If one were to imagine a life that encapsulated many of the landmark events that marked the second half of the Tudor dynasty’s hold on England, it might look a lot like the life of Thomas Churchyard. Matthew Woodcock plausibly suggests that Churchyard was born in the final months of Cardinal Wolsey’s lord chancellorship. Surviving into his seventies, Churchyard lived to see the accession of James VI of Scotland as the first Stuart king of England and to write an epitaph for John Whitgift, Elizabeth I’s last archbishop of Canterbury, only weeks before his own death in 1604. During the century before his birth, Churchyard’s family rode the wool boom of the late fifteenth century to local prominence and wealth in Shrewsbury. In his early teens, young Thomas aspired to cap this provincial success by seeking his fortune at Henry VIII’s court. Churchyard’s own later publications suggest this initial foray to court was not a success, but he ultimately became a servant to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the flamboyant and ambitious heir to the Duke of Norfolk.

Surrey proved to be the first of a series of aristocratic patrons who crashed and burned politically before Churchyard could truly benefit from their support. Later examples included Lord Protector Somerset, his son the Earl of Hertford, and (more tangentially) Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of his favored modes of writing was the complaint—specifically that he never seemed to receive the rewards his services warranted. He was “an incorrigible complainant” (234). Churchyard’s early association with the “Poet Earl” of Surrey and his subsequent emergence as a soldier-writer have inspired much scholarly speculation about Surrey’s literary influence on Churchyard. Woodcock rightly urges the need for caution in this regard, especially as “the full extent of Churchyard’s corpus of writings … remains unclear and difficult to reassemble, even for its author” (37).

Whatever the nature of Churchyard’s early literary aspirations, Henry VIII’s desire for one last war against France in 1543–44 propelled him into a military career that would last, off and on, for forty years. Churchyard served in Henry’s capture of Boulogne, Somerset’s revival of the Rough Wooing against Scotland in 1547, and the loss of the Pale of Calais in 1558, in Ireland and the Low Countries. Churchyard’s writings contain vivid accounts of some of these campaigns, focusing on the experience of the soldiers who fought in them. Churchyard himself became a captain and, for a few fleeting months, a cavalry officer in the army of William of Orange in 1568 (138–39). According to his own later published accounts, he helped to negotiate the English surrender at Guisnes in 1558 and persuaded Calvinist “Beggars” from sacking Antwerp in 1567. He also boasted that his rhetorical skills enabled him to escape captivity after being taken prisoner in Scotland and France. For a writer who consistently emphasized the uniquely honorable qualities of soldiers, Churchyard apparently had few qualms about lying to his captors and breaking parole when his own future was at stake.

Churchyard’s career arguably peaked in the 1570s, when he was commissioned to write entertainments for Queen Elizabeth (most importantly for her visit to Norwich in 1578, when he helped to create the new concept of the Virgin Queen) and made repeated information-gathering visits to the Low Countries for Elizabeth’s councilors. However, his health was broken during a visit to Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland in 1575 (223). By 1580, he was in prison for manslaughter and desperate enough for money to promise intelligence to the French ambassador (214). Thanks to Sir Christopher Hatton, Churchyard eventually received two small royal grants and, briefly, the job of muster-master for the Kent militia. In 1592 he was granted a royal pension of 18d a day, although actually receiving the money brought its own problems (241). By then, Churchyard was an old soldier who had been portraying himself in print as an unappreciated and dying servant of the queen for twenty years. Churchyard’s most famous works—Davy Dicars Dreame and “Shore’s Wife”—were even older, dating back to the 1550s. Although Churchyard continued to publish new works to the end of his life, he was increasingly a man—and an author—who seemed old fashioned and served as the butt of jokes for younger writers such as Spenser and Nashe. The problem was undoubtedly compounded by the flagrantly self-referential (and clumsily alliterative) titles of many of Churchyard’s works, such as Churchyarde’s Chippes (1575), Churchyard’s Choise (1579), and Churchyard’s Charitie (1595).

Thomas Churchyard has long been a well-known, if comparatively minor, figure in the cultural history of Tudor England. As Churchyard himself self-deprecatingly claimed, “No gift of pen, the gods me sent” (177). Matthew Woodcock’s book does not seek artificially to inflate Churchyard’s reputation, but reexamines his life and writings with scrupulously careful scholarship. Throughout, the exploration of Churchyard’s sprawling literary oeuvre and its complicated relationship with the writer’s actual lived experiences is sensitive and compelling. Woodcock’s book is also superbly researched, knitting together history, literature, and biography in a very satisfying way. This is now the magisterial study of Thomas Churchyard.