9 Had Edmund Spenser not died in 1599, he had good reason to fear the future when James I ascended to the English throne. As is well known, Spenser aroused James I’s wrath through his portrait of the trial of Duessa in The Faerie Queene, V. ix, a transparent allegory of the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots on 8 February 1587. The English ambassador in Scotland, Robert Bowes, wrote to Lord Burghley on 1 November 1596 that James refused to allow the second edition of The Faerie Queene to be sold in Scotland and ‘further he will complain to Her Majesty of the author as you will understand at more length by himself.’ 1 On 12 November, Bowes wrote again explaining that the problem stemmed from ‘som dishonourable effects (as the King deems thereof) against himself and his mother deceased.’ Although Bowes claimed that he had persuaded James that the book had not been ‘passed with privilege of Her Majesty’s Commissioners’, James ‘still desire[d] that Edward [sic] Spenser for his fault be duly tried and punished’. 2 Nor was the affair over yet. On 5 March 1598, George Nicolson, a servant of Robert Bowes, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil that Walter Quinn, a poet later to enjoy a successful career at the courts of James and Charles I, was ‘answering Spenser’s book, whereat the king is offended’. 3 The work, assuming it was ever completed, has not survived. Spenser’s relationship to the Stuart claimants to the throne was clearly a key feature of his mature work published in the 1590s, as Richard A. McCabe has conclusively demonstrated. 4 Nevertheless, a series of questions about Spenser’s representation of an event that had taken place nine years before the publication of the second edition of The Faerie Queene remain unresolved. In Spenser and the Stuart Succession Andrew Hadfield University of Sussex