To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English invaders was now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion after rebellion was punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is notorious for his massacre of six hundred disarmed Italian and Spanish filibusters at Smerwick (November, 1580), and the poet of the "Faery Queen" was present at this abominable deed. It was neither without precedent nor imitation. Seventy years later David Leslie, urged on by a preacher, massacred the remnant of Montrose's Irish contingent at Dunaverty. Spenser himself in his most Interesting "View of the Present State of Ireland" says concerning the foreign prisoners, "there was no other way but to make that short way with them which was made". He defends Grey's ruthless policy; he had made Ireland "ready for reformation" when he was recalled, on the charge of being "a bloody man" who had left the country in ashes (1582). Grey was pursued by the clamour of a horrified people, that is, he was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, molested by the Blatant Beast, the public. The idea of the public is a Blatant Beast is borrowed from Plato. It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that Spenser, acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war in Munster, wrote part of the "Faery Queen". He held public posts, was Clerk of Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, he received 3000 acres of land, and a ruinous castle of the Desmond family, Kilcolman, between Mallow and Limerick (1586). Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he had the advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical literary society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, its satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conversation of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his friends the aim and scope of the "Faery Queen". Each virtue was to be incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it by example. In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, Spenser says that Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be a perfect exemplar of "the twelve private virtues". The Faery Queen herself is, first, Glory in general and next Gloriana, the royal and "most virtuous and beautiful" Queen Elizabeth, who also appears as Belphœbe. He is to begin in the middle, before telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs, and a palmer bearing an infant with bloody hands came seeking adventures to a festival of the Faery Queen. "Many other adventures are intermeddled." The "Faery Queen" is not, and does not aim at being an epic. It is without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six books were not written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser was driven from Kilcolman.