The real problem with Spenser, the reason his poem has never caught on, is a built-in, all-encompassing
bogosity. Everyone who cared knew that, whatever else Elizabeth I was head of, it wasn't the Church, just as everyone knew that her famous virginity was more an article of faith than a fact.
More fruitful, perhaps, would be considerations of Waugh's connection to modernism, from "In Defence of Cubism" (1917, and Picasso, long before he called for his death in post-World War II correspondence) through his fascination with The Waste Land and apparently ending in the late 1920s with his praise of Picabia, Ernst, and Malliol in contrast to a wire head by Cocteau, "the apotheosis of
bogosity."