The Faerie Queene earned Spenser a queen’s lifelong pension
Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic celebrating Elizabeth I brought a fifty-pound yearly pension—and still failed to win him a secure court post. Ireland gave him land, a burned castle, and a banned pamphlet arguing English rule required crushing native culture.
Born in London around 1552, probably to clothmaker John Spenser, he studied at Merchant Taylors’ School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, befriending Gabriel Harvey. In 1580 he went to Ireland with Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, served at the Smerwick siege, and stayed for posts and Munster Plantation estates, including Kilcolman near Walter Raleigh’s holdings. After a brief stint as secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester, he published The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 and married Machabyas Childe, with whom he had Sylvanus and Katherine. Later he bought a second holding at Rennie above the Blackwater, where local legend says he wrote part of his epic beneath a tree called Spenser's Oak, until lightning destroyed it in the 1960s.
In 1590 he published the first three books of The Faerie Queene in London, helped by Raleigh, and secured the queen’s life pension. A later publication’s satirical Mother Hubberds Tale antagonized Lord Burghley. By 1594 his first wife had died; he married younger Elizabeth Boyle, celebrated in Amoretti and Epithalamion. His 1596 prose View of the Present State of Irelande urged destroying Irish language and customs and stayed unpublished in his lifetime. Back in Ireland he anchored a literary circle including his lifelong friend Lodowick Bryskett, and in 1591 he issued Ruines of Rome, a verse rendering of Du Bellay's sonnets. Elizabeth Boyle, a relative of the first Earl of Cork, bore him a son, Peregrine.
In 1598 Hugh O’Neill’s forces burned Kilcolman; Ben Jonson claimed an infant child died in the fire. Spenser died in London in 1599, aged about forty-six. Jonson said he starved “for want of bread,” though a government payment and pension were due. Poets buried him near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
Source: Edmund Spenser
