Lordship, and he feels that he is on the road to fortune. Harvey's reply was evidently written with the object of cooling his young friend's ardour. He is a little doubtful of the progress that Spenser is making, and is unkind enough to question whether he will go abroad at all. Whether Harvey was right in this we cannot say ; but it is certain that his general scepticism, due perhaps to his knowledge of Spenser's sanguine temperament, was not ill-judged. It is clear that in his desire to serve Leicester Spenser overreached himself and met with a rebuff. The introductory sonnet to Virgils Gnat, published in 1591, but 'long since dedicated to the most noble and excellent Lord, the Earle of Leicester, late deceased', which can only refer to this period, makes it obvious that some action which Spenser took in the interests of his patron was resented, and got him into trouble. Where evidence is so fragmentary it would be rash to dogmatize: but the key to the mystery is probably to be found in Mother Hubberds Tale.1 To those who played a part in directing the policy of the nation these were stirring times. Queen Elizabeth was obviously attracted by the Duke of Alençon, and so successful had been the intrigues of Simier, his master of the robes, that the announcement of her marriage was anticipated as fully as it was dreaded. The aversion of the whole country to the match was intensified in the Puritans, who remembered the implication of the family of Alençon in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and feared that so unholy an alliance would end in the restoration of Roman Catholicism. Burghley was commonly supposed to favour the match; and they looked to Leicester as the one man able to influence the queen against her present inclination. In tracing the adventures of the fox and the ape Spenser combined a satire against a church reformed in little but name, in which by disgraceful shifts men crept into preferment, with attacks upon the court, where foreign influence tended to destroy the more sterling native qualities that he set forth in his portrait of the brave courtier. But to this he adds a second allegory in which, though the main actors remain the same, the fable changes, and invites a more definite interpretation. The lion who in the earlier part signified Leicester now becomes the queen, and Elizabeth's habit of nicknaming her courtiers with the names of animals suggests to him to represent the court as a world of beasts. The ape has stolen the lion's cloak and sceptre, and by that means is ruling over the kingdom surrounded by foreine beasts not in the forest bred', and to the great advantage of the fox, who 'feeds his cubs with fat of all the soyle'. This is Spenser's forecast of what will result from the coalition of Alençon and Burghley. And the disaster is only avoided when Jove sends Mercury to warn the sovereign lion of the indignity that he is suffering in his slumber. Thus would Spenser arouse Leicester to his 1 Cf. Greenlaw, Spenser and the Earl of Leicester (Mod. Lang. Assoc. of Am., 1910), where the political significance of the poem is fully and convincingly worked out. responsibility, and awaken both him and the queen to the impending national danger. This scathing attack upon what was thought to be Burghley's policy, and upon the obvious wishes of the queen, revealed in Spenser a fearless independence hardly calculated to advance his fortunes. A Puritan who had denounced the French match in a pamphlet had lost the right hand with which he wrote it; and Sidney, who had the courage to send to the queen a dignified remonstrance, was banished the court. Spenser took his cue from Sidney. He had, of course, no intention of publishing his poem, and to what extent it was circulated in manuscript it is impossible to say; but if its drift reached the ears of Burghley or any of his cubs, it is quite enough to account for the irreconcilable disfavour with which Spenser had always to reckon from the Lord Treasurer. To Leicester, who, whatever his private feelings, had no open quarrel with Burghley, such a satire from one of his protégés could only be an embarrassment. Whether this poem was or was not the service which Spenser thought that his master had so ill requited, it is at least typical of over-zeal, and an anxiety to direct rather than to follow, which is rarely appreciated by a great lord in his subordinate. The criticism which the more prudent Harvey passed later upon Mother Hubberds Tale was just enough. Its author in the heat of choler had wilfully overshot his miscontented self'. And Spenser had to pay the penalty of his indiscretion. When he wrote to Harvey in April 1580, it was to express no eager hopes for his budding fortunes: he now reverts to the safer subject of English versifying, and in speaking of his own literary projects shows the keen disappointment that he has suffered. O Tite, siquid ego, Harvey in his reply good-naturedly twits him with his extravagant expectations, and reminds him of the gloomy view of poetry taken by Cuddie in the Shepheardes Calender. In August preferment came, though it was not the preferment for which he had hoped. He was appointed private secretary by Grey, the new Lord Deputy, and with him set sail for Ireland, which was thenceforth to be his home. But he had no reason to be dissatisfied; for it was a good opening, and it brought him into close contact with that man who, next to Sidney, had the deepest and most permanent influence upon his imagination. Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, was already distinguished as soldier and patron of letters. He was a zealous Puritan who saw in Roman Catholicism the root cause of the disaffection of Ireland. He accepted the appointment with some hesitation, for he knew that he did not enjoy the favour of the queen; and the task before him, beset as it was with danger and difficulty, was impossible without the confidence and support of the home government. But once in Ireland he set himself with unflinching sternness to execute his conception of duty. To the governors of those days the only course open seemed to be one of suppression, and what others accepted from a sense of political expediency was to Grey a deep religious obligation. No compromise was possible, there could be no half measures. Ireland, said Grey, could not be built up before force have planed the ground for the foundation', and he lost no time in setting about the planing. When he landed in Dublin the country was in a ferment, torn by feuds of one clan against another, and united only in deadly hatred of the English. In the south Desmond was in active revolt, and Grey soon learned that on the south-west coast of Kerry a band of foreign invaders, under the Pope's blessing, had landed and fortified a port at Smerwick, which was to serve as the base for attacks upon the English rule. Grey first marched against the rebels at Glenmalure in Wicklow and suffered a reverse. Then he turned to Smerwick, reduced it to surrender, and put the whole garrison of 600 to the sword, 400 of them as gallant and goodly persons as of any I ever beheld'. Through the length and breadth of Ireland he passed like a scourge, hanging and mutilating the rebels, burning the crops, reducing the wretched inhabitants to surrender by the terror of famine and the sword. His record after two years' campaign in Ireland was '1,485 chief men and gentlemen slain, not accounting those of the meaner sort, nor yet executions by law, which were innumerable'. Grey's term of office does not make pleasant reading. But it is idle to expect the humanitarianism of the twentieth century in an Elizabethan who combined the spirit of imperialism with the religious fervour of an early crusader. He reproached himself with a lack of thoroughness in the extirpation of his foes; and to the criticism of an unsympathetic government which professed to dislike his cruelty whilst, in reality, it only grudged his expenditure, he sorrowed that pity for the wicked and evil should be enchanted unto Her Majesty.' And Spenser endorsed all that Grey did. To him, and he must have had ample opportunity for judging, Grey was a man whom, who that well knewe, knewe him to be most gentell, affable, loving, and temperate, but that the necessitye of that present state of thinges enforced him to that violence, and allmost changed his very naturall disposition'. As private secretary he would probably accompany Grey on all his expeditions; and the vivid pictures which he drew of the poverty and destitution of Ireland, which suggested not a little detail in the Faerie Queene, read like the records of an eyewitness. The Veue of the Present State of Ireland, written some years later, is a reasoned defence of Grey's character and policy, and that same man who after two years' fruitless attempt to crush rebellion was recalled to England to undergo a strict examination of his stewardship, was glorified in the Faerie Queene as Sir Artegall, the chosen instrument of Justice Most sacred vertue she of all the rest.' After Grey's departure Spenser remained in Ireland executing subordinate but not unlucrative duties as a civil servant. Already, in the previous year, he had been appointed Clerk of Decrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, and had obtained the lease of the Abbey and Manor of Enniscorthy, in Wexford County. But the Abbey was not long his home, if indeed he ever lived there, for in December 1581, he had relinquished it in favour of one Richard Synot, and in the following month was granted for six years a house in Dublin, valued at five pounds. Later in 1582 the House of Friars, called New Abbey, Co. Kildare, was granted to him to be held on a twenty-one years' lease at a rent of three pounds. In May 1583 Edmund Spenser of New Abbey' is nominated with some others' to be a commissioner of musters in the County of Kildare, its crosses and marches, to summon all the subjects of each barony, and there so mustered to assess in warlike apparel, arms, horse, horsemen, and footmen, according to the quantity of their lands and goods, according to the ancient customs and laws of the kingdom and the instructions of the Lords Justices '.1 In the following two years he performs a similar office. In 1586 he dates a sonnet to Harvey from Dublin; in 1589 he succeeds his friend Ludovick Bryskett as Clerk of the Council of Munster. This Council, with Sir John Norreys as its president, was actively engaged in planting' Munster with English colonists, dividing the province into different seigniories to be assigned to different gentlemen undertakers whom the crown was anxious to enrich, and by whose influence the barbarism and destitution of the country should be civilized and turned to prosperity. Prominent among these was Sir Walter Ralegh, who obtained various grants, amounting in all to some forty thousand acres. Spenser himself received the more modest grant of the manor and castle of Kilcolman in the county of Cork. It consisted of 3,028 acres, with six English householders settled under him as cultivators of the land. The date at which he took up his residence at Kilcolman cannot be exactly determined, but his resignation in 1587 of his Clerkship in Dublin, the same year that the lease of his Dublin house ran out, points to that time. The grant was not ratified until 1591, but he was certainly in possession two years before. Spenser's life during these nine years was not entirely occupied with official business. He had leisure for literary work, and he had now completed the first three books of that great poem on which he had embarked before leaving England. And though he must often have been lonely, and thrown entirely upon his own resources, he was not altogether cut off from the stimulus of congenial society. In Dublin, holding various offices under the crown, was a coterie of Englishmen who loved learning and held Spenser in high repute as scholar and as poet. No biographer of Spenser can leave unquoted the account given by Bryskett, in his Discourse of Civil Life, of a gathering of friends at his cottage near Dublin. Touched with the dignity and courtly grace of the Renaissance 1 Vide Reports of Deputy Keeper of Public Records in Ireland, quoted by Buck : New Facts concerning the Life of Spenser (Mod. Lang. Notes, December 1904). dialogue, it casts a vivid light upon the character of the society into which Spenser was thrown, and upon the part he played in it. 'Yet is there a gentleman in this company,' says Bryskett, whom I have had often a purpose to intreate, that as his liesure might serue him, he would vouchsafe to spend some time with me to instruct me in some hard points which I cannot of myselfe understand; knowing him to be not onely perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well read in Philosophie, both morall and naturall. Neuertheless such is my bashfulnes, as I neuer yet durst open my mouth to disclose this my desire unto him, though I have not wanted some hartning thereunto from himselfe. For of loue and kindnes to me, he encouraged me long sithens to follow the reading of the Greeke tongue, and offered me his helpe to make me vnderstand it. But now that so good an oportunitie is offered vnto me, to satisfie in some sort my desire; I thinke I should commit a great fault, not to myselfe alone, but to all this company, if I should not enter my request thus farre, as to moue him to spend this time which we have now destined to familiar discourse and conuersation, in declaring unto us the great benefits which men obtaine by the knowledge of Morall Philosophie, and in making us to know what the same is, what be the parts thereof, whereby vertues are to be distinguished from vices; and finally that he will be pleased to run ouer in such order as he shall thinke good, such and so many principles and rules thereof, as shall serue not only for my better instruction, but also for the contentment and satisfaction of you al. For I nothing doubt, but that euery one of you will be glad to heare so profitable a discourse and thinke the time very wel spent wherin so excellent a knowledge shal be reuealed unto you, from which euery one may be assured to gather some fruit as wel as myselfe. Therefore (said I) turning myselfe to M. Spenser, It is you sir, to whom it pertaineth to shew yourselfe courteous now unto us all and to make vs all beholding unto you for the pleasure and profit which we shall gather from your speeches, if you shall vouchsafe to open unto vs the goodly cabinet, in which this excellent treasure of vertues lieth locked up from the vulgar sort. And thereof in the behalfe of all as for myselfe, I do most earnestly intreate you not to say vs nay. Vnto which wordes of mine euery man applauding most with like words of request and the rest with gesture and countenances expressing as much, M. Spenser answered in this manner : Though it may seeme hard for me, to refuse the request made by you all, whom euery one alone, I should for many respects be willing to gratifie; yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but with the consent of the most part of you, I shall be excused at this time of this taske which would be laid vpon me, for sure I am, that it is not vnknowne unto you, that I haue alreedy vndertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is in heroical verse under the title of a Faerie Queene to represent all the moral vertues, assigning to euery vertue a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in whose actions and feates of arms and chiualry the operations of that vertue whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same, to be beaten down and ouercome. Which work, as I haue already well entred into, if God shall please to spare me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish (M. Bryskett) will be in some sort accomplished, though perhaps not so effectually as you could desire. And the same may very well serue for my excuse, if at this time I craue to be forborne in this your request, since any discourse, that I might make thus on the sudden in such a subject would be but simple, and little to your satisfactions. For it would require good aduisement and premeditation |