Barnabe Googe - Marriage and Later Life

Marriage and Later Life

Correspondence survives on the subject of Googe's marriage with Mary Darrell, whose father, Thomas Darrell, refused Googe's suit on the ground that she was bound by a previous contract. More to the point, recent research has shown that Thomas Darrell was a recusant who harboured Jesuit priests in his manor house of Scotney, near Lamberhurst in Kent. When Googe found his suit discouraged by Thomas Darrell, he appealed to his powerful contacts and the marriage duly took place in 1564 or 1565; Googe took his wife to live in Lamberhurst at the manor house of Chingley.

In 1569 he dedicated a long allegorical poem with a moralistic marine topic, The Shippe of Safegarde, to his sisters-in-law. By this time, Googe had served Cecil on a military expedition to Ireland, where he had contracted dysentery and nearly died. In 1571 he was returned as MP for Aldborough, north Yorkshire. Further service in Ireland awaited him in 1582 when Googe was appointed to the position of provost-marshal of the court of Connaught, and some twenty letters of his in this capacity are preserved in the Public Records Office. It is often said, on scant evidence, that Googe knew other poets in Irish service, notably Edmund Spenser. Googe repeatedly petitioned the political masters in London to be allowed to come home.

He finally succeeded in selling his office in the late 1580s, and he retired to his family lands in Alvingham in Lincolnshire. He died there on 7 February 1594 and was buried at North Cockerington.