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2022/5/2 01:01 Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book
Home Books Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book
Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book
Get access Cited by 9
Hazel Wilkinson, University of Birmingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Online publication date: November 2017
Print publication year: 2017
Online ISBN: 9781108185714
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108185714
Subjects:
Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
Contents
Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book pp i-ii

Get access Export citation
Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book - Title page

pp iii-iii
Copyright page pp iv-iv

Dedication pp v-vi
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/edmund-spenser-and-the-eighteenthcentury-book/982FEACE48DE7D46CF4A3B8D7C6AB834 1/3
Contents pp vii-vii
Abbreviations pp viii-viii
Illustrations pp ix-x
A Note on the Text pp xi-xi

Acknowledgements pp xii-xiv
Introduction - ‘The Wits have sent for the Book’ pp 1-26

(Non-)Reading, and Spenserian Books before 1700
Chapter 1 - Spenser the Whig pp 27-63

John Hughes’s Clubbable Edition, 1715
Chapter 2 - Miscellaneous Spenser pp 64-98

Verse Miscellanies and Miscellaneous Culture, 1716–1750
Chapter 3 - Spenser Illustrated pp 99-124

Antiquaries and Illustrations: Thomas Birch’s 1751 Edition
Chapter 4 - Spenser Annotated pp 125-174

Two Scholarly Editions, 1758–1759
Chapter 5 - Spenser and the Public Domain pp 175-211

The Scottish Publishers’ Series, 1778–1795
Conclusion - The Legacy of Eighteenth-Century Spenserianism

Get access Export citation pp 212-217
Appendix - A Checklist of the Eighteenth-Century Editions of

Edmund Spenser pp 218-238
Works Cited pp 239-258

Index pp 259-264
introduction
‘The Wits have sent for the Book’

(Non-)Reading, and Spenserian Books before 1700
Sir Guyon chaunst eke on another booke,

That hight Antiquitie of Faerie lond.
In which when as he greedily did looke;
Th’off-spring of Elues and Faries there he fond,
As it deliuered was from hond to hond . . .
But Guyon all this while his booke did read,
Ne yet has ended: for it was a great
And ample volume, that doth far excead
My leasure, so long leaues here to repeat
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.ix.60, II.x.70
The most conspicuous quality of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
never to have received serious critical attention is its unreadability.
Those who have broached the subject have often done so to comic
effect, intentionally or otherwise. Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote
that
Of the persons who read the first Canto, not one in ten reaches the end of
the first Book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the
poem. Very few and weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant
Beast.1
The error was perhaps a joke, but Macaulay’s comment has been dismissed
as a piece of ironically apt misreading (The Faerie Queene ends with the
Blatant Beast very much alive and ‘at liberty againe’).2 C. A. Patrides archly
commented that ‘Macaulay himself, it is clear, did not persevere to the
end.’ Patrides went on to defend Spenser from the charge of tediousness,
and to imply that those who struggle with the poem are guilty of various
1
Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Review of Southey’s Edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Edinburgh
Review 54 (Dec. 1831): 450–61, 452.
2
VI.xii.40. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from The Faerie Queene are from the edition by
A. C. Hamilton et al. (London, 1980); henceforth referred to in the notes as FQ. For ease of reference
I refer to the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ as Book VII.
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toledo, on 07 Dec 2019 at 09:20:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108185714.001
2 Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book
misreadings themselves.3 Edmund Gosse was more sympathetic, reasoning
that The Faerie Queene is ‘so long that it really is excusable not to be aware
that the Blatant Beast does not die’,4 and David Hill Radcliffe described
Macaulay’s supposed blunder as ‘one of the most endearing passages in
Spenser criticism’, before concluding that ‘one cannot but suspect that
many . . . handsome [nineteenth-century] library editions of Spenser’s
works merely gathered dust.’5 The few who have acknowledged Spenser’s
unreadability have characterised The Faerie Queene as requiring special
study. T. S. Eliot wondered
Who, except scholars, and except the eccentric few who are born with a
sympathy for such work, or others who have deliberately studied them-
selves into the right appreciation, can now read through the whole of The
Faerie Queene?6
The New Critics Harry Berger Jr, Donald Cheney, and Paul Alpers
showed that the whole of The Faerie Queene is well worth reading closely,
but the assured refusal of Spenserian scholars to acknowledge Eliot’s
pessimism has continued to obscure the fact, briefly alluded to by
David Hill Radcliffe, that the history of Spenserian books is unlikely to
be one of diligent and exhaustive readings.7 Spenser himself alluded to
the fact that his poem had the potential to grow to an enormous and
unwieldy size. In Book II Sir Guyon fails to finish reading the ‘Antiquitie
of Faerie lond’, Spenser’s analogue for his own poem, ‘for it was a great /
And ample volume’. Guyon’s fatigue alerts us to Spenser’s awareness that
his own history of ‘Faerie lond’ was always in danger of remaining
unfinished by both author and reader.
A. C. Hamilton wrote that ‘The Faerie Queene is not meant to be
understood but to be possessed.’8 This statement was intended to defend
the poem from interpretative criticism that sought to explain or sum-
marise its allegory, or as Hamilton put it, to ‘violate’ the poem’s
‘subtlety, complexity, and wholeness by rationalizing its imaginative
3
C. A. Patrides, ‘Edmund Spenser: The Definition of Poetry’ (1980), collected in Figures in a
Renaissance Context, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Ann Arbor, MI, 1989), 35,
39–43.
4
Edmund Gosse, From Shakespeare to Pope (Cambridge, 1885, repr. 2013), 26.
5
David Hill Radcliffe, Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (Colombia, SC, 1996), 114.
6
T. S. Eliot, ‘Charles Whibley’ (1931), in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (London, 1999), 403–15, 405.
7
See Harry Berger Jr, The Allegorical Temper (New Haven, CT, 1957). Also see Donald Cheney,
Spenser’s Image of Nature (New Haven, CT, 1966), Paul Alpers, The Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’
(Princeton, NJ, 1967).
8
A. C. Hamilton, ‘The Faerie Queene’, in Critical Approaches to Six Major English Works, ed. R. M.
Lumiansky and Herschel Baker (Philadelphia, PA, 1968), 132–66, 161.
(Non-)Reading, and Spenserian Books before 1700 3
statements’.9 As a maxim, the assertion that ‘The Faerie Queene is not
meant to be understood but to be possessed’ also works more literally.
Spenser’s poem has a history of being purchased in order to be displayed,
admired, and possessed, rather than read. The few who do read it in full
often become possessive, emphasising its difficulty to others in order to
confirm their achievement. The Faerie Queene has this in common with
later works like Richardson’s Clarissa, Browning’s The Ring and the
Book, and Melville’s Moby Dick. The Faerie Queene, however, has a
unique physical presence as a tome (or tomes). In 1941 C. S. Lewis
advised newcomers to Spenser that
it is imperative that you should think of The Faerie Queene as a book suitable
for reading in a heavy volume, at a table – a book to which limp leather is
insulting – a massy, antique story with a blackletter flavour about it.10
It was the ‘blackletter flavour’ of ‘massy’ volumes that fuelled the
‘Spensermania’ of the eighteenth century.11 According to Matthew Prior, a
Spenser revival began on 6 July 1706, with the publication of his own Ode,
Humbly Inscrib’d to the Queen, a celebration of the Duke of Marlborough’s
victory in the Battle of Ramillies, ‘written in imitation of Spencers Stile’. I
discuss the Ode itself in Chapter 1. Relevant here is Prior’s assessment of its
influence a month after its publication:
every body acknowledges [Spenser] to have been a fine Poet, tho three
Months since not one in 50 had read him: Upon my Soul, tis true, the
Wits have sent for the Book, the Fairy Queen is on their Toilette table, and
some of our Ducal acquaintance will be deep in that Mythologico-Poetical
way of thinking.12
The ‘Wits’ may have ‘sent for the Book’, but whether they were actually
reading it was another matter, and Prior ridiculed those who were over-
doing it. ‘[D]eep in that Mythologico-Poetical way of thinking’, their
intimacy with the poem was a grandiose affectation. Prior imagined con-
sumers of Spenser to be wealthy and intellectually ambitious men, though
his image of The Faerie Queene on the ‘Toilette table’ also anticipated
Pope’s satire of female book ownership in The Rape of the Lock. In that
9
Ibid., 160.
10
C. S. Lewis, ‘On Reading The Faerie Queene’ (1941), in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, 1998), 146–48, 146–47.
11
Greg Kucich used the term ‘Spensermania’ in Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University
Park, PA, 1991), 33.
12
Prior to Lord Cholmondeley, 1 Aug. 1706, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 2 vols, ed. H.
Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears (Oxford, 1971), 1.896.
poem, Belinda keeps bibles as domestic paraphernalia, arranged on her
table alongside ‘Puffs, Powders, Patches’, and ‘Billet-Doux’. It has been
suggested that Pope was implying that Belinda habitually tore out pages to
curl her hair with.13 Spenser’s Faerie Queene was even more sensationally
misappropriated in 1756, when, according to newspaper reports, a reader
used her copy of the poem as a cryptic suicide note:
They write now from Bath, that the Hon. Miss C – having lost a large Sum
of Money at play, was found dead in her Lodgings, supposed by Poison. She
had been reading Spencer’s Fairy Queen, and turned down the Leaf at these
Lines:
Unhappy Maid! – whose dread
Untry’d, is less than when thou shalt it try:
Death is to him that wretched Life doth lead
Both Grace and Gain, but he in Hell doth lie
That lives a loathsome Life, but wishing, cannot die.14
The story of the unfortunate ‘Miss C – ’ is a macabre example of a failure to
finish The Faerie Queene, and one which suggests that it may have been best
kept as a toilet table ornament after all, if a consequence of actually reading
it was suicide.
There were always those who did survive complete readings of The
Faerie Queene, of course. Some of these, especially Spenser’s editors, were
consumed by the poem, while others developed unique reading strategies
to make it manageable. Abraham Cowley provided one of the earliest
accounts of reading Spenser:
I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was
wont to lie in my Mothers Parlour (I know not by what accident, for she her
self never in her life read any Book but of Devotion) but there was wont to
lie Spencers Works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely
delighted with the Stories of the Knights, and Giants, and Monsters, and
brave Houses, which I found every where there (Though my understanding
had little to do with all this) and by degrees with the tinckling of the Rhyme
and Dance of the Numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I
was twelve years old, and was thus made a Poet as irremediably as a Child is
made an Eunuch.15
13
Geoffrey Carnall, ‘Belinda’s Bibles’, in Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Colin
Nicholson (Aberdeen, 1988), 130–38, 136.
14
The Public Advertiser 6769 (12 Jul. 1756). The stanza quoted is FQ IV.vii.11, Amoret’s speech
following her rape by the Salvage Man.
15
Abraham Cowley, ‘Of My Self’ (ca. 1664), collected in The English Writings of Abraham Cowley, ed.
A. R. Waller, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1906), 2.455–64, 457–58.
Revealing that he had read Spenser ‘all over’, Cowley was quick to provide
disclaimers, averring that his ‘understanding had little to do with all this’,
and that his mother owned Spenser only by ‘accident’, possibly having
confused it with a book ‘of Devotion’ (or perhaps she used the protestant
allegory as a devotional aid). Cowley characterised the reading experience
as a series of disjointed impressions that refused to make sense as a whole.
This was no barrier to inspiration, and Cowley was irremediably ‘made a
Poet’, but the process was not subtle, intellectual, or even necessarily
positive, if we admit the full force of the ‘Eunuch’ simile. By his own
admission, in Cowley’s household Spenser was possessed but not under-
stood, literally by his mother, and figuratively by the young poet himself.
Non-reading, and partial, selective, or aborted readings are not exclusive
to Spenser, of course. Leah Price has advocated for greater recognition of
the fact that ‘reading is only one among many uses to which printed matter
can be put’. Books are also ‘Bought, sold, exchanged, transported, dis-
played, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, dis-
carded’.16 David Cressy has devoted particular attention to non-reading
practices in his study of seventeenth-century appropriations of the Bible ‘as
a magical talisman, as an aid to divination, as medicine, and as a device for
social display’.17 Investigations of the totemic use of non-biblical books are
scarce, though Nicholas Havely has investigated the various ways in which
editions of Dante became prized possessions in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries.18 The field of library history also offers material on this
subject, since library historians are sensitive to the function of books as
devices for social display. Giles Mandelbrote has identified a significant
shift in the cultural value of libraries between the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries:
At the beginning of this period, books were kept in studies and closets; many
were in Latin; their contents were praised for their learning and their
appearance for their ‘neatness’, a term which included a sense of appropri-
ateness to function. By the middle of the [eighteenth] century, larger
personal collections of books were housed in library rooms, which also
acted as a social space; most of the books were in English; they were admired
for their ‘politeness’ and the prevailing aesthetic was one of elegance. At all
16
Leah Price, ‘From The History of a Book to a “History of the Book”’, Representations 108 (special issue
‘The Way We Read Now’) (2009): 120–38, 120. See also James Raven, ‘New Reading Histories, Print
Culture and the Identification of Change’, Social History 23.3 (1998): 268–87, esp. 279.
17
David Cressy, ‘Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Library History 21
(1986): 92–106, 92.
18
Nicholas Havely, Dante’s British Public (Oxford, 2014), 68–127.
levels of society many more books were owned, but it may be that propor-
tionately fewer were being read.19
Mandelbrote’s claim is borne out by contemporary anxieties about book
collection. Jonathan Swift was quick to notice that the fashion for libraries
encouraged people to purchase books to display rather than to read, a practice
Swift considered ‘dishonourable’.20 John Adams, Provost of King’s College,
Cambridge, agreed, condemning
that unprofitable Vanity, which obtains so much now a-days, of collecting
Great Libraries, which serve for nothing but to dress, or entertain in, while
the well-bound Volumes enjoy as perfect rest, as their Authors do in their
Graves.21
Despite emphatic declarations such as Adams’s, and calls to arms by the
likes of Price and Raven, the history of the non-reading of secular texts has
not been investigated thoroughly. C. S. Lewis may have been playfully
indulging his own medievalist bibliophilia when he penned his advice to
readers of The Faerie Queene, but he hit on a truth about the history of
Spenser studies that had not been explored before or since: Spenser’s
readers have often placed more value on Spenserian books-as-artefacts,
and their manifold cultural meanings, than on the texts they contain. This
phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, and my aim is to
uncover them.
This is a study of the editions of Spenser published between 1715 and
1795. In this period, five editions of Spenser’s collected works were printed,
and The Faerie Queene appeared alone an additional four times. Separate
publications of the shorter works were sporadic. Three were made of The
Shepheardes Calender (1579), and one each of Amoretti (1595), Daphnaida
(1592), and A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1598, printed 1633).
These books shaped the way in which Spenser has been read and possessed
ever since. They also had a broader effect on the literary landscape of the
eighteenth century. Drawing on the growing body of work on the forma-
tion of the literary canon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I
argue that publications of Spenser played a particularly important part in
the process, and that Spenser’s role differed from those of Shakespeare,
19
Giles Mandelbrote, ‘Personal Owners of Books’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and
Ireland Volume II, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge, 2006), 173–89, 189.
20
Quoted in Paddy Bullard, ‘What Swift Did in Libraries’, in Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-
Century Book, ed. Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty (Cambridge, 2013), 65–84, 66.
21
John Adams, A Sermon Preach’d at St. Paul’s Cathedral (1702), sig. C4v.
Milton, and Chaucer.22 The canon was formed by numerous parties,
whose interests were not always purely literary. In the case of Spenser,
many of these parties have remained anonymous until now. The printers of
seven major eighteenth-century editions of Spenser were unknown, as were
some of their contributors. I identify Spenser’s unknown printers, and two
anonymous contributors to editions of his works. This is therefore the first
comprehensive study of the individuals and groups who controlled the
eighteenth-century Spenser industry. Only one survey of the eighteenth-
century editions of Spenser has been made, by Jewel Wurtsbaugh in 1936.23
For eighty years Wurtsbaugh has been the only authority on the subject,
and she includes only cursory information on the eighteenth-century
editions, several of which are not acknowledged at all. The present book
covers every eighteenth-century edition, as well as miscellanies in which
Spenser played a significant role. Each of the chapters is structured around
a major edition of The Faerie Queene, with the exception of Chapter 2,
which covers the years from 1716–49, when no editions of Spenser’s longest
poem were published. During this period Spenser was a staple of the poetic
miscellany, and important advances were made in the fields of Spenserian
biography and criticism. By necessity, in the central chapters much space
is given to the 1750s, arguably the most Spenserian decade of the century.
The five editions that occupy Chapters 3 and 4 were all published
between 1750 and 1759. Publishing revolutions of the 1770s produced
new types of editions, and London lost its monopoly on Spenser. Chapter
5 explores editions published in Scotland and Ireland and exported to
America from 1778 to 1795.
There are a number of ways in which eighteenth-century Spenserianism
could be studied, including through imitations, criticism, and fine art.
However, none of these subjects can be explored to its full extent until we
have a better understanding of the editions. The methodology of this book is
therefore chiefly bibliographical. I have compiled a bibliography of Spenser’s
eighteenth-century editions, which can be found in the Appendix. This is
intended to supplement F. R. Johnson’s Critical Bibliography of the Works of
22
On canon formation generally, see Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon
(Montreal, 1998), Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past (Oxford,
2001), and Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge, 2003). Studies
focusing on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer include Dobson, The Making of the National Poet
(Oxford, 1992), Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing
(Cambridge, 1997), Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge, 2003), Dustin Griffin,
Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2009), and J. A. Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s
Tomb? (East Lansing, MI, 1988).
23
Jewel Wurtsbaugh, Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship 1609–1805 (Baltimore, MD, 1936).
Edmund Spenser, which does not go past 1700. I refer to imitations where
they inform my understanding of the editions, but for the most part they are
not included in this study. This is the aspect of eighteenth-century
Spenserianism that has received most attention already, in reception histories
by Richard C. Frushell, Earl R. Wasserman, and David Hill Radcliffe.24 A
better understanding of the contexts in which Spenser was printed in the
eighteenth century will enable further studies of his influence on other poets.
Criticism and art are drawn on frequently, particularly where they are included
in editions as introductions and illustrations, and also when major Spenserian
public events occurred. In Shakespeare studies, Michael Dobson has shown
that the texts that now form the Shakespearean corpus were relatively low on
the list of artefacts that constituted the playwright’s cultural presence in the
eighteenth century.25 The concept of ‘Bardolatry’ still has as much to do with
social politics as with Shakespeare’s works.26 The same is somewhat true of
eighteenth-century Spensermania. Architecture, sculpture, painting, and per-
formance were employed, but they were all mediated through the book trade.
Guidebooks, engravings, and illustrated editions transformed local events into
national spectacles. I do devote space to the theory and practice of editing
Spenser, since alongside printer-publishers, Spenser’s editors made some of the
most important decisions regarding the design and production of the editions.
Textual criticism and bibliography are intricately connected for this reason.
Some work has already been done on the subject of Spenser’s eighteenth-
century texts. Joseph Loewenstein has made a brief but useful survey of some
of the major editors’ methods, and John G. Radcliffe published an edition of
the notes of Spenser’s most diligent editor, John Upton.27 I have collated
sections of each of the editions to confirm and supplement the findings of
Loewenstein and Radcliffe, and I report my conclusions here.
The eighteenth-century afterlives of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, and
Milton have all been explored to greater or lesser extents.28 The case of
Spenser is different, and worthy of investigation, for several important
24
See Frushell, Edmund Spenser in the Early Eighteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA, 1999), Radcliffe, Edmund
Spenser: A Reception History, and Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, IL,
1947).
25
Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, 134–84.
26
See Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester, 1988), and Gary Taylor,
Reinventing Shakespeare (London, 1989), esp. chapters 2–3.
27
Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Textual History’, in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed.
Richard A. McCabe (Oxford, 2010), 640–57. John G. Radcliffe (ed.), John Upton: Notes on The Fairy
Queen, 2 vols (New York, 1987).
28
See note 22, earlier in this chapter, and also Tom Lockwood, Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age
(Oxford, 2005).
reasons. The conspicuous allegory of The Faerie Queene encouraged its
adoption for political purposes. Opposition satirists in the first half of the
century found that the duplicitous Archimago mapped neatly onto
Walpole. As Christine Gerrard has put it, ‘Spenser’s double-sided political
profile – both Elizabeth’s royal panegyrist and yet a critic of court corrup-
tion and advocate of a more extreme form of Protestant mission than
Elizabeth herself – made him infinitely malleable to political manipula-
tion.’29 Spenser’s allegory was also malleable enough to provide convenient
examples of vice and virtue throughout the century. This made him
eminently quotable in miscellanies, and Una became a moral paradigm
for young women in the 1770s. Spenser had a unique status in literary
history. The vast majority of accounts agreed that the canon of English
poetry began with Chaucer, but that Spenser was the first poet who could
be read without being translated. Since he bridged the gap between
medieval and renaissance writings, there was little agreement about
whether Spenser was an ancient or a modern, but by all accounts he
presided over the canon as its oldest intelligible authority. This meant
that Spenser was turned to when debates arose about the origins and proper
use of English, and the revival of supposedly “native” literary qualities, in
particular Gothic and romance. There was very little interest in Spenser’s
shorter poems, which were rarely printed separately, and were not popular
in miscellanies. Sonnets were simply unfashionable for much of the cen-
tury, and Spenser’s other works, such as The Shepheardes Calender and
‘Mother Hubberds Tale’, contained his most self-conscious archaisms,
which made them appear difficult. The language of The Faerie Queene
may be more accessible, but at more than 4,000 stanzas long, it was
expensive to print, and therefore to buy. Until the last quarter of the
century it appeared exclusively in luxury editions, often with extensive
illustrations. Shakespeare could be read in cheap single-play texts by the
middle to lower classes, or enjoyed in performance, and in 1739 Milton’s
Paradise Lost was published in twelve instalments that cost only 2d. each.
By contrast, the market for Spenser was wealthy and often aristocratic,
since the whole Faerie Queene demanded wealth and literacy. This meant
that Spenser’s cultural value differed greatly from that of other early
writers. Editions of Spenser obtained a totemic status that has not been
explored.
29
Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (Oxford, 1994), 167. Gerrard’s survey of
‘political Spenserianism’ at 166–85 is an essential resource for the study of Spenser’s adoption by
the Opposition Patriots in the 1730s, and includes analyses of the Spenserian poetry of West,
Thomson, and Pope. Gerrard does not refer to Spenser’s eighteenth-century editions.
Spenser’s publication history has not been neglected by oversight or chance,
but in part because of a series of myths about the conditions in which his
poems were produced. These myths have their origins in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The remainder of this introduction is divided into two
sections. The first contains an overview of modern Spenserian textual scholar-
ship. I argue that traditional readings of Spenser’s biography have led to the
false assumption that Spenser’s texts are relatively free from the textual cruces
that have attracted textual scholars and bibliographers to Shakespeare. The
eighteenth-century editions have been considered hopelessly corrupt, and
ignored as a consequence. The final section of the introduction is an overview
of seventeenth-century Spenserianism, with a focus on the three early folio
editions. This overview provides an essential context for the first Spenser
revival of the early eighteenth century, with which Chapter 1 begins.
I.1 ‘Published by Himself’? The Mythology

of the Early Quartos
The traditional narrative of the first publications of The Faerie Queene in
the 1590s insists that
Spenser supervised the poem through the press . . . and attended the print
shop very faithfully when he was in London, as is attested by the number of
works printed during his London visits.30
The editions of The Faerie Queene published in quarto in 1590 (Books I–
III) and 1596 (Books I–III and IV–VI) are supposedly paradigms of the
authoritative text, as defined by R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg.31 The
assumption that Spenser ‘attended the print shop’ has also guided
responses to the shorter poems. F. R. Johnson, compiler of the critical
bibliography of pre-1700 editions of Spenser, claimed that ‘there is every
reason to suppose that [Spenser] attended the printing-house to correct the
proofs.’32 The evidence in support of this has been questioned more
recently. Jean Brink used the fact that the dedicatory poems were printed
in the wrong order to show that ‘Spenser was less responsible for the
presentation of his poem than has been assumed’, and Andrew Zurcher’s
meticulous examinations of the 1590 quarto have shown that compositors
corrected the text idiosyncratically, and that there is no evidence of
30
W. P. Williams, ‘Bibliography, Critical’, in SEnc, 91.
31
See W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of Copy-Text’, SB 3 (1950–51): 19–36.
32
F. R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Published before 1700
(Baltimore, MD, 1934), 27.
authorial intervention.33 The unverifiable story of Spenser’s attendance at the
printing office began in the eighteenth century, when his editors claimed
that The Faerie Queene was ‘Published by [Spenser] Himself’.34 The evidence
for this is either circumstantial (that the printing coincided with Spenser’s
visits to London) or non-existent.
If it is not possible to prove that the quartos of the 1590s have the authority
traditionally attributed to them, it is necessary to re-examine some prevailing
assumptions about the material history of Spenser’s poems. Louis Montrose
has argued that in The Faerie Queene
‘The Author’ is fashioned by means of discursive forms that are realised in
the printed book, a material object that through reproduction and circula-
tion generates cultural capital. Spenser synthesised a distinctive Elizabethan
authorial identity out of a variety of cultural materials.35
Montrose built on Richard Helgerson’s well-known depiction of Spenser as a
pioneer of a new and assertive type of authorial agency. As a ‘self-crowned
laureate’, Spenser supposedly fashioned his own identity in print with know-
ing deliberation, and carved out a social role for himself as a professional (as
opposed to an amateur or coterie) poet.36 This is all very well, but Montrose
extends Helgerson’s narrative to include ‘the material process of reproducing
and distributing [Spenser’s] poetry’.37 This process was more complicated
than has been allowed for. The myth of Spenser’s attendance at the printing
office has effaced the roles agents of the book trade played in the creation of
Spenser’s laureate identity. The narrative of the ‘self-crowned laureate’ was
formerly used to describe the careers of Jonson and Milton, but its applic-
ability to those authors has since been questioned. Enumerating the various
contributors to Milton’s Poems (1645) – publisher, printer, engravers, ded-
icatees, and correspondents – Stephen Dobransky concluded that
the book is hardly a manifesto of authorial autonomy. The obvious author-
ial perspective that the text invokes emerges paradoxically through the social
orientation of Milton’s collected writings and the book’s cooperative mate-
rial production.38
33
Jean Brink, ‘Materialist History of the Publication of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, RES 54 (2003): 1–26,
1. Andrew Zurcher, ‘Printing The Faerie Queene in 1590’, SB 15 (2005): 115–50.
34
Thomas Birch (ed.), The Faerie Queene, 3 vols (1751), vol. 1, sig. π1r.
35
Louis Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, in
Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter
Stallybrass (Cambridge, 1996), 83–132, 85.
36
Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates (London, 1983), esp. 60.
37
Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain’, 87.
38
Stephen Dobransky, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade (Cambridge, 1999), 11.
Like Poems (1645), Jonson’s 1616 folio was long hailed as a milestone in
bibliographical self-fashioning. In 1970 W. David Kay wrote that the folio
was Jonson’s attempt to ‘interpret himself to his age as a writer whose
individual works formed a unified corpus animated by his conception of
the poet’s function’.39 It has since become apparent that Kay ‘overesti-
mated the authority of the Folio . . . and made greater claims than are
warranted for Jonson’s involvement at the press’.40 Following this reap-
praisal, Wendy Wall argued that
a book’s reidentification was not dependent on whether the author did or
did not supervise the text’s actual production, for she or he became the
recipient of the newly emphasised textual authority that different textual
producers arrogated to the book.41
In the early modern period, the author was often the recipient, not the sole
originator, of the authority constructed by print. Roger Chartier suggested
that ‘the author is both dependent and constrained’ by the interpretative will
of the book’s producer, owner, or reader.42 Spenser was only one participant
in the fashioning of his authorial identity, alongside printers, compositors,
booksellers, and readers, and his identity continued to be reshaped after his
death in 1599. This makes the re-examination of Spenser’s posthumous
editions all the more necessary. Far from having little to do with Spenser
himself, they are the means by which Spenser’s identity has been interpreted
to us over time. Spenser’s cultural status influences our understanding of the
importance and relevance of his work, and the status he has today is the
legacy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether it is as a
canonical poet and a staple of university curricula, or as an archaic and
esoteric bard. In order to better understand our response to Spenser, we must
pay new attention to his publication history.
I.2 Spenser and the Seventeenth-Century Book

In the first half of the seventeenth century, Spenser continued to exert a
strong influence on poets, and the Spenserian tradition can be traced
through Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island (1633), William Davenant’s
Gondibert (1650), and Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1638) and Paradise Lost (1667).
39
W. David Kay, ‘The Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Career’, Modern Philology 67 (1970): 224–37, 236.
40
Kevin J. Donovan, ‘Jonson’s Texts in the First Folio’, in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady
and W. H. Herendeen (Newark, DE, 1991), 23–37, 34.
41
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 70.
42
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1994), 28.
David Hill Radcliffe and others have discussed Spenser’s poetic influence at
length. I focus on the seventeenth-century editions of his works, and on
some representative adaptations and commentaries, to give a sense of how
the poet’s reputation was shaped in the first 100 years after his death.
Spenser was published in folio three times in the seventeenth century. The
1609 first folio was printed for Matthew Lownes by his brother Humphrey,
and consisted of The Faerie Queene alone. It was the first edition to number
the stanzas, a practice all major editors have followed since. The numbered
stanzas offer the first subtle suggestion that this is not a poem to be read
linearly, from cover to cover. Numbered stanzas allow readers easily to locate
specific passages. The first folio has been described as ‘essentially a reprint of
Ponsonby’s 1596 quarto’,43 and the subsequent seventeenth-century folios
have been dismissed as ‘derivative reprintings’.44 In fact, the folios make
thousands of changes to the texts, only a fraction of which have been
documented in the textual appendices to the Variorum Spenser; the texts
of the early folios warrant further study.45 The Lownes brothers followed the
early quartos in not including Spenser’s name on the title-page, a pose of
humility that complicates Montrose’s claim that Spenser’s exuberant self-
identification as a laureate poet extended to the material features of his
books. It was not until 1611–17, when the Lownes brothers extended the
folio edition to include Spenser’s shorter works, that a new title-page was
printed that presented the author as a figure of national importance.46 The
border used on the title-page of the second Spenser folio was recycled from
the 1593 publication of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. It features the heroes of the
Arcadia, Musidorus, and Pyrocles, alongside Sidney’s emblem, the boar.
Steven Galbraith came to the conclusion that although the choice of wood-
cut border could be ‘a reflection of Spenser’s continued association with
Sidney’, it was more likely a case of cost cutting:
Spenser’s first folio was chiefly a consumer-based product rather than a
monument to the author . . . Unlike the men behind the folios of
43
Stephen Galbraith, ‘English Literary Folios 1593–1623’: Studying Shifts in Format’, in Tudor Books
and Readers, ed. John N. King (Cambridge, 2010), 46–67, 57.
44
SEnc, 91.
45
The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 10 vols (Baltimore,
MD, 1932–57).
46
I refer to this as the second folio (F2), but it should be acknowledged that its publication history is
complicated. The shorter poems were printed between 1611 and 1625, and were not bound in an
established order. Early in the print run, old stock copies of F1 were given a new general title-page
and bound with the newly printed shorter poems. The Faerie Queene was then reprinted between
1611 and 1617, and the date on the general title-page was changed to 1617. See Johnson, Critical
Bibliography, 33–53.
Shakespeare and Jonson, Lownes demonstrates no interest in monumenta-
lising Spenser. The materiality of his folio editions neither celebrates nor
enhances Spenser’s literary reputation.47
Financial concerns dictated many of the Lownes’ decisions, and even the
choice of the ‘monumental’ folio format actually allowed them to use less
paper.48 But by emphasising the economic concerns of the second folio,
Galbraith underestimated the importance of the association made on the
title-page between Spenser and Sidney. The use of front matter to high-
light an author’s social connections was common. The 1612 edition of
Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion included a frontispiece portrait of Prince
Henry, son of James I, and the frontispiece to the 1687 Works of Chaucer
depicted a table of ‘The Progenie of Geffrey Chaucer’, showing him to be
related to Henry VII and various aristocrats. The 1593 Arcadia’s title-page
was a well-thought-out piece of design, which directed attention to
Spenser’s powerful patron. With regards to the concept of the ‘self-
crowned laureate’, Wall has warned that
In noting that Renaissance poets worked to dismantle the view of poetry as a
mere gentlemanly pastime, we may forget that ‘gentlemanly’ pastimes had
vast cultural value.49
The Sidneian border capitalised on the ‘vast cultural value’ of gentlemanly
pastimes, by implying that Spenser’s laureate identity was not a profes-
sional qualification, but in fact derived from his supposed friendship with a
paradigm of aristocratic masculinity.50 In 1611, contemporaries of Spenser
and Sidney were still living, and the Sidney family heraldry was recogni-
sable, so Spenser’s connection to Philip Sidney could be visually encoded
on a title-page.
Even as the second folio was being printed for an audience of Spenser’s
near contemporaries, William Camden was writing a history of the reign of
Elizabeth I that presented Spenser’s life in its historical context.51 Camden
focused on Spenser’s timeless poetic ability rather than his illustrious
patrons. According to Camden, Spenser was ‘borne to so great fauour of
47
Steven Galbraith, ‘Spenser’s First Folio’: The Build-it-Yourself Edition’, Spenser Studies 21 (2006):
21–49, 33–35.
48
Galbraith, ‘Edmund Spenser and the History of the Book, 1569–1679’, unpublished PhD thesis
(Ohio State University, 2006), 138–58.
49
Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 17.
50
On the cultural cache of Sidney’s name, see J. A. van Dorsten et al. (eds), Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and
the Creation of a Legend (Leiden, 1986), and Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author
(Cambridge, 1996), 53–82.
51
William Camden, Annales Rerum Gestarum Angliae et Hiberniae Regnante Elizabetha (1615).
the Muses, that hee surpassed all our Poets, euen Chawcer himselfe his fellow
Citizen’.52 Camden elided the temporal distance between Chaucer and
Spenser to present them as fellow citizens, and one consequence was that
Spenser quickly appeared dated. In 1616, John Lane began to update The
Faerie Queene in an unpublished continuation of Spenser’s version of
Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’.53 Lane conflated his two originals, and although
he modelled his language and diction on the more recent Spenser, he
retained Chaucer’s verse form, complaining that Spenser wrote ‘promiscu-
ouslie, and that in longer staves, then couplettes’.54 Lane claimed to be able
to ‘vendicate into [the] trewe scope and meaninge’ of his originals, present-
ing himself as the possessor of special access to Spenser.55 Elizabeth Scala
wrote that Lane ‘sets an important literary historical precedent when he
remarks his prescience’ for the intentions of Chaucer and Spenser, a pre-
cedent that established Spenser as outmoded enough to require either
interpretation or revision.56
Ben Jonson famously criticised Spenser’s archaic style, writing that
‘Spencer, in affecting the Ancients writ no language’.57 In 1643, Kenelm
Digby confirmed that Spenser was unintelligible without special under-
standing or study, when he published a line-by-line commentary on a
single stanza of The Faerie Queene (II.ix.22). Digby invested Spenser with
neoclassical authority, describing him as ‘our English Virgil ’, and ascribing
to him
such a learned Spirit, and so generally a knowing Soul, that were there
nothing else extant of Spencers writing, yet these few words would make me
esteeme him no whit inferiour to the most famous men that ever have been
in any age: as giving an evident testimonie herein, that he was thoroughly
verst in the Mathematicall Sciences, in Philosophy, and in Divinity, to
which this might serve for an ample Theme to make large Commentaries
upon.58
Digby separated Spenser from his historical situation, and elevated him to
a pantheon of ‘the most famous men’ of any age and discipline. Digby
52
Camden, Tomus Alter, & Idem, trans. by A. Darcie (Oxford, 1629), sig. 2F4v.
53
Lane’s continuation appears in two versions, Bodl. Lib. MS Douce 170 (1616) and Bodl. Lib. MS
Ashmole 53 (1630). The text was edited by F. J. Furnivall as ‘John Lane’s Continuation of Chaucer’s
“Squire’s Tale”’, The Chaucer Society 23 (1888–90).
54
Lane, preface to ‘Squire’s Tale’, in Furnivall (ed.), 3. 55 Ibid., 6.
56
Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval
England (New York, 2002), 85.
57
Ben Jonson, Timber, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 2 vols (1640), vol. 1, sig. P4v.
58
Kenelm Digby, Observations on the 22. Stanza in the 9th. Canto of the 2d. Book of Spencers Faery Queen
(1643), sigs A3v, A4r–v.
described his Observations as a ‘declaration of what I conceive to be the true
sense of this place’ unmediated by ‘Authorities and examples drawne from
others’.59 The claim that Spenser’s learning in several subjects meant his
works might furnish ‘large Commentaries’ suggests that Digby’s Observations
were only a preview of the kind of explanation Spenser required. This
elevated Spenser’s status as a subject for high scholarship, but the tone of
nonchalant erudition also served to complicate The Faerie Queene even as it
was explained, by suggesting that Digby had an access to Spenser that was the
product of his uniquely learned understanding. Digby’s insouciance is com-
pounded by the epistolary format of the Observations, which were addressed
to Edward Stradling, and presented as a record of a conversation that took
place ‘th’other day’.60 Digby claimed that his Neo-Platonic insights were the
fruit of only ‘the first halfe quarter of an houre’, and that he published
Observations ‘without having reduced it to any better form, or added any
thing at all unto it’.61 In fact, the supposedly recent conversation took place
fifteen years previously, in 1628, when the Observations were first drafted. The
claim that they were the result of a conversation and the boast that they took
minutes to write are both belied by the fact that the Observations were
paraphrased from Ben Jonson’s notes in his copy of Spenser’s second folio
(which Digby acquired).62 The first published piece of Spenserian scholar-
ship was driven not so much by sincere critical enquiry as by the desire to
display an intimate understanding of Spenser, and was in fact plagiarised.
Digby characterised the act of reading The Faerie Queene as a private and
exclusive gentlemanly pastime. I will return later to the significance of his
identification of Spenser with Virgil, which continued throughout the eight-
eenth century. Digby’s use of the phrase ‘our English Virgil’ here bestows as
much authority on Digby’s interpretive performance as on Spenser himself.
Other readers followed Digby’s example, and turned to their advantage
the image of Spenser as difficult. In 1648, twenty-six stanzas of The Faerie
Queene (V.ii.29–54) were published, with a preface, in an anonymous
pamphlet called The Faerie Leveller.63 The stanzas feature Spenser’s mem-
orable Egalitarian Giant, who suggests that all things should be made equal
to remedy universal disorder:
59
Ibid., sig. A4v.
60
Ibid., sig. A3v. For the addressee’s identity, see Jewel Wurtsbaugh, ‘Digby’s Criticism of Spenser’,
RES 11 (1935): 192–95, 192.
61
Digby, Observations, sig. B7r.
62
James Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser (Pittsburgh, PA, 1995), 99–111.
63
John N. King has argued that Leveller was written by Samuel Sheppard, a prominent Royalist writer,
in ‘The Faerie Leveller: A 1648 Royalist Reading of The Faerie Queene V.ii.29–54’, Huntington
Library Quarterly 48 (1985): 297–308, 307–8.
I will throw downe these mountaines hie,
And make them levell with the lowly plaine . . .
Tyrants that make men subject to their law,
I will suppresse, that they no more may raine;
And Lordings curbe, that commons over-aw;
And all the wealth of rich men to the poore will draw.64
Artegall, a ‘Lording’ himself, is understandably affronted, and considers this
a vision of physical and social chaos. He argues with the Giant, before
resolving the dispute by pushing him off a precipice, appropriately bringing
about the Giant’s death using the ‘mountaines hie’ that he had proposed to
abolish. The preface to The Faerie Leveller presented the Egalitarian Giant
episode as a piece of prophetic anti-Cromwellian satire. A key anachronis-
tically identified Artegall as Charles I, Talus as the king’s army, and the Giant
as Oliver Cromwell, the ‘Ring leader to the faction of Levellers’.65 Although
he eventually suppressed them, in 1648 Cromwell could still be aligned with
the Levellers, the authors of The Agreement of the People (1647), which
threatened royal authority by arguing for equality before the law, regardless
of rank or degree.66 Although we can now recognise a degree of ambivalence
in Spenser’s portrayal of the Giant’s defeat, for the Royalist author of The
Faerie Leveller it served as a rousing example of the defeat of a social agitator.
Spenser was proclaimed ‘propheticall’, and The Faerie Queene ‘A lively
representation of our times’, enabling the author to boast of having ‘descried
and deciphered’ the prophecy with a cipher available only to champions of
the monarchy.67 The Leveller author assumes an even more overtly privileged
position than Digby, as the discoverer of a series of anagrams embedded in
Spenser’s text. These are given in the key, in which ‘Parliaments Army’ is
translated, appropriately, into ‘Paritie mar’s al men’, and the identification of
Cromwell as ‘The Gyant Leveller’ is confirmed by the rearrangement of
‘Oliver Cromewell’ into ‘Com’ our vil’ Leveller’.68 Despite the clunking
absurdity of these examples, anagrams had a particular cultural significance
in 1648, as Lois Potter writes:
The civil war was a period when encoding and decoding had more than
metaphorical meaning . . . For anyone obsessed by the idea that the world
was turned upside down, the anagram was the perfect literary form.69
64
FQ V.ii.38. 65 The Faerie Leveller (1648), sig. A2v.
66
Philip Baker, ‘Cromwell and the Levellers’, in Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives, ed. Patrick Little
(Basingstoke, 2009), 90–115.
67
Faerie Leveller, sigs A1r, A2r. 68 Ibid., sigs A1r, A2v.
69
Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings (Cambridge, 1989), 38, 51.
For all its humour, The Faerie Leveller contains serious ideas about arcane
reading practices, and the satire was based on Spenser’s poem because it
was identified as esoteric enough to bear anachronistic interpretation, yet
important enough to strike a blow at the Levellers. The Leveller author’s
Royalist interest in Spenser was a symptom of a broader revival of pre-Civil
War literature, particularly of Jacobean plays, in the 1640s and 1650s,
which Potter suggests betrayed a
nostalgia for a pre-war England which was also a Stuart England; it
assumes a shared set of values on the part of [its] readers; and it whets
their appetites for finding hidden meanings in polite literature.70
Similarly, The Faerie Leveller set up the Elizabethan period as a golden age
of royal patronage. Spenser was specifically identified as Elizabeth’s ‘Poet
Laureat’ on the pamphlet’s title-page. The Royalist nostalgia this invoked
lent real significance to the hidden messages found in the poem.
The portrait of Spenser as great-yet-mysterious in Digby’s Observations
and The Faerie Leveller was extended and formalised elsewhere. During the
1610s Theodore Bathurst, a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge,
Spenser’s alma mater, had translated The Shepheardes Calender into Latin
hexameters. Friends of Spenser were still at Cambridge during Bathurst’s
early years there. Spenser’s schoolmate Lancelot Andrewes was Master of
Pembroke from 1589 to 1605, and their undergraduate colleague Thomas
Neville was Master of Trinity College from 1593 to 1615.71 Bathurst’s
translation was probably first undertaken as an academic exercise, but it
grew into a tribute to Spenser, which privately circulated in Cambridge
among those who had known or taken an interest in him, as demonstrated
by the existence of several manuscript versions dedicated to Bathurst’s
colleagues.72 Bathurst never published the translation, but a year after his
death in 1653 it was printed under the title Calendarium Pastorale, in a
parallel text with Spenser’s original, edited by William Dillingham, Master
of Emmanuel College. In print, the function of the translation was com-
pletely redefined. Dillingham presented it not as a private exercise or
tribute, but as an improvement. He characterised Bathurst’s translation
as a refinement of Spenser’s rough original: ‘obscuris lucem, & facilitatem
70
Ibid., 36–37. 71 W. H. Kelliher, ‘Bathurst, Theodore (c.1587–1652)’, ODNB.
72
BL Add. MS 33586, ff. 75–81 was dedicated to Thomas Neville. The library of Pembroke College,
Cambridge holds a transcript of the translation in Bathurst’s hand dedicated to Samuel Harsnet,
who succeeded Andrewes as Master of Pembroke in 1605. Several other manuscript copies were
circulated in Cambridge during Bathurst’s lifetime. See BL 1077.e.52 and C.117.b.10.
aspera, atq[ue] omnibus ferè nitorem ac elegantiam fæneraverit’.73 The fact
that Dillingham printed Spenser’s original alongside Bathurst’s Latin
shows that he did not consider Spenser’s language an entirely lost cause,
but the translation was presented as a vital reading aid. Dillingham even
compiled a glossary of Spenser’s difficult words, which he appended to
Calendarium Pastorale. The entries in the glossary were printed in a black-
letter fount, and the definitions in roman, compounding the impression of
Spenser’s language as archaic. Although The Shepheardes Calender does
contain some of Spenser’s most affectedly archaic language, Dillingham
also stated that the glossary ‘may be of use for the understanding not only
of this Poem, but of the Faery Queen also, and others of this Author’.74
Dillingham’s glossary served precisely this function when it was included
at the end of the third folio of 1679, which acknowledged Spenser’s difficulty
by providing the glossary, along with a three-page ‘Summary of the Life of
Mr. Edmond Spencer’.75 The material for the biography was lifted from
Camden’s Annales (1615–25), Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of
England (1662), and Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum (1675). The
1679 biographer significantly elaborated upon this source material, and the
result is worth quoting at length, because it was later used by the majority of
Spenser’s eighteenth-century editors. Here Spenser has arrived at Leicester
House and presented The Faerie Queene I.ix to Sidney, whom he has not
yet met:
[Sidney] having read the Twenty-eighth Stanza of Despair, (with some signs in
his Countenance of being much affected, and surpris’d with what he read)
turns suddenly to his Servant, and commands him to give the Party that
presented the Verses to him Fifty Pounds; the Steward stood speechless, and
unready, till his master having past over another Stanza, bad him give him an
Hundred Pound; the Servant something stagger’d at the humour his Master
was in, mutter’d to this purpose, That by the semblance of the Man that
brought the Paper, Five Pounds would be a proper Reward; but Mr. Sidney
having read the following Stanza, commands him to give Two Hundred
Pounds . . . After this Mr. Spenser, by degrees, so far gain’d upon him, that he
73
Dillingham (ed.), preface to Bathurst, Calendarium Pastorale (1653), sig. A4r. ‘And the result was
illumination to the obscure, polish to the rough, and brightness and elegance in general [was] lent
[to Spenser’s original]’ (my translation).
74
Ibid., sig. L2r.
75
The F3 biographer is anonymous. It has been suggested that Brook Bridges (1643–1717) was the
author based on Bridges’s notes in a copy of F2 held by the Folger Shakespeare Library (Deck B–
STC Vault, Copy 1). See Andrew Fleck, ‘Early Modern Marginalia in Spenser’s Faerie Queene at the
Folger’, N&Q 55 (2008): 165–70. R. M. Cummings wrote that ‘it is also not beyond possibility that
Dryden contributed material to [the biography]’. Spenser: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M.
Cummings (London, 1995), 337.
became not onely his Patron, but his Friend too; entred him at Court, and
obtain’d of the Queen the Grant of a Pention to him as Poet Laureat: But in
this, his Fate was unkind; for it provʼd only a Poetical Grant, the payment,
after a very short time, being stopt by a great Councellour, who studied more
the Queenʼs Profit than her Diversion, and told Her, ’twas beyond Example
to give so great a Pention to a Ballad-maker. Of this, the grieved Poet thus
Complainʼs in his Tears of the Muses76 . . . How much deeper his resentment
wrought in Mother Hubbard’s Tale, may appear to those that list to read it
with reflection.77
Andrew Hadfield has confirmed that there is no evidence for the meeting
of Spenser and Sidney at Leicester House. ‘Sidney only mentions
Spenser once in his extant writings, in the Apology for Poetry, and does
not even mention his name.’78 The story of their friendship was a
fanciful interpretation of Spenser’s dedication of The Shepheardes
Calender to Sidney: Spenser’s early biographers were guilty of ‘misre-
cognition of “familiarity” between patron and client as an “intimate”
relationship’.79 The story of the cancelled grant was embellished from
Fuller and Phillips. Although there is clear evidence in Spenser’s poetry
that he was deprived of promised financial rewards, the specific details of
Spenser’s mistreatment at the hands of Burghley (the ‘great Councellour’)
are speculative.80 Elsewhere, the biographer rehearsed the myth that the
final six books of The Faerie Queene were ‘unfortunately lost by the
disorder and abuse of [Spenser’s] Servant’. Phillips had claimed that
Spenser died of ‘a deep Melancholy’ that was the result of lack of support
for his poetry.81 The 1679 biographer adjusted this detail, and had
Spenser die of ‘a broken heart’, caused by anguish at the death of
Sidney, silently eliding the fact that Sidney died more than a decade
before Spenser. Every anecdote in the 1679 biography was selected to
paint Spenser as loved by royalty and nobility, yet underappreciated by
narrow-minded bureaucrats. The poems were portrayed as coded auto-
biographical accounts, meaningful only to those who ‘list to read [them]
with reflection’.
If the biography itself is ‘read with reflection’, it yields some clues
concerning the political implications of publishing Spenser in 1679. The
biographer fancifully identified not only the book and canto of The Faerie
76
The biographer has confused ‘The Teares of the Muses’ with ‘The Ruines of Time’. It is in the latter
that Spenser complains of lack of reward.
77
F3, sigs A1r–v. 78 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, 2012), 420.
79
Pask, The Emergence of the English Author, 83. 80 See ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’, ll. 895–914.
81
Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum (1675), sig. 2B6r.
Queene that Spenser brought to Leicester House, but the specific stanza
that so impressed Sidney, I.ix.28:
From whom returning sad and comfortless,
As on the way together we did fare,
We met that Villain (God from him me bless)
That cursed wight, from whom I scap’t why lear,
A man of Hell, that calls himself Despair:
Who first us greets, and after fair areeds
Of tydings strange, and of adventures rare:
So creeping close, as Snake in hidden weeds,
Inquireth of our states, and of our Knightly deeds.82
This is spoken by Sir Trevisan, who has recently escaped Despair. Like
Archimago, the Catholic villain of the earlier cantos, Despair allures with
‘fair areeds’ and ‘tydings strange’, but hides sinister intentions. Redcrosse,
to whom this stanza is addressed, forgets Trevisan’s warnings and is
persuaded to attempt suicide by Despair’s insidious rhetoric. No earlier
or later biographers specified which stanza Sidney supposedly read.83 The
1679 folio was licensed for publication on 24 October 1678, in the immedi-
ate wake of the Popish Plot. In 1678 the monarchy seemed genuinely under
threat from deceptive conspirators. In this context, the image of Despair as
a ‘Snake in hidden weedes’ who ‘Inquireth of our states’ would have been
alarmingly political, particularly given the precedent set by The Faerie
Leveller for finding hidden prophetic meanings in Spenser. The emphasis
the biographer placed on Burghley’s cancellation of Elizabeth’s patronage,
an example of royalty undermined, also appears politically charged.
The frontispiece to the third folio depicts Spenser’s tomb in Westminster
Abbey, rather than the poet himself, in what Stephen Galbraith has
described as a ‘deviation from what had become the norm for literary folios’.
Galbraith attributed the strange choice to the ‘lack of any extant portrait’ of
Spenser, and this was no doubt a factor, but the engraving rewards further
consideration.84 Below the tomb are two rhyming couplets not present on
the real monument:
Such is the Tombe, the Noble ESSEX gave
Great SPENCER’S learned Reliques; such his graue;
How ’ere ill-treated in His Life he were,
His sacred Bones Rest Honourably Here.85
82
FQ I.ix.28, in F3 (1679), sig. F3v.
83
See William Winstanley, England’s Worthies (1684), sig. Q1r, and Giles Jacob, An Historical Account
of the Lives and Writings of our Most Considerable English Poets (1720), sig. O4v.
84
Galbraith, ‘Edmund Spenser and the History of the Book’, 286. 85 F3, sig. π1v.
The description of Spenser as ‘ill-treated in His Life’ encapsulates an
attitude that Jonathan Sawday has defined as typical of seventeenth-
century Spenserians:
the present was degenerate, a sad retreat not just from the golden
world of pastoral myth, but . . . from recent providential history, in
which England had (briefly) appeared to be a ‘saved nation’.
Increasingly, alienated from court, Spenserians took Spenser himself
as the symbol of virtue abused . . . This sense of retreat into the past –
the re-creation of the gilded pastoral world – signals [an] intervention
in [the] political moment.86
Sawday was thinking of poets like Phineas Fletcher, who protested against
modern degeneracy in his Spenserian Purple Island (1633). The image of the
tomb on the frontispiece of the third folio drove home the fact that Spenser
was a relic of a historic golden age. This colluded with the contrast drawn by
the biographer between the chivalric Sidney and the avaricious Burghley, the
ill-fated courtier set against the thriving counsellor. Nostalgia driven by
political anxiety was the theme of the paratexts of the third folio. This was
an important assessment of Spenser’s legacy for the next generation, and as I
will show, nostalgic politics subsequently underpinned a number of early
eighteenth-century responses to Spenser.
The nostalgia of the third folio relied on the presentation of Spenser as
antiquated (in the frontispiece) and difficult (in the glossary). Inevitably
then, less than a century after its first publication The Faerie Queene was
adapted into more modern English, and published as Spencer Redivivus
(1687). The author of this adaptation, the playwright Edward Howard,
anticipated Prior’s observations on Spenser’s paradoxical popularity:87
There are few of our Nation that have heard of the Name of Spencer, but
have granted him the repute of a famous Poet. But I must take leave to
affirm, that the esteem which is generally allow’d to his Poetical Abilities,
has rather been from an implicite or receiv’d Concession, than a knowing
Discernment paid to the value of this Author: Whose Design, in his
Books of the Fairy Queen, howsoever admirable, is so far from being
familiarly perceptible in the Language he deliver’d it in, that his Stile
seems no less unintelligible at this Day, than the obsoletest of our English
or Saxon Dialect.88
86
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned (London, 1995), 175.
87
For the identification of Howard as author, see Leicester Bradner, ‘The Authorship of Spencer
Redivivus’, RES (1938): 323–26.
88
Howard, Spencer Redivivus (1687), sig. A3r.
Like Prior, Howard doubted whether many actually read The Faerie
Queene, although Spenser’s reputation was maintained by common con-
sent. He thought the problem lay in Spenser’s ‘unintelligible’ language,
and the unmanageable length of The Faerie Queene. In his adaptation he
‘abreviated’ and thereby ‘improv’d’.89 Here is Spenser’s Proem to Book I,
followed by Howard’s version:
LO I the man, whose Muse whylome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shephards weeds,
Am now enforst a farre vnfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds:
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds,
Whose praises hauing slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broade emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.90
Behold the man whose Muse in former time
Divulg’d in Pastoral Song his softer Rhyme:
Does now presume t’attempt the lofty Praise
Of Martial Verse and Deeds that Hero’s blaze.91
David Fairer identified ‘a widespread embarrassment at the barbarity of the
native literary past’ in Enlightenment thinking, a barbarity that Howard
clearly located not only in Spenser’s diction, but in his self-presentation.92
The phrases by which Spenser affected a pose of humility are all removed
(‘lowly’, ‘too meane’, ‘too humble, too vile’, ‘weaker novice’, ‘vnfitter task’).
Only ‘presume t’attempt’ remains, and assumes a precocious tone in its new
context. Howard lent The Faerie Queene a directness and confidence char-
acteristic of late seventeenth-century poetry. Although the translation encour-
aged engagement with a version of Spenser, it contributed to the growing
perception that the original was inaccessible and outdated.
Adaptations and translations of Renaissance works were common in the
late seventeenth century. Dryden (1677) and John Hopkins (1699) trans-
lated Milton’s Paradise Lost into rhymed couplets, and Dryden, William
Davenant, Colley Cibber, and Nahum Tate all rewrote Shakespeare. Jean
Marsden found that in the seventeenth century, Renaissance authors
‘might be revered, but their genius was situated not in the words they
wrote but in larger issues such as character, plot, and even ideas’.93 Hence
89
Ibid., sig. A4r. 90 FQ I.i.1. 91 Spencer Redivivus, sig. A8v.
92
David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth-Century (London, 2003), 145.
93
Jean Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text (Lexington, KT, 1995), 13.
Dryden’s adoption of the term ‘transfusion’, to refer to his loose adaptations
that aimed to catch the spirit of the original, without reproducing their
clumsy form or diction.94 Or, as it was articulated on the title-page to
Spencer Redivivus, the ‘Essential Design [is] preserv’d’, the ‘obsolete
Language and manner of Verse totally laid aside’.95 Howard was alone,
however, in his judgement that Spenser was a candidate for this species of
adaptation, which maintained that the only impediment to the appreciation
of The Faerie Queene was linguistic. Dryden regarded Spenser as a ‘Genius’,
and held The Shepheardes Calender in uncommonly high esteem, but he never
attempted a ‘transfusion’ of The Faerie Queene, because its plot did not
measure up to classical standards. ‘There is no Uniformity in the Design of
Spencer: He aims at the Accomplishment of no one Action.’96 Dryden
asserted that ‘A Heroick Poem’ is ‘undoubtedly the greatest Work which
the Soul of Man is capable to perform. The Design of it is to form the Mind
to Heroick Virtue by Example . . . The Action of it is always one, entire, and
great’.97 The Faerie Queene failed on the latter counts, because of its many
digressions and loosely related sub-plots. Dryden’s influence on literary taste
was exceptionally strong during the final decades of the seventeenth century.
Despite Howard’s efforts to dress Spenser in ‘more fashionable English and
Verse’, it was Dryden’s more equivocal judgement that prevailed.
By the last decade of the century Spenser was definitely out of fashion.
The best summary of the situation was given by Joseph Addison, in his
‘Account of the Greatest English Poets’ (1694). The poem charts the
progress of English poetry from Chaucer and Spenser, via Milton and
Dryden, to Congreve and Charles Montagu. Addison began by presenting
Chaucer as a ‘merry Bard’, but one for whom ‘Age has Rusted what the
Poet writ.’ Spenser follows:
Old Spencer next, warm’d with Poetick Rage,
In Antick Tales amus’d a Barb’rous Age;
An Age that yet uncultivate and Rude,
Where-e’er the Poet’s Fancy led, pursu’d
Through pathless Fields, and unfrequented Floods,
To Dens of Dragons, and Enchanted Woods.
But now the Mystick Tale, that pleas’d of Yore,
Can Charm an understanding Age no more;
The long-spun Allegories fulsom grow,
94
Dryden, ‘Preface’ to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), sigs *A1r–*D2v.
95
Spencer Redivivus, sig. A2r.
96
Dryden, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1693), sig. a4v.
97
Dryden, Works of Virgil (1697), sig. (a)1r.
While the dull Moral lies too plain below.
We view well-pleas’d at distance all the sights
Of Arms and Palfries, Cattel’s, Fields and Fights,
And Damsels in Distress, and Courteous Knights.
But when we look too near, the Shades decay,
And all the pleasing Lan-skip fades away.98
As with Chaucer, Addison’s criticism of Spenser begins with lukewarm
admiration and develops into an indictment that borders on scathing. This
should be considered in light of the fact, agreed on by Addison’s contem-
poraries, that in 1694 he had not actually read The Faerie Queene. Pope
reflected on the ‘Account’ in 1730:
[Addison] wrote it when he was very young [he was twenty-two], and as such
gave the characters of some of our best poets in it by hearsay only. Thus his
character of Chaucer is diametrically opposite to the truth: he blames him for
want of humour. The character he gives of Spenser is false too, and I have
heard him say that he never read Spenser, till fifteen years after he wrote it.99
Addison’s assessment of Spenser’s relevance is ‘echoed from the common
voice’, as Richard Hurd later put it.100 This makes it a good barometer of
taste at the end of the seventeenth century, if a poor reflection of Addison’s
personal response to Spenser. In 1694 Addison had recently attracted the
attention and favour of Dryden, and the younger poet’s ‘Account’ is closely
modelled on Dryden’s influential narrative of the progressive refinement of
literary history. Addison was also writing to curry favour with his new
friends and patrons, both literary and political. His praise of Dryden and
Congreve is unequivocal, and his presentation of them both as the superior
inheritors to Chaucer and Spenser is a flattering tribute. Addison’s
‘Account’ ends with fulsome praise of the political verses of Charles
Montagu, first Earl of Halifax, who in 1694 was Chancellor of the
Exchequer and a key member of the Whig Junto. Addison presents the
Whig Junto as the executors of English high culture, in a significant
anticipation of the direction that Spenserianism took in the early eight-
eenth century, when Spenser became a cultural figurehead for the Junto
and its allies. Addison’s ‘Account’ was written at a pivotal moment. It looks
forward to the Whig appropriation of Spenser, but its easy dismissal of him
98
Addison, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ (1694), ll. 9–23, in The Annual Miscellany
(1694), sigs X7r–Y4r.
99
Pope, 13 Dec. 1730, in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, 2
vols, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966), 1.73–74.
100
Richard Hurd (ed.), Works of Joseph Addison, 6 vols (London, 1811), 1.22–3n.
as the bard of a ‘Barb’rous Age’ would appear outdated by the early
eighteenth century. To derive significant and lasting cultural value from
Spenser, and for that value to be politically persuasive, it became necessary
to cultivate (or affect) a more earnest appreciation of Spenser and his
works. Hence Prior’s ‘Ducal acquaintance’ who, in 1706, were ‘deep in
that Mythologico-Poetical way of thinking’.
Addison himself was to contribute to the cultural shift that caused Spenser
to go from deeply unfashionable in 1694 to in vogue by 1706. In 1699
Addison embarked on his five-year-long Grand Tour, and in Italy he was
struck by constant reminders of the country’s literary past in the landscape
and architecture: ‘Poetick Fields encompass me around, / And still I seem to
tread on Classic Ground’.101 These lines are from the ‘Letter to Italy’ which
Addison wrote on his return across the Alps in 1701, addressed to Charles
Montagu (with whom he had concluded his ‘Account’). In 1704 Addison
returned to England with a new perspective on the social importance of
antiquarianism and literary history. In that year he was still describing
Spenser’s ‘Rhime’ as a ‘Bodge’, but now he was prepared to consent that
‘the best Judges’ found many ‘beautys’ in Spenser’s poems.102 Around 1710
Addison finally read The Faerie Queene,103 and thereafter he set about
peppering his writing with references to Spenser and Sidney. He explicitly
celebrated Spenser in his Spectator articles on fables (183) and the Gothic or
‘Fairy Way of Writing’ (419). In the Guardian 152 (1713) he reflected that in
recently imitating Spenserian allegory (in Spectator 3, 558, and 559) he had
‘revived several antiquated ways of Writing’, and he went on to reveal that he
‘was once thinking to have written a whole Canto in the Spirit of Spencer’.104
He never completed this project, but Spenser was no longer a poet to be
blithely invoked and dismissed. Instead, Addison was seeking a ‘Classic
Ground’ for England, the equivalent of the Italian model which had so
inspired him on his Grand Tour. This search was motivated by the aesthetic
fervour Addison had felt in Italy, but also by politics. The complex interac-
tion between these two motives was enshrined in the first eighteenth-century
edition of Spenser.
101
Addison, ‘A Letter from Italy’ (1701), in Poetic Miscellanies: The Fifth Part (London, 1704), sig. A3v.
102
Addison to Ambrose Phillips, 10 Mar. 1704, in Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham
(Oxford, 1941), 48–49.
103
‘[N]o other references to Spenser [except the ‘Account’] occur in Addison’s writings until 1710’,
Osborne, in Spence, Anecdotes, 1.74n.
104
Guardian 152 (4 Sep. 1713).
chapter 1
Spenser the Whig

John Hughes’s Clubbable Edition, 1715
Saide Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,

That hath so soone forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when he life began,
That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.
To whom the Palmer thus, The dunghill kinde
Delightes in filth and fowle incontinence:
Let Gryll be Grylle, and haue his hoggish minde;
But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and winde.
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.xii.87
By the end of the seventeenth century the English literary canon ‘had not
only been drawn up but had become subject to its own tradition of recital’.1
Spenser, Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden
all regularly featured in seventeenth-century lists of English “classics”.
Nonetheless, the canon is said to have its foundations in the eighteenth
century, because it was in this period that the value of actually having a
native literary canon was brokered, chiefly by members of the book trade. A
number of questions were hotly debated, because they dictated how
canonical works were to be published. Were English writers equal – or
even superior – to the ancients? Could English writers be “ancient”
themselves, or were they always “modern”? Who owned the canon? Was
it possible to claim an exclusive right to print and sell Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton? Or did their works belong to the nation? The question of
material ownership led to the related subject of appropriation. Was it
possible for politicians to claim certain authors as their political allies?
On a larger scale, what role could the canon play in the construction of
national identity? These questions were negotiated throughout the eight-
eenth century, and their answers – insofar as such questions can be said to
1
Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 37–39.
27
have answers – governed understandings of the concept of the literary
canon for two centuries.
In the first decades of the eighteenth century Spenser’s fame was buoyed
by the commodification of the literary past that took place in polite society.
The emergence of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in the eighteenth century has
been well documented.2 Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the
balance of power shifted from the monarch to the landowning classes, and
financial revolutions such as the founding of the Bank of England, the
National Debt, and the stock market created opportunities for private
enterprise that were not exclusive to the landed gentry. The latter decades
of the seventeenth century had been characterised by a series of crises of
national identity fuelled by anti-Catholicism. Anti-Jacobites were persuaded
to replace a British monarch with a Dutch one to defend against the threat of
Catholicism. Once William of Orange was installed on the throne, it was
necessary for parliamentarians, and their aristocratic and mercantile allies, to
reassess the meaning of Britishness. Anti-Jacobites and others acting under
the broad umbrella of Whiggism began to distance themselves from the
polemic of the 1680s and 1690s, and instead fostered ideals of refinement and
politeness, which contributed to the image of the ‘public sphere’ as ‘an
autonomous organism rooted within a variety of gathering places where
“opinion” was formed’, such as the drawing room, the coffee house, and the
theatre.3 In addition to political discourse, cultural hegemony became more
important than ever for the maintenance of power. The effect of this was to
blur the boundaries between propaganda and culture. The Tatler and the
Spectator did not need to be overtly political to collude in the creation of an
ideology. Both organs were instrumental in popularising the idea of the
polite gentleman, a desirable model whose values, and those of Whiggism,
were liberty, the inviolability of property, advocacy of trade and commerce,
politeness, and sincerity. The English literary past was integral to the
Whiggish cultural project. One of Mr Spectator’s virtues was that he had
as easy a familiarity with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton as he did with the
Greek and Latin classics. The renewed interest in (relatively) early British
writers had political overtones that are explored in this chapter.
Spenser was appropriated by the Junto Whigs and their allies with the
publication of the first eighteenth-century edition of his works in 1715. In
assessing why and how Spenser ‘became a Whig’, I continue the argument
2
See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), trans. by Thomas
Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1989), and Roger Chartier, Cultural History, trans. by Cochrane
(Cambridge, 1988).
3
David H. Solkin, Painting for Money (New Haven, CT, 1996), 27.
Spenser the Whig 29
begun in the Introduction, that the ideology of a book is shaped not just
by the author or editor, but also by its printers, publishers, patrons,
consumers, and readers. A thorough understanding of the cultural forces
that shaped the 1715 edition of Spenser has not been reached previously.
In the only article on the subject, Ray Heffner was constrained by the fact
that the identity of the printer was unknown.4 This is remedied here, and
the printer is considered in relation to the other agents who produced the
edition. Each of their motives for bringing about an edition of Spenser is
considered, and their cumulative effect on Spenser’s reputation is
assessed.
1.1 The Origins of the Spenser Revival

The majority of this chapter is concerned with the Whig appropriation of
Spenser in the 1710s, but the first eighteenth-century Spenser revival was
provoked by a Tory poem. As discussed earlier, Matthew Prior claimed
that he caused a sudden craze for Spenser with his Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to
the Queen (1706). The Ode was written to celebrate John Churchill, Duke
of Marlborough’s victory for Queen Anne at the Battle of Ramillies (1706),
in the War of the Spanish Succession. Anne and Marlborough were not
Prior’s natural allies; the Ode was a well-pitched attempt to win their
favour. Marlborough’s wife, Sarah Churchill, was an intimate friend of
Anne, but she suspected Prior of libelling her in the press, leading to Anne’s
disaffection with the poet, though Prior and Marlborough kept up an
amicable correspondence.5 In the Ode Prior compares Marlborough’s
military feats to those performed in the reigns of Emperor Augustus and
Queen Elizabeth I, though the poem focusses not on the monarchs, but on
their literary champions, Horace and Spenser respectively. A stanza
devoted to Horace’s martial odes is followed by one on Spenser and
Elizabeth:
When bright Eliza rul’d Britannia’s State,
Widely distributing her high Commands;
And boldly Wise and fortunately Great
Freed the glad Nations from Tyrannick Bands;
An equal Genius was in Spencer found:
To the high Theme he match’d his Noble Lays;
He travell’d England o’er on Fairy Ground,
4
Ray Heffner, ‘The Printing of John Hughes’ Edition of Spenser’, Modern Language Notes 50 (1935):
151–53.
5
See Private Correspondence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 2 vols (London, 1838), 2.408.
In Mystic Notes to Sing his Monarch’s Praise:
And telling wond’rous Truths in pleasing Dreams,
He deck’d Eliza’s Head with Gloriana’s Beams.6
Just as Horace (Spenser’s ‘equal’) had served Augustus and Rome, so
Spenser served ‘Eliza’ and ‘England’. In the ‘Preface’ to the poem, Prior
noted that Horace had celebrated the descent of the Romans from Aeneas,
and Spenser the descent of the British from Brutus.7 Both Aeneas and
Brutus, Prior points out, were Trojans, making Spenser not just the equal
of Horace, but his true successor as a chronicler of a tradition that linked
Britain to ancient Rome. At the turn of the century Prior had flirted with
membership of the Whig Kit-Cat Club, but by 1706 his views were clearly
aligned with the Tory Party. The Ode is characterised by nostalgia for a
strong monarchy in which Elizabeth was free to ‘distribut[e] her high
Commands’. The implication is that an overweening Parliament, particu-
larly the interfering Whig Junto, prevented free and easy celebration of
Anne’s sovereignty, or at least, such celebrations are in danger of going
unrewarded because of petty factionalism. Prior explicitly offers to take on
Spenser’s laureate mantle:
Yet if the Soverign Lady deigns to Smile,
I’ll follow Horace with impetuous Heat,
And cloath the Verse in Spencer’s Native Stile.8
In Spenser, Prior found a model of panegyric which could be declared
uniquely English. The emphasis he placed on Spenser’s ‘Native Stile’ was
particularly suited to a poem in support of Marlborough, who was peri-
odically suspected of Jacobitism, and Anne, whose reign was characterised
by Anglocentrism. Indeed, Anne encouraged comparisons of herself with
Elizabeth I, adopting Elizabeth’s motto, Semper Eadem, and appearing for
her first address to Parliament wearing the crown, the star and garter, and a
red and gold gown lined with ermine, in a deliberate imitation of
Elizabeth.9 ‘I know my own heart to be entirely English,’ she declared on
that occasion, alluding to Elizabeth’s speech to the troops at Tilbury in
1588.10 It was astute of Prior to acknowledge this comparison in print, and
to position himself in Spenser’s laureate role. Prior’s Spenserian credentials
6
Prior, An Ode, sig. B1v.
7
The Trojan foundation of Britain appears in FQ at II.x.9–13, III.iii.22, and III.ix.33–51.
8
Ibid., sig. B2r. Cf. Spenser’s ‘Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds’, FQ I.proem.1.
9
Abel Boyer, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, 11 vols (1703–13), vol. 1, sigs M1r–v. See also
Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, 152.
10
R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court (Stanford, CA, 1993), 205–06.
Spenser the Whig 31
were emphasised further in a portrait by Michael Dahl, in which he is
depicted holding a book labelled ‘Spenser’s Works’; he was later buried at
the foot of Spenser’s memorial in Westminster Abbey.11
The fact that Prior was painted holding Spenser’s works shows that his
engagement with the Elizabethan poet was sincere, but it was not unre-
served. The comparison was risky. Prior was aware of how unfashionable
Spenser was in 1706. In the ‘Preface’ to the Ode he pleaded with his readers
‘not [to] judge my Muse less handsom, tho’ for once she appears in a
Farthingal’.12 However, if Prior’s muse was wearing a farthingale, it was
sported over an eighteenth-century suit. Prior retained only ‘some few’
‘Obsolete Words’, ‘to make the Colouring look more like Spencer’s’, and
he refused to adopt the nine-line Spenserian stanza, with its difficult rhyme
scheme of ababbcbcc, and a terminal alexandrine. Instead, Prior created a
new ten-line stanza, consisting of two quatrains and a couplet, with the far
less knotty rhyme scheme ababcdcdee (he kept the alexandrine for its
Spenserian flavour). The Prior stanza eventually became the form of choice
for eighteenth-century imitations of The Faerie Queene, until Spenserians
were revived by the Romantic poets.13 The initial reception of the Prior
stanza, however, was lukewarm, for reasons of both politics and taste.
William Atwood suspected Prior of insincerity, and considered the use of
Spenser’s ‘Dull antiquated Words’ insulting to the lofty subject of
Marlborough’s victory. Atwood framed his objections as aesthetic, but really
he suspected Prior of using Spenserian fustian to mask a covert celebration of
the death of William of Orange, defender of the Whig ‘Cause of Liberty’.
Atwood interpreted Prior’s vision of Anne-as-Gloriana as a flagrant state-
ment of Tory allegiance, and his response called for Anne to ‘give to all their
Rights’, a significant, and overtly Whiggish, tempering of Prior’s exuberant
vision of unlimited monarchy.14
Other commentators prioritised aesthetic objections over the political. In
a 1709 poem on the art of versification William Coward wrote against the
alexandrine, condemning it as ‘A Six-foot Line, spun with too long a
Thread’.15 Objections to Spenserian stanzas continued to be raised through-
out the century, but they were often answered with popular imitations in
11
Dahl’s portrait of Prior is kept in a private collection at Knole House, Kent.
12
Prior, An Ode, sig. A1r.
13
Frushell lists imitations written in the Prior stanza (Edmund Spenser in the Early Eighteenth Century,
215–40). On the Romantic poets and Spenser, see Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic
Spenserianism.
14
Atwood, A Modern Inscription (1706), sigs B1r, B2v.
15
Coward, Licentia Poetica discuss’d (1709), sig. G6v.
Prior stanzas, or looser imitations of Spenserian pastoral. Indeed, William
Coward’s anti-Spenserian manifesto contains two commendatory poems by
Aaron Hill and John Gay, both of whom later became Spenserian imitators
themselves, Gay in The Shepherd’s Week (1714) and Hill in The Tears of the
Muses (1737). Even as Atwood and Coward were dismissing Spenser as a
model, the pedagogue Henry Felton was recommending Spenser to young
students of poetry. ‘Spencer, tho’ he be antiquated too, hath still Charms
remaining to make Your Lordship enamoured of him,’ he advised the
twelve-year-old Marquis of Granby.16 Felton ventured that Spenser ‘may,
perhaps, dispute the Pastoral, even with Theocritus; for I dare prefer him to
Virgil ’.17 The battle of the ancients and moderns is at play here. Curiously,
both Coward and Felton were on the side of the moderns, and both
advocated for new and dynamic poetry. Coward, however, classified
Spenser as an outmoded ancient, whereas Felton held him up as a modern
hero to be pitted against the ancients Theocritus and Virgil. Neither argu-
ment won, and Spenser continued to be classified as both ancient and
modern throughout the century, but Felton’s praise for Spenser reached a
much larger audience than the objections raised by Atwood and Coward.
Felton’s Dissertation was not published until 1713, but it then went swiftly
into five new editions. The problem with recommending Spenser as a
subject for imitation was that the last Spenser folio had been printed three
decades before, and was hard to come by for would-be imitators. A new
edition of Spenser was clearly necessary.
1.2 Spenser among the Kit-Cats

Prior had attempted to initiate a Tory revival of Spenser that drew on the
Elizabethan’s image as a champion of powerful and unfettered monarchy,
but it took a new edition to turn a swell of interest into a Spenserian revival,
and no edition was printed under Anne’s Tory regime. Instead, the first
eighteenth-century edition of Spenser was entered in the Stationers’ Register
on 23 October 1714. It was no coincidence this was three days after the
coronation of George I. In the months following Anne’s death in August
1714, there was a drive to claim Spenser for the new regime. The Whig poet
Samuel Croxall published An Ode Humbly Inscribed to the King (1714),
‘Written in The Stanza and Measure of Spencer’. Croxall’s Ode was
intended to supersede Prior’s and to re-appropriate Spenser for George.
Croxall described Anne as a ‘faint declining Star’, and celebrated George’s
16 17
Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics (1713), sigs K10r–v. Ibid., sig. L4r.
Spenser the Whig 33
accession as a return to the Whig values of William III’s reign: ‘In Him
they see Great WILLIAM’S Virtues live.’18 The Ode ends by pointedly
looking forward to patronage:
Nor will Thou, Gracious Sovereign, refuse,
Among the gaudy Garlands of the Day,
The humble Tribute of a grateful Muse.19
Whereas Prior had selected martial imagery from Spenser to praise Anne’s
foreign policy, Croxall preferred Spenser’s pastoral language (‘gaudy
Garlands’ is lifted directly from The Shepheardes Calender).20 Croxall
anticipated a reign characterised by peace and the refinement of culture,
and Spenser was integral to this vision. The decision to publish an edition
of Spenser was an extension of Croxall’s Whig appropriation of Spenser. In
the following sections I analyse the front matter of the 1715 edition (with
the exception of the illustrations, which are discussed separately at the
end), and discuss its various contributors, to assess how it was presented to
the public as a Whig edition.
The Publishers
The entry into the Stationers’ Register of the ‘Copy’ of ‘The whole works of
Mr. Edmond Spencer, as last printed in the folio’ was made by Jacob
Tonson II, nephew of the famous Jacob Tonson I, head of the Whig Kit-
Cat Club, and heavyweight of the literary publishing industry.21 The
Tonsons dominated the book trade from the late seventeenth century
until 1767. Richard Tonson I (ca. 1653–1700) established the business in
1676, and entered into a partnership with his brother Jacob I (1655–1736) in
1678.22 Around the time of Richard’s death in 1700, Jacob II (d. 1735)
joined the trade.23 In 1710 the business moved from its original location at
Gray’s Inn Gate to the Strand, at the sign of Shakespeare’s Head. The sign
18
Samuel Croxall, An Ode Humbly Inscrib’d to the King (1714), sigs B1v, C1v. 19 Ibid., sig. F1v.
20
Shepheardes Calender, ‘June’, ll. 43–46. All citations of the shorter poems are from The Shorter Poems,
ed. Richard A. McCabe (London, 1999), unless otherwise specified.
21
Stationers’ Register (1714), item 215, BL M.985. The full entry reads: ‘October. 23. [1714] Jacob
Tonson Junr. Then entred for his Copy, the Latin Library in 3-vol: Written by a Lady. Published
now by Mr Steele. Witness. Thomas Glenister. Ditto. October. 23. [1714] Then also entred for his
Copy, The whole works of Mr. Edmond Spencer, as last printed in the folio. Witness. Thomas
Glenister’.
22
Biographical information on the first three Tonsons can be found in G. F. Papali, Jacob Tonson,
Publisher (Auckland, 1968), Harry M. Geduld, Prince of Publishers (Bloomington, IN, 1969), and
Kathleen Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, TN, 1971). All three focus on Jacob I.
23
Henry Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers (Oxford, 1922), 292.
clearly stated the Tonsons’ intentions to represent themselves as specialist
literary publishers. In 1679 Jacob I became Dryden’s principal publisher, a
role he held until Dryden’s death in 1700. As publisher to the poet laureate,
Jacob I attracted the business of Addison, Behn, Butler, Congreve, Otway,
Pope, Prior, the Earl of Rochester, Steele, and Waller. As well as working
with living authors, at the turn of the century Jacob I commissioned the first
work of the Cambridge University Press, in the form of subscription editions
of Horace, Virgil, Terence, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. These were
edited by Michael Mattaire, and ‘set a new standard’ of typographical quality
by using Dutch Elzevir type.24 Thus the Tonsons began the eighteenth
century with a reputation for publishing fine editions of contemporary and
classical writers. Since the 1680s they had also regularly published Milton,
and single play texts of Shakespeare, but in the new century they expanded
their range of early English authors, producing editions of Abraham Cowley
(1707), John Denham (1709), Katherine Philips (1710), and John Suckling
(1709), and their first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works (1709). These
were printed in octavo, and their layout mimicked the Mattaire Classics, but
from 1711 the Tonsons began to favour the considerably smaller duodecimo.
Their 1711 Paradise Lost was advertised as ‘printed very correctly, with a neat
Elzever [sic] Letter, in 12mo, for the pocket’.25 They produced an edition of
Beaumont and Fletcher to match, hoping that the public would ‘approve of
the Publishing these Authors in the same Portable volume’.26 Portability,
clarity, and uniformity were the hallmarks of the new style. Duodecimo
editions of Milton (1713), Shakespeare (1714), Donne (1719), and Cowley
(1721) all followed, and eventually, as David Foxon put it, the Tonsons’
inventory ‘contained something like the whole of English literature in
duodecimo’.27 The consistent format inspired buyer loyalty. William
Congreve, for one, collected the Tonson editions, and kept them together
in his library.28
If the choice of these English authors and the use of the portable and
convenient duodecimo seem obvious now, they were certainly not at the
time. The Tonsons were unique in devoting so much energy and money to
24
David Foxon, Pope and the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. by James McLaverty (Oxford,
1991), 53.
25
Spectator 39 (14 Apr. 1711).
26
Dedication to Prince William, probably by Jacob Tonson II, in The Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont
and Mr. John Fletcher, 7 vols (1711), vol. 1, sigs A2r–v.
27
Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 29.
28
John C. Hodges, The Library of William Congreve (New York, 1955), 9. See also John Barnard,
‘Creating an English Literary Canon, 1679–1720’, in Literary Cultures and the Material Book, ed.
Simon Eliot et al. (London, 2007), 307–21, 318–19.
Spenser the Whig 35
the publication of deceased English writers, and their small volumes would
have stood out in a market that generally favoured large formats for
prestigious publications like collected works. The significance of the
Tonsons’ decision to revive earlier English authors should not be under-
estimated. Keith Walker called Jacob Tonson I the ‘inventor of English
literature’ for his championing of Shakespeare and Milton.29 Tonson
editions were built around their social function. Whether the work in
question was Shakespeare’s plays or Milton’s Paradise Lost, the format and
size of each volume was the same, so that they made a handsome appear-
ance on the shelf, but they were also ‘Portable’, so that they could be
displayed and discussed outside the library, in the coffee house, club, or
theatre. The Tonsons intended their customers to be seen displaying or
reading their books, and hence to use them in the construction of their
social identity.
The entry of Spenser in the Stationers’ Register was an act of appropriation.
In 1710 the Act for the Encouragement of Learning, known as the Statute of
Anne, had attempted to define the limits of copyright. For works printed
before the Act, the author owned the copyright for twenty-one years, and for
anything printed after 10 April 1710, the term was fourteen years.30 The Act
also decreed that anyone who had already purchased the copyright to a book
had ‘the sole right and liberty of printing [that] book’ for twenty-one years.31
Officially, Spenser was long out of copyright by 1714, but the terms of the
Statute of Anne were almost entirely ignored by the book trade, and copy-
rights that had legally expired continued to be invested with immense value,
fought over, and bought and sold for large sums. Jacob I had begun purchas-
ing copyrights to early English authors in the mid-1680s. His most notable
purchase was the copyright to Paradise Lost, which he bought in two stages in
1683 and 1692.32 In 1707 Jacob II paid £125 for the copies formerly belonging
to Henry Herringman (publisher of the Shakespeare fourth folio), followed
by Humphrey Moseley’s Shakespeare copies in 1718.33 It seems unlikely that
any similar transaction took place over the Spenser copyright. Spenser’s
29
Keith Walker, ‘The Master of Extremes’, Times Literary Supplement (19–25 Feb. 1988), 193.
30
On the 1710 Act, see John Feather, ‘The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act of
1710’, Publishing History 8 (1980): 19–44, 37. On copyright generally, see Mark Rose, Authors and
Owners (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
31
An Act for the Encouragement of Learning (1710), reproduced in Global Copyright, ed. Lionel
Bently, Una Suthersanen, and Paul Torremans (Camberley, 2010), 501.
32
See Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard (Columbia, MO, 2006), 77–78; and David Masson, The
Life of John Milton, 7 vols (London, 1859–94), 6.781–82.
33
See Giles E. Dawson, ‘The Copyright of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works’, in Studies in Honour of A.
H. R. Fairchild, ed. Charles T. Prouty (Columbia, MO, 1946), 9–35, 23.
previous publisher, Jonathan Edwin, had died in the year his 1679 folio was
published, several years before the Tonsons began buying English literary
copyrights, and moreover there is no evidence that Edwin ever presumed to
own the copyright himself. Spenser had no living editors, publishers, or
relatives (known to the Tonsons), a fact that probably led the Tonsons to
consider him unoccupied territory. They claimed that territory by simply
entering Spenser in the Register, with no regard for the Statute of Anne, a
spurious but strategic move. Trevor Ross calls this kind of copyright claim a
‘de facto occupancy’.34 Although they were not legally binding, such claims
had a powerful symbolic value. Jacob II’s entry in the Register declared the
Tonsons the guardians of Spenser, and a year later they ratified this claim with
the publication of a new edition under their imprint.
On 23 August 1715 the Tonson Spenser was published in six volumes
duodecimo. The first four volumes contained The Faerie Queene, and the
final two contained the shorter poems (some of them apocryphal), A View
of the State of Ireland, Bathurst’s Calendarium Pastorale, and a selection of
Spenser’s correspondence with Gabriel Harvey. The edition contained
nineteen illustrations by Louis du Guernier. Each element of the edition
was designed to make clear that this was a book made by and for Whigs.
This began with the Tonson name, which appeared on the title page of all
six volumes (see Figure 1.1). Although Jacob I had all but retired from the
publishing business in 1701, Jacob II chose not to distinguish himself from
his uncle in colophons and advertisements.35 The name Jacob Tonson had
significant cultural cache and overt political connotations. As the head of
the Kit-Cat Club, Jacob I was the most powerful Whig never to hold
political office. The Kit-Cat Club has been described as ‘the most famous
and influential manifestation of the Whig party in its social sphere’, and as
‘an alternative court’.36 In 1703 Jacob I converted rooms in his house at
Barn Elms into a clubhouse, and the Kit-Cats refused to meet when he was
not present.37 The Club was the driving force behind the Whig patronage
of literature. Although both Jacob I and II maintained friendships and
working relationships that transcended party politics (notably with Pope
and Prior), the majority of their authors were likely to identify as Whigs.
34
Trevor Ross, ‘Copyright and the Invention of Tradition’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992): 1–27, 5.
35
Papali, Jacob Tonson, 50.
36
Geduld, Prince of Publishers, 151; Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture
(Oxford, 2005), 158.
37
When Jacob I was visiting Amsterdam in 1703, John Vanbrugh wrote to him, ‘the Kit Catt too, will
never meet without you, so you see here’s a general Stagnation for want of you.’ 13 Jul. 1703,
Beinecke Gen. MS 229, f. 39v.
Spenser the Whig 37
Figure 1.1 Title-page of The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, ed. John Hughes (1715).
By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
They supported the Whiggish writings of the likes of Richard Blackmore,
William Congreve, Samuel Garth, John Hughes, Nicholas Rowe, Thomas
Tickell, and John Vanbrugh. Two of these writers were also editors for the
Tonsons. Nicholas Rowe edited their first collected plays of Shakespeare
(1709, 1714), and John Hughes was the editor of the 1715 Spenser.
The Dedication
Like the Tonson imprint, the name of the editor John Hughes signalled the
Whig credentials of the 1715 Spenser. As a poet, Hughes had made his
name at the turn of the century by publishing a series of panegyrics on
William III. The Tonsons published his Court of Neptune (1700) and his
Ode to the Creator of the World (1712–13). Hughes was patronised by the
Whig Lord Chancellor Earl Cowper, he was a member of the Kit-Cat
Club, and he contributed to the Spectator, Tatler, and Guardian. Hughes
worked with Richard Steele on theatrical productions, and wrote plays and
masques for performance at Drury Lane. His most successful play, The
Siege of Damascus, was first performed on the day of his death in 1720.
If the reader was unaware of Hughes’s political persuasions, he or she
would have been in no doubt upon turning past the title-page of the 1715
Spenser. The first item in volume 1 is Hughes’s dedication to Sir John
Somers, stalwart of the Whig Junto, under an ornament bearing the
Somers family motto ‘Prodesse quam conspici’. For two decades Somers
led the Whigs in the Lords, both in government and opposition.38 He died
of ill health in April 1716, but at the publication of Hughes’s Spenser his
name was still a byword for the Junto, whose party had secured an over-
whelming majority in the general election of January–March 1715.
Hughes’s dedication celebrated the Whig ascendancy under George I:
‘By his Majesty’s happy Accession to the Throne, the Nation is now put
into Possession of a wise and just Settlement’.39 Hughes looked forward to
a second golden age of patronage:
I cannot think I have acquitted myself of what is necessary towards placing
the Writings of our Celebrated Spenser in the most advantageous Light, till
I have address’d them to Your Lordship, by whom they have always been
particularly esteem’d. And I am zealous in making known so honourable a
38
R. M. Adams, ‘In Search of Baron Somers’, in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the
Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 165–93.
39
Hughes (ed.), The Works of Mr. Edmond Spenser, 6 vols (1715), vol. 1, sig. A4r, hereafter referred to in
the notes as Hughes.
Spenser the Whig 39
Distinction, of the same consequence to his fame now, which is the After-
Life of Poets, as the friendship of the admir’d Sidney was to his Reception at
his first Appearance.40
Hughes placed Somers in a tradition of statesmen patrons of the arts by
comparing him to ‘the admir’d Sidney’. Somers’s esteem for Spenser (and
by implication his patronage of Hughes’s edition) was ‘of the same con-
sequence’ to Spenser’s ‘After-Life’ as Sidney’s friendship was in Spenser’s
lifetime. Historians have traditionally identified a decline in court culture
between the reigns of Charles II and Anne.41 In fact, Abigail Williams has
shown that the idea of a decline in court patronage was a fabrication of
disaffected Tory and Jacobite writers under George I, designed to under-
mine overt shows of patronage by the likes of Somers.42 Court patronage
actually remained an important source of income for even the most
professional of authors. Of the total profits Dryden secured from the
1697 Virgil, for example, approximately one third came from gifts from
patrons.43 In the biography of Spenser attached to the 1679 folio edition,
Sidney’s fictional generosity was heralded as an example of patronage the
likes of which would not be seen in an age of modern bureaucracy. English
writers looked with jealousy to the courts of Europe, where patronage was
presumed to be flourishing, and in 1714 many anticipated that the new
German king might be culturally predisposed to dispense rewards more
generously than his Stuart predecessors.44 Hughes seized on the example of
Spenser to show that the revival of court patronage would not necessarily
mean submission to foreign mores, but could be seen as a return to a
thoroughly English system that had its apogee in the Elizabethan era.
It was necessary for Hughes to highlight Somers’s particular esteem for
Spenser, because throughout his career Somers received many dedications: R.
M. Adams counts twenty.45 These include works by Locke and Shaftesbury,
Addison’s Remarks on Several Part of Italy, and the 1711 Tonson Paradise Lost,
which Jacob II had personally dedicated to Somers. Dedicating works to
Somers became fashionable enough to be parodied by Jonathan Swift, who
began A Tale of a Tub (1704) with a mock dedication to Somers. A dedication
was not necessarily made with the dedicatee’s permission, but Somers ratified
40
Hughes, vol. 1, sigs A2r–v. 41 See Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority (Ithaca, NY, 1993).
42
Williams, ‘Patronage and Whig Literary Culture in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in Cultures of
Whiggism, ed. David Womersley (Newark, DE, 2005), 149–72, esp. 149–58. Also Poetry and the
Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 163 and passim.
43
John Barnard, ‘Dryden, Tonson, and Subscriptions for the 1697 Virgil’, PBSA 57 (1963): 129–51, 140.
44
See T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford, 2002), 78–102.
45
Adams, ‘In Search of Baron Somers’, 196–97.
Figure 1.2 John Somers, Baron Somers (1651–1716), by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Oil on
Canvas, circa 1715–16. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Hughes’s in a unique way. Shortly after its publication he chose to be painted

by Godfrey Kneller, proudly holding volume 1 of Hughes’s Spenser, in a copy
with a luxury morocco binding: see Figure 1.2.46
46
For an example of a morocco copy of the 1715 Spenser, see BL G.12799–804, which is also rubricated,
with a gold embossed spine and covers, and gilt page edges.
Spenser the Whig 41
The 1716 portrait of Somers is a particularly emphatic example of the use
of the 1715 Spenser in an act of self-presentation. Somers was a lawyer,
politician, and translator and editor of the classics. He owned thousands of
books and hundreds of manuscripts, so why did he choose to be painted
with a new edition of Spenser in his portrait? Kneller’s portrait of Somers
was part of a series, designed to hang on the walls of the Kit-Cat clubhouse
at Jacob Tonson I’s home at Barn Elms. In the series, Jacob I was painted
holding one of his own folio editions of Paradise Lost. The Kneller portrait
was intended to show that he was not just a mercenary bookseller (though
he did not shy away from the image), but also a sincere literary devotee (he
had bought a manuscript draft of Paradise Lost, and may even have edited
parts of the poem).47 The Kneller portrait of Somers holding his Spenser
served a related purpose that was at once literary, and political and
proprietorial. The image hearkens back to a project Somers had begun at
the outset of his career as a lawyer, when he had anonymously published a
tract in defence of the Exclusion Bill, A Brief History of the Succession of the
Crown of England (1689). Somers defended the Bill against charges of
revolutionary intent, by drawing on precedents from Saxon history
which upheld the rights of Parliament. Somers, along with other com-
monwealthsmen like James Tyrrell and Robert Atkyns, built on the work
of the parliamentary historian William Petyt to equate the Glorious
Revolution with the Barons’ revolt against King John in 1215, and the
subsequent concessions made by John in Magna Carta, framing the
Glorious Revolution as a return to an ancient and rightful covenant
between the King and his subjects.48 Despite Tory attempts to dismiss it
as irrelevant, Magna Carta was held up as an emblem of the historical
precedent for a limited monarchy.49
An offshoot of the Whig interest in ancient constitutionalism was the new
popularity of antiquarianism. By 1715 invocations of Magna Carta had
dissolved into broader interest in the British past, which still had Whiggish
overtones but was less polemical. In 1695 Richard Blackmore had published
47
Stuart Bennett, ‘Jacob Tonson: An Early Editor of Paradise Lost?’, Library, 6th ser., 10 (1988):
247–52.
48
William Petyt, The Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted (1680); James Tyrrell,
Bibliotheca Politica (1694) and The General History of England, 5 vols (1700–04); Robert Atkyns,
The Power, Jurisdiction and Priviledge of Parliament (1689). See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957, repr. 1987), and Jeffrey Denys Goldsworthy,
The Sovereignty of Parliament (Oxford, 1999), chapter 6.
49
Gilbert Burnet was a defender of Magna Carta, and he even owned its foundational document, the
Article of the Barons (1215) (BL Add. MS 4838). The document is cited throughout Burnet’s Second
Collection of Several Tracts (1689).
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I was left alone and was hesitating as to what I should do when my
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said, “I know where there is a boat.” He started off at the run and
covered ground so fast that I had to gallop my horse to keep up with
him. He led the way to the beach near where my cargo had been
landed and pushed a native boat from under a clump of mangrove
trees. We jumped in and shoved off in a hurry, for Ortega and
several of his men had just appeared on the bluff above us and were
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loose from the bottom and used it as a paddle. A strong current from
the east swept us clear of the peninsula and out to sea; but I was not
alarmed, for I figured that we would soon be in the path of coasting
vessels. Scattered rifle patter reached us for a long time, indicating
that my former comrades-in-arms were being ignominiously chased
around in a way that must have been most discouraging to Pulgar.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, as we were trying to work in
toward the land, the Indian let our paddle get away from him, which
left us entirely at the mercy of the elements, and I suspected that we
might have fared better if we had stayed on shore.
We drifted around for three days and nights without so much as a
glimpse of a distant sail, and without an ounce of food or a mouthful
of water, save only such as we were able to suck out of our clothes
during and after a providential rain that fell on the second night. On
the morning of the fourth day a fog lifted and close to us was a fleet
of fishermen from the island of Oruba, twenty miles to the westward
of Curacoa. They took us to their island and after we had rested and
eaten for two days a fishing boat took us to Curacoa. There I learned
from Consul Faxon what had happened in Venezuela. Guzman’s
plans had worked out more rapidly than he anticipated when he sent
me to New York for arms, and he landed in Venezuela early in
February at the head of a small force but with a large army waiting
for him. The old Liberals flocked to his standard and with only slight
resistance he entered Caracas and proclaimed himself Dictator. His
victory was so easily achieved and was so largely a personal one
that he did not give to Pulgar the reward to which that general
considered himself entitled, and the latter immediately started a new
revolution.
When I told Faxon the manner in which I had been imposed on and
how I had been impressed into Pulgar’s service, he advised me to
go to Caracas at once and tell President Guzman the whole story.
Though somewhat dubious as to the result, because of the fear that
Guzman would be skeptical, and perhaps brutal, I followed his
advice and went on the next steamer. The same ship carried a letter
to Guzman from Faxon in which he told him of my experiences and
of the precautions I had taken to verify the signature to the order
Ortega had given me on my arrival with the arms. From the effect
which this letter produced I judge that Faxon also said some very
complimentary things about me, but I never had an opportunity to
thank him, for he died before I was in Curacoa again.
I called on Guzman after I knew he had received Faxon’s letter, and
was welcomed with marked cordiality. “Tell me your whole story,” he
said, “but let me assure you, it is believed before it is told.” His face
took on an ugly look when I told him how Ortega had tricked me with
the forged order and he interrupted me to say that he had sent an
officer to Curacoa to await the “Juliette” and direct me to deliver the
arms at La Guaira. This officer’s failure to get to me in advance of
Ortega had not been satisfactorily explained and had, Guzman said,
been severely punished. It was evident that he suspected collusion
between his agent and Ortega.
When I had finished Guzman told me he was surrounded by men
whom he either suspected or hesitated to trust. He wanted a man
whom he could rely on implicitly to watch for evidences of treachery
among those around him, and he was kind enough to say he thought
me the man for whom he had been looking. He asked me to remain
in Caracas for an indefinite time, to mix freely with his entourage and
become intimately acquainted with them and ascertain who could be
trusted and who were doubtful. I could pose as an American who
was studying the country with the idea of making investments, which
would explain my interest in things and my desire to cultivate the
members of his court. I spoke Spanish well and could also converse
easily enough in French, though that language was little used except
among the diplomats.
I accepted his invitation gladly and a part of the time that I was in
Caracas I spent at the Yellow House, the residence of the President,
as his guest. Guzman was the handsomest man I have ever known;
tall and as straight as a sword, with long black beard and dark eyes,
sharp as needles, that could flash fire or friendship. He was
magnetic and winning to the last degree and every inch a ruler of
men, without the faintest notion as to what fear meant. During the
nearly twenty years that he was absolute ruler of Venezuela his
temper was the thing most dreaded through all the land. I have seen
grizzled generals, descended from the best families of old Spain,
turn almost white at the sign of his anger.
Himself a pure Castiliano, he regarded the native Venezuelanos as a
vastly inferior race, thereby furnishing another illustration of his good
judgment, and there was much of contempt in his attitude toward
them. Many times, when they had incurred his displeasure by a
display of cowardice or some other fault, I have heard him abuse a
quailing crowd of the highest officers in the Venezuelan Army in
language much more vigorous and profane than an American
policeman would use to a gang of hoodlums. “You are not worth a
damn,” he would always tell them in conclusion, “except in proportion
to the amount of foreign blood that is in you.” Yet until the day when
he was treacherously overthrown, to the great loss of Venezuela, no
criticism of his was ever resented nor was there ever a whisper of
protest. The people knew their master.
One of the first whom Guzman asked me closely to observe was a
young Indian officer named Joachim Crespo, an aide attached to his
household. I reported that he could be implicitly trusted, and
knowledge of that fact helped me out of a scrape years later, when
Crespo was President of Venezuela.
Not more than ten days after my arrival in Caracas Guzman asked
me to be in his private sala at ten o’clock the next morning, to meet
an old friend. At the appointed hour the Governor of the Casa
Publica came in, with a few officers, escorting none other than Gen.
Vicento Pulgar, who had put to his service my cargo of arms. Pulgar
was in full uniform and bore himself like a hero. His manner was
almost contemptuous and his expression was one of amused
curiosity rather than fear.
Guzman made him a courtly bow and extended his hand, which
Pulgar reluctantly accepted.
“This is an unexpected pleasure,” Guzman said.
“I dare say it is to you, General, but here I am, at your service.”
“I hope you are here as a friend.”
“Whatever General Guzman desires must necessarily be accepted
as an accomplished fact.”
Guzman turned to the Governor and asked him the occasion for the
call. The Governor replied that they had brought General Pulgar as a
prisoner of war.
“Prisoner!” exclaimed Guzman with profound astonishment. “My
friend General Pulgar a prisoner! If that is the purpose of your visit
you may retire.”
After the officers had departed Guzman turned to Pulgar with a more
serious air. “You will be my guest in Caracas until such time as I
need you elsewhere,” he said. “I will be pleased to receive a call
from you every day.”
Pulgar bowed; no other parole was necessary.
That was Guzman’s way of doing things and it was well understood,
especially by men of intellect like Pulgar. No firmer hand than
Guzman’s ever ruled but it was ordinarily encased in a velvet glove.
His bare hand, which was displayed only when extreme conditions
demanded, was a sign of terror.
As Pulgar was leaving he stopped and congratulated me on my safe
trip to Caracas. I thanked him, with the same politeness. Neither of
us alluded to his seizure of my arms or to my enforced service with
him. Pulgar and I subsequently became good friends.
I congratulated Guzman on his diplomacy and his shrewd effort to
turn a powerful enemy into a useful friend, though I doubted if he
would succeed.
“If I and my good adviser, Captain Boynton, cannot pull the claws of
the General, we will have to take the consequences,” he said. From
that I understood that I was to keep close watch of Pulgar and report
daily, which I did. Everything that I saw and heard indicated that
Guzman’s diplomacy would fail. Pulgar told his friends openly that
while Guzman seemed very friendly he was not deceived and would
kill him at the first opportunity. “Well, he’ll have plenty of opportunity,”
said Guzman with a laugh when I reported this to him.
There was a reception at the Yellow House a few nights later. Pulgar
was invited and was present. Guzman soon found an opportunity to
engage him in conversation. “I have already found that being
President of Venezuela has its objectionable features,” sighed
Guzman after they had chatted lightly for a few minutes. “One has to
listen to so many ridiculous tales. For instance, I have heard many
foolish stories about you, one of them being an alleged threat to kill
me the first time you have a chance.”
“I don’t know about the others, but I did say that,” replied Pulgar.
Guzman shrugged his shoulders, as though wearied. “How often,” he
responded, “we say we are going to do things which we may think
we will do but which we never do do.”
“When I get an opportunity that a gentleman can take advantage of, I
intend to kill you, General Guzman,” said Pulgar, still smiling.
“Let that be the understanding then,” answered Guzman as he
walked away, without displaying the slightest concern.
The very next day Guzman sent Pulgar an invitation to come to the
palace at three o’clock and go driving with him. Contrary to his
custom he ordered that no guards accompany them. They had not
gone a quarter of a mile when one of the front wheels came off and
both of them were thrown out in a heap. As they disentangled
themselves Pulgar drew a revolver but it was not well out of his
pocket before Guzman had him covered with his pistol.
“Ah, you were prepared for me, I see, General,” said Pulgar.
“I am always prepared for friends and enemies alike,” replied
Guzman.
They put up their weapons and walked back to the palace.
“I am sorry our ride was so short,” said Guzman.
“It was long enough,” was Pulgar’s reply, “to convert an enemy into a
friend.”
“In that case it has been truly delightful,” responded Guzman. They
shook hands and that was the end of the Pulgar revolution.
Peace palled on Pulgar and he died not long afterward. As was his
right he had the largest funeral ever seen in Venezuela. Without
exception he was the bravest man I have ever known. He had all of
Frank Norton’s daring and added to it what seemed to be a foolhardy
recklessness that times without number carried him right up against
old Graybeard’s scythe, yet he always knew the chances he was
taking and coolly calculated them. When he was stripped he looked
as though he had been run through a threshing machine. From head
to foot he was covered with scars left by knives, swords, and bullets
of all sizes. In an assault on the fortress at Porto Cabello, years
before I knew him, he climbed into an embrasure and over the mouth
of a cannon just as it was fired. Had he been a second later he
would have been blown to pieces. The explosion burned nearly all
the flesh off his legs and reduced them to pipe-stems. He was a tall,
handsome man of pure Castilian blood; a revolutionist by birth,
breeding, education, and occupation, and his one ambition was to be
President of Venezuela. I doubt if that country will ever produce
another just like him.
It was known that Guzman favored the introduction of foreign capital
to develop the wonderful resources of Venezuela, the full extent of
which is not even yet understood, and Caracas was soon over-run
with concession hunters. Many of them sought my support and
offered me all sorts of inducements, but I told all of them that I had
no influence with Guzman and would not use it if I had, in such ways
as they desired. I always advised Guzman fully as to whom the
concession hunters were and what they wanted. One of those on
whom I thus reported was Cyrenius Fitzgerald, an American civil
engineer, who sought a concession covering the delta of the Orinoco
and a considerable distance up the river, which section then was an
unknown land. Guzman wanted a report on it and asked me to visit
it, which I did, in company with Fitzgerald and an English engineer
named Tucker, who was there making a survey for the railroad which
subsequently was built between Caracas and La Guaira. We made
the trip on the old government boat “Bolivar,” being away two months
and going up the Orinoco as far as Ciudad Bolivar. We went over
much of the territory included in the proposed concession and
explored many uncharted passages in the delta of the river which
had long been safe havens for revolutionists and smugglers. I
became enchanted with the country, which was rich in minerals and
valuable woods. In reporting to Guzman and talking with him about
the project, I found that he was to receive a large block of stock in
the enterprise. This concession finally was granted by Guzman in
1883, without any solicitation from me, and thirteen years later it was
decreed by fate that I should become manager of the property for the
Orinoco Company, Limited, which is now known as the Orinoco
Corporation.
CHAPTER V
THE MAROONING OF A TRAITOR
I HAD been with Guzman Blanco for about a year after he

proclaimed himself Dictator of Venezuela, on February 14, 1871,
when I began to grow restless again. This was in no sense due to
any fault I had to find with Guzman. He had treated me with every
mark of friendship and had proved, time and again, that I possessed
his entire confidence. He had paid me fifty thousand dollars for the
cargo of arms which Pulgar secured through Ortega’s forgery and
had been liberal in other financial matters, though I would not accept
any direct payment for my confidential services, as I considered
myself, in a sense, his guest. But, under the strong hand of Guzman,
things were settling down to a humdrum, and I rebelled against
peace and order and fretted under the restraint of the land. At sea I
could go where I pleased, when I pleased, and do what I pleased; on
shore, except for the Yellow House and the evening social events, all
of which were alike, my time was largely divided between Madam
Santa Amand’s hotel in Caracas and the old Posada Neptuno in La
Guaira, and my movements were circumscribed by the part I was
playing. Then, too, revolutions were popping in Central America,
according to the reports that reached Caracas, and I felt that I was
missing a lot of excitement and some business. This latter
consideration entered into my thoughts not largely, and at all only
because my expenses were greatly in excess of the amounts I
received from Guzman in roundabout ways. In those days and for
years afterward, I gratified my foolishly extravagant tastes without
any regard to the cost of things; it is only within recent years that I
have come to understand that money has a value.
With my whole nature clamoring for a change to more strenuous
scenes I put the situation up to Guzman and secured his permission
to go away, on the promise that I would return within six months. I
summoned the “Juliette” from Curacoa and set sail for England, for
the double purpose of securing a cargo of arms, with which to add to
the joy of living in Central America, and looking up Frank Norton,
who had so well planted within me the germ of his China Sea
insanity that it was taking root. With the good little ship heeled over
to the steady trade winds that fanned my dusky cheek, lovingly as I
fancied in my enthusiasm, and with the waters that are nowhere else
so blue murmuring a welcome back to them, I was again a rover of
the sea and my exultant soul joined in the lyric chorus of the rigging.
We stopped at St. Thomas, that haven of thieves, blacklegs, and
revolutionists, and there I met General Baez, brother of
Buenaventura Baez, President of Santo Domingo, and his Minister of
War. Buenaventura Baez was one of the most interesting characters
the romantic West Indies have produced. He was the son of a rich
mulatto and was born early in the last century. He coöperated with
General Santana in establishing the independence of Santo
Domingo and was President from 1849 to 1853, when he was
supplanted by Santana, who expelled him from the island. Santana
was deposed three years later and Baez, who had spent the interval
in New York, resumed the presidency. Two years later he was once
more ousted by Santana and forced to live abroad until 1865, when
he again assumed the presidency. In 1866 General Pimental headed
a successful revolt in favor of General Cabral, and Baez was
banished a third time, going to St. Thomas. His star was in eclipse
only a short while, however, for the following year he again fought his
way to the presidential chair. In the latter part of 1869 he signed two
treaties with President Grant, one for the cession of Samana Bay,
which probably is the most beautiful harbor in the West Indies and
was wanted by our Navy Department for years before these treaties
were signed and for many years afterward, and the other for the
annexation of the whole island of Santo Domingo to the United
States. The people of Santo Domingo approved both of these
conventions at an election decreed by Baez in February, 1870, and
held under the guns of an American warship, but the United States
Senate refused to ratify either treaty. President Grant believed
strongly in this annexation, wherein he showed his farsightedness,
and a commission which he sent to the island reported, in the Spring
of 1871, in favor of the treaty; but sentiment in the Senate was
decidedly against it and the measure was not pressed.
If Grant could have lived until to-day he would find considerable
satisfaction in the protectorate the United States has assumed over
Santo Domingo, which really amounts to American control. The
same course must be taken with helpless Hayti, and it may well be
that before these lines are read the administration of the finances of
the “Black Republic” will have been taken over by American officers;
and the American minister, acting under orders from Washington, will
be the real ruler of the land, as he is in Santo Domingo. Let me
digress here to express the conviction that within ten years every
European possession in the West Indies, with the possible exception
of Barbadoes, will come under the Stars and Stripes. Even if
economic conditions do not compel this change, as they would do
sooner or later, it will be made necessary by the completion of the
Panama Canal. The United States, though seldom given to any
riotous display of good sense, is still too wise a nation to permit a
foreign power to have a naval base almost within gunshot of Colon,
from which it could strike a quick and destructive blow at the inter-
oceanic waterway.
Conditions are ripe for the change. England has made a failure of
governing her islands and, in advance of formal retirement, has
abandoned her great naval station at Saint Lucia, on which millions
of pounds were spent, and withdrawn her warships from the
Caribbean. The Danish Islands are a heavy and continuous drain on
the Copenhagen treasury that cannot be maintained for many years
longer, and Washington years ago, through clear-visioned John Hay,
served formal notice on Denmark that the sale of these islands to
any nation except the United States would be regarded as an
unfriendly act. It was the determination then to keep these islands
away from the outstretched hands of Germany, because of their
proximity to South America, and there are many more reasons now
to prevent their transfer to any foreign power. They are so largely
owned by Americans that they are practically American colonies to-
day. The French Islands are the most prosperous of all, but only
because of a bounty on sugar which the national government is
anxious to drop. Holland has no reason for retaining her islands,
which are an expense to which no glory attaches. Under American
ownership these beauty spots would be restored to their old-time
prosperity and no one knows this so well as the islanders
themselves. In my judgment it is a matter of only a comparatively few
years until England, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands will
enter into some arrangement, the details of which I do not attempt to
predict, by which all of their Caribbean islands will be turned over to
the United States. The only possible exception is Barbadoes, which
England may wish to retain as a midway station on her commercial
highway to South America, but as that poverty-stricken islet, which
has twice disappeared under the sea and then bobbed up again, has
no port that could be defended, there might be no objection to such a
plan. Cuba is certain to become an American possession, for the
Cubans are as incapable of self-government as are the Filipinos, and
if Santo Domingo and Hayti are not recognized as children of the
United States, they will be its wards. The United States, too, must
take a larger hand in the affairs of Central America and Venezuela.
The Monroe Doctrine cannot run on one wheel. At the same time
that it protects the Latin-American countries from European
aggression, it must compel them to pay their debts and maintain
order. I am glad, however, that this theory did not obtain in the old
days, for it would have robbed me of many exciting episodes.
The defeat of Grant’s annexation project gave Pimental and Cabral
an excuse for starting a new revolution, and they were beginning to
show their hand when I ran into General Baez at St. Thomas. He
knew of my association with Guzman Blanco and at once
approached me with a proposition to go to Santo Domingo to aid his
brother in the troubles he foresaw. He also suggested that I might
undertake a mission to America or Europe in relation to the
readjustment of the debts of the island, which even then were
becoming burdensome and a source of much anxiety to the party in
power, because of the insistent belief of the creditors that they were
entitled to their money when it was due. I told him I knew nothing at
all about finances but that, if I could get an extension of leave from
Guzman, I would consider any practical plan that promised
excitement. He said he would consult with his brother and write me
at Caracas.
We went on to London, where I learned that Norton was in the
Mediterranean with the “Leckwith,” impatiently carrying general
cargoes. I left word for him with Nickell & Son that I expected soon to
be ready to go out East with him, took on a cargo of arms and
headed for Costa Rica, where I had information that a revolution was
hatching against Gen. Tomaso Guardia, who had recently come into
power. For this trip, I remember, I took the name of “Captain John F.
Kinnear.” We had some trouble in getting away, for the British
Government was still dead set against filibustering, and in the hope
of removing all suspicion I gave our destination as Kingston,
Jamaica, though I had no idea of stopping there. I gave the ship a
new set of papers, showing British registry, and was, of course, flying
the British flag.
We ran into bad weather in the Caribbean and were forced, after all,
to put in at Kingston, leaking badly. The ship was so opened up, in
fact, that she had to be recalked and have a few new planks, which
necessitated putting her in dry dock. The port regulations stipulated
that when a ship went in dry dock a general cargo could be left in
her, at the option and risk of the owner, but that all explosives and
munitions of war must be taken out and stored in the government
arsenal, or in some place selected by the commandant. There was
nothing for it but to take out our cargo, and five days were consumed
in loading and repairing the ship. I had the work hurried with all
possible speed, for the mail ship from England was due in nine days
after our arrival and I was fearful that she would bring an order for
our detention, which, as a matter of fact, she did, as I learned years
afterward. When the repairs were completed the governor of the
island refused to allow us to reload our cargo, as he had an
intimation that the ship was not what she pretended to be. This hint,
it developed later, came from Jimmy Donovan, a “sea lawyer” whom
I had shipped at the last minute in the hurry of getting away from
London. He made what is known on the sea as a “pier-head jump.”
On the fourth day I prevailed on the governor to allow us to take on
our cargo, but he insisted that the ship must be held, with both
anchors down, until further orders. I decided that we would go out
that night and so informed Lorensen, the sailing master. Knowing me
even as well as he did he laughed incredulously, thinking I was
joking, for the channel through the harbor was shaped like the letter
“S” and commanded by a fort which could, as he said, blow us out of
the water without half trying.
“Just the same,” I said, “we are going to sea or to hell to-night.”
“All right, Captain, but it will be to hell, if I am any judge,” was the
quiet reply of the game Lorensen, than whom a braver or better
seaman never walked a deck. During the evening he greased all of
the blocks so we could start on our problematical journey without any
noise. The moon went down at midnight and before it was out of
sight we had one anchor up, with a muffled capstan. We were
getting up the other when the harbor policeman came along. A few
Bank of England notes blinded him and we got under way, with two
of the ship’s boats towing us and the tide helping us along. Evidently
the fort had orders to look out for us but we caught them napping,
apparently, for we were almost past it when we were hailed and
ordered to stop. In a minute, without giving us a decent chance to
heave to, even had we been so inclined, they whanged away at us.
The second shot went clear through us, just below the waterway,
and Lorensen, who was with me at the wheel, exclaimed grimly,
“Here we go, Captain.”
But he was mistaken, for in the darkness their gunnery was not up to
the standard of British marksmanship, for which I have a wholesome
respect. They kept at it hard enough but all of their shots went wild,
except for one that punched a hole in the port bulwarks forward,
though from the way the shells whistled I have no doubt our canvas
would have been punctured many times, had it been up. We were
soon under cover of the Myrtle Bank Hotel and after that two ships
protected us until we were far enough away so that only a chance
shot could reach us. When we were well enough out in the harbor so
that we could manœuvre and get the full effect of the light breeze
that was blowing over the salt flats, we set all of our sails and pulled
away.
At daylight I had the carpenter at work fixing up the little damage the
fort had done us, and it was well that we were quick about it for
during the afternoon we met the old warship “Bellerephon,” which
was attached to that station, coming in from a trip around the island
ten days ahead of time. We were preparing to salute her when she
stopped and hove us to with a blank shot. I don’t think I have ever
been more surprised, for there was no wireless telegraph in those
days and I could not conceive how she had gotten word that we
were suspected of filibustering. While I was racking my brain for
some solution of the problem Lorensen ran forward, leaned out over
the side, and came back and reported that there was a blue shirt
under the bobstay. That explained it, for in those days it was an
unwritten law in the British Navy that when a sailor on a merchant
ship had any pronounced complaint to make, regarding either his
own treatment or general conditions on the vessel, he would hang a
shirt in the chains, under the bowsprit, where it would not be seen by
the officers unless they were looking for it, as a signal to any warship
they met that there was something wrong on board. Whenever and
wherever a warship saw a shirt fluttering under the bobstay the
vessel was held up and carefully investigated.
I suspected at once that it was Jimmy Donovan who had hung out
the shirt, and I had him bucked and gagged and stowed away in the
hold before he could have said “Jack Robinson.” Then, quickly, I
made an entry on the log which showed that he had been left in the
hospital at Kingston, with pernicious fever. By that time the lieutenant
from the “Bellerephon” was alongside. When he came aboard I
assumed a look of injured innocence and profound surprise. He
ordered me to muster the crew aft and called for my papers. To my
great satisfaction he merely glanced at the certificate of registry,
which was forged, and centred his attention on the crew list. The
men answered to their names as he called them off. When he came
to Donovan I explained that he had been taken sick at Kingston and
left there, and produced the log, which satisfied him.
“Who among you has any complaint to make?” he asked of the men.
There was no response, and he repeated the question.
“Don’t be afraid,” he encouraged them. “The ‘Bellerephon’ will
protect you. If you have any complaint to make, step out and make it.
We will see that you get fair play and, if necessary, take you on
board.”
No one moved, and after waiting some time the lieutenant turned to
me with the remark that everything seemed to be all right. I told him I
had heard of no complaints from any of the men and asked why they
had “stood us up.”
“Why, there is a shirt out forward,” he explained. I suggested that
perhaps some of the crew had been washing. Hearing my remark a
quick-witted fellow named Bill Johnson, who had shipped on my first
trip with the “Juliette,” stepped out and said he had washed his shirt
that morning and hung it in the chains to dry, without knowing that it
meant anything. “I’ve been a sailor for a good many years but that is
one signal I never heard of before,” he said.
“Is that true, Bill?” asked the lieutenant with what seemed like just a
shade of suspicion.
“It is, sir,” replied Bill with the steady gaze of an honest man.
“He is a ‘True Bill’ all right,” I told the young officer as I shot a grateful
look at the grizzled sailor that meant a raise in wages. “He is the
oldest man on the ship and one of the best. That shirt signal is a new
one on me, too, and I thought I knew all the signs of the sea.”
“Very good, sir,” he replied. “It is quite evidently a mistake.”
He then returned to the “Bellerephon,” which answered our salute,
and we squared away for Costa Rica. My mind was free from any
further fear of capture, for a stiff breeze was singing over our quarter,
and I knew by the time the old warship could get to Kingston and
start after us again we would be well out of reach. As soon as she
was hull down I mustered the crew aft and complimented Bill on his
ready wit and rewarded it. He was with me for years after that and
was never known by any other name than “True Bill.”
I then reminded the men that, in accordance with my invariable rule
when running contraband, I had told all of them the exact nature of
our voyage before we were out of sight of land and had offered to set
ashore any who did not wish to undertake it, while those who stayed
with me were to receive double pay, and a bonus out of the profits in
addition, in consideration of the hazardous nature of the trip.
“Therefore,” I told them, “the treachery of Donovan has not only
endangered your extra pay and bonus but also placed your freedom
in jeopardy. As he was one of your number I will turn him over to you
for such punishment as you think his case deserves. I, of course,
reserve the right to review your verdict, but I do not believe you will
be too lenient with him.” The crew welcomed this announcement with
cheers, which could not be regarded as a good omen for the traitor,
and a court-martial was organized, with the “bos’n” at the head of it.
Donovan confessed when he was brought before the court,
whereupon it was unanimously and speedily decided that he should
run the gantlet and be marooned, which verdict I approved, for I
believed it to be none too severe. The crew prepared for the first
ceremony by knotting a lot of rope ends and tarring them until they
were as hard as iron but flexible. They then formed in a double line
the full length of the ship and as Donovan ran down the middle of it
they laid on so well that he was leaving a trail of blood before he
tumbled in a heap at the end. He was then placed in the brig and
kept there until we came to a small island off the Costa Rican coast,
on which he was landed with enough water and provisions to last
him a couple of weeks or more and a flag that he could use to signal
any vessel coming his way. There was not a great deal of travel
down that way in those days and he may still be there, doing a
repetition of the Robinson Crusoe act, though the island was not
very large and the boat’s crew that landed him reported that they
saw no goats. Donovan was helpless from fear when he was
lowered into the boat to be rowed to the island, and begged for
mercy, but that was something our cargo did not contain.
The arms we carried were sold to the revolutionists in Costa Rica,
being paid for partly in cash and partly in coffee, which I sold at
Curacoa. From there I returned to Venezuela and reported to
Guzman Blanco, after having been away only about four months.
Not long after my arrival in Caracas, where I resumed my old
position as confidential agent for Guzman, I received a letter from
President Baez asking me to enter his employ, to reorganize his
army and aid him in suppressing the revolutionary feeling which was
being developed by agents for Pimental and Cabral. He offered to
give me a commission as General in the Santo Domingan Army,
which he did do later, and to pay me liberally for my services, which
he didn’t do. I replied that I had again associated myself with
Guzman and that while no length of service had been specified, I
wished to remain with him at least a short while, after which I would
try to get leave to join the Santo Domingans.
Guzman was paving the way for his election as Constitutional
President, which was accomplished the next year, 1873, and all of
his friends were working to that end. He was supported by a public
sentiment that became practically unanimous, but there were a few
who were unalterably opposed to any established order of things and
who could not get over the habit of “revoluting,” with or without
provocation. During the Fall and Winter these discontented ones
gradually drew together under the leadership of General Pulido.
Guzman was kept advised as to what they were doing but their
following was so small that it caused him no uneasiness and, to
further strengthen himself with the people, he determined to take no
steps against them until they came out in the open, when he was
prepared to crush them. The moment the rebels raised their banners
Guzman took the field against them, in person. At the head of an
army of four thousand veterans he marched to Valencia where he
met Pulido and routed him, following up his scattered forces and
almost annihilating them, and the revolt was stamped out with one
smashing blow. That was the last hand raised against Guzman for
seventeen years; during all of that time he was the absolute dictator
of Venezuela. The constitution prohibited the President from
succeeding himself so he occupied that office for alternate terms,
with an obedient dummy serving in the intervals, which he spent in
Europe as Minister Plenipotentiary, directing the government by mail.
His rule was wise and progressive. Railroads were built, roads
improved, schools established, and real religious liberty took the
place of clericalism. He was betrayed, in the end, by his supposed
friends, men whom he had raised to prominence and prosperity. Had
he been succeeded by a man as strong and able as himself
Venezuela would to-day be the foremost country in South America,
instead of the one most uncivilized.
Not long after the campaign against Pulido, in which I served on
Guzman’s staff, I received another letter from Baez, urging me to
come to Santo Domingo. The same mail brought a letter from Baez
to Guzman, asking him to grant me leave of absence for a few
months to enter his service. Guzman was flattered by this request
and with his permission I went to Santo Domingo City in the Spring
of 1873, on the “Juliette.”
CHAPTER VI
A SWIFT VENGEANCE
PRESIDENT BAEZ of Santo Domingo was short and thin and had a
washed-out look, as though his skin had been faded by chemicals
instead of by a three-quarters’ admixture of white blood. He had
large full eyes that were shifty and insincere. He was clever but
superficial, cunning and treacherous. Had I seen him before I went to
his cursed country, to reorganize his army and aid in putting down
the growing revolutionary sentiment, I would have remained in
Venezuela or gone elsewhere in search of adventure, for he looked a
coward and provoked distrust. I had heard of him only as a good
fighter but that reputation, I became convinced soon after my first
visit to the “palace,” had been earned for him by his former friends
and supporters and was in no sense the work of his own sword, at
least so far as recent years were concerned. In his earlier days he
might have displayed more bravery, and he must have shown some
courage to arouse a fighting degree of loyalty that had four times
swept the country, but presuming that to be true he had gone back
greatly with advancing age. He seemed to have convinced the
superstitious mulattoes, with whom the still more fanatical full-
blooded blacks were always at war, that he was a real man of
destiny whose course could not safely be interfered with, and his
successive successes probably were due more to that belief than to
any other cause. His brother, the Minister of War, had all of the
President’s faults in accentuated form and added to them an
inordinate vanity. He was jealous of me from the start. He had
expected that I would recommend to him such changes in the
“military establishment” as I thought wise, but I insisted on doing
things myself and having a free hand, which the President was quite
willing to give me, perhaps because he was suspicious of even his
own brother.
The “army” was, in reality, not much more than an unorganized body
of densely ignorant natives who, as practically the only
compensation for their supposed loyalty, were allowed to carry guns,
which they did not know how to use. I taught them how to march
without getting in each other’s way, how to handle their arms without
shooting themselves, and as much discipline as they were amenable
to, but I fear my efforts did not go much beyond that even though
they did effect a decided improvement. One of my first
recommendations to the President was that he buy and fit out two
small gunboats with which to patrol the coast and hold in check such
revolutionary centres as Monte Cristi, under threat of bombardment.
They could also be used, as I pointed out, to transport troops quickly
to rebelliously inclined districts. The President thought well of the
plan and, though I advised steamers, he directed that the “Juliette,”
for which he agreed to pay a fair price, be converted into such a
craft. I ordered five small rapid-fire guns sent from England to
Halifax, Nova Scotia, and, the revolutionary spirit seemingly having
subsided with the improvement in the army, took the “Juliette” there
in the Summer of 1873, to have her decks strengthened and mount
the cannon. We returned early in the Fall to find that the smouldering
revolution had burst into a flame and a large force was marching on
Santo Domingo City, and only a few miles away. When I reached the
palace the President and his brother were vehemently but vainly
advising each other to be brave.
“What shall we do—what shall we do?” demanded the President as I
entered the door.
“It strikes me that it might be a good scheme to fight,” I replied, with
no attempt to conceal my disgust at their attitude. “In fact, I should
say it is up to us to fight, and fight until we are all bloody, if we have
to.”
“Yes, yes, but where?” queried the trembling chief executive.
“Go out and meet them,” I advised. “They probably will not be
looking for us, as I judge that would be a departure from the
established Santo Domingan method of warfare, and we may be
able to take them at a disadvantage.”

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Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth

Century Book 2017th Edition Hazel

Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture: The

Gender, Space and Illicit Economies in Eighteenth-

English Biography in the Eighteenth Century Mark

A Maturing Market The Iberian Book World in the First

Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century 1st Edition

Studies in Eighteenth Century British Art and

Eating the Empire Food and Society in Eighteenth

Home Books Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Get access Cited by 9

Hazel Wilkinson, University of Birmingham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book pp i-ii

Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book - Title page

Copyright page pp iv-iv

A Note on the Text pp xi-xi

Introduction - ‘The Wits have sent for the Book’ pp 1-26

Chapter 1 - Spenser the Whig pp 27-63

Chapter 2 - Miscellaneous Spenser pp 64-98

Chapter 3 - Spenser Illustrated pp 99-124

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Chapter 4 - Spenser Annotated pp 125-174

Chapter 5 - Spenser and the Public Domain pp 175-211

Conclusion - The Legacy of Eighteenth-Century Spenserianism

Appendix - A Checklist of the Eighteenth-Century Editions of

Works Cited pp 239-258

‘The Wits have sent for the Book’

Sir Guyon chaunst eke on another booke,

I.1 ‘Published by Himself’? The Mythology

I.2 Spenser and the Seventeenth-Century Book

Spenser the Whig

Saide Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,

1.1 The Origins of the Spenser Revival

1.2 Spenser among the Kit-Cats

Hughes’s in a unique way. Shortly after its publication he chose to be painted

I HAD been with Guzman Blanco for about a year after he

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