ells, Dr. Mulcaster,
his master, were north country men.

Spenser was sixteen or seventeen when he left school for the university,
and he entered Cambridge at the time when the struggle which was to
occupy the reign of Elizabeth was just opening. At the end of the year
1569, the first distinct blow was struck against the queen and the new
settlement of religion, by the Rising of the North. In the first ten
years of Elizabeth's reign, Spenser's school time at Merchant Taylors',
the great quarrel had slumbered. Events abroad occupied men's minds; the
religious wars in France, the death of the Duke of Guise (1563), the
loss of Havre, and expulsion of the English garrisons, the close of the
Council of Trent (1563), the French peace, the accession of Pius V.
(1565/6). Nearer home, there was the marriage of Mary of Scotland with
Henry Darnley (1565), and all the tragedy which followed, Kirk of Field
(1567), Lochleven, Langside, Carlisle, the imprisonment of the pretender
to the English Crown (1568). In England, the authority of Elizabeth had
established itself, and the internal organization of the Reformed Church
was going on, in an uncertain and tentative way, but steadily. There was
a struggle between Genevan exiles, who were for going too fast, and
bishops and politicians who were for going too slow; between authority
and individual judgment, between home-born state traditions and foreign
revolutionary zeal. But outwardly, at least, England had been peaceful.
Now however a great change was at hand. In 1566, the Dominican
Inquisitor, Michael Ghislieri, was elected Pope, under the title of Pius
V.

In Pius (1566-72), were embodied the new spirit and policy of the Roman
Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order,
and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of
Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against
abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist
or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his
soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and martyrdom,
but by the sword and by the stake, the unity of Christendom and of its
belief. Eastwards and westwards, he beheld two formidable foes and two
serious dangers; and he saw before him the task of his life in the
heroic work of crushing English heresy and beating back Turkish
misbelief. He broke through the temporizing caution of his predecess