin in 1582.¹⁸²

Bryskett’s purpose in recording those present at the debate is to show how lively and varied the intellectual culture of the New English in Dublin was, perhaps as a means of promoting and defending Grey, but probably his real aim was to illustrate how civilized and sophisticated they were in trying to establish culture in an island best known to an English audience as a violent, savage outpost, and a graveyard for the English forces there. After all, although they are assigned speaking parts in the dialogues, the group are not really required to further the debate, which takes place over three days.

The first day concerns the ideal education of a young child; the second, the progress from youth to adulthood; and the third, the proper activities and pursuits of a mature man.¹⁸³ This group of diverse citizens from the civil service and the military, who have a wide range of interests from the conquest of Ireland and the establishment of colonies to treatises and poems on self-government and education (Spenser and Bryskett), closely resemble the group who met at Hill Hall about a decade earlier. Might that event have been a model for subsequent gatherings? Or did middle-ranking citizens frequently stage such intellectual debates? Bryskett’s record of his symposium is probably a good guide to the aspirations of the more educated and studious English in Ireland in the late sixteenth century and it is likely that similar meetings took place later when Spenser and Bryskett moved south to Munster, although geographical factors undoubtedly limited their frequency. There was a need not only to stage such events but to make sure that they were recorded and duly noted.

Bryskett lavishly praises Spenser in the only passage devoted to him in the work. He describes Spenser as impressively well educated, a model of the sophisticated gentleman, who is ‘perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well read in Philosophie’.¹⁸⁴ Bryskett states that Spenser has been instructing him in Greek, and urges him to teach the company about ‘the great benefites which men obtaine by the knowledge of Morall Philosophie, and in the making vs to know what the same is, what … be the parts therefore, whereby vertues are to be distinguished from vices’ (pp. 25–6). The text may have been emended before it was published in 1606 to take account of the retrospective knowledge of the two published volumes of The Faerie Queene. But, even so, we are given a clear sense of Spenser’s high standing within colonial circles, and his reputation as a serious thinker and teacher.

Spenser declines the invitation to ‘open … the goodly cabinet, in which this treasure of vertues lieth locked vp from the vulgar sort’ (p. 26), Bryskett’s phrasing indicating that the event serves as a process of self-validation for the group. He asks to be excused because he has

Already vndertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is in heroical verse, vnder the title of a Faerie Queene, to represent all the moral vertues, assigning to euery virtue, a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same: in whose actions and feates of arms and chiualry, the operations of that virtue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and vnruly appetites that oppose themselues against the same, to be beaten downe & ouercome. Which work, as I haue already well entred into, if God shall please to spare me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish (M. Bryskett) will be in some sort accomplished, though perhaps not so effectually as you could desire … Whereof since I haue taken in hand to discourse at large in my poeme before spoken, I hope the expectation of that work may serue to free me at this time from speaking in that matter, notwithstanding your notion and all your intreaties. (pp. 26–7)

Instead, he urges them that they listen to a reading of Bryskett’s translation of Giraldi, to which they assent, even though ‘they had shewed an extreme longing after his worke of the Faerie Queene, whereof some parcels had bin by some of them seene’ (p. 28).

Spenser’s poem is used as a means of introducing Bryskett’s translation and it is not clear whether this stands as a faithful record of the event or a retrospective reconstruction that, with some humour, promotes Bryskett’s own status via his famous dead friend. Nevertheless, Spenser’s clear, precise, polite, and familiar manner of speech bears a close resemblance to his surviving non-poetic works, the Letters, the Letter to Ralegh appended to The Faerie Queene, and sections of A View which establish the nature of the interaction between Irenius and Eudoxus. Perhaps we are genuinely hearing his voice here. We also learn that Spenser’s work circulated widely in manuscript, as it did in England, which suggests that many apparent echoes of Spenser’s work that appeared before the relevant text was printed are likely to be authentic.¹⁸⁵ The discussion of works and their circulation among colonists appears to have been a key method of constructing a shared series of reference points, even a common identity, notable features of a number of works Spenser published in the 1590s.

On 27 January 1582 Grey wrote to Walsingham that he was able to redistribute land and property confiscated by the crown after the rebellion of James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglass, who had fled to Spain in the wake of the Massacre at Smerwick in the vain hope of raising more troops to continue the revolt, a conspiracy ‘motivated almost exclusively by religious concerns’.¹⁸⁶ Grey noted that he had rewarded Wallop, Raleigh, Thomas Lee, and others, and had granted ‘the lease of a house in Dublin belonging to Baltinglass for six years to come unto Edmund Spenser, one of the Lord Deputy’s secretaries, valued at 51 [£]’, showing that Spenser was being handsomely remunerated for his valuable service as the Lord Deputy’s secretary. This is probably where Spenser lived while he was in Dublin: undoubtedly the largest property he had occupied so far and a sign that he was moving up in the world towards the status of a gentleman. The Baltinglass estates were to the south of the city centre, based around the village of Rathfarnham, three miles from Dublin Castle on a good road which appears on John Speed’s map of the city.¹⁸⁷ As already noted, Bryskett lived here, and it is possible that Spenser had moved to the area before he acquired this house. The principal beneficiary from the Baltinglass Rebellion was Adam Loftus, who acquired extensive lands at a nominal rent, cementing his position as one of the largest property owners in Dublin. He was able to build Rathfarnham Castle in the mid-1580s, probably the earliest example of a fortified house in Elizabethan Ireland.¹⁸⁸ The roots of Spenser’s apparent hostility to Loftus appear to date from this period, and experiencing Loftus’ rapacious acquisition of property at first hand and possibly suffering in a dispute, could have caused—or added—further fuel to his anger.

Spenser was also granted the lease of lands at Newland, County Kildare, near Naas, for an annual rent of £3, confiscated from James Eustace, presumably a relative of Baltinglass. He may not have enjoyed possession of these for long, and they were reassigned to Thomas Lambyn on 1 December 1590.¹⁸⁹ However, a Chancery Bill dated 9 July 1622, filed against Spenser’s second wife, Elizabeth, and her second husband, Roger Seckerstone (then deceased), by Spenser’s second son, Peregrine, designed to restore his rights to his father’s lands, indicates that Spenser did retain connections with Kildare after he moved to Munster, including the ownership of land.¹⁹⁰ The deed states that two prominent landowners in the Dublin area, Sir William Sarsfield of Lucan (1520–1616), and Sir Garrett Aylmer (d. 1634), had ‘granted lands and impropriate [i.e., ecclesiastical property that had passed to a layman] tithes in trust for the use of Roger Seckerstone and Elizabeth his wife’ on 24 August 1600.¹⁹¹ The lands had been bought by Spenser who had paid all but £25, which had then been paid by Seckerstone after Spenser’s death. Peregrine claimed that they were really intended for his use. The details of the original document, destroyed in 1922, but copied out in the nineteenth century, provide further evidence that Spenser was a successful accumulator of property and wealth: he secured the livings associated with the rectories of Athnowen (Ovens), Rennyborough, Kilbride, Kilbrogan (near Bandon), Kilmainane, and Agneholtie.¹⁹² Spenser also held ‘parcels’ of the lands of the Abbey of Graney, a nunnery, about fifty miles south-west of Dublin and ten miles north-east of Carlow, part of a prosperous area with a number of other religious and military settlements, some twenty miles south of New Abbey, Kilcullen. Graney had been in the possession of two Lord Deputies, Lord Leonard Grey and Anthony St Leger, before becoming part of the Kildare holdings.¹⁹³ The remaining livings are all in the Cork area, many of them appearing as part of his estate in other documents.¹⁹⁴

Spenser continued to work hard for Grey, copying out a number of important documents which show that he was ‘at the centre’ of the ‘intense political turmoil’ in Ireland, including information of the killing of Captain James Fenton, the brother of Geoffrey Fenton, the secretary for state, on 23 March 1582.¹⁹⁵ However, it is likely that Spenser was acutely aware that the term of a Lord Deputy was likely to be relatively short, especially as so many were eager to be recalled. Grey left Ireland on 31 August, having finally been granted the recall he so desperately wanted, a desire frequently expressed in the letters to members of the Privy Council that Spenser copied out for him.¹⁹⁶ He was not replaced by another deputy until Sir John Perrot was appointed on 7 January 1584. For the intervening eighteen months Ireland was governed by Loftus and Wallop, who were appointed on 25 August. Spenser received his last payment as Grey’s secretary that month—from Wallop—and now had to find other sources of income.

Spenser was involved in a number of land deals in the early 1580s and undoubtedly acquired a lot of property in this period. On 6 December 1581, he leased the manor of Enniscorthy in Wexford, a former Franciscan monastery, along with ‘a ruinous castle, land, and a weir there, lands of Garrane, Killkenane, Loughwertie, Barrickerowe and Ballinparke, and the customs of boards, timber, laths, boats bearing victuals, lodges during the fair, and things sold there, and fishings belonging to the manor, and all other appurtenances as well within the Morroes country as without’ (Plate 16).¹⁹⁷ This was a substantial collection of lands and properties situated in a strategically important place, twenty miles north of Wexford on the River Slaney south of the Wicklow and Blackstairs Mountains. In his description of the Irish rivers present at the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, Spenser refers to ‘The sandy Slane, the stony Aubrain’ (FQ IV.xi.41, line 2), linking together two waterways next to places which he owned (the Aubrain is the River Arlo, near Kilcolman, Spenser using a different name because he had already used Arlo to name the mountain, Galtymore, and the Vale of Aherlow).¹⁹⁸ Like other planters of relatively modest means Spenser was involved in major land deals that would have been beyond his imagination in England. The crown urgently needed to find loyal subjects to occupy the estates of those they had dispossessed and there were rich pickings available for anyone bold enough to risk being a settler. Spenser immediately sublet the property out (9 December) to Richard Synnot, sometime sheriff of Wexford, who had possessed it earlier. Synnot, who was probably acting as an agent for Wallop, then apparently passed the lands on to his master (4 November 1595), who had earlier written to Walsingham of his plans to develop them on 6 January 1586, suggesting that they were probably already in his possession.¹⁹⁹ Wallop, an assiduous acquirer of Irish ecclesiastical property, had been associated with the history of the monastery from early on: in 1582, acting in the queen’s service, he had destroyed the house and killed the guardian and two others, when ordered to suppress what had become an illegal religious organization.²⁰⁰ Lodowick Bryskett acquired one of the farms connected to the Castle, Maghmaine [Macmine], in the early 1580s, and spent the Christmas of 1594 with the Wallops, a further indication of how closely the Lord Treasurer was involved with his intimate circle.²⁰¹ The Castle remained as a possession of the Wallop family until the early twentieth century, though it had fallen into decay by the time it was sold in 1914.²⁰² That Spenser took part in such a land deal is an indication of his importance to Wallop, who probably assumed the role that Grey had previously played in his life. Wallop not only accumulated a great deal of land and property for himself, but was also eager to look after the interests of his clients, notably Bryskett and Spenser, through the generous distribution of Irish assets.²⁰³

The property commanded a substantial annual rent of £11. 13s. 4d. and the description of the lease to Wallop makes it clear that this was a valuable estate with an orchard and a mill.²⁰⁴ Wallop later rebuilt the castle that survives today and it is a matter of conjecture whether he established a new building or added to the thirteenth-century structure badly in need of repair.²⁰⁵ At the same time Spenser leased the former Augustinian friary at New Ross (Plate 17) about ten miles away, buying the lease from Lord Mountgarret of Ballyragget, Kilkenny, and, as with the estate at Enniscorthy, selling the lease on within a short time, this time to Anthony Colclough of Tintern, Wexford.²⁰⁶ Both Enniscorthy and New Ross were key strategic sites in south-east Ireland, part of the southern corridor established by the English to prevent ‘major regional alliances from being created or sustained between the Gaelic lords of the Midlands and those of the southeast’.²⁰⁷

Spenser, Wallop, and Synnot were behaving as most English settlers in Ireland behaved throughout the early modern period, acquiring land and property cheaply in order to make a quick profit.²⁰⁸ In the sixteenth century substantial properties and estates were to be had for little after the dissolution of the monasteries, as was the case here, and the confiscation of the lands of rebel Irish lords. In many ways what happened was a replication of events in England in the first half of the sixteenth century, although in Ireland ecclesiastical property and rents were considerably less lucrative. Even so, Richard Boyle was able to amass what was probably the largest fortune in the British Isles by using his position to claim land for himself, one that perhaps exceeded that of the most successful English sheep farmers of the period, the Spencers of Wormleighton and Althorp, a sign of what was possible for New Englishmen on the make in Ireland.²⁰⁹ Probably, even at this early stage, and whatever he thought about making a life in Ireland, Spenser planned to acquire a significant estate and so afford himself the status of a gentleman, with which came independence and the freedom to write with fewer restrictions, especially in Ireland. He would be free of the need to depend on patrons and away from the political intrigues and fashions of court.

Only when he acquired his estate in 1590 did Spenser start publishing again and he produced the bulk of his works in a frenetic outpouring of six years: part one of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1590, as did the Complaints; Daphnaïda in 1591; the Amoretti and Epithalamion in 1594; and Colin Clouts come home againe, along with Astrophel, in 1595; and part two of The Faerie Queene, the Fowre Hymnes, and the Prothalamion in 1596, an astonishing achievement.²¹⁰ Clearly Spenser had been writing throughout the 1580s and had made no secret of the fact that he was at work on a large project, as the testimony of Bryskett demonstrates. His day jobs would have taken up a significant amount of time, even if he farmed work out to deputies, as he was entitled to do. It is possible that he had considerable family duties after the birth of his son, which was probably at some point during his early years in Dublin, but childcare and the education of children were seen by most men as the exclusive responsibility of women.²¹¹ The writer he most closely resembles is Shakespeare, whose priorities appear to have been similar. Shakespeare clearly valued his independence and security, and used his talents to acquire a number of houses in Stratford, which he achieved by becoming a shareholder in his acting company and limiting his writing to two plays a year. Each would have been anxious to avoid the fate of talented, over-prolific writers such as Robert Greene, who was only ever a writer for hire and so never acquired wealth and property. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Greene was involved in literary conflict with both writers.²¹²

In the same month that Grey left we have a record of Spenser acquiring yet more property. On 24 August he was granted a twenty-one-year lease of the former friary, New Abbey, in Kilcullen, County Kildare, along with ‘an old waste town, adjoining, and its appurtenances’, also forfeited after the Baltinglas rebellion, all told another substantial acquisition which helped make him a landed gentleman.²¹³ Indeed, the abbey was significant enough to have its founding recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters, and its founder, Roland Eustace, Baron of Porchester (d. 1496), had been Lord Treasurer of Ireland and, briefly, Lord Deputy, further indications that Spenser was able to deal in land and property which would have been beyond his horizons in England.²¹⁴ Spenser probably made some use of this property, as it was only twenty-five miles from Dublin, and on 12 May 1583, he was appointed as one of the commissioners for the musters in the county, the entry recording New Abbey as his residence, part of the plans for strengthening the army in the wake of the Desmond Rebellion.²¹⁵ Spenser might even have secured the property in order to fulfil this role at a crucial time, rather than the other way round. The other commissioners were stationed at key places throughout the county, some being local gentry, others, like Spenser, citizens of Dublin who were chosen to oversee the armies gathered in England and Ireland; some volunteers, others pressed into service. The principal duty of a commissioner was, with the muster masters, to check on numbers and to oversee the payment of the troops.²¹⁶ Spenser had had extensive experience of the military in the previous three years, which would have made him an ideal candidate for the task, but it is also likely that there was a limited choice of suitable men available.²¹⁷ Along with largely the same group of men, he was appointed again on 4 July 1584.²¹⁸ Mustering was an especially important and fraught activity in the Irish wars, owing to the corruption of so many captains, who had to be closely watched by the muster officials. Frequently incomplete companies would be sent over from Chester, captains planning to pocket the difference in pay once they had claimed it. Maurice Kyffin, a translator and poet, who occupied the post of muster master in 1596 and who clearly knew Spenser, frequently complained to the Privy Council about the corrupt state of the musters in Ireland but despaired of the prospect of reform.²¹⁹

Now that Spenser was no longer secretary to Grey it is harder to track his movements. Nevertheless, we can tell that he spent time in both the Dublin area and south-west Ireland probably because of his close link to Bryskett, who appears to have become, as Harvey was before, a patron or mentor, as well as a personal friend. Once again, we can see the vital importance of rank and status in the Elizabethan world, and how much easier it was to become friendly with equals than with superiors or inferiors.²²⁰ Even at this early date, New English officials probably knew that there might be a chance of securing land in Munster. After Gerald Fitz James Fitzgerald, the fourteenth and last earl of Desmond had been proclaimed a traitor on 2 November 1579, his lands were forfeited by the 1582 Act of Attainder. It was clear what future plans the English government had for the area.²²¹ The commission of Sir Valentine Browne and others to survey the rebels’ lands (19 June) and the appointment of the resolute Sir John Norris as president of Munster on 24 June 1584 would only have confirmed what many already knew. Spenser, perhaps via Bryskett, may well have felt that his future lay in south-west Ireland rather than the Dublin Pale. It is therefore likely that he was trying to make a profit on his land dealings in order to save up for an estate there. Information may have come from Wallop, who ‘had been the first and most persistent of the commissioners [of the Munster Plantation] to press for the peopling of the escheated lands from England’.²²² The Irish and Old English frequently complained that the New English officials knew when land titles were likely to become available and tipped each other off.²²³ The immediate problem that faced the English government was how to repopulate the devastated areas in the south-west and there was ample opportunity for English settlers to acquire an estate, exactly what Spenser must have wanted.

On 11 March 1583 Bryskett was promised the lucrative position of clerk of the Council of Munster (at £20 per annum the salary was about three times the salary of Bryskett’s job as clerk of the Council in Dublin) upon the death of the incumbent, Thomas Burgate. Burgate duly died on 17 October and Bryskett obtained the necessary letters patent on 6 November.²²⁴ The Council had been revitalized by Sir Henry Sidney, based on his experience of the value of the Council of Wales, as part of his attempt to impose a regional government in Ireland, a key strategy in anglicizing the country. The Council, under an English president, was expected to take an active role in bringing over-mighty feudal magnates to heel, and to spread English law and culture.²²⁵ The Munster Council had jurisdiction over the five shires of Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Kerry, and Desmond: Tipperary, although nominally part of Munster, was overseen by the earl of Ormond as his palatinate. This included the forest of Arlo, the area to the north-east of Spenser’s estate on the other side of the Ballyhoura Mountains, notorious as the refuge of Irish resistance to English government. The president had the power to oversee all military, civil, and ecclesiastical matters without reference to Dublin or London.²²⁶ The administration of the province involved a combination of military and administrative skills, the former more vital in periods when martial law was established, the latter necessary to facilitate the everyday running of government machinery and the spread of control over the area.²²⁷ This balance of concerns mirrored the experience of Bryskett and Spenser in Dublin.

As Raymond Jenkins has pointed out, it is unlikely that Bryskett spent much—if any—time in Munster between 1584 and 1588. Apart from the lure of his life in London, the Council rarely met because so many of its members were absentee landlords and the Norris brothers effectively ruled the province alone.²²⁸ On 15 January 1584, the earl of Ormond, who, as the principal military leader in Munster, was responsible for mopping up the last vestiges of Desmond resistance after the earl was killed in November 1583, complained that Bryskett had gone to England trusting his duties to a servant, Henry Shethe.²²⁹ Bryskett was bearing letters from Wallop and Loftus to Burghley—later he worked as Wallop’s steward at Enniscorthy, which had first been granted to Spenser from Grey and immediately sold, yet another link between the two officials.²³⁰ This transaction further reveals the closely interrelated nature of New English society in Ireland and indicates that Spenser deputized for Bryskett in Munster, just as he had used deputies in his work himself. The relatively well-paid job as clerk provided exactly the same income that Spenser had received as secretary to Grey and, even if he was not paid the full amount, living in Munster would have been cheaper than living in the Dublin area.²³¹ The clerk was entitled to ‘diet money’ and Bryskett stopped receiving this in April 1584, which would indicate that Spenser and his family moved down to Munster at this time.²³²

Spenser may have known his new employer, Sir John Norris, for some time as he was yet another figure connected to Daniel Rogers.²³³ Norris, who remained as president until 1597 when his brother Thomas took over, became Spenser’s principal employer until he secured the estate at Kilcolman, suggesting that their relationship was similar to the ones Spenser had with Grey and Wallop. Very few letters survive in Spenser’s hand from his time in Munster. Either they have been lost or destroyed, or Spenser now undertook more responsible duties for Norris than he had done for Grey and, because he worked with Thomas Norris for a relatively long time, a case can be made that the Norris brothers became more important figures in Spenser’s life than Grey had ever been.²³⁴ Spenser undoubtedly accompanied Norris on a number of military expeditions in the next few years, as he had done with Grey. It is likely that he went with Norris and the new Lord Deputy, Sir John Perrot, first through Munster and Connaught in July, to establish the new presidents, Norris and Sir Richard Bingham (1527/8–99) in their posts. Bingham, another military man with a fierce reputation, later distinguished himself by massacring 2,000 Scots at Ardnaree on the River Moy, when they had tried to unite with the Mayo Burkes (22 September 1586).²³⁵ They then headed north, after briefly stopping in Dublin, to Ulster in late August to campaign against the Antrim MacDonnells after Sorley Boy MacDonnell had landed on the Antrim coast with a large contingent of Scots, the crown forces eventually overrunning the MacDonnell stronghold, Dunluce Castle.²³⁶ Spenser’s impressive knowledge of the geography of the north of Ireland indicates that he must have been on this excursion, which further suggests that he would have been in attendance on his superiors in other places.²³⁷ He then returned to Munster with Norris in November but was back in Dublin again in March 1585. Here he copied out letters to the Privy Council detailing, among other matters, the devastation that had been visited upon Ulster. Norris noted: ‘The wasteness and general desolation of the province is such, as well for want of people as of cattle, being all consumed through the late wars, as that amongst them, which remain many stealths are committed to keep them in life, which are hard to be avoided through their extreme necessity.’²³⁸ Norris’s logic is not far away from that of Spenser when describing the Munster famine: the suffering is, unfortunately, the inevitable consequence of rebellion. On 31 March Spenser copied out another letter from Norris to Burghley from Clonmel, which provided similar details showing that much of Ireland was in a similarly desperate state: ‘The wasteness of this province is so huge and universal for want of people that it will be very long before the inhabitants shall regain any ability of living.’²³⁹

Plans for the settlement of Munster were well underway and must have occupied both Spenser’s professional and his personal life in the mid-1580s. Norris had made it clear that he saw one of his key tasks as ‘planting’ English settlers.²⁴⁰ Given the ways in which land had been distributed by Grey and Wallop it is likely that Spenser hoped that he would gain from his service for John Norris, especially given the current situation after the Desmond Rebellion had been crushed. We have no actual record of where he was living at this time, but he probably stayed in Cork in order to attend the Lord President when they were not on the road. The president had no official residence and lived in either Cork or Limerick. John Norris spent two years (May 1585 to July 1587) campaigning in the Netherlands and ruled Munster through his brother, Thomas, who was appointed vice-president in December 1585, so Thomas would have spent more time in Munster and had a greater influence on the government of the province than his elder brother.²⁴¹ Thomas gravitated towards Cork, undoubtedly because his estate at Mallow was nearby.²⁴² One of the few surviving letters in Spenser’s hand from this period is from Thomas Norris to the Privy Council, 22 January 1589, from Shandon Castle in the city.²⁴³ Spenser was probably closer to Thomas than John, given the former’s presence at the debate at Bryskett’s cottage in 1582, and the fact that he owned the estate next to Kilcolman, including Mallow Castle (Plate 18). Whatever Spenser’s precise relationship with the Norrises, we do not know whether his family, Machabyas, Sylvanus, and Katherine, joined him or whether they stayed on in Dublin until he took control of Kilcolman at some point in the late 1580s.

Nevertheless, Spenser would have been busy with official duties, as plans for the Munster Plantation were gathering pace. He worked with a large team of predominantly English officials in the area, many of whom may have become friends: the chief justice Jessua Smythes and, later, William Saxey, and the Irish deputy, James Goold; Richard Royser, the attorney general; Captain George Thornton, whose nephew, Warham St Leger, had been at the symposium at Bryskett’s cottage; and Richard Beacon, attorney general after 1586, and author of Solon His Follie (1594), the only English treatise on Ireland that can rival Spenser’s View in its sophisticated analysis of Ireland.²⁴⁴ He also spent a great deal of time on the road between Cork and Dublin, travelling via either Limerick or Clonmel. Thomas Norris was in Dublin on 27 February 1586, and then again as Member of Parliament for Limerick, with its impressive Cathedral St Mary’s, notable for its splendid misericords (Plate 19), for the session that lasted from 26 April to 14 May, and it is more than likely that Spenser accompanied him.²⁴⁵ Spenser was back in Dublin on 18 July, either having returned by that date, or having stayed there for much of the first half of the year, indicating that he had not yet moved down to the Cork area. He dated a sonnet, ‘To the Right Worshipfull, my singular good frend, M. Gabriell Haruey, Doctor of the Lawes’, on this day, published on the last page of Fowre Letters and certaine Sonnets six years later:

HARVEY, the happy aboue happiest men
I read: that sitting like a Looker-on
Of this worldes Stage, doest note with critique pen
The sharpe dislikes of each condition:
And as one carelesse of suspition,
Ne fawnest for the fauour great:
Ne fearest foolish reprehension
Of faulty men, which daunger to thee threat.
But freely doest, of what thee list, entreat,
Like a great Lord of peerlesse liberty:
Lifting the good vp to high Honours seat,
And the Euill damning euermore to dy;
For Life, and Death is in thy doomefull writing:
So thy renowne liues euer by endighting.

Dublin: this xviij: Iuly: 1586.

Your deuoted frend, during life,
                             EDMUND SPENCER²⁴⁶

It is easy to see why Harvey would have wanted to publish this sonnet in 1592. Spenser was starting to become famous as a writer once again after a long absence with the publication of the first edition of The Faerie Queene in 1590, along with the fourth edition of the Calender, the Complaints, and Daphnaïda the following year, which also led to the issue of Axiochus. Embroiled in the quarrel with Nashe and mindful of the need to defend his family’s honour, Harvey launched an assault on the legacy of the recently deceased Robert Greene in Fowre Letters, as a vulgar popularizer, in pointed contrast to the serious work of his friend, Spenser. The sonnet stands as a reminder of the great literary friendship that had launched Spenser’s writing career.

In 1586, the sonnet probably had a less defiant significance for its author. Spenser appears to be envying Harvey his life of quiet solitude and contemplation, a reminder of their time together in the 1570s; but it is also a mild rebuke, contrasting Harvey’s settled life with his own itinerant existence serving the powerful in Ireland, constantly on the move, with little time to write and no home. There is an undisguised aggression in lines such as those describing Harvey ‘as one carelesse of suspition, | Ne fawnest for the fauour great’, that read as a bitter reflection on his own life in 1586. Spenser laments that he is unable to see a way beyond a life of enforced servitude rather than intellectual liberty, which makes it easy for us to see why he so valued a home, home life, and liberty so much in his later works. Nevertheless, the sonnet is one of remembered, affectionate friendship and indicates that Harvey and Spenser, even if they did not see each other often after 1580, kept in touch and had a high regard for each other. Harvey refers to ‘Scanderbeg’ in a sonnet published in A New Letter (1591), indicating that he knew about the forthcoming translation of that work by Zachary Jones (1596) for which Spenser wrote a dedicatory sonnet, further evidence that the two men were in contact.²⁴⁷ As Steven May has suggested, the Dublin sonnet may have been sent as an accompaniment to a manuscript version of The Faerie Queene, which would explain why the text circulated among literary figures, such as Christopher Marlowe whom Harvey may have known at Cambridge, before it was published.²⁴⁸

Spenser probably already had plans to change his lot. On 8 December 1586 he was behind with a payment of £3 for the prebend of Effin, a parish near Kilmallock, with a substantial church, some ten miles north of the area in which he eventually settled (Plate 20).²⁴⁹ The payment was due under the Act for First Fruits, decreed by Henry VIII in 1540, transferring the right of the pope to claim a percentage of the income derived from the first year of any ecclesiastical benefice to the king. Spenser’s nonpayment suggests that the prebend was a benefit to him rather than a sign of a serious religious calling.²⁵⁰ A prebend provided a stipend drawn by a clergyman (a prebendary) attached to a cathedral: usually the incumbent received an income from the cathedral’s estates in return for duties performed, helping with the complex administration of the cathedral and occasionally preaching. Most were distributed by the bishop, but a few were in the gift of the crown, which might explain the origin of Spenser’s office. In Ireland, prebendaries were sometimes canons, senior clergy who formed the chapter that administered the cathedral, entitled to sit in designated pews during services, although there were also some lay prebendaries and the position was evidently used as a convenient means of supporting government officials, probably the most likely explanation for Spenser’s role here. The practice inevitably reduced the effectiveness of ecclesiastical administration and resulted in widespread absenteeism.²⁵¹ Possibly Spenser attended chapter meetings at Limerick Cathedral, but, as virtually no cathedral records survive, we have no means of knowing.²⁵² The Effin lands consisted of about 1,052 acres.²⁵³ It is hard to believe that the possession of this prebend had any real significance for Spenser, especially given his obviously busy life and the fact that he was not ordained.²⁵⁴ Probably Spenser was one of a number of English officials granted such a position after the queen decreed that no native Irish should ‘be preferred to any ecclesiastical living in the cathedral church of Limerick’.²⁵⁵ Despite his condemnation of cynical abusers of clerical positions in Mother Hubberds Tale, Spenser undoubtedly did what he felt he had to do. In that poem the priest boasts:

Is not that name [i.e., a clerk] enough to make a liuing
To him that hath a whit of Natures giuing?
How manie honest men see ye arize
Daylie thereby, and grow to goodly prize?
To Deanes, to Archdeacons, to Commissaries,
To Lords, to Principalls, to Prebendaries;
All iolly Prelates, worthie rule to beare,
Who euer them enuie: yet spite bites neare. (lines 417–24)

We cannot be sure whether Spenser wrote this before or after he had taken up the position at Effin, nor whether he authorized Ponsonby’s publication of the Complaints in 1591.²⁵⁶ The lines might expose the poet’s hypocrisy; point out his own virtue; have been written in advance of his decision to take the money; or be designed to express the spirit of the age. Perhaps Spenser was prepared to resort to accepting dubious government handouts for personal gain, or, most likely, felt that he, unlike others in England, had earned such benefits in Ireland.

There are more examples of possible sharp practice. In 1587 Spenser was clearly involved in the illegal seizure of a Spanish carvel full of Canary wines, which had been captured by the Thomas Bonaventure, a ship owned by the London merchant Thomas Cordell. Along with his fellow undertaker, William Herbert, and the Norris brothers, the Thomas Bonaventure, which had run aground on the Dingle Peninsula, was sailed to Cork under Spenser’s command and looted of its cargo, which, unsurprisingly, led to a court case when Cordell and his fellow merchants found out what had happened. Piracy was common in south-west Ireland, perpetrated especially by crown officials who knew how hard it was for the law to touch them.²⁵⁷ The English colony at Baltimore, west Cork, prospered through supplying pirate ships.²⁵⁸ Spenser was perhaps forced to participate in the crime by the Norrises; equally, he may have felt that such booty was, like the prebend, the just deserts of hard-working, oppressed settlers transforming a dangerous land for the crown.²⁵⁹

Spenser still had a number of official duties but, by the end of the 1580s, these now appear to have been all in Munster. In March he must have been at the spring session of the Munster Council and in June and November at the summer and autumn sessions in Limerick. By October he was officially established as Bryskett’s deputy as clerk to the Council of Munster and a note next to the payment to Bryskett on 31 March 1588 records: ‘This is exercised by one Spenser as deputy to the said Bryskett.’²⁶⁰ Spenser must have paid a deputy to do his job at the Court of Chancery in Dublin until the office was sold to Arland Ussher, on 22 June 1588.²⁶¹ Arland was the father of James Ussher, who later obtained a copy of A View and almost certainly passed it on to Sir James Ware who used it to produce the first printed edition of the work.²⁶² This personal connection increases the likelihood that the copy used has a particular connection to Spenser, and suggests that, again, there is some substance in Aubrey’s anecdotes.²⁶³

The year 1588 witnessed the coming of the Armada and most of Spenser’s official work would have been concerned with the panic induced first by the possibility of Spanish invasion and then by the wrecks of ships off the Munster coast. Four ships came to grief in the province: the San Esteban at Doonbeg; the Anunciada in the mouth of the Shannon; the Sta María De La Rosa on the tip of the Dingle Peninsula; and the San Juan Bautista on the Blasket Islands.²⁶⁴ Thousands were drowned and those who made it ashore were invariably slaughtered, apart from a few who were worthy of a ransom.²⁶⁵ As Sir George Carew (1555–1629), then Master of Ordnance, put it, ‘There is no rebellion in the whole realm, so much terror prevails.’²⁶⁶ Carew estimated that about 5,000–6,000 Spanish sailors and soldiers died in Ireland, and that off the Irish coasts, 3,000 of them were slain when forced ashore by desperation. The Armada had been launched in part as a reaction to the execution of Mary Stuart on 8 February 1587, a crusade directed against the heretic Protestant Jezebel on the English throne in defence of her persecuted Catholic subjects.²⁶⁷ Certainly, this is how events were read by almost all English commentators, regardless of religious affiliation. By the late 1580s confessional battle lines were clearly defined.

Whatever the exact form of Spenser’s religious beliefs, like many Englishmen he clearly had a particular fear of aggressive international Catholicism and interpreted events in the light of contemporary European developments. For Spenser, the execution of Mary had been a justifiable action, as she threatened to undermine the stability of the state and so endangered the queen’s subjects. The Faerie Queene does not follow the chronology of recent historical events, but groups them thematically and in terms of their significance. In Book V, canto ix, we witness Mercilla/Elizabeth’s reluctance to execute Duessa/Mary Stuart, until she is forced to act by the logic of her councillor, Zele, who reminds her that pity for her fellow monarch is not reason enough to pardon someone whose crimes are so heinous:

First gan he tell, how this seem’d so faire
And royally arayd, Duessa hight
That false Duessa, which had wrought great care,
And mickle mischiefe vnto many a knight,
By her beguiled, and confounded quight:
But not for those she now in question came,
Though also those mote question’d be aright,
But for vyld treasons and outrageous shame,
Which she against the dred Mercilla oftn did frame. (40)

Zele wins the argument and Duessa, who has already escaped justice with a relatively light punishment, only to return to commit yet more crimes, is duly executed. Duessa, as Zele makes clear, has threatened the power of the prince and her representatives and so, like the Irish leaders who withstood the due process of English law, deserves to die.²⁶⁸ The penultimate stanza of the canto makes an explicit verbal and thematic link between Zele and Artegall, as ‘Artegall with constant firme intent, | For zeale of Iustice was against her bent’, at the same time that ‘Zele began to vrge her punishment’ because ‘was she guiltie deemed of them all’ (49, lines 4–7). Lord Grey had been a commissioner at the trial of Mary and had defended William Davidson when he was publicly blamed for issuing the order to execute Mary by Elizabeth, on the grounds that Davidson ‘preferred the saftie of his prince and contrie before his owne welfare … his zeale therein was in his opynion to be rewarded’.²⁶⁹ The use of the word ‘zeale’ here might indicate that, on this issue at least, Spenser had some insider knowledge of public policy. In The Faerie Queene he links the demand for the execution of Mary to an effective policy in Ireland, representing the monarch as weak and feeble on each occasion, first in trying to prevent Mary’s execution, and second in leaving Ireland exposed by recalling the successful hard-line Lord Deputy before his work is finished:

But ere he could reforme it thoroughly,
He through occasion called was away,
To Faerie Court, that of necessity
His course of Iustice he was forst to stay,
And Talus to reuoke from the right way,
In which he was that Realme for to redresse.
But enuies cloud still dimmeth vertues ray.
So hauing freed Irena from distresse,
He tooke his leaue of her, there left in heauinesse. (V.xii.27)

The allegory at one level represents the fate of Lord Grey and the criticism of his policies noted in A View.²⁷⁰ But it is far more flexible than this, working in terms of larger themes rather than merely historical events in line with Sir Philip Sidney’s argument that poets were not tied to the tyranny of facts as historians were, a distinction repeated in the Letter to Ralegh.²⁷¹ Here, the ‘poet historical’ can reveal the underlying truth, that the real dangers to Ireland and its Irish and English population often have their origins outside as well as inside Ireland itself, as was the case with the earlier Fitzmaurice Rebellion, the effects of which Spenser saw first-hand. The failure to deal with aggressive and dangerous Catholic opposition within England leads to attempted invasions of Ireland to support local rebellion, which then, in turn, threatens the stability of England. While Spenser appears to have been interested in native religious traditions within England, which meant the Catholic faith in its broader definition, he had no time for the papacy or Spanish-sponsored Catholic crusades. We should be careful to distinguish the two beliefs which have often been conflated and confused.

The failure of the Armada is represented in The Faerie Queene, but it appears as a relatively minor event, which has often surprised commentators.²⁷² The description of Arthur’s defeat of the Souldan (V.viii.28–45) has been linked to the defeat of the Armada since it was first noticed in John Upton’s edition of the poem (1758). The image of the Souldan in his chariot appears to refer to Philip II’s representation of himself in his impresa.²⁷³ Furthermore, the description of the Souldan’s horses fleeing in panic when blinded by the reflection from Arthur’s shield is tailored to refer to the scattering of the fleet by the fireships in the channel:

The dredful sight did them so sore affray,
That their well knowen courses they forwent,
And leading th’euer-burning lampe astray,
This lower world nigh all to ashes brent,
And left their scorched path yet in the firmament. (40, lines 5–9)²⁷⁴

Spenser compares the aborted Spanish invasion to the rash attempt of Phaeton, son of the sun god Helios, to drive his father’s chariot across the skies, a disaster ended only when Zeus destroyed the boy with a thunderbolt. The use of this particular classical myth shows that Spenser correctly understood that the Armada was a less threatening event than the serious rebellions within Ireland: perhaps he had in mind what he had witnessed at Smerwick, which features as a far more frightening prospect in his writing. It is also a sign that by the time the ships reached Munster the Armada was a spent force likely to cause little serious danger to the English in Ireland—although, as everywhere else in Elizabeth’s dominions, there was a thanksgiving service in Cork Cathedral, with a victory sermon delivered by Bishop William Lyon (d. 1617), former chaplain to Lord Grey.²⁷⁵ Perhaps Spenser was there. And, yet again, the placing of the representation of the event shows how flexible, in terms of both time and subject matter, Spenser’s allegory invariably was.²⁷⁶