Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Poems of Alexander Montgomerie

Ixii
INTRODUCTION.
1586, James was twenty years of age, and had never
been out of his kingdom.1
§ 30. If the evidence were not too circumstantial to
admit of any reasonable doubt that Edmund Spenser
was in Ireland in 1583, there might be a possibility that
he was the envoy, “ Maister Spenser,” referred to in the
following postscript to one of James’s letters to Queen
Elizabeth, dated from St Andrews, on July 2: “I have
staied maister Spenser upon the lettre quhilk is writtin
with my awin hand, & quhilk sail be readie within tua
daies.” That Spenser’s poetry was known at the Scottish
Court, however, there is interesting confirmation in the fact
that the king was greatly annoyed at the aspersions cast
on his mother in the fifth book of the ‘ Fairie Queen,’
where she figures as the “ False Duessa.” He complained
of this to the English agent in Scotland, Robert Bowes,
who promptly addressed a letter to Lord Burghley on the
subject: “ The King hath conceaued great offence against
Edward Spencer [sic] publishing in prynte in the second
part of the Fairy Queene and ixth chapter some dis¬
honourable effectis (as the King demeth thereof) against
himself and his mother deceased, he alledged that this
booke was passed with previledge of her mazLrtes comis-
sion^rs for the veiwe and allowance of all writinges to
be receaued into Printe. But therin I haue (I think)
satisfyed him that it is not giuen out wz‘t& such pmdledge,
1 Prefixed to a small volume of Latin poems on the death of Sir Philip
Sidney by various hands, published at Cambridge, February 10, 1587, is a
sonnet in English by King James. It is also worth noting that an edition (the
third printed) of the ‘ Arcadia ’ was published in Edinburgh in 1599, and that
a MS. of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets, which is likely to have been
William Fowler’s, was in the collection gifted by Drummond to Edinburgh
University.