Edmund Spenser
Henry’s closing of religious houses had caused what Ascham called ‘the collapse and
ruination’ of schools; Sir Thomas Pope, founder of Trinity College, Oxford, in
Mary’s reign, described Greek as ‘much decayed’. Only in the 1560s did good schools
revive, including Shrewsbury, attended by Sidney, or Merchant Taylors, London,
attended by Spenser. Edmund Spenser (b.1552) was a scholarship boy at
Cambridge, where he translated sonnets by Petrarch and Du Bellay. In 1579 he wrote
the Shepheardes Calender. From 1580 he was a colonist in Ireland, writing The Faerie
Queene. At Ralegh’s prompting, he published three books in 1590 (and got a
pension), adding three more in 1596. Spenser dedicated his heroic romance to the
Queen. It is now the chief literary monument of her cult.
After the reigns of her little brother, and a sister married to Philip II, Elizabeth
came to the throne – handsome, clever and aged 25. It was a truth universally
acknowledged that such a queen was in want of a husband. Dynastic marriage and
the succession had hung over the monarchy since Prince Arthur’s death in 1502. Yet
Elizabeth turned this truth to her advantage, not only in foreign diplomacy; each
year on Accession Day there was a tournament at which she presided, a lady whose
bright eyes rained influence. In the tournament in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale
(reprinted by John Stow in 1561), Emelye was the prize. The prize at Accession Day
tournaments was access to Elizabeth. Philip Sidney, who rode in the lists and devised
court masques. He wrote ‘Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance / Guided
so well, that I obtained the prize’; but he was to die of a bullet wound.
As marriage negotiations succeeded each other, the legend of the Virgin Queen
grew, unsullied by her real-life rages when her favourites Leicester and Ralegh fell to
ladies of the court.Elizabeth’s birthday was on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin
Mary, and some of the cult was transferred to her. There was a cult of virgins: Diana,
huntress; Cynthia, mistress of the seas; Astræa, goddess of justice. The stories of Sir
Walter Ralegh laying his cloak on a puddle in the Queen’s path, and of Sir Francis
Drake finishing his game of bowls in sight of the Spanish Armada, are true to the
theatricality of public life. As the Armada approached, Elizabeth addressed her
troops at Tilbury, armed as a knight. The Queen, her advisers and her courtier-writ-
er s knew about images. The armed lady Britomart in The Faerie Queeneis a figure
of Elizabeth uniting Britain and Mars.
Sir Walter Ralegh (pronounced ‘Rauley’), colonist of Ireland and Virginia and –
had he found it – El Dorado, wrote Elizabeth a long poem,The Ocean to Cynthia,of
which only the first book survives. A sample suggests the mythopoeia of Elizabeth’s
court:
To seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory,
To try desire, to try love severed far,
When I was gone, she sent her memory,
More strong than were ten thousand ships of war,To call me back, to leave great honour’s thought,
To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt,
To leave the purpose I so long had sought,
And hold both cares and comforts in contempt ...The Queen figures as the cruel beloved, the poet-hero as a knight-errant serving his
imperial and imperious mistress; this politic recreation of courtly love also informs
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