He probably dwells the more on this latter circumstance, because the Queen’s hair was yellow. But even if the marriage took place in 1593, his term of domestic happiness was very short. In the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion, in 1598, he was plundered and deprived of his estate. No direct or authentic account of the circumstances attending this calamity has come down to us; but among the heads of a conversation between Ben Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, given in the works of the latter, Jonson, after saying that neither Spenser’s stanzas pleased him, nor his matter, is stated to have given the following appalling description of his misfortune: that “his goods were robbed by the Irish, and his house and a little child burnt: he and his wife escaped, and after died for want of bread in King Street, Westminster.” Jonson however adds a circumstance, the strangeness of which throws suspicion over the former part of the story: “He refused twenty pieces sent him by my Lord Essex, and said he was sure he had no time to spend them.” But whether these particulars be true or not, it is certain that he died in London, ruined, and a victim to despair, according to Camden, in 1598, but according to Sir James Ware, who wrote the preface to the ‘View of the State of Ireland,’ in 1599. Sir James, after having given a high character of his poetry, says, “With a fate peculiar to poets, Spenser lived in a continual struggle with poverty: he was driven away from his house and plundered by the rebels: soon after his return in penury to England he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer, at the expense of the Earl of Essex; the poets of the time, who attended his funeral, threw verses into his grave.” In order to account for the inaccuracy of the dates on the monument, it is alleged that the inscription had been defaced, perhaps by the Puritans in revenge for the descriptions of the Blatant Beast; and that on its renewal, the carver (the year of birth being illegible) put ten at a venture, and ninety-six instead of ninety-eight or ninety-nine.