Elizabeth Spencer, Baroness Hunsdon

Who was Elizabeth Spencer, Baroness Hunsdon?

Elizabeth Spencer, Baroness Hunsdon was an English noblewoman, scholar, and patron of the arts. She was the inspiration for Edmund Spenser's Muiopotmos, was commemorated in one of the poet's dedicatory sonnets to the Faerie Queene, and was represented as "Phyllis" in the latter's pastoral poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. She herself translated Petrarch. Her first husband was George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, grandson of Mary Boleyn, elder sister of Anne Boleyn, mother of Queen Elizabeth I.