1938 When Edmund Spenser died on 13 January 1599 he was laid to rest, as the author of the greatest epic in the English language, The Faerie Queene, in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, alongside Geoffrey Chaucer (the first to be so honoured).
Spenser might well – given the extraordinary amount of achievement he crammed into his 47 years of life – have been entered in the annals of his country as a statesman, colonial governor, and soldier.
In Ireland, under the leadership of his patron, the Earl of Essex, Spenser proved one of the most efficient (and occasionally brutal) administrators of Elizabeth’s dominion over the restless Celtic colony.
Insoluble mystery surrounds the circumstances of Spenser’s final days. There had been an outbreak of rebellion in Ireland. Spenser had, since September 1598, occupied the post of Sheriff of Cork. His castle at Kilcolman was sacked the following month, obliging him and his family to take refuge in Cork. In December he left for London, with messages for the Privy Council.
Arriving in London at the turn of the year, he took up residence in King’s Street and, according to Ben Jonson, died there alone, ‘for lake of bread’, early on a Saturday. It seems strange that a nobleman, on state business – a man with many friends in high places – should have starved to death a few hundred yards from the seat of government.
Three days later, on 16 January 1599, he was interred in the abbey, the expenses (lead coffins were expensive) being supplied by the Earl of Essex.
Many poets die poor. But as pauper’s burials go, Spenser’s was glorious. According to the normally reliable historian, Camden (writing in Latin), Spenser had:
scarcely secured the means of retirement and leisure to write when he was ejected by the rebels (in Ireland), spoiled of his goods, and returned to England in poverty, where he died immediately afterwards, and was interred at Westminster near to Chaucer; his hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies, and the pens they wrote them with, being thrown into the grave.
Legend has identified the poets assembled round his coffin as it was lowered to its resting place; they were the leading playwrights of the time: Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Shakespeare.
Camden’s account (which did not identify the exact location of the coffin) was tantalising. On 2 November 1938 the Dean of the abbey was persuaded to allow the earth under Spenser’s (notionally) located memorial tablet to be dug up, in the hope of finding, inter alia, that unicorn among literary relics, the holograph manuscript of a Shakespeare work.
Alas, ‘all that was discovered was a collapsed lead coffin surrounded by dry soil’. In the coffin were some loose, disarranged bones and a skull. The coffin (which had been plundered by grave robbers – presumably immediately after inhumation) was dated by funerary experts at least a hundred years later than 1599. The identification was, plausibly, that of Matthew Prior (who died in 1721).
The manuscripts, if they are indeed beneath the flags of the abbey, still await a luckier dip – or a more adventurously exhuming Dean.