10 - Spenser's religion

Summary

Edmund Spenser lived during an era of chronic religious anxiety. He was born at about the time of the accession to the throne of Mary I (1553-8), the Catholic queen who attempted to reverse Henry VIII's schism from the Church of Rome and the Protestant religious settlement of her late brother, Edward VI (1547-53). Too young to remember Wyatt's Rebellion (1554), which triggered persecutions that earned the queen her reputation as 'Bloody Mary', Spenser would compose lines that allude at some level to burnings of Protestant heretics: 'holy Martyrs often doen to dye, / With cruell malice and strong tyranny' (FQ, I, viii, 36). Surely he read sensational accounts of religious persecution in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days (1563), known popularly as the Book of Martyrs. The most influential book of its age, other than the English Bible, that monumental collection exerted a profound influence upon the formation of English Protestant identity and nationhood.

Coming of age under Elizabeth I (1558-1603), the poet served the Virgin Queen who attempted to resolve religious discord with an ecclesiastical settlement that fused Catholic ritualism with codification of Protestant theology in the 'Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion' (1563). For hundreds of years, patriotic citizens celebrated the 17 November, the anniversary of her sister's death and her own Accession Day, as a national triumph over Catholicism.