if Winchester’s the capital of Thrace
Mutability makes St Albans stand
Thameside and Ireland’s an inside-out place
where Machiavellis plant the land
with people just as they were when they died -
Sir Orfeo demands his wife back
to which Artegal Faery King replies
with her corpse - because poetry has sacked
gold citadels for burial since Troy
and Smerwick must lie in Scythia -
that six hundred at Dun na Oin destroyed
in killing lines for false Cynthia
on them rain settles instead of flies
the dint of rain putting out hard eyes
Oxford
10 November 2018
Today is the 438th anniversary of the two-day long massacre of Spanish, Italian troops under the Papal flag and of Irish forces at Smerwick on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry in Ireland. They had surrendered Dun na Oin, ” the Fort of Gold”. The word for gold in Gaelic ” Oin” begins with a ” w” in English pronunciation.
A gold castle features in the early 14th century romance ” Sir Orfeo” in Middle English as the seat of the Faery King. It is believed that the poet Edmund Spenser was present at the Siege of Smerwick and massacre, as a secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Lord Grey de Wilton, whom he celebrates as ” Artegal” in Book V of ” The Faerie Queene”. New Zealand governor, Sir George Grey (1812-1898), was also known as Artegal.
Sir Walter Raleigh seems to have led the two day-long mass execution under Lord Grey’s orders. Raleigh adored Elizabeth I in his verse under the sobriquet ” Cynthia”. However the English and Papal governments regarded each other as “rogue states” at that time.
Spenser’s ” The Ruines of Time” does make the Thames flow past Verlamium or St Albans, while the anonymous author of “Sir Orfeo” does indeed make Winchester the capital of Thrace. His ” Mutability Cantos” and the non-response of Mutability to the charges made against her, place him in the Machiavellian tradition, just as his ” View of the Present State of Ireland” (1596) does, that was published in 1633.