Lord Burghley and the Oxford Marriage

Abstract

Long out of date in its facts and perspective, Alexander Judson’s biography is nevertheless one of the few studies of Spenser to consider William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as a serious reader of The Faerie Queene. Judson implies that had Burghley undertaken a close examination of Spenser’s poem, he would have inevitably appreciated the ‘deeper sence’ (FQ 727) of its moral allegory, and so would have been persuaded to support the work and its author’s ambitions for service to Elizabeth and to Tudor government. Although he admirably confronts the prospect of Spenser’s work in relation to the state and its central figures, Judson’s assertion is nevertheless puzzling in the face of the poet’s own perspective on the Lord Treasurer. In the opening of the poem’s second edition in 1596, Spenser addresses Burghley as a figure manifestly displeased with his work, a ‘rugged forhead’ ‘that doth sharply wite’ ‘[m]y looser rimes’ ‘[f]or praising loue’ (FQ 4. Pr. 1.1, 3, 4). If Spenser here strongly alludes to Burghley without direct identification, the conclusion of Book 6 returns to this disapproving ministerial figure, characterizing him as a ‘mightie [Pere]’ and virtually naming him outright in his scornful reference to ‘threasure’, Burghley’s most distinguished office (FQ 6.12.41.6, 9). For a poet engaged in the celebration of Elizabeth, Britain, and the Tudor state, Spenser’s opening and closing gestures in the 1596 Faerie Queene are both extraordinary and mysterious.