After his wife’s death, Richard Boyle, now a landowner and a man of some importance in Munster, had his time full fighting his personal enemies. There were powerful men among them, and by his own account they “all joined together, by their lies, complaining against me to Queen Elizabeth.” It was impossible, they said, he could have advanced so rapidly by honest means. They accordingly accused him of embezzlement and forgery, and, because some of his wife’s relations were well-known Catholics, they accused him—staunch Protestant as he was—of acquiring lands with Spanish gold, of harbouring priests, and being himself a papist in disguise. They even accused him of stealing a horse. For a time he was actually kept in a Dublin prison, and when by a kind of fluke he found the prison doors opened to him, and was intending to “take shipping,” and to “justify” himself before the Queen in London, the General Rebellion of Munster broke out. In the debacle, Mr. Richard Boyle—his wife’s lands wasted and his moneys gone—did manage to escape to England. And so did the poet Spenser—Spenser, marked of the rebels, the author not only of the _Faerie Queene_, but of the _View of the Present State of Ireland_. Why did Spenser ever return to Ireland to undertake the duties of Sheriff of Cork? Spenser and his wife and children were at Kilcolman when the Rebellion broke out. They fled for their lives; and the old peel tower of the Desmonds was burnt to the ground. One of their babies, Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden, was left behind, and perished in the flames. Spenser was to die in poverty in London, to be buried near to Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, the poet-mourners flinging their pens into his grave. Spenser’s wife—Mr. Richard Boyle’s cousin—was to live on in Ireland, to bring up her children (her son Peregrine was the “Joy of her Life”) and to marry yet twice again. Twice her great kinsman saw his cousin’s hand “given in marriage.” She had her compensations in life—but there never was another _Epithalamium_. Arrived in London, Mr. Richard Boyle, through the friendly offices of Anthony Bacon, whom he had known at Cambridge, was presented to the new Lord Deputy, the Earl of Essex, then just starting for Ireland. Queen Elizabeth may have had her reasons for clapping Mr. Boyle so unceremoniously into the gate-house of the Tower just as he was thinking of going back to his old Chambers in the Middle Temple. It is possible she was waiting for her new Deputy’s reports from Ireland. In due time Richard Boyle was fetched before her, and he did “justify” himself to his Sovereign. Her splendid royal words were burnt in upon his memory to the last day of his life:[11]— “By God’s death, these are but inventions against this young man.” And again: “We find him to be a man fit to be employed by ourselves.”