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XXII INTRODUCTION
Lordship, and he feeL that he is on the road to fortune Harvey's reply
was evidently written with the object of cooling his young friend's ardour
He is a little doubtful of the progress that Spenser is making, and is unkind
enough to question whether he will go abroad at all Whether Harvey
was right in this we cannot say, but it is certain that his general scepticism,
due perhaps to his knowledge of Spenser's sanguine temperament,
was not ill-judged It is clear that in his desire to serve Leicester Spenser
overreached himself and met with a rebuff The introductory sonnet
to Virgils Gnat, published in 1591, but' long since dedicated to the most
noble and excellent Lord, the Earle of Leicester, late deceased', which
can only refer to this period, makes it obvious that some action which
Spenser took in the interests of his patron was resented, and got him into
trouble Where evidene is so fragmentary it would be rash to dogmatize
but the key to the mystery is probably to be found in Mother Hubberds
Tale 1
To those who played a part in directing the policy of the nation
these were stirring times Queen Elizabeth was obviously attracted by
the Duke of Alencon, and so successful had been the intrigues of Simier,
his master of the robes, that the announcement of her marriage was
anticipated as fully as it was dreaded The aversion of the whole country
to the match was intensified in the Puritans, who remembered the implication
of the family of Alencon in the massacre of St Bartholomew,
and feared that so unholy an alliance would end in the restoration of
Roman Catholicism Burghley was commonly supposed to favour the
match, and they looked to Leicester as the one man able to influence the
queen against her present inclination
In tracing the adventures of the fox and the ape Spenser combined
a satire against a church reformed in little but name, in which by disgraceful
shifts men crept into preferment, with attacks upon the court,
where foreign influence tended to destroy the more sterling native
qualities that he set forth in his portrait of the brave courtier But to this
he adds a second allegory in which, though the main actors remain the
same, the fable changes, and invites a more definite interpretation The
lion who in the earlier part signified Leicester now becomes the queen,
and Elizabeth's habit of nicknaming her courtiers with the names of
animals suggests to him to represent the court as a world of beasts The
ape has stolen the lion's cloak and sceptre, and by that means is ruling
over the kingdom surrounded by ' foreine beasts not in the forest bred',
and to the great advantage of the fox, who 'feeds his cubs with fat of all
the soyle ' This is Spenser's forecast of what will result from the coalition
of Alencon and Burghley And the disaster is only avoided when Jove
sends Mercury to warn the sovereign lion of the indignity that he is
suffering in his slumber Thus would Spenser arouse Leicester to his
1 Of Greenlaw, Spenser and the Earl of Leicester (Mod Lang Assoc of Am , 1910),
where the political significance of the poem is fully and convincingly worked out