WILLIAM

See also:

• FOWLER, CHARLES (1792-1867)
• FOWLER, EDWARD (1632-1714)
• FOWLER, JOHN (1826-1864)
• FOWLER, SIR JOHN (1817-1898)
• WILLIAM FOWLER (c. 156o-1614)

FOWLER (c. 156o-1614)  , Scottish poet, was born about the year 156o . 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 (about ?1590) 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 . On the title-page of The Triumphs of Petrarke, Fowler styles himself " P. of Hawick," which has been held to mean that he was parson of Hawick, but this is doubtful . A MS. 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 . Two other volumes of his manuscript notes, scrolls of poems, &c., are preserved among the Drummond MSS., now in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland . 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 .