ors
by the Bull of Deposition against Elizabeth in 1570. He was the soul of
the confederacy which won the day of Lepanto against the Ottomans in
1571. And though dead, his spirit was paramount in the slaughter of St.
Bartholomew in 1572.

In the year 1569, while Spenser was passing from school to college, his
emissaries were already in England, spreading abroad that Elizabeth was
a bastard and an apostate, incapable of filling a Christian throne,
which belonged by right to the captive Mary. The seed they sowed bore
fruit. In the end of the year, southern England was alarmed by the news
of the rebellion of the two great Earls in the north, Percy of
Northumberland and Neville of Westmoreland. Durham was sacked and the
mass restored by an insurgent host, before which an "aged gentleman,"
Richard Norton with his sons, bore the banner of the Five Wounds of
Christ. The rebellion was easily put down, and the revenge was stern. To
the men who had risen at the instigation of the Pope and in the cause of
Mary, Elizabeth gave, as she had sworn "such a breakfast as never was in
the North before." The hangman finished the work on those who had
escaped the sword. Poetry, early and late, has recorded the dreary fate
of those brave victims of a mistaken cause, in the ballad of the _Rising
of the North_, and in the _White Doe of Rylstone_. It was the signal
given for the internecine war which was to follow between Rome and
Elizabeth. And it was the first great public event which Spenser would
hear of in all men's mouths, as he entered on manhood, the prelude and
augury of fierce and dangerous years to come. The nation awoke to the
certainty--one which so profoundly affects sentiment and character both
in a nation and in an individual--that among the habitual and fixed
conditions of life is that of having a serious and implacable enemy ever
to reckon with.

And in this year, apparently in the transition time between school and
college, Spenser's literary ventures began. The evidence is curious, but
it seems to be clear. In 1569, a refugee Flemish physician from Antwerp,
who had fled to England from the "abominations of the Roman Antichrist"
and the persecutions of the Duke of Alva, John Vander Noodt, published
one of those odd miscellanies, fashionable at the time, half moral and
poetical, half fiercely polemical, which he called a "_Theatre_, wherein
be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities which follow the
voluptuous Worldl