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.