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Barnabe Googe

(11 June 1540-7 February 1594) was an English poet.

Marriage

Curious 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. The idea of his daughter marrying a young man without fortune, and one moreover intimately acquainted with leading English Protestants such as Cecil and Archbishop Parker, must have horrified him. 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. Some sense that familial harmony was restored can be gauged by the fact that 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 difficult military expedition to Ireland, where he had contracted dyssentry and nearly died. Further colonial service on 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 did not relish his colonial service in Ireland and 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.