24-) English Literature
The
grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and heir presumptive to the earls of
Leicester and Warwick, Sir Philip Sidney was not himself a nobleman. Today he
is closely associated in the popular imagination with the court of Elizabeth I,
though he spent relatively little time at the English court, and until his
appointment as governor of Flushing in 1585 received little preferment from
Elizabeth. Viewed in his own age as the best hope for the establishment of a
Protestant League in Europe, he was nevertheless a godson of Philip II of
Spain, spent nearly a year in Italy, and sought out the company of such eminent
Catholics as the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. Widely regarded, in the words of
his late editor William A. Ringler, Jr., as "the model of perfect
courtesy," Sidney was in fact hot-tempered and could be surprisingly
impetuous. Considered the epitome of the English gentleman-soldier, he saw
little military action before a wound in the left thigh, received 23 September
1586 during an ill-conceived and insignificant skirmish in the Netherlands
outside Zutphen, led to his death on 17 October, at Arnhem. Even his literary
career bears the stamp of paradox: Sidney did not think of himself as primarily
a writer, and surprisingly little of his life was devoted to writing.
Early life
Born
at Penshurst Place, Kent, of an aristocratic family, he was educated at
Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry
Sidney and Lady Mary Dudley. His mother was the eldest daughter of John Dudley,
1st Duke of Northumberland, and the sister of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of
Leicester. His sister, Mary, was a writer, translator and literary patron, and
married Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Sidney dedicated his longest work,
the Arcadia, to her. After her brother's death, Mary reworked the Arcadia,
which became known as The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. His brother, Robert
Sidney was a statesman and patron of the arts, and was created Earl of
Leicester in 1618.
Philip,
the first child of Sir Henry Sidney and his wife, Mary, née Dudley, was born in
1554 at Penshurst in Kent, "on Friday the last of November, being St. Andrews
day, a quarter before five in the morning." Present at the birth were his
royal Spanish godfather and his maternal grandmother, whose husband, John
Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and son Guildford had been beheaded in 1553
following the failure of the Northumberland plan to place Guildford's wife,
Lady Jane Grey, on the throne.
It
was an auspicious beginning to an often fatherless childhood. In 1559 Queen
Elizabeth appointed Sir Henry lord president of the Marches of Wales, a post
that required him to spend months at a time away from home. As painful as his
absence from family must have been to Sir Henry, his absence from Penshurst
could only have compounded his distress. In the 1590 Arcadia Sidney recalled in
the character Kalander's house the warmth, serviceability, and understated
grace of the Sidney home:
not
neglected; each place handsome without curiosity, and homely without
loathsomeness, not so dainty as not to be trod on, nor yet slubbered up with
good fellowship—all more lasting than beautiful (but that the consideration of
the exceeding lastingness made the eye believe it was exceeding beautiful).
On
17 October 1564 Sir Henry enrolled the nine-year-old Philip in Shrewsbury
School, the same day that Philip's lifelong friend and biographer, Fulke
Greville, First Lord Brooke, was enrolled. Although far from Penshurst,
Shrewsbury was a logical choice for Sidney's early education. The town was
under Sir Henry's jurisdiction and boasted a fine grammar school under the
direction of its headmaster, Thomas Ashton. The rigors of Elizabethan
education—in winter students were at their studies from six o'clock in the
morning until four-thirty in the afternoon—suited Sidney's precocity and his
extraordinary self-discipline. The curriculum was almost entirely in Latin,
though modern languages seem to have had some place at Shrewsbury. An account
of Philip's expenses at school includes an entry "for two quires of paper,
for example books, phrases and sentences in Latin and French." Another
account records expenditures for a book of Virgil and a catechism of Calvin,
testifying to the school's mix of classical and Puritan values. Philip may even
have developed his taste and love for drama by acting in the didactic plays
that were a staple of many Elizabethan grammar schools, including Shrewsbury.
At
school he demonstrated a remarkable mastery of academic subjects. Greville
reports that, "even his teachers found something in him to observe, and
learn, above that which they had usually read, or taught." Greville may
have appraised Sidney's accomplishments fairly accurately. The physician Thomas
Moffett, a friend of the Sidneys and another early biographer of Philip, notes
his mastery of grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, Latin, French, and some Greek.
But the remarkable trait of Sidney's mind was that he saw the aim of human life
to be, as he said of poetry in The Defence of Poetry (1595), "well-doing,
and not of well-knowing only." Though Moffett comments that Sidney
neglected games and sports "for the sake of literary studies," he
developed into a handsome young man with a natural grace and considerable
athletic prowess. His excellent horsemanship would later make him, despite
delicate health, a champion in tiltyards and tournaments. Greville's
observation that Philip's "very play tend[ed] to enrich his mind"
seems close to the mark. A similar desire to make all experience educational
distinguishes the childhood of Pyrocles and Musidorus, the precocious
hero-princes of the Arcadias.
Twice
during his school days at Shrewsbury, Sidney traveled to Oxford for ceremonies
over which Queen Elizabeth presided. On the first trip, in August 1566, he
resided at Lincoln College and must have enjoyed a privileged view of the queen's
activities, as he was in the company of his uncle, Robert Dudley, first Earl of
Leicester and chancellor of the university. Sidney's servant, Thomas Marshall,
recorded that on the return trip to Shrewsbury, his master gave twelve pence to
a blind harper at Chipping Norton--a moment Sidney may have recalled years
later in The Defence of Poetry, when he reflected on the pleasures of lyric:
"I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart
moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder,
with no rougher voice than rude style." The second trip to Oxford came
early in 1568, just before he completed his studies at Shrewsbury. On that
occasion, according to his horoscope, he "delivered an oration before her
most serene Highness that was both eloquent and elegant."
Shortly
after his 1568 visit, Sidney returned to Oxford as a student at Christ Church,
where it seems he studied for three years. He soon established a reputation for
excellence in public debate. Richard Carew recalls in his Survey of Cornwall
(1602) an incident when "being a scholar in Oxford of fourteen years age,
and three years standing, upon a wrong conceived opinion touching my
sufficiency I was ... called to dispute ex tempore (impar congressus Achilli)
with the matchless Sir Philip Sidney, in presence of the Earls Leicester,
Warwick, and other great personages."
Like
most men of his rank Sidney left Oxford without taking a degree. After
recovering from the plague in the spring of 1572, he may have spent a term at
Cambridge. During this time his family was busy with preparations for his first
tour of the Continent. A peace treaty between England and France, concluded in
April, provided the opportunity. Late the following month he was given permission
to travel to Paris as a member the delegation accompanying Lord High Admiral
Edward de Fiennes, Ninth Earl of Lincoln, with a license from Elizabeth for
"her trusty and well-beloved Philip Sidney, Esquire, to go out of England
into parts beyond the seas" for a period of two years. By her instructions
he was to attain knowledge of foreign languages. Leicester commended his nephew
to Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris, Sir Francis Walsingham, who would become
Sidney's friend, adviser, and father-in-law. Sidney was not yet eighteen years
old.
Politics and marriage
In
1572, at the age of 18, he travelled to France as part of the embassy to
negotiate a marriage between Elizabeth I and the Duc D'Alençon. He spent the
next several years in mainland Europe, moving through Germany, Italy, Poland,
the Kingdom of Hungary and Austria. On these travels, he met a number of
prominent European intellectuals and politicians.
During
his Oxford years a marriage was proposed between Philip and Anne, Cecil,
daughter of Sir William Cecil, that would have linked the Sidneys to one of the
most powerful families of the realm. But when Sir William's investigations
revealed that the Sidneys were relatively poor, his enthusiasm waned, and
relations between the two families cooled. Anne later married Edward de Vere,
seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
Returning
to England in 1575, Sidney met Penelope Devereux (who would later marry Robert
Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick). Although much younger, she inspired his famous
sonnet sequence of the 1580s, Astrophel and Stella. Her father, Walter
Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, was said to have planned to marry his daughter to
Sidney, but Walter died in 1576 and this did not occur. In England, Sidney
occupied himself with politics and art. He defended his father's administration
of Ireland in a lengthy document.
More
seriously, he quarrelled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, probably
because of Sidney's opposition to the French marriage of Elizabeth to the much
younger Alençon, which de Vere championed. In the aftermath of this episode,
Sidney challenged de Vere to a duel, which Elizabeth forbade. He then wrote a
lengthy letter to the Queen detailing the foolishness of the French marriage.
Characteristically, Elizabeth bristled at his presumption, and Sidney prudently
retired from court.
During
a 1577 diplomatic visit to Prague, Sidney secretly visited the exiled Jesuit
priest Edmund Campion.
Sidney
had returned to court by the middle of 1581. In the latter year he was elected
to fill vacant seats in the Parliament of England for both Ludlow and
Shrewsbury, choosing to sit for the latter, and in 1584 was MP for Kent. That
same year Penelope Devereux was married, apparently against her will, to Lord
Rich. Sidney was knighted in 1583. An early arrangement to marry Anne Cecil,
daughter of Sir William Cecil and eventual wife of de Vere, had fallen through
in 1571. In 1583, he married Frances, the 16-year-old daughter of Sir Francis
Walsingham. In the same year, he made a visit to Oxford University with
Giordano Bruno, the polymath known for his cosmological theories, who
subsequently dedicated two books to Sidney.
In
1585 the couple had one daughter, Elizabeth, who later married Roger Manners,
5th Earl of Rutland, in March 1599 and died without issue in 1612.
Philip
Sidney was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney and his wife, Lady Mary Dudley,
daughter of the duke of Northumberland, and godson of King Philip II of Spain.
After Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne, his father was appointed lord
president of Wales (and later served three times as lord deputy of Ireland),
while his uncle, Robert Dudley, was created earl of Leicester and became the
queen’s most trusted adviser. In keeping with his family background, the young
Sidney was intended for a career as a statesman and soldier. At age 10 he
entered Shrewsbury School, where his classmate was Fulke Greville (later a
court official under Elizabeth), who became his lifelong friend and was his
early biographer. In February 1568 he began a three-year period of studies at
Christ Church, Oxford, afterward traveling in Europe between May 1572 and June
1575, perfecting his knowledge of Latin, French, and Italian. He also gained
firsthand knowledge of European politics and became acquainted with many of
Europe’s leading statesmen.
His
first court appointment came in the spring of 1576, when he succeeded his
father as cupbearer to the queen, a ceremonial position. Then in February 1577,
when he was only 22, he was sent as ambassador to the German emperor Rudolf II
and the elector palatine Louis VI, carrying Queen Elizabeth’s condolences on
the deaths of their fathers. But along with this formal task, he also had
secret instructions to sound out the German princes on their attitude toward
the formation of a Protestant league—the chief political aim being to protect
England by associating it with other Protestant states in Europe that would
counterbalance the threatening power of Roman Catholic Spain. Sidney apparently
brought back enthusiastic reports on the possibilities of forming such a
league, but the cautious queen sent other emissaries to check on his reports,
and they returned with less-optimistic accounts of the German princes’
reliability as allies. He did not receive another major official appointment
until eight years later.
He
nevertheless continued to busy himself in the politics and diplomacy of his
country. In 1579 he wrote privately to the queen, advising her against a
proposal that she enter into a marriage with the duke of Anjou, the Roman
Catholic heir to the French throne. Sidney, moreover, was a member of
Parliament for Kent in 1581 and 1584–85. He corresponded with foreign statesmen
and entertained important visitors—including the French Protestant envoy
Philippe de Mornay in 1577, the German Calvinist prince Casimir in 1578, the
Portuguese pretender Dom António in 1581, and, later, a number of Scottish
lords. Sidney was among the few Englishmen of his time with any interest in the
newly discovered Americas, and he supported maritime explorations by the
navigator Sir Martin Frobisher. In 1582 Richard Hakluyt, who published accounts
of English explorers’ enterprises, dedicated his Divers Voyages Touching the
Discoverie of America to him. Sidney later became interested in the project to
establish the American colony of Virginia, sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh, and
he intended to set out himself in an expedition with Sir Francis Drake against
the Spaniards. He had wide-ranging intellectual and artistic interests,
discussed art with the painter Nicholas Hilliard and chemistry with the
scientist John Dee, and was a great patron of scholars and men of letters. More
than 40 works by English and European authors were dedicated to him—works of
divinity, ancient and modern history, geography, military affairs, law, logic,
medicine, and poetry—indicating the breadth of his interests. Among the many
poets and prose writers who sought his patronage were Edmund Spenser, Abraham
Fraunce, and Thomas Lodge.
Sidney
was an excellent horseman and became renowned for his participation in
tournaments—elaborate entertainments, half athletic contest and half symbolic
spectacle, that were a chief amusement of the court. He hankered after a life
of heroic action, but his official activities were largely ceremonial—attending
on the queen at court and accompanying her on her progresses about the country.
In January 1583 he was knighted, not because of any outstanding accomplishment
but in order to give him the qualifications needed to stand in for his friend
Prince Casimir, who was to receive the honour of admittance to the Order of the
Garter but was unable to attend the ceremony. In September he married Frances,
daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. They
had one daughter, Elizabeth.
Such
trips were rare among Englishmen of Sidney's day. For him it was to be most
fateful, contributing deeply to his education and preparing him for a career in
the service of the state. Traveling with Griffin Madox, his Welsh servant, and
Lodowick Bryskett, a London-born gentleman of Italian parents, Sidney arrived
in Paris in early June. There he participated in official ceremonies marking
the Treaty of Blois. He and his companions remained in Paris for the summer,
where Sidney cultivated the friendship--and earned the admiration--of an
extraordinary variety of people, included Walsingham, the rhetorician Peter
Ramus, the printer Andrew Wechel, and perhaps even the distinguished Huguenot
Hubert Languet, his future mentor, whose friendship he cultivated later in
Strasbourg. But Sidney impressed not only Protestant intellectuals. In early
August 1572, King Charles IX created him "Baron de Sidenay"--partly
in recognition of his unusual personal appeal and partly in an effort to
cultivate powerful English Protestants. Because Elizabeth disliked foreign
titles, Sidney did not sign himself "Baron Sidney" in England, though
his friends on the Continent regularly addressed him by that title.
This
successful summer ended in horror. The marriage in late August of Charles IX's
sister Margaret de Valois to the Huguenot King Henry III of Navarre was
designed to end a decade of bloodshed between French Catholics and Protestants.
Over the summer soberly dressed Huguenots from the provinces and splendidly
attired Catholics of King Charles's family and the French nobility had flocked
to Paris for the wedding. Rumor swelled that the Huguenots would attempt a coup
d'état after the wedding. On the Catholic side, even before the wedding, Henri
I de Lorraine, Duke of Guise (with the assent of Catherine de' Médicis), had
been plotting the assassination of Adm. Gaspard de II de Coligny, the most able
and powerful of Navarre's advisers.
Sidney
witnessed many of the events of the week of 17-23 August 1572: secular and
religious wedding ceremonies, important state meetings, and lavish evening
entertainments. Festivities ended abruptly on Friday morning, when a sniper's
bullet wounded Admiral de Coligny in the arm and finger. The Guise plot had
been irrevocably launched. After a day of well-coordinated planning, the Saint
Bartholomew's Day Massacre began in earnest just after midnight on Sunday, 23
August. All over Paris, Huguenot men, women, and children were rounded up and
killed. The recuperating Coligny was murdered and his body thrown into the
street. Peter Ramus was ambushed and butchered, his corpse was hurled from a
window, and its entrails were dragged through the city. Languet himself barely
escaped a gang of assassins. News of the violence spread beyond the city, and
thousands more Protestants were dispatched in Lyons, Orléans, Bordeaux, and
other regions.
How
much of the slaughter Sidney witnessed in Paris is not known. Perhaps he was
among the Englishmen who found refuge with Walsingham at the English embassy
outside the city walls. Perhaps he was part of an English group taken to view
the mutilated corpse of Coligny. He seems to have been in little danger; there
is evidence that influential Catholics were careful to protect their English
visitors. Nevertheless, when word of the violence reached England, the queen's
council commanded Walsingham to secure Sidney's safe passage back to England.
These instructions arrived too late, for Walsingham had already spirited Sidney
away toward Germany. He never returned to France.
Arriving
in Frankfurt via Strasbourg, Sidney had the leisure over the following winter
to establish his friendship with the fifty-four-year-old bachelor Hubert
Languet, envoy of the elector of Saxony, with whom he was to exchange a
voluminous and invaluable correspondence in Latin for more than a decade. The
stately and erudite Languet, one of the leading Huguenot figures of Europe,
took what now seems a more-than-fatherly interest in Sidney's personal
well-being, the development of his scholarship, and the friendships he
established on the Continent. He saw in the brilliant young Englishman a
potential leader in an effort he himself regarded as essential: to interest
England in an alliance for the protection of European Protestants.
After
visiting Vienna for several months in 1573, Sidney set out in late August or
early September on a brief trip into Hungary that extended into a three-month
stay. His experience there is fondly remembered in The Defence of Poetry in a
passage praising lyric songs: "In Hungary I have seen it the manner at all
feasts, and other such meetings, to have the songs of their ancestors' valor,
which that right soldierlike nation think one of the chiefest kindlers of brave
courage." In his first letter to Sidney, dated September 1573, Languet
chided him for not having revealed his plans: "When you left [Vienna] you
said that you would not be gone for more than three days. But now, like a
little bird that has forced its way through the bars of its cage, your delight
makes you restless, flitting hither and yon, perhaps without a thought for your
friends."
When
Sidney announced his intention to visit Italy, Languet, envisioning an even
longer and more dangerous separation from his protégé, could win from him only
a promise that he would not visit Rome. Some of this anxiety was quite
practical: the more tolerant cities of northern Italy were reasonably safe for
Protestant travelers, but this was not so farther south, where the Inquisition
held sway. But Languet's letters reveal his fear that Sidney's youth and
tolerant disposition would make him, despite events of the previous summer,
susceptible to the persuasion of Catholics.
Because
of their reputation for religious and intellectual tolerance, Venice and the
university city of Padua were natural destinations for Englishmen who wanted to
see Italy. Again traveling with Bryskett and Madox, Sidney reached Venice in
early November 1573. He spent most of the following year there and in Padua,
with excursions to Genoa and Florence. In letters to Languet from Venice and
Padua he recounted meeting his distant cousin Richard Shelley (an ancestor of
the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a longtime resident of the city),
an erudite man who was, in Sidney's phrase, "sadly addicted to
Popery." In Venice he also met a variety of important Europeans.
Sidney
immersed himself in Italian culture--so much so that in one letter Languet
addressed him as "you Italians," and Walsingham began to be concerned
that the young man was wavering in his faith. The philosopher Giordano Bruno,
who later traveled to Oxford under Sidney's auspices and dedicated verses to
him, recorded that Sidney enjoyed an excellent reputation during this visit.
Yet one of Languet's replies to a now-missing letter suggests that Sidney was
not overly smitten with Venice's fabled charms, and in a 1578 letter to his
brother Robert, Sidney roundly criticized the "tyrannous oppression"
and "counterfeit learning" he observed in Italy, though he admitted
to admiring Italian arms and horsemanship.
By
February 1574 Sidney was sufficiently prominent in Venice to sit for a portrait
(now lost) by the Venetian master Paolo Veronese. Languet seems to have found
it indifferently pleasing. There are now extant only two primary likenesses of
Sidney, neither painted ad vivum: the youthful Longleat portrait, dated 1578;
and the Penshurst portrait executed for his brother, Robert, probably in the
1590s.
The
renowned university at Padua, to which Sidney repaired in January 1574,
provided a focus for his voluminous reading and improved his mastery of languages,
particularly Latin. At Languet's suggestion he translated "Cicero into
French, then from French into English, and then back into Latin again by an
uninterrupted process." But he demurred at Languet's recommendation that
he study German: "Of the German language I quite despair, for it has a
certain harshness about it." He complained that at his age he had no hope
of mastering it, "even so as to understand it." He seems also to have
studied astronomy and geometry--the latter because he had "always had the
impression that it is closely related to military science." His reading
included a vast range of subjects. According to John Buxton, he read works on
Venetian government (considered the model of European nations), world history,
a book on the Council of Trent, and collections of letters by Paolo Manzio,
Bernardo Tasso, Pietro Bembo, and Lorenzo de' Medici--as well as several books
on impresa, the emblematic devices that he would put to great creative use in
his life and writings.
In
August 1574, after ten months in Italy, Sidney left Venice for Languet's house
in Vienna, where he fell seriously ill. Nursed back to health by Languet, he
spent the winter of 1574-1575 enjoying the friendship of that city's important
men. His most intimate friend at the time was Edward Wotton, whom Walsingham
had appointed to a post in Vienna. The friendship would last until Sidney's
death. At the beginning of The Defence of Poetry he recalls how during his stay
in Vienna he and "the right virtuous Edward Wotton" studied horsemanship
under the famed John Pietro Pugliano, the Italian maestro of the Emperor
Maximilian II's stables:
according
to the fertileness of the Italian wit, [Pugliano] did not only afford us the
demonstration of his practice, but sought to enrich our minds with the
contemplations therein, which he thought most precious.... Nay, to so
unbelieved a point he proceeded as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a
prince as to be a good horseman--skill of government was but a pedanteria in
comparison. Then would he add certain praises, by telling what a peerless beast
the horse was ... that if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to
him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse.
Beneath
the levity of this passage--part of the fun is that in its original Greek the
name Philip (phil-hippos) denotes love of horses--is a tribute to an art that
Sidney, like Wotton, practiced to excellence. That he chose to discourse upon
the exercise of the "peerless beast" as an introduction to his work
about the "peerless poet" may seem peculiar unless we reader realize
how highly he regarded horsemanship as an art of "well-doing" and not
of "well-knowing" only. In sonnet 41 of Astrophil and Stella Sidney
recalls the satisfaction of "Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance /
Guided so well that I obtained the prize." In the Arcadia he explores the
elements of horsemanship in greater detail, portraying the dynamics of control,
the unspoken trust and communication between horse and rider, that makes of the
two a single composite being.
Instructions
from Leicester to hasten his return to England in the spring of 1575 altered
Sidney's planned route through Burgundy and Paris. He followed Languet to
Prague in early March, then joined Wotton in Dresden; after stops in Strasbourg
and Frankfurt the company reached Antwerp at the beginning of May and arrived
in England on the last day of the month--almost exactly three years after his
departure.
He
found his family well, though still mourning the death, in February 1574, of
Philip's youngest sister, Ambrosia, at the age of ten. This event had prompted
from the queen a letter of uncharacteristically intimate condolence, in view of
her usually aloof and ambivalent treatment of the Sidneys. The same letter
commanded Philip's sister Mary, not yet fourteen, to court. Sir Henry, who had
resigned his post as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1571, was happily employed as
president of the Marches of Wales, but his wife was seriously depressed through
bad health, bereavement, and financial problems.
Philip
Sidney had left England "young and raw," in the words of his uncle
Leicester; he returned in full manhood, having acquired a vast store of new
experience and learning, a network of important Continental friends, and a
knowledge of European political affairs that few Englishmen could match. Eager
to enter the service of his country, he spent the next eighteen months in
England, awaiting assignment. During his first summer at home he and his family
witnessed the spectacular entertainments--pageants, speeches, hunts, tilts,
games, animal baitings, and more--presented daily to the queen during her
three-week visit to Kenilworth, Leicester's estate near Warwick.
Later
that summer Sidney saw his father off to Ireland, where--much to Sir Henry's
regret--he had been reappointed Lord Deputy. Neglecting his correspondence with
his European friends, Philip spent the autumn and winter in London, where he
gave himself over to the pleasures at court; Elizabeth made him her cupbearer. Letters
from Languet and other friends on the Continent were addressed to him at
Leicester House, and an edition of Ramus's Commentaries (1555) was dedicated to
him. During this period Sidney enjoyed a deepening friendship with Walter
Devereux, first Earl of Essex, Sir Henry's comrade in Ireland. The following
summer he accompanied Essex back to Ireland and was reunited with Sir Henry.
Essex
soon fell victim to a plague of dysentery that swept Ireland, and he died on 22
September 1576 in Dublin. Sidney, who had received a letter summoning him to
the earl's bedside, arrived too late. There he found a touching message,
written during the earl's last days, in which he left Philip nothing except the
wish that "if God do move both their hearts ... he might match with my
daughter." The earl continued, "he is so wise, so virtuous, so
goodly; and if he go on in the course that he hath begun, he will be as famous
and worthy a gentleman as ever England bred." This daughter, Penelope
Devereux, would become the "Stella" of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.
Although
Essex's agent, Edward Waterhouse, repeated the hope that Philip and Penelope
would marry, it is unlikely that Philip, much less his father or any of his
mother's Dudley family, took this proposal seriously at the time. He was a man
of twenty-one, Penelope a girl of twelve. Moreover, he longed for a political
commission that would allow him to employ the knowledge and skills he had
acquired during his three years on the Continent. If Astrophil is naively read
as an undeflected representation of Sidney himself, he can be forgiven for his
neglect of Penelope, though it is a neglect that he later regretted when she
married Lord Robert Rich in 1581. In the second sonnet of Astrophil and Stella,
Astrophil explains that his love for Stella was the result of a gradual
process. In the thirty-third he blames himself for not having taken advantage
of opportunity when it presented itself:
But
to myself myself did give the blow,
While
too much wit (forsooth) so troubled me,
That
I respects for both our sakes must show:
And
yet could not by rising Morn foresee
How
fair a day was near, o punished eyes,
That
I had been more foolish or more wise.
When
news of the death of Maximilian II of Austria reached England in late October
1576, Sidney seemed to Elizabeth's advisers the logical choice to lead a
special embassy to extend her condolences to the emperor's family. Ostensibly,
Sidney's mission would be strictly formal; its informal purpose was entirely
political. Hard upon this news came the death of the staunch Calvinist
Frederick III, Elector of the Palatinate. Political uncertainty deepened when
Spanish mercenaries in the Low Countries sacked and burned Antwerp as well as
other smaller towns. While Sidney and his entourage visited the courts of
Europe, he would use his audiences with heads of state to enlist their support
for the creation of a Protestant League--a mission that seemed now more urgent
and propitious than before.
After
two months of preparations, Sidney's instructions were delivered on 7 February
1577, and he left for the Continent at the end of the month. Accompanying him
were two experienced statesmen, Sir Henry Lee and Sir Jerome Bowes, among other
career diplomats, and his personal friends Greville and Sir Edward Dyer, both
of whom figure importantly in Sidney's literary career. At Louvain he charmed
the Spanish governor, Don John, who (abetted by a group of English and Scottish
exiles) was plotting to overthrow Elizabeth, free Mary, Queen of Scots, and
marry her. From Brussels, Sidney's party traveled up the Rhine to Heidelberg,
where he greeted Prince John Casimir, and from thence to Prague, where he
accomplished his official mission of extending the queen's condolences to the
family of Maximilian II.
In
Prague he also visited Edmund Campion, whom he must have known, if only
casually, from their days at Oxford. To his tutor in Rome, Campion described
Sidney, mistakenly, as "a poor wavering soul" who might be amenable
to conversion to the Roman Church. It is clear that his interest in Sidney was
opportunistic. Yet Campion's words provide no basis for saying, as John Buxton
has, that Sidney was cynically "using all his tact and charm to learn from
Campion's own lips how far conversion had led him on the path of disloyalty."
Rather, though Sidney held Campion to be in "a full wrong
divinity"--as he said of Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer in The Defence of
Poetry--he probably admired the gifted and accomplished Jesuit, as many others
did. Sidney genuinely sought "the prayers of all good men" and was
happy to assist even Catholics who would ease the suffering of the poor. The
catalogue of the long-dispersed library at Penshurst, recently discovered by
Germaine Warkentin, lists an edition of the Conference in the Tower with Campion,
(1581) published shortly after Campion's execution. If in fact this book
belonged to Philip Sidney, perhaps he hoped to find in it evidence that Campion
had discovered the true religion in the hours before his death.
On
the return trip to England Sidney met with William I of Orange and discussed
plans for a Protestant League. It is a testament to his growing international
status--which S. K. Heninger, Jr. believes was so great as to unsettle
Elizabeth herself--that William offered him his daughter's hand in marriage.
The promised dowry included the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Of course,
Elizabeth would never have tolerated the marriage of one of her most powerful
courtiers to a foreign royal family, no matter how close the interests of
England and Orange might be, and the proposal was not advanced.
In
Ireland Sidney had witnessed firsthand Sir Henry's vigorous prosecution of the
campaign against the Irish rebels. Returned from the Continent in the fall of
1577, he found himself obliged to defend his father's policies. To maintain the
English garrison Sir Henry had ordered the imposition of a cess, or land tax,
against certain lords living within the Pale. The Irish lords resisted the tax
and through their effective spokesman, Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormonde,
argued their case before Elizabeth and the Queen's Council. Sidney entered the
debate with his "Discourse on Irish Affairs," which survives only in
a holograph fragment.
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