10
  
Return to London, 1596–7

THE YEAR 1596 was another major one in Spenser’s life, although it proved to be a swansong rather than a new beginning. No one could have known at the time that it would be the last year in which he published anything: Spenser undoubtedly had a lot more to say that never materialized. By its end he had produced the second edition of The Faerie Queene, adding a further three books and changing the ending of Book III in order to link the narratives together; he had also published the Fowre Hymnes; and the Prothalamion, a spousal verse for the daughters of the earl of Worcester who were married on 8 November. He also probably started and perhaps finished his prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, and returned to England with his wife Elizabeth. One aim was to settle an inheritance dispute, as well as to visit a number of significant figures throughout the country.¹ However, if 1594 had seemed an especially hopeful year for Spenser, and, one imagines, the other English inhabitants of the Munster Plantation, then 1596, with the rebellion of Hugh O’Neill gathering pace, was one overshadowed by impending disaster.

If Spenser’s public declarations about his marriage are anything to go by, his relationship with Elizabeth was a happy one. Spenser was not an old bridegroom but he would have been aware that he was now well into middle age and may not have had a great deal of time left, which may have been one reason why he wrote and published with such regularity. He was almost certainly at least twice as old as his wife and they lived on his estate, which suggests that he dominated the relationship, as might have been expected. Sylvanus and Katherine would have been teenagers by 1596, so that the birth of Peregrine would have made the household acutely aware that it consisted of two different layers. Elizabeth might even have conceived on their wedding night or very soon after, so the Epithalamion may be referring to a fait accompli when it charges Cynthia to bless their union and ‘the chast wombe informe with timely seed’.

It is possible that we can work out how the Spensers’ marriage would have functioned by paying heed to the wealth of social history about early modern marriage and the family, the archaeology of south-west Munster, and what Spenser tells us in his writings. Writing about a slightly later period Alan Bliss has used the evidence of the influence of Irish on the English spoken by settlers to conclude that ‘the planters must as babies have been cared for by Irish nurses, and in their childhood they would no doubt have fraternised with the children of their servants’.² Certainly there were numerous complaints about Irish wet nurses and foster mothers breastfeeding English babies and so transforming them into rebels.³ This was a natural corollary to the commonly held belief that wet nurses could determine the character of the babies they suckled.⁴ In A View, which was written when Spenser had a baby who was probably still being breastfed, Irenius comments that:

The Chief Cause of bringinge in the Irish language amongst them was speciallye their fosteringe and marryinge with the Irishe The which are two moste daungerous infeccions for first the Childe that suckethe the milke of the nurse muste of necessitye learne his firste speache of her, the which beinge the first that is envred to his tongue is ever moste pleasinge vnto him In so muche as thoughe he afterwards be taughte Englishe yeat the smacke of the firste will allwaies abide with him and not onelye of the speche but alsoe of the manners and Condicions for besides the younge Children be like Apes which will affecte and ymitate what they see done before them speciallye by their nurses they love so well. (Variorum, x. 119)

Quite a lot can be gleaned from this passage. Irenius casts himself as the man who really knows what is happening in Ireland and so is in a position to speak with authority to those back in England. Like many other commentators, he singles out the Irish practice of fostering children out to nurses as a central cause of Ireland’s ills, one that has been imitated by the English, which has caused them to become Irish and which has to be stopped if Ireland is to be reclaimed under English authority.⁵ The passage indicates that this was still common practice among colonists on the Munster Plantation, one reason why the settlement was such a dangerous place, lacking proper English authority, the problem beginning within the family unit.⁶ Presumably, Irish nurses were chosen because they were available, and English parents acted as they would have if they had been in England; or, perhaps, as in England, the use of wet nurses was a sign of a rise in status, and many settlers were adopting practices and customs that would have been beyond their means in their homeland.⁷ In late Elizabethan London parents often sent children out as far as forty miles away to be nursed.⁸ In the provinces servants and former servants were used so that wet nursing ‘was simply an extension of their previous role within the household’.⁹ Such nurses tended to have their own domestic duties and rarely lived with the family for whom they worked, and were invariably chosen with great care.¹⁰

However, it is hard to imagine that, after Irenius’ comments in A View, the Spensers would have used Irish nurses to rear Peregrine. This would suggest that either they made use of English servants or that Elizabeth breastfed Peregrine herself.¹¹ Both Richard Jonas’s book on midwifery, The Byrth of Mankynd (1540) and Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Form of Household Gouernment (1598) recommended that mothers breastfeed their children themselves in order to nurture and protect the Protestant family and there was a pressure from some puritan quarters to induce good Protestant mothers to feed their own children.¹² It is more likely that someone of Spenser’s relatively new status would have preferred the former option and, possibly through the earl of Cork, who played such a central role in their lives and who influenced so many major decisions made by his extended family, they had access to English domestics who would perform the task. Like many men in the period, he might have objected to his wife breastfeeding and preferred the employment of a wet nurse.¹³ Given the wealth of opinions about love, marriage, and reproduction that Spenser articulates in his work it is likely that we would have heard about breastfeeding if he had been a very early advocate of its practice. Peregrine, like his half-brother and half-sister, would have been breastfed for nearly two years, his diet probably supplemented by ‘pap and pre-chewed bread or vegetables’.¹⁴ A live-in English/Protestant wet nurse would have joined the array of servants living on the Kilcolman estate.

Most duties in the household would have been devolved to the chief servants of whom there must have been a number in a relatively large household like Kilcolman, especially if we bear in mind the ambitious building projects that were undertaken there in the 1590s.¹⁵ The Spensers must have had at least a dozen servants to run the household, assuming that the tenant farmers played a role in running the estate. If Spenser spent most of his time writing, as his prolific output indicates, Elizabeth probably played a considerable role in overseeing what went on if her life was anything like that described in the diaries left behind by women who managed households in provincial England.¹⁶ The archaeology of the estate suggests that Kilcolman would have been established in relatively similar ways to its English counterparts. Elizabeth, like Machabyas before her, would have tended the gardens near the house; she would probably have been involved in preserving and preparing food; she may well have taken part in brewing ale and, if the estate had beehives, mead, as many women did; she may have had to play some role in sorting out the accounts of the estate, as well as overseeing the servants if her husband was busy and wanted to be left alone to write.¹⁷ She would have been expected to oversee the education of the children, who may have been taught by a private tutor, as no schools would have been available in the area for them to attend.¹⁸ Unless, of course, the couple educated their children themselves. This is possible, as we know from her letters that Elizabeth was literate and articulate, whereas no evidence survives to attest to Machabyas’ education. Whatever the arrangements, Elizabeth’s life would have been as busy as that of her husband, as early modern marriage dictated that husband and wife were partners, albeit scarcely equal ones.¹⁹ The circumstances of life on the Plantation would have made the Spensers a closer family unit than their English counterparts, especially if Spenser was travelling infrequently by this time.

All of which suggests that the couple probably spent a larger amount of their time with their children than they would have done had they lived in England, since the elder two would still have been at home in the mid-1590s, as they could not have been older than 13 or 14 in 1595. Spenser’s work, however, while it shows great interest in marriage and reproduction, contains relatively little about childhood.²⁰ An exception is the much-discussed episode of the child with the indelibly bloodstained hands, Ruddymane, born to Amavia and Mortdant in Book II of The Faerie Queene, but this tells us little about Spenser’s understanding of childhood and more about his willingness to explore the subtle nuances of theories of predestination.²¹ Moreover, the little evidence we have about his children that survives does not tell us much at all: if anything, it points to an antagonistic relationship between Elizabeth and her sons, perhaps to be expected in a litigious age, but also a possible sign of a household that had been less harmonious than the parents had desired.

It is likely that the household was a godly one, given Spenser’s interest in religion and the varieties of religious thought throughout his life, as well as the ways in which he represented his courtship and marriage in the Amoretti and Epithalamion, and that devotions structured the everyday experience of the house (after all, he had worked for a bishop immediately prior to his first marriage). A key feature of Protestant writers on marriage was that they placed more emphasis on religion as a family experience within the household than their Catholic predecessors and counterparts. Wives were supposed to defer to their husbands, who assumed the role as head of the household; public prayers would mark points in the day; and there would be time for private devotions.²² Spenser’s intimate and detailed knowledge of the Bible, which he undoubtedly read in the Geneva version (although he clearly knew other versions), and his desire to think about its relevance for everyday life suggest that his work was reflected in, and perhaps grew out of, his diurnal experience.²³ It is unlikely that the Spenser household was as pious and devoted as that of the devout Lady Margaret Hoby, who habitually prayed privately at least three times a day, but religious belief would have structured the life of the inhabitants of Kilcolman Castle.

On 20 January the second edition of The Faerie Queene was entered in the Stationers’ Register.²⁴ Spenser had clearly been at work on Books IV–VI for much of the time since he had acquired Kilcolman. Parts of Book IV were probably written earlier and survive from an incarnation of the poem produced in the 1580s (although not the Timias/Belphoebe episode in Book IV, cantos vii–viii, which was written after 1592), but Books V and VI read like later works. It is possible, of course, that sections of Book V were also written earlier than others, notably the story of Britomart and Artegall, but the ending of Book V refers to events in the mid-1590s and is clearly designed to be read alongside Book VI.²⁵ The new Books significantly widen the focus of the poem, so that the journey from Holiness to Chastity, centred on the individual self, now moves outward through Friendship and Justice to Courtesy. It will always be a matter of debate whether Spenser intended the published poem to end with Book VI, and had abandoned his apparent plan to write twenty-four Books, as he indicated in the Letter to Ralegh.²⁶ The quest of Calidore is impossible because courtesy is defined in series of contradictory ways, being the ‘roote of ciuill conuersation’ (VI.i.1, line 6) yet also buried ‘deepe within the mynd’ (proem, 5, line 8); emanating from the court (i.1, line 1) and imagined as a flower that grows on a ‘lowly stalk’ (proem, 4, line 3). It is little wonder that Calidore, who ‘loathd leasing [lying] and base flattery, | And loued simple truth and stedfast honesty’ (i.3, lines 8–9), feels that he has been forced ‘To tread an endlesse trace, withouten guyde’ (i.6, line 2).²⁷ Nor is it surprising that his quest seems peripheral to the narrative of the book, which comes to focus on the pastoral community of shepherds who need protecting from savages, brigands, and other hostile enemies, an allegorical continuation of the world that Spenser had established in Colin Clout.²⁸ The ending of the 1596 Faerie Queene could be read as a despairing comment on the nature of the project as outlined in the Letter to Ralegh, claiming that the poem was designed to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’.²⁹ Now, circumstances contrive to thwart any such project since courtesy, the culmination of a gentleman’s training, proves to be an impossible ideal, neither fashioning a gentleman nor enabling him to fashion himself, but actually preventing him from acting.³⁰ Perhaps the omission of the Letter from the second edition of the poem reflects Spenser’s acknowledgement that his original purpose was now impossible—although the 1596 poem still promises twelve books—as well as a sign of his realization that there was nothing to be gained by being so publicly associated with Ralegh. Ralegh was no longer in disgrace in 1596, but he had not regained his original status and the allegorical representation of him as a courtier whose devoted love for Belphoebe exceeds the bounds of what is proper in Book IV of the poem is, at best, an ambiguous defence of a former patron and ally.³¹

The poem did acknowledge, however, the substance of Ralegh’s achievements in taking over the patent for the first American colonies, in contrast to some rather sceptical comments about the value of transatlantic discovery that Spenser had made elsewhere. Spenser expanded the 1590 dedication of the poem to Elizabeth as ‘Qveene of England, Fravnce and Ireland and of Virginia’.³² In doing so he recognized the reality of England’s overseas possessions, placing them on an equal footing with the multiple kingdoms she ruled within the British archipelago and the rather spurious claim to be the sovereign of the old enemy, France.³³ The edition, printed by Richard Field who replaced John Wolfe, for Ponsonby, reproduced, in the main, the 1590 text, with a few corrections, and the addition of a stanza, I.xii.3, which had probably been omitted by a printer’s error. The mass of commendatory and dedicatory verses were also omitted—along with the Letter—apart from the two sonnets by Ralegh and Harvey’s poem, ‘To the learned shepherd’. which now appears at the end of Book III and so between the two parts of the poem.³⁴ This indicates that the first edition had been seen as inadequate, and perhaps Nashe’s scathing comments on the accompanying poems had hit home. The 1596 edition was also a far more impressive book, printed on better, more uniform paper than it had been in 1590, so that the print does not bleed as it does in places in the 1590 text, the volume having a more professional appearance, a sign of how much Spenser’s stock had risen since his return to print in 1590.³⁵ The volume would have required three, perhaps four, compositors, a sign also of how carefully the work was printed. Moreover, revisions to the episode involving Sir Sergis, in V.xi.36–44, suggest that Spenser oversaw the production of the second half of the text, if not the first.³⁶

The poem was revised to change the ending of Book III so that the story runs on into Book IV. The union of Scudamour and Amoret, who no longer form a hermaphrodite, now takes place in canto x of Book IV.³⁷ It is possible that Spenser changed the ending of the first edition because of opposition from Burghley, who perceived a reference to the disastrous marriage of his daughter to the earl of Oxford.³⁸ Book IV has usually been seen as the least successful of the new books, probably because it betrays rather too many traces of its complicated history and the changes that must have been made to it before publication.³⁹ The ending of the first edition is recycled and refigured, so that Scudamore now tells us how he led Amoret away from the Temple of Venus, having become a Petrarchan lover eager to impose himself on his lady, not an equal half of conjoined flesh. He displays his shield to Amoret ‘On which when Cupid with his killing bow | And cruell shafts emblazond she beheld, | At sight thereof she was with terror queld, | And said no more’ (IV.x.55, lines 3–6). He then seizes her hand and forcibly removes her from the Temple, seeing her as a ‘warie Hynd within the weedie soyle’, boasting that ‘no intreatie would forgoe so glorious spoyle’ (lines 8–9). In the first edition of the poem the union of the lovers had a clear purpose in showing a Platonic ideal of equal married love and looking forward to Britomart’s realization of the true ideal of chastity. Here, the story is deferred once more, and no end is in sight. The virtue of friendship points us forward to the opening out of private values into a more obviously public world, but it is not always clear where we are heading.

In a sense, this is the point. Just as Calidore laments that he has to follow an endless trace without any real means of understanding where he is going or what he is doing, so does the narrator of Book IV exclaim towards the end of the book, ‘O what en endlesse worke haue I in hand’ (xii.1, line 1). It is significant that this complaint appears immediately after Spenser has told the story of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, surely a revised version of one of his earliest lost poems, Epithalamion Thamesis, now incorporating his knowledge of the Irish rivers, especially those near his home, who are invited to the nuptials of the chief rivers of the queen’s dominions.⁴⁰ Spenser is commenting not simply on the complexity of his task in trying to finish The Faerie Queene, already noted in Amoretti 33, but also on his life’s work as a poet, one that could never be completed to his satisfaction. In representing the Irish rivers he makes three central points. First, he shows how vital the rivers are to Irish economy and society, in providing transport links as well as sustenance. Second, he emphasizes his own relationship to the natural world:

There was the Liffy rolling downe the lea,
The sandy Slane, the stony Aubrian,
The spacious Shenan spreading like a sea,
The pleasant Boyne, the fishy fruitfull Ban,
Swift Awniduff, which of the English man
Is cal’de Blacke water, and the Liffar deep,
Sad Trowis, that once his people ouerran,
Strong Allo tombling from Slewlogher steep,
And Mulla mine, whose waues I whilom taught to weep. (IV.xi.41)

The list of rivers begins with the Liffey, which Spenser would have known well from his life in Dublin; it includes the Arlo (the Aubrian), which flows down from Arlo Hill (Galtymore); it notes that the English have named the Blackwater, the arterial waterway of south Munster and Spenser’s route down to Youghal; and it concludes with a reference to his local waterway, the Awbeg, the tributary of the Blackwater, that flowed through his estate.⁴¹ The inclusion of the Irish rivers also reminds the reader that all is not simply harmonious: why has Spenser taught the waves of the Awbeg to weep? Is it because he is seen as an intruder? Or has he told the sad stories of his life to his local river?

Third, Spenser shows how little control the English have over the Irish rivers, and how they are unable to record them all. The description begins: ‘Though I them all according their degree, | Cannot recount, nor tell their hidden race, | Nor read the saluage cuntreis, thorough which they pace’ (40, lines 7–9). The same applies to the ‘saluage cuntreis’, and also because they are not appropriate guests at a wedding. In mentioning the hostility of the country Spenser is reminding readers of the provisional nature of the celebration of the union, one that is still under threat from the combination of forces that he witnessed when he first came to Ireland. The sequence ends with more obvious signs of Irish resistance to English rule: ‘The spreading Lee, that like an Island fayre | Encloseth Corke with his deuided flood; | And balefull Oure, late staind with English blood: | With many more, whose names no tongue can tell’ (44, lines 3–6). Cork is enclosed because it is a walled city built to withstand assault; the Oure is a reminder of the bloody defeat of Lord Grey’s troops in Glenmalure on the banks of the Avonbeg in the Wicklow Mountains. The list begins and ends with references to rivers that Spenser observed in his first few months in Ireland.

Book IV contains a number of different narrative strands that represent the complex elements of friendship and show how our understanding of the virtue is always related to other concerns. As James Nohrnberg has observed, ‘Stories begun in III are dilated in IV, and even beyond.’⁴² The story of the true friends Cambell and Triamond who, together with their two ladies, make up a group of four, a number that symbolizes concord, is interwoven with the tale of Scudamour, who has been separated from Amoret, and that of the discordant group of four false friends, which includes Duessa, Ate, goddess of Discord in the Iliad, and Paridell and Blandamour, as well as Braggadocchio, a word that Spenser added to the language. Also involved are Artegall and Britomart, although they disappear from the narrative halfway through the book. The unit of four is then often combined with other numbers to form yet more stable units, principally with the Telamond of the book’s title, the three brothers Priamond, Diamond, and Triamond, and a series of other couples (Triamond and Canacee, Cambell and Cambina) and brother/sister pairs (Cambell and Canacee, Triamond and Cambina). The plot is loosely held together as the changing groups of knights and ladies attend a series of tournaments where the knights compete for the girdles of the true and false Florimells. However Book IV is read and whatever its high points, it appears far more episodic than the other five books of the poem.⁴³ Spenser continues his sustained interest in Chaucer through a continuation of The Squire’s Tale beginning in ii.32–4.⁴⁴ He imitates the first line of The Knight’s Tale, the first of The Canterbury Tales, ‘Whilom, as olde stories tellen us’, with his ‘Whylome as antique stories tellen us’ (IV.ii.32, line 1). Nevertheless, the different forces of amity are brought together at the end of the Book. The relationship between love and friendship is reconciled in a tour de force that pays further homage to Chaucer, the Temple of Venus, in canto x, followed in the next canto by the manifestation of cosmic order in the marriage of the Thames and the Medway.⁴⁵

Books V and VI, works which make an obvious pair, are more clearly rooted in Spenser’s experience in Ireland. This is not to deny that, as throughout his work, there are episodes in Book IV which can be related to patterns of imagery that are informed by Spenser’s life in Ireland, such as the description of Lust as ‘a wilde and salvage man’, ‘ouergrowne with haire’ (IV.viii.5), which forms part of the debate about the nature of the savage in the second edition of the poem.⁴⁶ Spenser’s representation of the savage can never be separated from, although it is not confined to, his understanding of the nature of Ireland.⁴⁷ Book V, for so long the least popular of the Books of the poem because of its brutal subject matter, argues that only if justice is imposed in Ireland can the British Isles flourish in peace and prosperity.⁴⁸ When Artegall, the Knight of Justice, is called away prematurely from the Salvage Island by the Faerie Queene, he is first attacked by the hags Envy and Detraction who claim that he has behaved with brutal disregard for the lives of his enemies in Ireland:

Then th’other [Detraction] comming neare, gan him reuile,
And fouly rayle, with all she could inuent;
Saying, that he had with vnmanly guile,
And foule abusion both his honour blent,
And that bright sword, the sword of Iustice lent,
Had stayned with reprochfull crueltie,
In guiltlesse blood of many an innocent:
As for Grandtorto, him with treacherie
And traynes hauing surpriz’d, he fouly did to die. (V.xii.40)

The stanza alludes to Lord Grey’s alleged treachery at Smerwick, in deluding the besieged Italian and Spanish soldiers, as well as the frequent attacks on his brutal tactics in restoring order, which represented him as a cruel and vicious commander, causing unnecessary bloodshed.⁴⁹ Here, Spenser provides a forceful defence of Grey’s actions, dehumanizing the opponents of Grey as allegorical representations of related vices, akin to figures such as Malbecco, the envious husband who becomes a figure of jealousy near the end of Book III.⁵⁰ We do not learn what the consequences of this failure have been until we read Book VI, the legend of Courtesy, which represents its hero as bewildered and bemused, eager to abandon his quest and to become one of the shepherds he is supposed to protect. His desire may well be reasonable enough, but the consequence is that the shepherds are assaulted and overwhelmed by savages and brigands who are able to ambush them without fear of opposition.⁵¹ The English pastoral world that Spenser created in the Calender, which was then transplanted to Ireland in Colin Clout, now stands for the rural, non-metropolitan fabric of the British Isles. The message is clear enough: the failure to deal properly with Ireland and to establish a platform on which to build Irish society anew, populated with English settlers who will be enabled to transform the island to an ordered and prosperous state, will lead to the destruction of English society. The forces of Grantorto, the Souldan, and others, representing aggressive international Catholicism led by Spain and the papacy, will overwhelm the English crown.⁵² Others may attack Grey for his policies but the true knight of justice will be able to see the bigger picture and will know that he will have to supplement force with guile in order to defeat the forces of darkness. And, given his experience in Ireland, he will undoubtedly see this problem more clearly than the queen back in the capital.

In canto ix of Book V, probably the allegorical core of the Book, the reader can see why the quest of Book VI is doomed before it is begun. Here, at the court of Mercilla, we witness a body that is not fit to govern itself, let alone a nation, so that it should come as no surprise that Calidore’s quest fails because he has no hope of defining what he does. Furthermore, there is no proper means of ruling, or even controlling, the country in which the Blatant Beast has been set loose by the actions of the crown itself. The failure of justice leads directly to the meaninglessness of courtesy in Book VI, as the one paves the way for the other.⁵³ Furthermore, we also witness the poet Bonfont, who has his tongue nailed to a post and his name changed to Malfont. This is a brutal iconic image that shows how impotent the poet, a proper counsellor of the monarch unlike the flattering, self-interested courtiers, is in the face of vicious suppression. There is no point in writing poetry for the queen and her court if no one is prepared to read it. Spenser weaves together a series of narrative threads which point towards an imminent disaster.⁵⁴

Sections of the second half of The Faerie Queene were probably written earlier than 1595, as the poem looks back to events in the early 1580s, the defining moment of Spenser’s political consciousness. Equally, Books V and VI appear to have been produced with the current events of 1596 very much in mind, applying the lessons of earlier years to the current situation. There is an awareness of a manifest threat to the settlers articulated at key moments in the Amoretti and Epithalamion, but nothing that compares to the level of anxiety articulated in Spenser’s poetry published a year later, when the need for Talus, the iron man, is everywhere present, and when he is absent the isolated rural communities are invariably overwhelmed by secretive and hostile forces that he is designed to root out and destroy. It is hard to believe that the poem published in 1596 was ignorant of specific developments in Ireland, as the rebellion of Hugh O’Neill gathered pace. The extent of the direct challenge to the crown became obvious on 7 August 1594 when the English forces under George Bingham coming to the relief of the Enniskillen garrison were overwhelmed by Tyrone’s forces.⁵⁵ The battle took place in Ulster, so may not have signalled an obvious transformation of the military state of the country, and probably had little impact on Spenser’s composition of the sonnets and the wedding ode, when that was sent over to London soon afterwards. But there could be no mistaking what was happening by the time the manuscript of The Faerie Queene reached London in early 1596. On 16 February Tyrone’s brother, Art O’Neill, burned the fort and bridge on the Blackwater that Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, had established in 1575; English reinforcements were sent from Brittany and arrived in Waterford on 19 March 1595, followed soon after by Sir John Norris who was immediately appointed military commander for Ireland. In May Enniskillen, one of the key strongholds in Ulster, fell to Hugh Maguire of Fermanagh and Hugh Roe O’Donnell, two of O’Neill’s closest allies, evidence that he was able to command the loyalty of the powerful Ulster lords. On 13 June O’Neill overwhelmed Sir Henry Bagenal’s forces at Clontibret, County Monaghan, and he was duly proclaimed traitor on 23 June. The Lord Deputy, Sir John Russell, waged a summer campaign against Tyrone, who now received the promise of aid from the Scots, in Ulster, converting Armagh Cathedral into a garrison. On 22 August Tyrone indicated to Norris that he was prepared to seek a pardon, but a day later he offered the kingship of Ireland to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Albert, demonstrating that the rebellion had already gone further than any in the century, and that O’Neill had the realistic ambition of driving the English out of Ireland. On 17 September O’Neill and O’Donnell formally wrote to Philip II of Spain, asking for military aid in return for securing him the Kingdom of Ireland. A month later, on 18 October, Tyrone and O’Donnell submitted to the crown, and they were pardoned on 12 May 1596.⁵⁶

Spenser, given his contacts in the Munster government, and his close relationship to the Norris brothers, would have known a great deal about these events and the seriousness of the threat to the Munster planters, especially after the surrender of O’Neill and O’Donnell, even though the rebellion had the appearance of being contained within Ulster. Of course, the move was designed to buy time, and by the end of 1596 the rebellion was spreading throughout the island as Tyrone urged the ‘gentlemen of Munster’ to join him (6 July) and Spanish ships landed in Donegal (17–18 September).⁵⁷ The gathering pace of the threat would explain the polemical urgency of the last two Books of The Faerie Queene, which signal a clear break with Book IV, as the poem displays a terrifying vision of English civilization, which had been in a fragile and semi-formed state at the start of the poem, engulfed by hostile forces it is unable to repel.

Spenser’s knowledge of what was taking place might also explain why he risked yet another confrontation with one of the most powerful figures in the British Isles. The most hostile reader of the poem was James VI of Scotland, one of whose courtiers must have brought the poem to his attention. Correspondence preserved in the State Papers for Scotland shows that James was furious at what he correctly perceived were aggressive attacks on his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who had been executed on 8 February 1587 for her alleged role in the Babington Plot to overthrow Elizabeth.⁵⁸ On 1 November 1596 the English ambassador in Scotland, Robert Bowes, wrote to Burghley to inform him that the king had refused to allow the second edition of The Faerie Queene to be sold in Scotland and ‘further he will complain to Her Majesty of the author as you will understand at more length by himself’.⁵⁹ On 12 November Bowes followed his letter up with another, explaining that James was quite clear why the poem had aroused his anger, as it contained ‘som dishonourable effects (as the king deems thereof) against himself and his mother deceased’.⁶⁰ Although, according to Bowes, he had persuaded James that the book had not been ‘passed with the privilege of Her Majesty’s Commissioners’, and so did not have the royal approval that James suspected that it had, he, nevertheless, ‘still desired that Edward [sic] Spenser for his fault be duly tried and punished’.⁶¹ The affair did not end there. On 5 March 1598 George Nicolson, a servant of Bowes, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil that Walter Quinn, a poet later employed at the courts of James I and Charles I, was in the process of ‘answering Spenser’s book, whereat the king is offended’.⁶² The work, assuming it was completed, has not survived, suggesting that while rancour remained in Scotland no further action was taken, although it is possible that Spenser’s public connection with Ralegh did little to help the latter gain favour with the new monarch.⁶³

If anything, this was an even more severe crisis for Spenser than that of 1591, and the strength and length of James’s reaction demonstrates the seriousness with which he viewed Spenser’s hostile representation of his mother as Duessa in Book V, canto ix.⁶⁴ There is a rather neat comic irony in Bowes writing to Burghley to assure his political master that he is defusing the crisis as best he can after Burghley’s experience of Spenser’s writing in 1591, and Burghley’s own behaviour in stoking earlier, related aggression. Why had Spenser risked returning to controversial events and represented them in such a way that they were likely to provoke a hostile reaction? Perhaps he had simply miscalculated, or perhaps he did not really care what those in power thought about him. A more likely explanation is that he was drawing a comparison between the events of 1587 when the queen had to be persuaded by her counsel, led by the recently deceased Lord Grey, represented in the poem as Zele, to execute Mary before ever more dangerous plots against Elizabeth were hatched, which threatened not just her life but the stability of her subjects.⁶⁵ Certainly there was opposition to James in south-west Ireland when he did become king of England.⁶⁶ Perhaps Spenser knew about the submission of Tyrone and O’Donnell in late 1595 and was publicly warning Elizabeth not to repeat what he saw as her earlier error. More plausibly, the poem reminds readers of the dangers of Scotland and the treachery of the Stuarts, making clear that the threat to Protestant England came from Scotland as well as Ireland, especially if forces within the British Isles were supported by military aid from Spain and the papacy.⁶⁷ Spenser was eager to use the second edition of his historical allegory to demonstrate the nature and strength of the variety of forces confronting England and the New English in Ireland.

Spenser, accompanied by his wife, made another long visit to England in 1596–7. The dedicatory letter to Fowre Hymnes was written from Greenwich on 1 September and it is highly probable that the couple were still in England in Easter 1597, as they were fighting a complicated lawsuit concerning funds relating to Elizabeth’s father’s will.⁶⁸ However, it is likely that they came over earlier, perhaps in the early summer of 1596. Internal evidence suggests that A View was written in that year, probably finished at some point well before Christmas.⁶⁹ The most compelling evidence for this dating is that Spenser refers to the impending death of Daniel McCarthy-More, the earl of Clancarty, who was known to have been ill in late 1595 but who did not die until the end of 1596.⁷⁰ Moreover, there is an allusion to the rising star of Essex near the end of the dialogue.⁷¹ Essex had enjoyed spectacular success in capturing and looting Cadiz in the summer of 1596, the fleet setting off on 1 June and the first ships returning on 1 August.⁷² Irenius argues that Ireland needs to be ruled by a Lord Deputy, ‘But thearewithall I wishe that ouer him theare weare also placed a Lorde Lietennante of some of the greatest personages in Englande, suche an one I Coulde name vppon whom the ey of all Englande is fixed and our last hopes now rest’.⁷³ Given the nature of the statement and the clear expectation that any reader would know who was meant, the reference must be to Essex, who was lauded for his success, became a national hero, and increased his standing at court when he returned to England. Indeed, the Cadiz expedition was the key event that precipitated the division that dominated court life in the last years of the century, that between the Cecils and Essex.⁷⁴

It is easy to see why Spenser might gravitate towards Essex, as did many who felt that they had nothing to gain from the Cecils. Moreover, Essex was, and was seen to be, a generous patron of writers and intellectuals.⁷⁵ Whether Spenser was making a serious pitch to the earl, as he did in the Prothalamion, or had extensive dealings with his closer circle is impossible to determine without more evidence. But the trajectory of Spenser’s dialogue suggests that he thought that Essex rather than Cecil could be persuaded to support the expensive military operations that A View argues are vital for the preservation of Ireland under English rule, an opinion which many would have shared in the summer of 1596. Spenser’s erstwhile champion and rival, Ralegh, was also present in Cadiz and played a crucial part in ensuring the success of the raid.⁷⁶ But his role was eclipsed by that of Essex, at least in public.⁷⁷ Spenser’s apparent change of sides might seem callous, but it was probably a move born out of a growing sense of the impending crisis in Ireland. It suggests that he was thinking pragmatically and it shows that he saw the earl as the right man for the job, a judgement that was cruelly exposed when Essex was actually made Lord Lieutenant on 12 March 1599.⁷⁸

The opening of A View indicates that it was written, as it was set, in England:

Eudox: But if that Countrie of Irelande, whence youe latelye come be so goodlye and Commondious a soyle as yee reporte I wonder that no course is taken for the turninge thereof to good vses, and reducinge that salvage nacion to better gouernment and Cyvilitie/

Iren: Mary soe there haue byne diuerse good plotes devised and wise Councells cast alreadye aboute reformacion of that realme, but they saie yt is the fatall destinie of that Lande that no purposes whatsoeuer are mente for her good, prosper or take good effecte, which wheather it proceed from the very Genius of the soile, or influence of the stares, or that Almighty god hathe not yeat Appointed the tyme of her reformacion or that he reserueth her in this vnquiet state still, for some secret scourge, which shall by her Come vnto Englande it is harde to be knowen but yeat much to be feared//⁷⁹

It is hard to imagine a more dramatic opening to a political dialogue. Certainly, although there are a number of eloquent works preserved in the Irish State Papers, there is nothing that remotely resembles A View. Spenser was using all his literary, logical, and rhetorical resources to produce a work that would transform his English audience’s understanding of the importance of Ireland so that they would realize that helping the beleaguered New English was not just a moral duty, but central to the survival of England. Eudoxus is a rational but ignorant humanist intellectual, unable to understand why Ireland cannot be made obedient and civil, as his education has indicated should be the case.⁸⁰ Irenius’ subtly crafted opening speech, with its detached, forensic style, the product of considered rational reflection that matches that of Eudoxus, carefully built up parallel clauses, metaphysical imagery, leads towards a shocking conclusion: if Ireland is resistant to the application of humanist logic, perhaps this is because its recalcitrance is part of God’s shocking plan to bring arrogant England to its knees. The reader knows after reading these two short speeches that A View is a work that cannot be ignored. The dialogue will explain that what must have seemed like a pressing and frightening prospect in the late 1590s was in fact a far more urgent problem than anyone had realized. The island requires immediate attention and only English people who live in Ireland will be able to explain the significance of the threat that is now posed to England. The message dovetails neatly with that of the last two books of The Faerie Queene: England is in mortal danger from what is happening in Ireland and the voices of the New English must be heeded.

A View did indeed have an enormous impact, and about twenty manuscript copies have been discovered, an unusually large number and a testament to the influence of Spenser and the seriousness with which his dialogue was taken as an analysis of the situation in Ireland. The Rawlinson copy in the Bodleian Library (B.478), which was submitted to the Stationers’ Register in April 1598 by Matthew Lownes, is inscribed twice by John Panton, who wrote out the title and dated and attributed the work: ‘1596 by Ed: spenser gent.’ (Figure 9).⁸¹ Panton was in a good position to know who had written the text—he studied at Lincoln’s Inn and moved in intellectual circles in London. He acted as secretary and confidential agent to Sir Thomas Egerton (1540?–1617), the Lord Chancellor, who had requested that Panton be admitted to the Inn in 1594. There was a close family connection as Egerton had employed Panton’s father.⁸² Egerton also had a sustained interest in Spenser’s work as he owned and annotated the copy of the dialogue now in the Huntington Library, and employed the young John Donne alongside Panton.⁸³ Gregory Downhall, who had been at school with Spenser, also worked for Egerton.⁸⁴ Egerton’s third wife (they married in October 1600), was Lady Strange, née Spenser, who had received a number of dedications of literary works from Spenser.⁸⁵

Figure 9. MS Rawlinson B.478, title page. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bodleian Library.

A copy in the British Library has the name of Sir Arthur Chichester (1563–1625), Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1605 to 1616, inscribed on the top of the first page, indicating that Spenser was read by powerful and influential people a long time after the immediate significance of the text had passed. The copy is in neat secretary hand, has justified left-hand margins, and inscribes the names Irenius and Eudoxus in a slightly lighter coloured ink for ease of reference.⁸⁶ The copy preserved in the State Papers would also have belonged to a high profile figure, probably the Lord Deputy, either Sir William Russell (c.1553–1613), the incumbent when A View was written, who served from 1594 to 1597, or Essex himself.⁸⁷ Another copy, already noted, now in the Huntington Library, can be directly traced back to Egerton, ‘who may have acquired it through his marriage to Alice Spencer [the dedicatee of The Teares of the Muses] … or to whom it may have been directly presented by Spenser himself’.⁸⁸ Clearly Sir James Ware had a copy, perhaps the one preserved in Trinity College Dublin. This manuscript, still in its original binding, is neatly copied out in secretary hand, and contains two marginal notes directing the reader to a passage on ‘Religion’ and another on ‘St. Patrick’, suggesting that the work was owned by someone particularly interested in ecclesiastical matters.⁸⁹ Other copies, such as that in Lambeth Palace Library, were small, and designed to be carried around easily, probably by those on campaign in Ireland or important statesmen in England. The text is copied out by a number of hands, perhaps the work of a secretariat producing a work for someone who needed it in a hurry such as a major official or military commander in Ireland.⁹⁰ A View could have been used to supplement a map of Ireland.⁹¹ This Lambeth text, still in its original vellum wrapper, carries the date ‘finish 1596’ at the end of the manuscript, and consists of a series of approximately equal sections in different secretary hands, suggesting that the work was produced rapidly for immediate use. The Rawlinson copy has a similar appearance and, like the Lambeth Palace copy, also has its vellum wrapper, and was produced by a number of hands. It was the text that Lownes attempted to publish in 1598.⁹² Copies in the National Library of Ireland, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the one preserved in the State Papers, have also been copied out rapidly by a scribe or series of scribes, indicating that secretariats were put to work to produce copies of a major work that required immediate attention.⁹³ Also of note is the copy preserved as part of Folger V.b.214, a long collection of different works, many dealing with issues of treason and religious conflict, a significant number relating to Essex, which was probably compiled just after Essex’s execution in 1601.⁹⁴ The volume later belonged to the Scott family, clients of Essex, further indicating a link between Essex and Spenser and strengthening a sense that the reference to Essex in A View was understood by Essex’s inner circle.⁹⁵ What is significant is the care with which this elaborate and expensive book has been made. It still has its original calf binding, contains paper of ‘heavy and of uniform quality’, and has been carefully copied out by a skilled secretariat, a work designed for years of use.⁹⁶

A number of readers clearly wanted to preserve A View for consultation at leisure in a library. What is undoubtedly the most handsome, carefully written copy, that preserved in the archives at Castle Howard, looks as if it might have been originally intended as a presentation copy for James I, perhaps written in the wake of the proposed union in 1607, as the material on Scotland and Ireland is highlighted on the title page. The manuscript is in a single, easily legible secretary hand, with even spaces between speeches and key words highlighted in italic, and still has its original velvet binding.⁹⁷ The Gough copy, which was probably produced during Spenser’s lifetime or in the early seventeenth century, also seems to have been designed for use in a library and places great emphasis on the etymological sections of the text.⁹⁸ It is noticeably larger than the Lambeth and Rawlinson copies, has an added title for reference, ‘Ireland’s Survey’, is carefully transcribed with wide margins, and has a number of marginal notes to help guide the reader. These refer to historical sections and explanations (‘Spaniards arrival into the west pt. of Ireland’; ‘Ireland had letters—before England long’); judgements about Irish life and culture (‘The abuses of the Irish bards’); and practical and military matters, often highlighting the numbers of soldiers and horses needed or the number of ploughlands in any one region.⁹⁹ It is possible that this text was also designed to be published.¹⁰⁰ The Sloane copy in the British Library is in one, far neater, italic hand, has justified left-hand margins and litterae notabiliores (thick large script) to signal the beginning of every speech, also indicating that it was produced for consultation in a private library.¹⁰¹ The same would appear to be true of Harley 1932, also in one neat italic hand throughout, a slightly smaller manuscript, which has a number of printed sections pasted in dating from the mid-seventeenth century, to provide the reader with lists of Lord Deputies, ‘A Prognostication of Irish history’, up to 1612, and ‘A Brief Computation of times, and memorable things done in this kindgome of Ireland’. This copy suggests that its seventeenth-century owner—perhaps not the original—added information to update the volume.¹⁰² Harley 7388 is another copy in neat italic hand suggesting similar usage.¹⁰³ The variety of types of copy of A View shows just how important the manuscript was seen to be when it was first written and that it retained its importance as an analysis of Ireland until well into the seventeenth century.¹⁰⁴

A View is a response to an immediate, growing crisis, which manifests itself in a trenchant defence of the New English position in Ireland. Spenser either composed the dialogue just before he came over to England, or completed it after he had arrived, staying with his family in a patron’s house or lodgings, probably somewhere in London. Therefore it is most likely that one of the purposes of his visit was to act as a spokesman for the Munster settlers and to persuade as many powerful English politicians and courtiers as possible to support their cause, a role he clearly assumed later when he came over for the last time in December 1598. The number of manuscript copies of A View that survive—and it is safe to presume that we have only a proportion of those that were made—suggest that the work was aggressively promoted and placed in the hands of influential figures by either the poet himself or his patrons and allies. After all, the evidence of the dedicatory sonnets appended to the first edition of The Faerie Queene indicates that Spenser was not averse to using whatever contacts he had when need dictated, and this time more was at stake than simply the revitalization of a moribund career. Spenser would surely have used a series of familiar names: Wallop, who had entertained the queen at his house in Farleigh Wallop; perhaps Ralegh, even though their relationship may have been problematic by this time; Sir Christopher Hatton; Harvey, who still had some connections to the great and the good; and, most important, Essex. As Spenser recommends Essex as the best man to oversee the pacification of Ireland, it is likely that he presented Essex with a copy during his time in London. This might even have been the main reason why he travelled over in 1596.

But it is also clear that A View is not simply a hurried response to a crisis, like so many other treatises preserved in the Irish State Papers.¹⁰⁵ The dialogue was the work of many years of study and thought, much of which must have been undertaken to produce Spenser’s works on history, genealogy, and ruins, providing further evidence that he had access to a substantial collection of books in Ireland. Eudoxus’ final words suggest that the work was not conceived in isolation but would be joined by a companion piece in due course (although this may have been a conventional trope, common in humanist dialogues): ‘I thanke youe Iren: for this your gentle paines withall not forgettinge now in the shuttinge vp to put youe in minde of that which ye haue formerlye halfe promised that hereafter when we shall mete againe vppon the like good occacion ye will declare vnto vs those your observacions which ye haue gathered of the Antiquities of Ireland////.’¹⁰⁶ Eudoxus’ request probably explains why Spenser was able to produce A View so rapidly. The conclusion suggests that he was working on a history of ancient Ireland and Irish antiquities, which, given his scholarly attention to English history, would have been a logical development of his intellectual ambitions and would explain why he had such knowledge of Irish historical writings.¹⁰⁷ It would also explain the somewhat hybrid form of A View, a work that has struck at least one commentator as unfinished.¹⁰⁸ The truth is probably that the material was adapted to suit circumstances, not that the text was simply uncompleted. Had Spenser lived longer it is likely that he would have produced more historical work on Ireland, and it is possible that Sir James Ware had some knowledge of his plans when he published A View, along with the histories of Campion and Hanmer—the latter was probably the source of much of the historical material that informed Spenser’s dialogue—in 1633.¹⁰⁹

A View can also be read both as a text that states what its author thinks needs to be spelled out in the desperate year, 1596, and in terms of longer and broader perspectives. Spenser notes how much money the queen has to spend to keep Ireland quiet, upwards of £20,000 a year, and argues that it would be better to send over a huge army of ten thousand footmen and a thousand cavalry to sort out any rebellion quickly than to continue to incur substantial long-term debts. The cost would be tremendous, of course, but, in the end, it would save considerable sums of money. Then, in his final recommendations as to how Ireland should be reformed, Irenius argues that the country needs to be levelled, flattened, and civilized:

and firste I wishe that order weare taken for the Cuttinge downe and opening of all places thoroughe wodes so that a wide waye of the space of C. yeardes mighte be laide open in euerye of them for the safetie of trauellers whiche vse often in suche perilous places to be Robbed and sometimes murdered Next that Bridges weare builte vppon all Riuers and all the fordes marred and split so as none mighte passe anie other wye but by those bridges, and euerie bridge to haue a gate and a smalle gatehowse set theareon. Whereof this good will Come that no nighte stealthes which are Comonlye driven in by waies and by blind fordes vnused of anie but suche like, shalbe Convaied out of one Countrye into another as they vse, but that they muste passe by those bridges, wheare they maie either be happelye encountred or easelye tracted or not suffred to passe at all by meanes of those gatehowses thereon. Allsoe that in all stretes and narrowe passages as between Two Boggs or thoroughe anie depe forde or vnder anye mountaine side theare shoulde be some little fortilage or woden Castle set which shoulde kepe and | Comaunde that streighte wheareby anie Rebelles that should come into the Coutrye might be stopped that waie or passe with great peril/

Moreouer that all higeh waies shoulde be fenced and shut vp on bothe sides leaving only xl fote breadth for passadge so as none shoulde be hable to passe but thoroughe the highe waies, wheareby theves and nighte Robbers might be the more easelye pursued and encountred when theare shalbe no other waie to drive theire stolen Cattell but therein as I formerlye declared:

Further that theare shoulde in sundrie Conveniente places by the highe waies be townes appointed to be builte the which shoulde be freeburoughes and incorporate vnder Bailifes to be by theire inhabitants well and strongeleye entrenched or otherwise fenced with gates at eache side theareof to be shut nightely like as theare is in manye places in the Englishe pale and all the waies aboute it to be stronglye shut vp so as none shoulde passe but thoroughe these Townes, To some of which it weare good that the priviledge of a market weare given the rather to strengthen and enhable them to theire defence for theare is nothinge dothe soner Cause Civilitye in anye Countrye then manye market Townes by reasone that people repairing often thither for their nedes will dailye see and learne Civill manners of the better sorte[.]

Spenser has clearly thought carefully about what needs to be done in Ireland and what he outlines is exactly in line with what happened when the Londonderry Plantation was established in the early seventeenth century with the removal of the great forests that once covered Ulster; the introduction of small farms and small towns; the construction of proper roads, crossings, and bridges; and, crucially, the building of well-fortified garrisons in strategic places throughout the north.¹¹¹ Spenser’s comments are, of course, principally a comment on what had not yet happened on the Munster Plantation and amount to a desire to transform Ireland into what one contemporary treatise described as ‘mearely a West England’.¹¹²

The conclusion is shocking, as is so much throughout A View, most famously, the description of the Munster famine with its provocative ending, ‘which they themselves had wroughte’.¹¹³ But there is a determined, pitiless, and rigorous logic to the dialogue, one that tallies exactly with the political arguments advanced about Ireland in The Faerie Queene.¹¹⁴ However uncomfortable Irenius’ arguments and conclusions might make the reader feel, he shows that he has superior logic and knowledge to his interlocutor, remaining one step ahead in the dialogue. Eudoxus’ objections can always be countered effectively and provide Irenius with the chance to demonstrate just how far beyond the experience and understanding of even the most astute and adept English political thinkers England’s Irish problem has become.¹¹⁵ The same might be said of Irenius’ claim that Protestantism cannot be advanced in Ireland because ‘instruccion in religion nedethe quiet times and ere wee seke to settle sounde discipline in the Clergie we muste purchase peace vnto the Layitye for it is ill time to preache amongst swords’.¹¹⁶ Other writers, notably John Hooker and Barnabe Rich, made the opposite case, claiming that Catholicism inspired the Irish to rebel against the crown and so it had to be tackled as a matter of urgency.¹¹⁷ Irenius’ comments justify the lack of emphasis on religion throughout A View, as well as warning an English audience that what they expect is never the case in contemporary Ireland.

Spenser’s disturbing claims show why he was so widely read and why he was able, in Nicholas Canny’s words, to ‘set the agenda’ for English policy in Ireland.¹¹⁸ A View points back to the debates held at Hill Hall, when Ireland was the major topic of discussion among humanists eager to think about colonialism and colonial policy. It also advertises its origins in the Cambridge of Spenser’s youth. The dialogue is a text that follows a straightforward logical argument, its form owing much to the educational system that Spenser had experienced as a university student and which had been augmented by Gabriel Harvey. Other public debates in Ireland and England were carried out with a conscious acknowledgement of the forms of logic and argument acquired through a university education.¹¹⁹ The point is further cemented if we also note that the works of Sidney and Spenser—albeit not A View—were then employed by Abraham Fraunce to illustrate his books on Ramist rhetoric and logic, a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc logic.¹²⁰ Irenius constantly reminds Eudoxus that his propositions might seem reasonable in England, but have no chance of working in Ireland because of the unsettling and unclassifiable nature of the country, meaning that proper experience is required in order to argue logically about it. The argument between the two invariably takes the form that what Eudoxus states would be true if Ireland were what he thought it was. However, it is not and so the solution to the problems existing there has to be of a different order, a form of negative syllogistic reasoning. Hence, Eudoxus argues that the spread of the law should render Ireland loyal to the English crown, but is told by Irenius that his own experience qualifies his logic and renders it inadequate by itself to understand a strange land in which fundamental principles need to be re-established.¹²¹ This is surely an argument based on Spenser’s own experience of working with the law in both countries.¹²²

Eudoxus is further staggered at the size and cost of the army that Irenius argues is needed to conquer Ireland, complaining that Irenius is recommending ‘an infinite Chardge to her maiestie’, but he is eventually persuaded that such expense has to be borne as it will save money in the long run.¹²³ The dialogue might be read as one large, provocative syllogism:

Ireland needs to be governed properly.

Proper government will involve methods that will seem shocking, but which are necessary.

Therefore:

Ireland requires methods that will seem shocking, but which are necessary.

A View is a humanist dialogue of the most sophisticated sort, building on the tradition established throughout the sixteenth century, notably by Sir Thomas Smith in the wake of Erasmus and More.¹²⁴ In the Letter to Ralegh Spenser had argued at length that the principal virtue of the ‘Poets historicall’ was to establish exemplary figures who would influence readers eager to learn how to govern, a key reason why the work of the poet could not be read in the same way as that of the historian, whose task was to remain faithful to the facts: ‘For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were done, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most conceneth him, and there recoursing to the thingesd forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.’¹²⁵ In a dialogue Spenser can combine his literary and historical skills to produce a fiction that has a more obviously direct impact on policy-making than even so grand a poem as The Faerie Queene, an example of Harvey’s ideal of the intellectual in public service. Furthermore, A View is an embattled defence of Spenser’s right to possess the estate he had worked so hard to acquire in Ireland. The number of surviving manuscript copies is a tribute to the dialogue’s success, as well as to Spenser’s ability to craft an argument that could not be ignored by those who mattered.

Spenser was also over in England with his wife to fight a court case in Chancery, concerning the considerable sum of £100 that had been entrusted by Elizabeth’s late father, Stephen, to two local men, John Mathew, from Elizabeth’s home village, Bradden, and Thomas Emyly, from Helmdon, about five miles away.¹²⁶ We do not know how much of the proceedings Spenser attended in person, but it is likely that he felt the need to be over in Northamptonshire to instruct counsel about this suit. The case indicates that Elizabeth’s late father, Stephen, who died in 1582, had left about £250 to his four children in his will, to be given to them when they came of age or got married, which, as the Chancery document records, did not take place until 1593–4. Three of the Boyle children survived into adulthood: George, Alexander, and Elizabeth, Alexander joining his sister in Ireland.¹²⁷ This was all quite normal practice and Stephen was behaving responsibly in ensuring that his children would be properly provided for and that his widow—or, more likely, her husband—could not appropriate their rightful legacy—a common, and in this case prescient, fear. Elizabeth’s mother, Joan, now remarried to Ferdinando Freckleton, allowed £100 of her children’s legacy to be lent to Edward Lucy, of Kingston, Warwickshire, a member of the powerful Lucy family from Charlecote, Warwickshire, whose surety was provided by Valentine Knightley, another member of a prominent local gentry family.¹²⁸ Both men sealed a penal bond of £200 to repay the capital and any interest to Thomas Emyly and John Mathew, who were named as trustees by the Freckletons, placing them in the role of prochains amis, trusted friends of the family who would act in their best interests.¹²⁹ Emyly and Mathew were probably quite close to the Boyle family: Mathew had witnessed Steven Boyle’s will in 1582.¹³⁰ Emyly was probably older than many of the others involved in the case, having taken his BA at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1555, so that he would have been about 60 in 1596.¹³¹ He died on 29 March 1608. His will, granted probate on 15 September 1608, shows that he held extensive lands in Helmdon, including the local manor, Netherbury or Cope’s manor, which he had bought from Sir Richard Knightley, further evidence of the close links between families with property in the area.¹³²

Both Emyly and Mathew were lawyers. Mathew had studied at Gray’s Inn, having been admitted under special circumstances in 1573.¹³³ As another Chancery document demonstrates, Emyly had chambers there and he appears in the pension records as a member of the Inn, helping to pay for a new gate (7 February 1593), but probably studied elsewhere as there is no record of his admission.¹³⁴ Emyly appears to have been the link between the Boyle family and Mathew, who was probably associated with him in London as a fellow lawyer at Gray’s Inn. Mathew held extensive lands in Hertfordshire, and he was involved in a series of relatively high profile disputes in the years immediately prior to the case analysed here. The Acts of the Privy Council records two disputes with James Smyth and Thomas Crane, both over the sale of lands. Crane was especially incensed—or, at least, claimed to be—by Mathew’s behaviour, and petitioned the Privy Council, complaining of the ‘coolorable and craftie practises used by John Mathew … who by his circumventions and by wresting th’intencion of the law according to his own humour and subtiltie multiplieth sondrie suits without anie sufficient cause’ against Crane. The Privy Council took Crane’s side, deciding that he had been ‘wronged by the craftie devises of the said attorney’ and asked that both men appear before the archbishop of Canterbury so that Mathew could be commanded to ‘conform himself to such severall orders as have formerlie been sett down eyther in th’Exchequier or els whear for the determining of the said variaunces, and to cease to vex or molest the said Mr Crane with anie frivolous suits’.¹³⁵ In the earlier case the Privy Council deemed that Mathew was the wronged party, although there was clearly less certainty than in the dispute between Crane and Mathew. The Council ordered both men, Mathew and Smyth, to appear before the Lord Mayor of London, ‘to give such speedie order for the redress of the injuries by the said Mathew sustained’, further adding that, ‘if by the wilfulness of either parties their differences can not take end, then you certifie us in whome the default resteth’.¹³⁶ Disputes over property were common enough in early modern England and virtually every family who owned an estate of some value was embroiled in the intricacies and complexities of the legal system at some point, plaintiffs invariably turning to the Chancery courts for restitution, as they were designed to deal with such conflict.¹³⁷ However, the surviving legal records of Mathew’s dealings suggest that he may have been involved in some dubious deals, having to sell off his lands to pay for something else or simply to manage his affairs. It is possible that at a time when moneylending was heavily restricted after the 1571 Usury Act, he was effectively arranging mortgages for his clients. There is no indication that Emyly was a party to Mathew’s unusual legal affairs and he was clearly still prepared to work with Mathew while such matters continued (the Smyth dispute was not resolved until 24 June 1595). But the evidence that remains of Mathew’s disputes indicates how fractious and confrontational property cases invariably were in early modern England, and suggests that families engaged experienced and hard-nosed lawyers to defend their interests even when other members of the immediate family unit were involved.

The demand for the return of the loan undoubtedly arose after 1594 when Elizabeth married Spenser, and the newly-weds were trying to put their affairs in order. The three children were also now over 21 and so were entitled to their legacy. The case first went before the Northamptonshire Assizes on 20 November 1596, but was unsuccessful. It was then lodged with the lawyer, Edward Heron, who filed a suit in Chancery. Spenser, who appeared as plaintiff alongside the three Boyle siblings, may have taken the lead in presenting the case, because of his age, education, and, more importantly still, because of his experience as a Chancery official and land speculator in Ireland. Moreover, Spenser had been involved in a similar case in Ireland. An entry in the Irish Chancery Recognizances dated 10 June 1589 records that Edmund Spenser and Richard Roche of Kinsale entered a bond of 100 marks for a case in Chancery between Spenser and Hugh Strawbridge (Strowbridge).¹³⁸ No details are given of the case, but as Strawbridge became clerk of the first fruits, charged with ensuring that taxes on ecclesiastical properties were paid, it is likely that the case had something to do with Spenser having failed to pay the £3 he owed as prebend of Effin.¹³⁹ It is also worth noting, however, that Strawbridge was a prominent servant of Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam who served in that office from 17 February 1588 to 16 May 1594, frequently taking messages from Fitzwilliam to the Privy Council.¹⁴⁰ Like Spenser and other New English settlers in Ireland he was connected with a number of significant land deals.¹⁴¹ Strawbridge also fell out with Wallop, perhaps over one of these deals, and this connection suggests that Spenser’s description of Fitzwilliam as an incompetent doctor who had actually made Ireland ‘more dangerously sicke than euer before’, may have had some basis in his own personal experience, recalling his sly digs at Loftus.¹⁴² Whether Richard Roche was related to the Roches of Fermoy with whom Spenser had such bitter and lasting disputes is not known, but, if he was, then the case provides more evidence of how flexible early modern allegiances could be when interests of property were involved.¹⁴³

The dispute between the Boyles and Freckleton was heard before the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, who had significant links to Spenser, although not ones which would have been regarded as improper by the standards of the age.¹⁴⁴ The most curious aspect of the Chancery case is that the defendants were not Lucy, who had borrowed Boyle’s money, or Knightley, who had stood surety, but Emyly and Mathew, who were supposed to have been acting on behalf of the Boyle children. Their answers, which gain credibility from the fact it would have been easy to disprove their testimony, insist that they had both behaved in a responsible manner. Mathew, who filed an answer before Erasmus Dryden and Edward Cope, both cousins of Elizabeth, at Canons Ashby on 18 January 1597, acknowledged receipt of the money and bond from Lucy, but claimed that he had given the bond and the money to Emyly to pass on to Freckleton. In his answer on 20 February, Emyly denied any knowledge of the money himself, and claimed that he had given the money to Freckleton.¹⁴⁵

We do not know the outcome of this fascinating case, nor what really happened about the money, but the paper trail leads to Freckleton as the guilty party, an interloper in the family, who has misappropriated the children’s legacy. But matters may not be so straightforward. Such cases were, of course, common, and there was often conflict between children and stepparents over the rights to property as one party would be eager to establish their future while the other would be attempting to ensure security in their later years.¹⁴⁶ Indeed, in 1603 Spenser’s eldest son, Sylvanus, disputed the right of his stepmother to occupy Kilcolman with her second husband, Roger Seckerstone, and he petitioned the Lord Chancellor for return of the title deeds, which he thought would prove his right to the property, a case that neatly mirrors Elizabeth and Spenser’s dispute with Joan Boyle and Freckleton.¹⁴⁷

Was Freckleton guilty of defrauding his wife’s children? Not necessarily—if this was his intention, the plaintiffs would have expressed themselves in far stronger language in their bill. His own answer insisted that Lucy owed him a large sum of money, which had been settled with a land transaction. So the most likely reason Freckleton had not paid his stepchildren their legacies was because the cash was tied up in land. The plaintiffs’ replication makes it clear that they believed that Freckleton was the party at fault, and that he could expect further proceedings. However, the language of the case does not indicate that an irreparable breach had torn the family apart; rather, that a paper trail was being established so that the rights to considerable assets could be fairly determined. Of course, a subsequent case, should one have been brought, might well have been far more explosive, but none is known to exist. The likeliest outcomes were either that Freckleton borrowed the money required to pay the outstanding legacies and end the lawsuit before it became too expensive, or that events in Ireland in the last two and a half years of Spenser’s life overwhelmed the couple before they could file a fresh lawsuit.

We know relatively little about Freckleton, whether he might have been the villain of the piece, or whether this was simply the sort of difficulty that most families with property experienced.¹⁴⁸ But a number of pieces of evidence link him to the Boyles and the Spensers. Freckleton was presumably part of a Warwickshire family, making him a member of the gentry circles in the Northamptonshire–Warwickshire area, in which the Boyles and Spensers moved. The will of Walter Freckleton, 26 February 1606, leaves his son Ferdinando 20s., ‘as a token of my last farewell’. The will also provides evidence that the Freckletons were a well-connected family, as some money is left to Walter’s kinsman John Freckleton, who served Lady Puckering, widow of Sir John Puckering (1543/4–96), Speaker of the House of Commons, patron of Thomas Kyd, and Egerton’s predecessor as Lord Keeper.¹⁴⁹ A Ferdinando Freckleton graduated from Oxford on 4 April 1573, the same year that Spenser graduated from Cambridge.¹⁵⁰ Assuming he is the same man, he later published a dedicatory verse to the clown/actor Richard Tarleton’s Tragical Treatises (1578), a work published by Henry Bynneman two years before he published the Harvey–Spenser Letters. Freckleton’s verse is not especially remarkable, but the classical allusion in the opening stanza suggests literary ambition, a knowledge of the conventions of poetry, as well as an ability to play the game of advertising his skills to a potential employer.¹⁵¹ Given his link to both Bynneman and Tarlton, Freckleton might have been known to Spenser from the late 1570s, and they both had an interest in jest books and merry tales. Spenser, through Harvey, was probably quite close to Bynneman, and may also have known Tarlton, a notable London figure at this point, who knew of the Harvey brothers and who was referenced by both sides in the Nashe–Harvey quarrel later.¹⁵² Later, perhaps unable to secure a position in a significant household, having failed as a writer, or, simply cutting his losses, Freckleton became a captain in the army, where he enjoyed a conspicuously long and successful career. At the time of the Chancery case he was in Chester recruiting men ready to sail to Ireland where he was stationed in Newry and Dundalk.¹⁵³ In Ireland he started off with a reasonable command of a fifty men, rising later to a hundred, and he was knighted for his services on the coronation day of James I in 1603, by the Lord Deputy, George Carey, along with Richard Boyle.¹⁵⁴ Again, the intertwining with Spenser’s life and career is notable, and it would be odd if this were not the same Freckleton who married Joan Boyle. Freckleton continued to serve in the army with distinction, before he was discharged at some point before 1610.¹⁵⁵ A monument was erected to his wife, Frances, at Nether Eatendon (Ettington) in Warwickshire.¹⁵⁶ She died aged 80 on 13 September 1633, demonstrating that Freckleton married another woman from the area after Joan died, although we do not know when this was. Freckleton had apparently died in Ireland and she had returned to her family.¹⁵⁷

If blinde men could of costlie colours iudge,
and intermeddle with Apelles arte,
Or were not fretting Enuie giuen to grudge
the faith of him who places a freindlie paste,
Or if my skill could see in causes deepe,
I would reueale what nowe I secreate keepe

Therefore, Joan Boyle’s second husband must surely have been the gentleman of Huntingdon who had taken part in an identical transaction to the one outlined here between the Drydens and the Spencers of Althorp in 1591–2, preserved ‘in the Exchequer of George Dryden of Adson alias Adneston co. Northamp. gent.’: ‘Whereas Ferdinando Freckleton of Huntington gent became bound to me 25 October 28 Eliz. in 200 £to secure 100 £; and Whereas Sir John Spencer of Althorpe Kt is indebted to the Queen in divers sums of money—to assign Freckleton’s bond on security in behalf of Sir John Spencer—28 April 34 Eliz. 1592.’¹⁵⁸ This is further evidence of a connection between the Boyle family and Freckleton, as the grandfather of Joan Boyle, née Cope, had married Jane Spencer, granddaughter of John Spencer of Hodnell, Warwickshire.¹⁵⁹ Freckleton may have been put forward as a husband for Joan after she was widowed as a means of keeping the family together and so preserving its property.

The Chancery case also raises a host of issues relating to Spenser’s life. If nothing else, it shows that he now had—assuming he had not before—a vested interest in the Bradden–Canons Ashby area of Northamptonshire. It also suggests that he was now relied upon to take the lead in family matters by his wife and her brothers, as we might expect given his age, status, and legal knowledge. What we cannot know is for how much of the case Spenser and his wife were present; whether the case signalled a permanent break with the Freckletons; whether those family members who lived in Ireland travelled back to Northamptonshire to attend the various proceedings; nor, indeed, how many of them lived there anyway. It does provide yet more information about the social and familial networks in which Spenser existed, indicating that local contexts were especially important for him and that he lived at least one remove from the established gentry, as did the Northamptonshire Boyles. The case, as made practical sense, was heard locally, further evidence provided by the fact that the replication of the Boyles was lodged in Clapham, a village about twenty miles from Northampton. The documents also show that the Spensers were not—and probably could not be—careless with money and felt that he needed to ensure that they kept what they held.

They also indicate that Spenser may have fostered a link with Egerton, a powerful figure whose stock was still rising, as on 6 May of that year he was made Lord Keeper to succeed Sir John Puckering, probably as a result of the queen’s intervention, retaining the Mastership of the Rolls.¹⁶⁰ The Egertons were Catholics, Sir Thomas only converting to Protestantism in the early 1580s, another indication of the close interaction of people on either side of the religious divide in early modern England. Egerton employed John Donne as his secretary (1597–8), after Donne had served with Egerton’s son under Essex on the Azores expedition in 1597. However, Egerton then dismissed him after Donne secretly married Ann More, daughter of Sir George More, Egerton’s brother-in-law, a further reminder of the need to respect distinct social hierarchies.¹⁶¹

Spenser was evidently busy at work in England, and it is unlikely that the property dispute with his wife’s family took up too much of his time. He produced two more poems within the year, Prothalamion, to celebrate the bethrothal of the daughters of the earl of Worcester on 8 November 1596, an event he probably attended; and, Fowre Hymnes, the dedicatory letter to which was written from Greenwich, on 1 September 1596. Spenser was evidently advertising the fact that he was in attendance at court, which was held at the royal palace at Greenwich that summer, suggesting to readers that he was, at last, in favour.¹⁶² Spenser would have witnessed Henri IV, king of France (ruled 1589–1610), invested as a Knight of the Garter on 29 August, a more opulent and elaborate ceremony than the investitures he had attended in Dublin.¹⁶³ His representation of the Burbon episode (FQ V.xi), which tells the story of the knight Artegall rescues from Grantorto and restores to his lady, Flourdelis, a transparent allegory of the besieged French king, could have been informed by personal observation of the monarch.¹⁶⁴ Spenser may well have been able to stay there and write A View under the patronage of Essex, or someone in his circle. Whatever the story, the fact that the place is cited is significant, as it suggests that Spenser was advertising his connections and angling for patronage, and, probably, a position away from Ireland, at least in the short term. A View was undoubtedly written to benefit its author as well as the settlers in Munster. Given Spenser’s previous comments about the court there is a rather nice irony in his attempt to return and secure lucrative favours, and perhaps an inevitability about his failure to achieve these.

Fowre Hymnes occupy an uneasy position within the Spenser canon. They are elaborate poems, inspired by the Neoplatonic philosophy which had become modish in court circles since the 1570s. They suggest that Spenser had recently read a French or Italian translation of the Symposium, and had immersed himself in the writings of Ficino and the Platonic Academy in Florence, Pico della Mirandola, Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, and Jerome Benivieni’s Canzona della Amore celeste et divino, which has been seen as a direct source for the Hymnes.¹⁶⁵ The poems might also provide further evidence that Spenser was reading such major Italian poets as Dante and Cavalcanti, as well as making use of the Neoplatonic French poetry of Ronsard and Du Bellay that he had learned from Mulcaster.¹⁶⁶ Probably these were all works he read throughout his life. The Hymnes are into two pairs, the first two describing earthly love and beauty, the second two recounting the far greater forms of heavenly love and beauty, of which the earthly forms are a pale shadow.¹⁶⁷ ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie’ concludes with a plea for the reader to abandon the vain pleasures of earthly delights and to concentrate on the secure and everlasting value of God’s love:

And looke at last vp to that soueraine light,
From whose pure beams al perfect beauty springs,
That kindleth loue in euery godly spright,
Euen the loue of God, which loathing brings
Of this vile world, and thease gay seeming things;
With whose sweete pleasures being so possest,
Thy straying thoughts henceforth for euer rest. (lines 295–301)

Although the four poems have often been praised as the mature works of a major poet establishing a late style, and have been regarded as the culmination of Spenser’s poetic career, bearing comparison to ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’, they occupy a distinctly anomalous place in his œuvre and literary trajectory.¹⁶⁸ Perhaps, as has been suggested, they were an attempt to answer the criticism recorded in the proem to The Faerie Queene, Book IV, that Spenser was a ‘loose’ poet who had written indiscriminately on love.¹⁶⁹ Perhaps they were a response to the Jesuit martyr-poet Robert Southwell (1561–95), a keen reader of Spenser who had been executed the previous year.¹⁷⁰ As Terry Comito has noted, they ‘do not wear their learning lightly’, an observation that would support the judgement that they are not quite what they seem.¹⁷¹ The dedicatory letter to the countesses of Cumberland and Warwick makes a scarcely veiled joke about the censorship of the Complaints, which places the two ladies on familiar terms with the poet and demonstrates to the outside world that they can all share a highbrow literary joke.¹⁷² Not only can the ladies appreciate the joke, but the reader can see that Spenser is on intimate terms with these powerful aristocrats, suggesting that the Hymnes may be a part of Spenser’s strategy of securing patronage by advertising his literary skills. Ponsonby published the Hymnes in a neat quarto with expensive paper and handsome and clear roman type, along with Daphnaïda.¹⁷³ It was ‘more carefully printed than any other of Spenser’s works printed in his lifetime’, further evidence of the close link between author and publisher, as well as a reminder that what is subsequently valued by readers may not have been what was thought important at the time.¹⁷⁴ The earlier poem had a separate title page, now reset from the original, so that the words ‘An Elegy’ were now in capitals and appeared on a line alone, standing out, before the reader notes for whom the poem is written.

The reproduction of Daphnaïda makes the volume look even more like an advertisement of the poet’s skill. Two very different works, each conspicuously lofty literary forms, are contained within one small, handsome book, each written to order for aristocratic patrons. The dedicatory letter sees Spenser claiming that he had two works already written from ‘the greener times’ of his youth, and now he produces two more, challenging readers to try and see the join.¹⁷⁵ Given the complex and challenging nature of Spenser’s poetry, which often links harmonious forms with disturbing subject matter, the Hymnes seem particularly slight as philosophical statements. Other poets who use Neoplatonic ideas in their poetry invariably do so in order to undermine the ostensible subject of their verse. Sidney’s sonnet ‘Who will in the fairest booke of Nature know’ (Astrophil and Stella 71) has Astrophil claiming that in witnessing Stella’s beauty he is inspired to behave more virtuously and to think about the perfect forms of Platonic beauty before the final line undermines his sentiment and exposes his true feelings:

And not content to be Perfection’s heire
Thy selfe, doest strive all minds that way to move,
Who marke in thee what is in thee most faire.
So while thy beautie drawes the heart to love,
As fast thy Vertue bends that love to good:
‘But ah,’ Desire still cries, ‘give me some food.’¹⁷⁶

Spenser would have known this poem, given his connections with Sidney, and it shows that even those with personal connections to European Neoplatonists did not necessarily treat them with unqualified respect.¹⁷⁷ John Donne also had an interest in Neoplatonic philosophy, but his major lyric, ‘The Extasie’, is based on the joke that because the union of the lovers is so pure and refined they ought to unite their bodies so that others can read the essence of their love, even though they do not need to:

To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love revealed may look,
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is the book.
And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change, when we’are to bodies gone.¹⁷⁸

Indeed, Neoplatonic poetry in Italy and in England was full of sly, underhand references and was rarely what it seemed to be. Given Spenser’s representation of his relationship with Harvey in the Calender it is possible that he knew that ‘Socratic love’ in many Italian poems exploited the ambiguity of the Greek texts and stood as barely disguised code for same-sex desire.¹⁷⁹ It is hard to imagine that the Hymnes were designed to be taken at face value. The last two hymns reject the earthly love in the first two, which would seem to be at odds with the relationship between sexuality and religion in The Faerie Queene.¹⁸⁰ Equally, it is hard to imagine that a poet as sophisticated as Spenser could take such ideas quite so seriosuly when his contemporaries were often sceptical about the significance and purpose of Neoplatonism and imaginative in their employment of the ideas and images it generated.

What might the two countesses have made of the Fowre Hymnes and why might Spenser have dedicated the work to them? They were Lady Margaret Russell, countess of Cumberland (1560–1616), and Anne Russell (1548/9–1604), widow of Ambrose Dudley, first earl of Warwick, who had died in 1590. They were younger sisters of Sir William Russell, the Lord Deputy of Ireland (1594–7), at the time when the poems were published. Spenser would have known, or, at least, met, Russell, although he may not have been especially close to him, as Russell had an openly fractious relationship with Spenser’s patron, Sir John Norris.¹⁸¹ Lady Margaret had lived with her aunt in Lilford Hall, Northamptonshire, for some years after her mother died in 1562, about forty miles from Bradden, so there would have been obvious connections between her and the gentry families that were linked to Spenser, and she certainly would have known the Spencers of Althorp.¹⁸² She married George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland (1558–1605), one of the dedicatees of The Faerie Queene.¹⁸³ Her daughter, Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), on whom Lady Margaret doted after the early death of her two sons, later paid for Spenser’s funeral monument in 1620, further indicating the close link between the family and Spenser.¹⁸⁴ The family home was Skipton Castle, Yorkshire, and it is possible that Spenser sought them out during this period in a bid to secure their support. Lady Anne was a noted reader and patron of English poetry, who knew a variety of major intellectuals, including John Dee and Aemilia Lanyer. She had a number of literary works dedicated to her and was tutored by Samuel Daniel.¹⁸⁵ Spenser perhaps knew Lanyer (1569–1645) through the Clifford family and so may had an impact on her poetry, just as he influenced the work of Mary Sidney.¹⁸⁶ Lady Anne had a portrait commissioned, the Belcamp triptych, when she was 53, showing her standing in her closet with her dog. On the shelves behind her are her books, which, along with biblical, classical, and philosophical works, include those of the major Elizabethan and Jacobean poets—Daniel, Sidney, Hall, and Spenser.¹⁸⁷ Moreover, she mixed with the Spencers of Althorp, the Wallops, and the Norris family, further indicating close links to Spenser’s circles.¹⁸⁸ Spenser praised Lady Margaret in Colin Clout as ‘Faire Marian, the Muses onely darling: | Whose beautie shyneth as the morning cleare, | With siluer deaw vpon the roses pearling’ (lines 505–7).¹⁸⁹

While Lady Margaret was a provincial figure of some significance, her sister, the countess of Warwick, was much closer to the centre of power, having been made a maid of honour to Elizabeth in 1559, becoming one of her favourites. She had other obvious links to Spenser as the stepsister of Lord Grey’s wife, and correspondent with the wife of Sir Nicholas Malby (c.1530–84), a prominent figure in Ireland in the late 1570s and early 1580s, who became president of Connaught and was unusual because he had learned Irish well. Malby served with Grey at the defeat at Glenmalure, and so would have been known to Spenser.¹⁹⁰ The countess was also a female aristocrat who had a reputation as a major patron of writers and intellectuals and she had been instrumental in gaining John Dee favour at court. She had done what she could for her friends, the Sidneys, but had not been able to have Sir Henry relieved of his position as Lord Deputy of Ireland, demonstrating that her power had clearly defined limits.¹⁹¹ Spenser had praised her more extensively than her sister in Colin Clout:

Ne lesse praise worthie I Theana read,
Whose goodly beames though they be ouer dight
With mourning stole of carefull widowhead,
Yet through that darksome vale do glister bright;
She is the well of bountie and braue mynd,
Excelling most in glorie and great light:
She is the ornament of womankynd,
And Courts chief garlond with all vertues dight.
Therefore great Cynthia her in chiefest grace
Doth hold, and next vnto her selfe aduaunce,
Well worthie of so honourable place,
For her great worth and noble gouernance. (lines 492–503)

The countess is celebrated as a wise widow, respected by the monarch as someone who merits her place at court and who is able to dispense good advice, eagerly sought out by those eager to secure their just deserts from the apex of power. The adjectives and nouns are carefully placed throughout this passage, designed to praise the countess as she probably wished to be seen by those around her. She is ‘worthie’ (a word used twice, along with the noun ‘worth’), ‘carefull’, possesses great ‘vertue’, and is ‘honourable’ and renowned for her ‘bountie’ and ‘noble gouernance’. Spenser had earlier praised her in The Ruines of Time as the wife of the earl, ‘His noble Spouse, and Paragon of fame’ (line 245), who had made her husband especially happy.

It is easy to see why Spenser, eager for support from those in high places, should have turned to these sisters at this time. He may have travelled to visit one or the other, met them through their family connections, or encountered them in Greenwich in 1596. Each had the means and the desire to ease the lives of writers like him; he had numerous connections to the families of each lady, had already praised them extravagantly in public; and they continued to promote his memory and fame after his death, indicating that a reciprocal relationship had been established. Moreover, given what he had written elsewhere and the stern reactions his words had provoked, Spenser probably had relatively few options. But it is likely that Spenser’s links to the sisters were especially close. On the last page of an early fifteenth-century illuminated vellum manuscript of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis belonging to Anne Russell, two lines from Ovid’s Tristia are copied out, ‘Tempore foelici multi numerantur amici | Cum fortuna perit nullus amicus erit’ (‘While you are safe, the friends you’ll count are many; | If cloudy weather comes, alone you’ll be’), bracketed next to the name ‘Spenserus’ in an Italian hand (Figure 10).¹⁹² If this is by Spenser, and circumstantial evidence would suggest that it is—especially as Gower was an author he would have read, even though there is only one direct reference to his work in a gloss in the Calender—then he may well have had access to the Bedford family library in his youth.¹⁹³ Anne’s father, Francis Russell, second earl of Bedford (1526/7–85), compiled one of the largest recorded Elizabethan libraries, which contained a number of important manuscripts, as well as printed books—including Mulcaster’s Positions.¹⁹⁴ He was another noted patron of writers and had a large number of books dedicated to him.¹⁹⁵ Furthermore, the Russells may have played more of a role in patronizing Spenser than has often been realized, perhaps helping to secure his position in Ireland. The lines seem to express Spenser’s gratitude to the family and sense of loss in being severed from their hospitality (assuming Spenser wrote them on a visit in 1596–7).¹⁹⁶

Both Lady Anne and Lady Margaret had well-established reputations for running puritan households and for supporting puritan divines (as, indeed, did Lady Anne Clifford). The Hymnes would seem to be exactly the sort of poetry that such sophisticated readers would like. Written in Chaucerian rhyme royal, they domesticate and anglicize Neoplatonic ideas and sentiments. Spenser would have known that both branches of the family knew John Dee and had an interest in alchemy, as her daughter noted, so that the Hymnes could easily be read as tailor-made for the sisters, merging mystical philosophy and orthodox Christian theology in an elegant, yet easily digestible form.¹⁹⁷ ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Love’ concludes by telling the enlightened that, once the reality of God’s love has been realized and understood,

Figure 10. MS Bodley 902, Anne Russell’s copy of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bodleian Library.

Thenceforth all worlds desire will in thee dye,
And all earthes glories on which men do gaze,
Seeme durt and drosse in thy pure sighted eye,
Compar’d to that celestiall beauties blaze,
Whose glorious beames all fleshly sense doth daze
With admiration of their passing light,
Blinding the eyes and lumining the spright.

Then shall thy ravisht soule inspired bee
With heauenly thoughts, farre aboue humane skil,
And thy bright radiant eyes shall planely see
Th’Idee of his pure glorie present still,
Before thy face, that all thy spirits shall fill
With sweete enragement of celestiall loue,
Kindled through sight of those faire things aboue. (lines 274–87)

Such poetic sentiments are not hard to understand, certainly not when compared to the intricacies of form and substance articulated in the Calender or The Faerie Queene, nor, indeed, even so apparently straightforward a poetic sequence as the Amoretti. The simple notion that we should despise our flesh and concentrate only on heavenly glory directly contradicts the thrust of the argument of The Faerie Queene, a work that is acutely sensitive to the dictates of the body and the need to accept, control, and govern them productively. But such a message would undoubtedly have pleased two aristocratic sisters of a puritan persuasion, especially one who was a widow and who had been publicly praised by the same writer for her discipline, self-control, generosity, and piety, and they would surely have been flattered by so eminent a poet publicly stating that he had revised work he had long forgotten at their behest. And the Hymnes are an astonishing technical accomplishment produced with Spenser’s characteristic mastery of form and numerology, pitting the wilfulness of the blind Cupid against the infinitely powerful universal love of God.¹⁹⁸ Enough readers have heaped praise on the poems subsequently to suggest that Fowre Hymnes have always found an audience eager to read them as substantial literary achievements, so it would be something of a surprise if Lady Margaret and Lady Anne were anything but delighted with Spenser’s offering. Lady Anne’s subsequent support of Spenser would indicate that they were a success, even if they did not produce the material reward for which the poet perhaps hoped.

In the same year Spenser produced a ‘spousal verse’ to celebrate the betrothals of Elizabeth and Katherine, the two daughters of Edward Somerset, fourth earl of Worcester (c.1550–1628) to Henry Guldeford and William Peter (although they would have been married by the time the poem was actually published).¹⁹⁹ Guldeford and Petre were both Catholics, further evidence, if any more were needed, that Spenser moved in diverse religious circles.²⁰⁰ The Prothalamion would be the last work published in his lifetime.²⁰¹ Spenser’s reasons for writing and publishing the poem would seem obvious enough. The wedding took place at Essex House, with three days of celebration, 8–10 November, but the betrothal ceremony, as the poem suggests, was probably in late summer or early autumn, as the court was at Greenwich until 1 October, most likely at some point between 7 and 29 September.²⁰² In writing a poem connected with this large, fifty-room house on the Strand Spenser was returning to the start of his career, because Essex House was Leicester House, which had become the property of the earl of Essex in about 1590. Spenser may well have stayed there, perhaps with his family, as he had done in 1580. Essex did have many guests to stay, setting aside rooms for frequent guests, such as Lady Penelope Rich (1563–1607), Essex’s sister, when she came to London.²⁰³ The interior of the house would have looked very different from 1579, however, as Leicester’s family were forced to sell off the possessions, including the earl’s extensive art collection, to pay off his debts.²⁰⁴ Essex would have refurbished the house, at a time when the Strand witnessed the erection of ever grander palaces, each competing in splendour with the others. Soon after the betrothal, the great house-building family, the Cecils, close neighbours of Essex, started to build Salisbury House.²⁰⁵ Worcester was a close ally of Essex, but the relationship was to turn spectacularly sour later on when Worcester was imprisoned by Essex during his coup after he was sent with other Privy Councillors to ask why so many men were assembling in Essex House, and then became one of the key crown witnesses at the trial.²⁰⁶

Spenser’s poem is yet another innovative, technically sophisticated work, based on ‘the Elizabethan dance-song stanza of three traces’.²⁰⁷ In celebrating the espousal of the sisters, the poem follows what must have been their real journey upstream, recording the actual event as a brilliant memento. The poem was probably presented as a wedding present, and may have been financed by Essex.²⁰⁸ The volume also looks like an attempt to secure the patronage of the earl, especially if read alongside the obvious reference to Essex in A View. Spenser had no clear connection to the family other than through Essex, so we must assume either that Spenser was asked to write the Prothalamion or offered it as an engagement present.²⁰⁹ Essex receives extravagant praise for his heroic feats in Cadiz, the most important event of the summer, which the earl was trying his hardest to exploit to secure his position as the pre-eminent figure at court, and to which Spenser had alluded, albeit indirectly, in A View:

Yet therein now doth lodge a noble Peer,
Great Englands glory and the Worlds wide wonder,
Whose dreadfull name, late through all Spaine did thunder.
And Hercules two pillors standing neere,
Did make to quake and feare:
Faire branch of Honor, flower of Cheualrie,
That fillest England with thy triumphes fame,
Ioy haue thou of thy noble victorie,
And endlesse happinesse of thine owne name
That promiseth the same:
That through thy prowesse and victorious armes,
Thy country may be freed from forraine harmes:
And great Elisaes glorious name may ring
Through al the world, fil’d with thy wide Alarmes. (lines 145–58)²¹⁰

If Spenser’s neighbour Henry Cuffe was related to Essex’s secretary, Hugh Cuffe, as seems likely, Spenser would have had an obvious means of knowing about Essex’s attempts at self-promotion, as Cuffe collaborated with Essex to produce the pamphlets which made his case.²¹¹ While Spenser celebrated his own position within the social order in the Amoretti as akin to that of a merchant, Spenser here defers to the earl as the ‘flower of Cheualrie’, referring to his elite status as a Knight of the Garter, elected at the tender age of 22, an order to which Worcester also belonged.²¹²

In the Prothalamion Spenser plays his hand with a clarity that would later seem like reckless abandon, as the court started to crystallize into two factions surrounding Essex, the heir of Leicester, and the Cecils. As well as openly backing Essex, he laments his own status as an outsider in the capital, casting himself as a disgruntled and poorly rewarded loyal servant who deserves far better than he gets. Spenser contrasts his dark mood with the calm of the city on a pleasant day:

Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre,
Sweete breathing Zephyrus did softly play
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titans beames, which then did glyster fayre:
When I whom sullein care,
Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay
In Princes Court, and expectation vayne
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away,
Like empty shaddowes, did aflict my brayne,
Walkt forth to ease my payne
Along the shoare of siluer streaming Themmes. (lines 1–11)

It is rare that early modern poets are as open about their failures and disappointments as Spenser is here, especially in an expensively produced slim volume.²¹³ Spenser casts himself as a discordant figure at odds with the relative harmony of the city, a position that enables him to celebrate the betrothal of the couples when he perceives the happiness of the event and is included as a guest.²¹⁴ He will be able to transform the world and give it meaning for the young lovers.²¹⁵ But the Prothalamion begins with the poet advertising the fact that he has been unsuccessful at securing anything from the court, ensuring that his presence there, which he had trumpeted abroad in the Hymnes, was no happier than his previous recorded visit six years earlier. Instead he shows that his success is tied to securing help from Essex. The Prothalamion, like the Amoretti and Epithalamion, pits commercial values against aristocratic ones, deliberately eliding the role of the poet in the early modern economy.²¹⁶ In producing this functional ambiguity, Spenser reminds us that his position as a hired writer is a precarious one and that he always risks returning home with nothing.

What cannot be disputed is the poem’s celebration of the marriage as a definitive London event, one that sees the author begin as an exile but soon start to remember his place in the city and, therefore, his part in the marriage as an event in the capital. Although he takes his name from ‘another place’ and ‘An house of auncient fame’—aligning him, for a moment, with the aristocratic values represented by Essex—Spenser takes the opportunity to remind readers that ‘mery London’ was his ‘most kindly Nurse, | That to me gaue this Lifes first native sourse’ (lines 127–31). These are, as usual, biographical details that are carefully and strategically placed in the poem, demonstrating that Spenser belongs to the city and so has a right to live and work there.²¹⁷ The refrain, ‘Sweete Thames runne softly, till I end my Song’, can be read as a declaration of Spenser’s identity, and as a plea that he return to the city until his death, especially when produced by a poet who had written so often about rivers and defined his identity in terms of them throughout his literary career.²¹⁸ Spenser has deliberately produced his most London of poems at a late stage in his life, reminding readers of his origins and showing them where he thought he belonged. In doing so he has skilfully adapted a series of poetic traditions, most significantly William Vallans’s A Tale of Two Swans (1590), a work that established the genre of the river poem and which had urged Spenser to publish his Epithalamion Thamesis.²¹⁹ Vallans probably did not know Spenser, but would have read about the early river poem in the Letters, a version of which had now appeared in Book IV of The Faerie Queene.²²⁰ Vallans celebrates his own River Lee, a tributary of the Thames that runs through Hertfordshire, and establishes the boundary between Middlesex and Essex, before joining the Thames at Bow Creek, just east of Greenwich, where Spenser stated that he was staying. Vallans had clearly been influenced by Spenser to produce his poem. He has his swans swim past Verulam, a key source of Christianity in the British Isles, ‘albeit there be nothing left but the ruines and rubbish of the walles’, in what must surely be a reference to his own The Ruines of Time, as well as the historical substance in Camden and Powell.²²¹ In writing the Prothalamion, Spenser outdoes his disciple, Vallans, celebrating London through the Thames and showing that he was the true poet of the capital.

It is noticeable that in the second edition of The Faerie Queene and A View, Spenser is at pains to promote his credentials as an expert on Ireland, attuned to its history and place within the British Isles, understanding the island’s ancient culture as well as any antiquarian working in England, and, perhaps most significant of all, proving himself to be an astute commentator on contemporary Irish politics. Whether this was part of a subtle plan, designed to show that he would be best used as an expert on Irish affairs resident in London; whether he became more eager to demonstrate his allegiance to the capital as he realized that he would have to go back to Ireland; or whether he was simply articulating the two sides of his impressive literary career, is impossible to know.