George Gascoigne

He is considered the most important poet of the early Elizabethan era, following Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and leading to the emergence of Philip Sidney.

He was MP for Bedford in 1557–1558 and 1558–1559, but when he presented himself in 1572 for election at Midhurst he was refused on the charges of being "a defamed person and noted for manslaughter", "a common Rymer and a deviser of slaunderous Pasquelles", "a notorious rufilanne", and a constantly indebted atheist.

He obtained a captain's commission, and took an active part in the campaigns of the next two years including the Middelburg siege, during which he acquired a profound dislike of the Dutch, and a great admiration for William of Orange, who had personally intervened on his behalf in a quarrel with his colonel, and secured him against the suspicion caused by his clandestine visits to a lady at the Hague.

In 1575 he had a share in devising the masques, published in the next year as The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelworth, written to celebrate the queen's 1575 visit to the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle.

[8] At Woodstock in 1575 he delivered a prose speech before Elizabeth, and was present at a reading of the Pleasant Tale of Hemetes the Hermit, a brief romance, probably written by the queen's host, Sir Henry Lee.

Its frontispiece shows the Queen rewarding the kneeling poet with an accolade and a purse; its motto, "Tam Marti, quam Mercurio", indicates that he will serve her as a soldier, as a scholar-poet, or as both.

[10] Gascoigne's theory of metrical composition is explained in a short critical treatise, "Certayne notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English, written at the request of Master Edouardo Donati," prefixed to his Posies (1575).

He acknowledged Chaucer as his master, and differed from the earlier poets of the school of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Thomas Wyatt chiefly in the greater smoothness and sweetness of his verse.