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William Fowler (c. 1560—1614)
Scottish
poet, was born about the year 1560. He attended St Leonard’s College,
St Andrews, between 1574 and 1578, and in 1581 he was in Paris
studying civil law. In 1581 he issued a pamphlet against John
Hamilton and other Catholics, who had, he said, driven him from
his country. He subsequently became private secretary and Master
of Requests to Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI., and was renominated
to these offices when the queen went to England. In 1609 his services
were rewarded by a grant of 2000 acres in Ulster.
His
sister Susannah Fowler married Sir John Drummond, and was mother
of the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden. A collection of seventy-two
sonnets, entitled The Tarantula of Love, and a translation (1587)
from the Italian of the Triumphs of Petrarke are preserved in
the library of the University of Edinburgh, in. the collection
bequeathed by his nephew, William Drummond.
Specimens
of Fowler’s verses were published in 1803 by John Leyden in his
Scottish Descriptive Poems. Fowler contributed a prefatory sonnet
to James VI’s Furies; and James, in return, commended, in verse,
Fowler’s Triumphs.
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