The Earl never forgot the accoutrements and the various suits of clothes with which he started in life when, at two-and-twenty, he shut the door of his chambers in the Middle Temple behind him: “A taffety doublet cut with and upon taffety; a pair of black velvet breeches laced, a new Milan fustian suit, laced and cut upon taffety, two cloaks, competent linen and necessaries, with my rapier and dagger.” And he must have carried letters of introduction also, which procured the young lawyer employment and influential friends; for Mr. Richard Boyle was very soon launched on Dublin society, and was on friendly terms with at least two men who hailed from his own county of Kent, Sir Edward Moore, of Mellifont, in Meath, and Sir Anthony St. Leger, who was living in Dublin. It is more than possible that he met also at this time the poet Spenser; for Dublin must have been Spenser’s headquarters since 1580, when he came over to Ireland as Secretary to the Lord Deputy. Spenser, who it is believed had been through all the horrors of the Desmond Rebellion, was, in 1588, after having held various appointments, leaving Dublin to take up his bachelor abode at Kilcolman, a peel tower abandoned by the Desmonds and assigned, with some thousands of acres around it, to this English poet-politician, already known as the author of the Shepheard’s Calendar. At Kilcolman, in this peel tower in a wild wooded glen among the Galtee Hills, about thirty miles south of Limerick, Sir Walter Raleigh came to stay with Spenser when he too was in Ireland, inspecting the vast Irish estates that had been assigned to him. It was there they read their poems aloud to each other, and that Raleigh persuaded Spenser to go back with him to London, together to offer their poems to the Queen. During the first year or two, therefore, of Boyle’s sojourn in Ireland, while he was working his way into the notice of Englishmen of influence there, Spenser was in London, being lionised as the Poet of Poets, the author of the first three books of the Faerie Queene.
When Spenser returned to Ireland with a royal pension as Clerk to the Council of the Province of Munster, Richard Boyle was already clerk, or deputy, to the “Escheator General,” busy adjusting the claims of the Crown to “escheated” Irish lands and titles—travelling about, and making enemies of all people who did not get exactly what they wanted out of the Escheator or the Escheator’s clerk. Both Boyle’s sisters had joined him in Ireland, and both were soon to marry husbands there; and somewhere about this time his cousin, Elizabeth Boyle, daughter of James Boyle, of the Greyfriars in Hereford, was in Ireland, and the poet Spenser, back from his London visit, the literary hero of the hour, met and fell in love with Boyle’s cousin Elizabeth. She is the lady of the Amoretti and Epithalamium; “my beautifullest bride,” with the “sunshyny face,” and the “long, loose, yellow locks lyke golden wyre,” whose name the poet-lover was to trace in the yellow Irish sands, and of whom he sang so proudly—
“Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did you see
So fayre a creature in your town before, ...?”
They were married in the Cathedral of Cork in the summer of 1594. A few months later, Spenser turned his face Londonwards again, taking with him presumably his English wife, and certainly the other three books of his Faerie Queene. He was to return to Ireland once again.
In 1595, a year after Spenser’s marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, Mr. Richard Boyle married a young Limerick lady, Joan Apsley, one of the two daughters and co-heirs of Mr. William Apsley, a member of the Council of Munster. Joan Apsley’s five hundred a year in Irish lands, “so goodly and commodious a soyle,”[10] was to be the foundation of Mr. Boyle’s fortunes. She left it all to him when she died, at Mallow, “in travail with her first child,” and was buried in Buttevant Church with her little stillborn son in her arms.
After his wife’s death, Richard Boyle, now a landowner and a man of some importance in Munster, had his time full fighting his personal enemies. There were powerful men among them, and by his own account they “all joined together, by their lies, complaining against me to Queen Elizabeth.” It was impossible, they said, he could have advanced so rapidly by honest means. They accordingly accused him of embezzlement and forgery, and, because some of his wife’s relations were well-known Catholics, they accused him—staunch Protestant as he was—of acquiring lands with Spanish gold, of harbouring priests, and being himself a papist in disguise. They even accused him of stealing a horse. For a time he was actually kept in a Dublin prison, and when by a kind of fluke he found the prison doors opened to him, and was intending to “take shipping,” and to “justify” himself before the Queen in London, the General Rebellion of Munster broke out. In the debacle, Mr. Richard Boyle—his wife’s lands wasted and his moneys gone—did manage to escape to England. And so did the poet Spenser—Spenser, marked of the rebels, the author not only of the Faerie Queene, but of the View of the Present State of Ireland. Why did Spenser ever return to Ireland to undertake the duties of Sheriff of Cork? Spenser and his wife and children were at Kilcolman when the Rebellion broke out. They fled for their lives; and the old peel tower of the Desmonds was burnt to the ground. One of their babies, Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden, was left behind, and perished in the flames.
Spenser was to die in poverty in London, to be buried near to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, the poet-mourners flinging their pens into his grave. Spenser’s wife—Mr. Richard Boyle’s cousin—was to live on in Ireland, to bring up her children (her son Peregrine was the “Joy of her Life”) and to marry yet twice again. Twice her great kinsman saw his cousin’s hand “given in marriage.” She had her compensations in life—but there never was another Epithalamium.
Arrived in London, Mr. Richard Boyle, through the friendly offices of Anthony Bacon, whom he had known at Cambridge, was presented to the new Lord Deputy, the Earl of Essex, then just starting for Ireland. Queen Elizabeth may have had her reasons for clapping Mr. Boyle so unceremoniously into the gate-house of the Tower just as he was thinking of going back to his old Chambers in the Middle Temple. It is possible she was waiting for her new Deputy’s reports from Ireland. In due time Richard Boyle was fetched before her, and he did “justify” himself to his Sovereign. Her splendid royal words were burnt in upon his memory to the last day of his life:[11]—
“By God’s death, these are but inventions against this young man.” And again: “We find him to be a man fit to be employed by ourselves.”