Spenser’s family stayed in Ireland after his death. Assuming that Elizabeth fled to London with him, as seems most likely, she probably returned at some point in the early 1600s. She appears as ‘Mrs Spenser’ in a list of undertakers, appended to a letter written by Hugh Cuffe to Sir Robert Cecil in February 1601.1 Cuffe states that he himself ‘never more intend to dwell in Ireland, having had so many crosses’. He had lost his son in the defence of Kilmallock (fifteen miles north of Kilcolman over the Ballyhoura Mountains) at the start of the insurrection, and his seigniory was now reinhabited by his two daughters and his bailiff. Cuffe places the blame for the destruction of the Plantation squarely on the shoulders of the other undertakers and demands that they now return and populate the devastated lands, ‘Otherwise myself and some few others that are desirous to do her Highness service shall lose our labour, as hitherto we have done.’ Perhaps with some significance, Sir Walter Ralegh heads the list of both Cork and Waterford undertakers: Mrs Spenser is fourth from last in a list of twelve, after Cuffe himself.
Munster remained in turmoil until Sir George Carew’s campaign in summer 1600 started to clear out rebel strongholds in Limerick and Kerry. After this, settlers started to return, and the government was eager to repopulate the Plantation. A few appear to have stayed throughout parts of the crisis, such as Hugh Cuffe (although he clearly had abandoned his estate at one point), but as late as 1603 there was concern that sixteen of the undertakers were still absent.2 Elizabeth was obviously in the first wave of English settlers to return, most likely because she had too much to lose in staying away and had to take the risk. Eventually, the Plantation was reestablished and became a much more obviously anglicized settlement, with swift transport links to England and Europe.3 This is where the family lived until the eighteenth century.
The family’s principal home, Kilcolman, had been badly damaged in the rebellion, and must have been in a state of disrepair in the first years of the seventeenth century. It is hard to know whether Renny was in a similar state, but it is possible that it had survived the years rather better and may have been where the family lived at first. At some point between Spenser’s death and 20 August 1600, Elizabeth married Roger Seckerstone, as proved by a deed that grants ‘Roger Seckerton and his wife’ the right to ‘Rennyborough’ and various rectories that must have been associated with the castle. The Seckerstone family, like so many other settlers (including the Spensers), appear to have become Catholics by the middle of the seventeenth century.4
It is possible that Sylvanus and Peregrine stayed in England and only returned to Ireland later, as we know that Peregrine was in London on 15 May 1618, when Richard Boyle sent him £5.5 Sylvanus would have been almost at the age of majority when his stepmother remarried; Peregrine would have still been quite small, and could not have been older than 5. At some point in the early 1600s, Sylvanus’s sister, Katherine, married William Wiseman of Bandon, the most significant new town in Ireland some twenty miles south-west of Cork city.6 Spenser had income from a number of ecclesiastical properties in the area in the late 1590s, notably at Kilbrogan, where Katherine was eventually buried. More relevant still, Bandon was a Protestant planter town owned, planned, and developed by Sir Richard Boyle, to show that settlements in Munster could rival those in Ulster, such as Londonderry.7 Wiseman, son of Simon Wiseman, an original colonist, was described by Boyle as a ‘verie loving friend’.8 He was escheator for County Cork, a lucrative position which involved the inspection of the property resulting from people who had died intestate, to see whether it could be transferred to the crown.9 Richard Boyle had been the deputy escheator, which would explain how the couple met.10 They lived in Kilbeg Castle, just outside Bandon. Boyle made his fortune through appropriating land in this manner, and the Wisemans clearly did well for themselves, as his will indicates.11 William remarried in 1635, so Katherine was dead by this point, probably at some point in the 1630s. She was buried in the grounds of Christ Church, Kilbrogan, the oldest Protestant church in Ireland, about a mile from her house (Plate 43).12 Wiseman died on 11 February 1635, his funeral entry confirming that they had no children who survived into adulthood.13 A Lawrence Spenser of Kilpatrick, near Bandon, who died in 1653 and was also buried in Christ Church graveyard, was a yeoman father and not the poet’s son, as was once claimed.14
Nothing is really known about Seckerstone. He was another acquaintance of Sir Richard Boyle’s as references in the Lismore Papers demonstrate, and he may have been descended from a merchant who was either Irish or who was English and had lived in Ireland for a long time.15 Elizabeth, a vulnerable widow in a difficult situation, was probably persuaded that remarriage was desirable.16 Widows in late sixteenth-century England generally remarried after nine months so Elizabeth appears to have followed a well-established pattern, probably waiting slightly longer than the norm.17 The union produced one child, Richard, who was the godson of the earl. Seckerstone was dead by April 1606, probably dying in that month, as an indenture between Elizabeth Seckerstone and Richard Boyle of 3 May 1606 describes her as a widow. The document was drawn up to lease a house in Kilcoran, Youghal (near the strand) to her for sixty-one years at an annual rent of 2s. 6d., presumably the house where the couple had been living.18
Elizabeth now remained as a widow for a relatively long period, perhaps because she had no immediate need to remarry now that the situation in Ireland had stabilized, perhaps because she was well looked after by her wealthy cousin. She eventually remarried Captain Robert Tynte in 1612, becoming his second wife and assuming the title ‘Lady Tynte’. The couple had four children before Elizabeth died on 23 August 1622.19 She may have been in ill health before this, as a letter to Richard Boyle written on 5 January 1615 indicates.20
In the intervening years the complicated nature of the Spenser family had led to a series of legal disputes about property that resemble those brought by Edmund and Elizabeth against the previous generation. In 1603, Sylvanus, who had probably just come of age, petitioned the office of the Lord Chancellor for access to the title deeds to Kilcolman which were held by Roger and Elizabeth Seckerstone. The document, now destroyed, stated
Whereas your Petitioner’s father, Edmund Spenser was seized in his demense in ffee of Kyllcolman and divers other lands and tenements in the county of Corke, which descended to your petitioner by the death of his said father, so it is right honourable, the evidences of the sayd inheritance did after the decease of the petitioner’s father cum to the hands of Roger Seckerstone and petitioners mother which they unjustly detayneth; which evidences forasmuch as your petitioner can have no accion at common lawe, he not knowing theire dates and certainty, he is driven to sue in consideracion before your Honourable Lordship, and avoweth that the said Roger Seckerstone, his mothers now husband, unjustly detayneth the said evidences, to your petitioners damage of one hundred pounds, where in he prays remedy.21
These words indicate a serious conflict between heir and widow, as was often the case with English inheritance laws.22 Sylvanus was obviously successful, perhaps through an amicable settlement with his stepmother, as he is recorded as an undertaker in 1603.23 In 1605/6 Sylvanus was embroiled in disputes about death duties (heriot and relief) and he was summoned before the Exchequer court, after which the estate was seized on the sheriff’s orders.24 Sylvanus evidently paid the duties and reoccupied the estate in 1606.25 Like his father, he was involved in disputes with his neighbours over the extent of his land, Sir Allan Apsloe, Kt. and John Power of Doneraile, but also had some rent abatements as his father had sold two ploughlands to the Synans.26 He was indicted in 1611 for being an absentee landlord, most of whose tenants were ‘mere Irish’.27
Sylvanus would have occupied Kilcolman at some point in the early seventeenth century, animal remains indicating that the castle was inhabited at this time, when a number of architectural innovations took place, including the raising of the floor in the parlour that his father had established.28 However, it is likely that Sylvanus abandoned the tower house in 1620, when a fire destroyed much of the building and he had a manor house constructed on the estate as the Plantation Survey of 1622 records.29 In c.1630 Sylvanus married Elinor, one of David Nagle’s nine daughters.30 Nagle was a powerful Anglo-Irish neighbour of the Spensers, who held lands in Monanimy, near Killavullen, about eight miles east of Mallow, the marriage being a sure sign that the Spensers now envisaged themselves as part of the minor gentry in south Munster.31 More significantly, David Nagle also owned Ballynamona Castle, only a few miles from Kilcolman. Elinor was the granddaughter of William Roche, who was related to Lord Maurice Roche, a sign of how complex family relationships and legal disputes could be in the early modern British Isles.32 The first wife of Edmund’s nephew, Sir Robert Travers, was Katherine Nangle, who may have been from the same family.33 The Nagles were a prominent and distinguished Catholic family who controlled the area around Monanimy, before they were dispossessed after the leading role that Sir Richard Nagle (1636–99), Sylvanus’s nephew, played as a Jacobite in the Williamite Wars.34 The marriage of Sylvanus and Elinor suggests that either the Spenser family had changed or that they had always had good relations with their Catholic neighbours.35 Neither story would be surprising, as many undertaker families—notably the Audleys, the Brownes, the Cullums, and the Thorntons—had become Catholic by the second quarter of the seventeenth century.36 Sylvanus and Elinor probably lived in Ballygriffin, near Killavullen for a part of their twenty-odd years of married life.37 Sylvanus died in 1636, having produced two sons who survived into adulthood, Edmund and William, Edmund being his heir and assuming the rights to the estate.
Peregrine, Spenser’s son from his second marriage, appears to have suffered from the general affliction of second sons, lack of means of support. He appears in the Lismore Papers, writing a rather self-pitying letter to Richard Boyle on 2 October 1618 for help to secure a living. Claiming that his health has prevented him from effective study, Peregrine apparently pleads for guidance—‘But if yor charity wil voutchsafe to be a meanes to direct my youth in a path that my age may liue to pray for you in all the zealous offices that so obliged a kinsman as my self may be acceptable, I wil conforme my industry to yor disposing’—before asking the earl if he knows what has happened to the £5 he has heard from his mother that he sent him, one of what looks like a number of payments made to him by the earl.38 The earl appears to have looked after his relative, as he had his mother, which was surely another reason why the family returned to Ireland. An earlier letter (19 November 1616) from Lady Tynte to Boyle pleads with the earl to overlook some unstated ‘childes accions to excuses in regarde of his youeth & want of exsperiance’ and thanks him for offering to allow Peregrine to stay with him ‘for his better edicacion’.39 Peregrine was clearly regarded as something of a problem child, worried his relatives about his development into adulthood, and does not appear to have followed their plans. Like his brother, Peregrine had to fight against what he saw as the appropriation of his rightful property by his mother and stepfather, lodging a bill on 14 January 1623, after Elizabeth’s death, against Francis Marshall, who had presumably acquired Renny and its accompanying lands from Roger and Elizabeth Seckerstone.40 Peregrine married Dorothy Tynte, the daughter of Elizabeth’s third husband, Sir Robert Tynte, from an earlier marriage, in 1623.41 They had four children, and the eldest son, Hugolin, inherited the Renny estates. Hugolin’s sister, Catherine, married Ludovicus O’Cahill, son of Daniel Duffe O’Cahill, the harper of Queen Anne of Denmark, James I’s wife.42 Peregrine died in February 1641/2 fighting for Charles I in the Civil War.43 Hugolin lodged a claim with the Court of Claims in the early 1660s and had to deny suggestions that he and his father were Catholic, indicating that the family, like many others, had been under suspicion for a long time. The court concluded that they were innocent.44 Dorothy lived on for many years and may well have possessed the copy of The Faerie Queene that Spenser gave to Elizabeth, as the initials ‘D. S.’ are written on the title page.45
Sylvanus’s son, Edmund, who appears to have been rather argumentative and confrontational, died on 28 August 1640, when he broke his neck falling from his horse in Dublin and was buried in St James’s churchyard, next to his maternal grandfather David Nagle.46 As he had no heirs, Kilcolman passed to his younger brother, William (1634–1713). William was a Catholic, and it is evident that Elinor had brought their children up as adherents of the traditional faith, clearly with the agreement of Sylvanus. Accordingly part of the estates, Kilcolman, Lisnamucky, and Knocknamaddery, totalling 1,599 acres, were seized by Cromwellian troops led by Captain Peter Courthope in 1654.47 William appealed to Oliver Cromwell on 27 March 1657 for the return of his lands, as is recorded in Cromwell’s letter to the Irish Council:
A petition hath been exhibited unto us by William Spencer, setting forth that being but seven years old at the beginning of the Rebellion in Ireland, he repaired with his mother, his father being then dead, to the City of Cork, and during the Rebellion continued in the English quarters, that he never bore arms or acted against the Commonwealth of England, that his grandfather Edmund Spencer and his father were both Protestants, from whom an estate of lands in the Barony of Fermoy and County of Cork descended on him, which during the Rebellion yielded him little or nothing towards his relief, that the said estate hath been lately given out to the soldiers in satisfaction of their arrears, only upon the account of his professing the Popish religion, which since his coming to years of discretion he hath, as he professes, utterly renounced; that his grandfather was that Spencer, who by his writings, touching the reduction of the Irish to civility, brought on him the odium of that nation, and for those works and his other good services Queen Elizabeth conferred on him the estate which the said Wm. Spencer now claims. We have also been informed that the gentleman is of civil conversation and that the extremity his wants have brought him to have not prevailed over him to put him upon indirect or evil practices for a livelihood; and if, upon inquiry, you shall find his case to be such, we judge it just and reasonable, and do therefore desire and authorise you that he be forthwith restored to his estate, and that reprisal lands be given to the soldiers elsewhere, in the doing whereof our satisfaction will be the greater by the continuation of that estate to the issue of his grandfather, for whose eminent deserts and services to the Commonwealth that estate was first given him.48
The Council resolved matters swiftly and issued a final judgement on 11 August 1657.49 Despite Cromwell’s intervention, William had to surrender the lands to the soldiers, although he preserved the rest of the Kilcolman estate, and he was transplanted to Connaught, albeit with a reasonably substantial portion of land, 1,011 acres in the Ballinasloe area, about twenty miles south-west of Athlone, on either side of the Galway/Roscommon border.50 In 1660 he was restored to his Kilcolman estate and appears to have kept his lands in Galway and Roscommon.51
This document tells us a great deal.52 William’s petition was clearly cunningly crafted and his description of the hostility of the Irish towards his grandfather’s ‘writings touching the reduction of the Irish to civility’, looks like a deliberate echo of the opening lines of A View, providing further confirmation of Spenser’s authorship of the dialogue.53 However, what Cromwell records that William Spenser claims is certainly problematic, although it may have a basis in reality. William argues that he was only ever a Catholic out of youthful ignorance, and that his father was always a Protestant. This would indicate that his mother dominated the character of the household, including the religion that the children would follow. Sylvanus, according to his son, maintained his faith in opposition to what was happening in the rest of the house, something that is possible but unlikely to be the whole story of the family’s religion. William’s own convenient renunciation of his Catholicism was the basis of his claim that he be restored to his estate. Certainly the Spenser household as represented by William seems to have been at odds with the norm in England where ‘[t]he husband was expected to be the dominant partner in the religious life of the household’.54 Moreover, the deposition of Richard Gettings of 10 May 1642 asserts that ‘the heirs and executors of Edmond Spencer late of Kilcolman’ were among the rebels, which would appear to refer to Sylvanus’s branch of the family, and would suggest that William and his brothers were out in rebellion.55 Gettings could, of course, be mistaken or lying, but his testimony indicates that the Spensers were not thought of as an especially loyal family. Certainly other settlers, assumed to have been ‘British Protestants’, joined the rebels, among whom was one Walter Spencer of Ballinalty.56
William Spenser had clearly exaggerated his loyalty in order to reclaim his property. Cromwell’s account suggests that he probably believed what William had told him, perhaps also out of convenience, as he probably wanted to retain a loyal subject in the area and thought that more land could easily be taken from other places to compensate his soldiers. It is also obvious from reading this that Cromwell had a high regard for Spenser and thought that he had been rewarded by the state just as he planned to reward his soldiers and Spenser’s grandson. Cromwell’s comments on A View indicate that he had read the text, undoubtedly in preparation for his campaign in Ireland.57 For Cromwell, the opprobrium that it had generated in Ireland was a sign of its author’s virtue for which his family deserved to keep their land.
William met his wife, Barbara Edwards, daughter of William Edwards of Loughrea, about twenty-five miles south-west of Ballinasloe. She brought a number of new lands in her dowry so that the couple owned about 2,000 acres in the region and, once they had recovered Kilcolman, they seem to have alternated between the two estates. The couple had two children, Nathaniel and Susanna.58 Nathaniel, like his great-grandfather, appears to have become a prebendary of a church in the diocese of Limerick Cathedral.59
Hugolin had an equally fraught and complicated existence, and an indenture dated 9 August 1673, shows that he had to mortgage many of his lands.60 He is mentioned in the 1641 depositions as living at Renny.61 Like William, he had become a Catholic, perhaps converted after he had left home, unless both of Spenser’s sons became Catholics when they married and passed their faith on to the next generation. Hugolin and Dorothy were dispossessed of their impoverished estate, although they were later reinstated as ‘Innocent Papists’.62 The two cousins fought on opposite sides in the Williamite Wars (1689–91), Hugolin taking the side of James and the Catholic Irish Confederacy, while William supported William III, a division that reflected the experience of many English families in Ireland in this period.63 William suffered particularly badly, complaining that he lost 300 head from his herd of black cattle, 1,500 sheep, and that his houses were ransacked and burnt down and his family abused. Hugolin was declared an outlaw for high treason at Mallow on 15 August 1694, his estates forfeited and transferred to William in compensation for his services to Ireland. The formal transfer was approved by the king on 23 April 1697, and the Renny lands passed on to William’s son, Nathaniel, on 14 June. William was later dispossessed by an Act of Parliament which negated all such grants, but he was reinstated when he travelled to London to appeal against the decision by a private Act.64
However, Hugolin had already mortgaged the Renny estates to his daughter Dorothy’s husband, Pierce Power, whose family had married into the Boyle family before Edmund had married Elizabeth, for £300, to be raised to £500 if Hugolin died without male issue, which he did.65 William and Nathaniel mortgaged all their lands, the Kilcolman and Renny estates, for £2,100 on 24 December 1697. When William died in April 1713 Nathaniel was forced to sell a large part of his lands to pay his debts. In 1738 mortgage documents amounting to £2,000 belonged to Elizabeth, the widow of Sir Richard Meade, the great-grandson of Sarah Spenser, Edmund’s sister (her son, Sir Robert Travers, had married the daughter of Sir John Meade).66
The male descendants of Peregrine died out with Hugolin; Sylvanus’s line lived on through Edmund Spenser the third, son of Nathaniel, making him the great-great-grandson of the poet. He finally disposed of the remnants of the original Spenser estates in 1733 and the Connaught estates in 1748.67 Edmund the third appears to have left to live in Dublin, where he planned to write a life of his ancestor for an edition of his works, which, unfortunately, never appeared.68 Spenser’s descendants through his female heirs survive today in the Cahill, Fitzgerald, Power, Ryan, and White families in Ireland.69