Sidney felt the uneasiness of the age; it was, he said, one ‘that resembles a bow too long bent, it must be unstrung or it will break’. But the task he imposed upon himself was affirmation of life. He would have wished for no better epitaph than the words taken from his own Arcadia: ‘We have lived, and loved to be good to ourselves and others: our souls, which are put into the stirring earth of our bodies, have achieved the cause of their hither coming. They have known, and honoured with knowledge, the cause of their creation, and to many men (for in this time, place and fortune, it is lawful for us to speak gloriously) it hath been behoveful that we should live.’ Many, from the greatest to the poorest, felt justified and enheartened by the example of Sidney’s life—from William the Silent to the thirsty wounded soldier at Zutphen, from the unlucky poet Edmund Spenser to the least citizen that bowed the head to Sidney’s funeral procession.
Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst on 30th November 1554. His ancestry was one of mixed fortunes; for while his father Sir Henry was a favoured courtier whom Holinshed commended for ‘his forwardness in all good actions’, his mother Mary was a Dudley, a member of a family noted for greed and ambition. Her grandfather, the most hated minister of Henry VII, had been executed by Henry VIII; her father, the Duke of Northumberland, had in the year before Philip’s birth tried to steal the throne from Mary Tudor and had in his turn been executed for it. It is a mark of Philip’s hopeful acceptance of his lot that he gloried in his blood. Though he was by his father’s side ‘of ancient and well-esteemed and well-matched gentry’, he wrote that his ‘chiefest honour is to be a Dudley’. His godparents were the Duchess of Northumberland and the Queen’s new husband, Philip of Spain, for whom the child was named. Watched over by a traitor’s widow and a cold alien prince, the boy was given an equivocal introduction to the world.
In the gentle Kentish land at Penshurst, later celebrated by Ben Jonson, young Philip spent his first years with his mother:
Thou hast thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers
Fresh as the air, and new as are thy hours.
His father, who in the reigns of Edward and Mary was ‘the paragon of the Court by reason of the many good gifts God had bestowed on him’, in the new reign of Elizabeth was still employed by the government, because of his honesty and diligence, though the Queen never showed him any personal favour. Between two terms of administration in Ireland, Sir Henry became in 1560 Lord President of the Welsh Marches and governed his territory from Ludlow Castle. Philip came from Kent to join his father and was sent to the nearby free grammar school at Shrewsbury. The boy was fortunate in his schooling, for when he entered Shrewsbury in 1564 the headmaster was Thomas Ashton, a scholar of reputation from Trinity College, Cambridge. And the headmaster was fortunate to receive such an apt pupil. Fulke Greville, Philip’s lifelong friend and later his biographer, who entered Shrewsbury on the same day, gave an account of the studious young Sidney: ‘His talk ever of knowledge, and his very play tending to enrich his mind, so as even his teachers found something in him to observe and learn above that which they had usually read or taught. Which eminence by nature and industry made his worthy father style Sir Philip in my hearing (though I unseen) lumen familiae suae.’
It was apparent at an early age that Philip had great ability; at the age of twelve he was writing to his father in both Latin and French. But Sir Henry demanded more than mere book learning in his eldest child. Like most cultivated men of his time, he had before him an ideal of courtly behaviour which he had pieced together out of Castiglione’s famous II Cortegiano, out of various courtesy books, and from Renaissance works written as far apart as Spain and Poland. Like many of his time, he knew the general aim of this education, but was not very explicit on the actual elements to be taught. In a letter to his son in 1566 he recommended diligence, obedience, humility, and a care for health and fitness; he gave little practical advice except to exercise ‘without peril to your bones or joints’, and to learn how to take wine ‘lest being enforced to drink upon the sudden you should find yourself inflamed’. But the first principle of education, as the authorities conventionally agreed, was a due reverence and humility before God. ‘From God only’, said Sir Thomas Elyot, one of the first Englishmen to write on the training of gentlemen, ‘proceedeth all honour’.
No doubt Philip Sidney took his father’s admonition to heart and accomplished what Sir Henry had hoped for. With his fine critical intelligence, he judged his progress as he went along; and when, years later, his younger brother Robert in his turn asked Philip for advice on education, he was able to amplify for the young man the ideal which Sir Henry had set for him. ‘Your purpose is’, he wrote, ‘being a gentleman born, to furnish yourself with the knowledge of such things as may be serviceable to your country and fit for your calling.’ In particular, he advised Robert to study arithmetic and geometry, to acquire an easy but not pedantic command of Latin, take a delight in music and practise it often, to exercise horsemanship, to learn to write a better hand, and lastly to ‘take care of your diet, and consequently of your complexion’.
In his fourteenth year Philip Sidney went to Christ Church, Oxford, a precocious, sober young Protestant. At university, he continued his easy academic triumphs and gave much time to the study of Aristotle. ‘For though translations are made almost daily’, he explained later to Hubert Languet, ‘still I suspect they do not declare the meaning of the author plainly or aptly enough.’ At this time also he came to the attention of William Cecil, and the Queen’s first minister was duly impressed. ‘Your Philip is here’, he wrote to Sir Henry in January 1569, ‘in whom I take more comfort than I do openly utter for avoiding of wrong interpretation. He is worthy to be loved, and so I do love him as he were my son.’ Emboldened by this, Sir Henry proposed a marriage between his son and Cecil’s daughter, Anne. But the Sidneys were poor and the Cecils never allowed affection to stand in the way of their ambition; Anne was married to the unruly but rich Earl of Oxford. Sidney did not stay long at Oxford and left without a degree. Perhaps it was the taste of life about the court which pulled him away; in any case his aristocratic temperament could not have liked the old-fashioned, provincial world of dusty books at Oxford, which the famous Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno condemned for its pedantic ignorance and conceit joined to rustic rudeness. To continue his education, Sidney wished to see something of the world outside England, and in May 1572 the Queen granted him a licence to go abroad for two years ‘for his attaining the knowledge of foreign languages’.
Schoolboy brilliance counted for little in the great world; to men of affairs Sidney was still a callow youth. His uncle, the Earl of Leicester, sent him to Walsingham in Paris with a recommendation and an explanation: ‘He is young and raw, and no doubt shall find those countries and the demeanours of the people somewhat strange unto him; and therefore your good advice and counsel shall greatly behove him for his better direction.’ But the qualities of his mind joined to the charm of his youth, his debonair manner and athletic presence, soon captivated the French. He had a natural feeling for languages (except for German whose rough inelegance offended his ear); his friend Languet could find no fault in his French, and his companion Bryskett noted that the French courtiers liked both the wit and the fluency of his conversation. For the aristocratic young Englishman foreign travel served a double purpose: he looked at governments and met politicians as a preparation for public service in his own land; and he studied Renaissance thought and literature in the countries of their birth, for the full development of his own mind. In Paris, in the summer of 1572, Sidney met such men as Henry of Navarre, the future king of France, and de l’Hôpital, the tolerant and judicious politique; he also sought out the Protestant culture of the French Reformation, and talked with Ramus, the philosopher, du Bartas, the dullest of poets, and Hubert Languet, humanist and scholar. Languet was particularly drawn to Sidney and made himself the mentor of the dashing youth. In August Sidney witnessed in Paris the slaughter of St Bartholomew,
and this massacre of the Huguenots impressed on Sidney’s young mind the value of Languet’s sober Protestant morality. In his later verse he acknowledged the debt to his master, praising Languet for:
faithful heart, clean hands, and mouth as true:
With his sweet skill my skilless youth he drew,
To have a feeling taste of Him that sits
Beyond the heaven, far more beyond our wits.
In the lurid days after St Bartholomew, Walsingham sent Sidney out of France. He went to join Languet in Frankfurt and then followed the Huguenot to the Imperial Court in Vienna. For some months Sidney travelled in Germany, Austria and Hungary, confirming at each step his detestation of Catholicism, meeting scholars, improving his command of classical literature, and learning Protestant ethics from the high-minded correspondence of Languet. The journeys were pleasant, the company distinguished—he met, among others, the man who first brought tulips to Europe from Constantinople, and the man who established the text of Aristotle—but for the young Englishman something was missing in the austere northern airs. The wicked vitality, the resplendent history, the pure art of Italy summoned him; and despite the protests of worthy Languet, who feared for his Protestant virtue, at the end of 1573 Sidney set out for Venice.
Venice did not please him and nor, entirely, did the Italians. ‘For the men you shall have there,’ he later warned his brother, ‘although some indeed are excellently learned, yet are they all given to so counterfeit learning, as a man shall learn of them more false grounds of things, than in any place else that I do know.’ Some things, he admitted, they did well, such as fencing and horsemanship; and since these were among the attributes of a gentleman Sidney studied them. To the relief of Languet, Sidney moved from the decadence of Venice to the sobriety of Padua, to study moral philosophy and politics at the famous university. These serious matters took most of his time; at least he has left few opinions on lighter subjects. He deprecated the opulent architecture, but was silent on the other arts. The evidence of profound Italian influence is only apparent in his writings, in Astrophel and Stella and in Arcadia. In 1574, just before his twentieth birthday, he rejoined Languet in Vienna; and in the spring of the next year returned to England.
Sidney came back, said Thomas Drant in a poem to Leicester, ‘praised by all the world’. He was something new in cultured English society—the Protestant chevalier. Grace and good looks he already had, with auburn hair and delicate features resembling his sister’s. ‘If I were to find a fault in it,’ wrote Aubrey, ‘methinks ’tis not masculine enough.’ Yet Aubrey added that ‘he was a person of great courage’. Fulke Greville said that Sidney was from his earliest years grave and composed, sound masters at Shrewsbury and Oxford had made him learned; manners and social graces he had learnt from Castiglione, his athletic body had been trained on horse and in the tiltyard by Pugliano. And he had taken his ideals of morality and justice from Languet and other Protestant mentors. He was, as the famous Dutch jurist Lipsius later said, ‘the flower of England’.
His birth, his training, his Protestant idealism, his instruction abroad, all naturally inclined him to seek service at court. His chief ends, wrote Greville, were ‘above all things the honour of his Maker, and the service of his prince or country’. His ambition was encouraged by Languet who knew that Sidney at court would be a firm opponent of Catholicism and Spanish power. Languet advised him to cultivate Lord Burghley: ‘he is fond of you, and will make everything easier for you.’ But despite the affection of Burghley, and despite the support of his uncle Leicester, Sidney was sharply checked by the realities of Elizabeth’s rule. His handsome and gallant presence was welcomed for the lighter business at court. Soon after his return he accompanied the Queen on one of her stately progresses, to his uncle’s castle at Kenilworth and then to Lichfield where his father, Sir Henry, was admitted to the Privy Council before being hastened away for another barren and impoverishing tour of duty in Ireland. But Sidney found no immediate favour from the Queen. Elizabeth did everything by calculation, and the young man, for all his brilliance, did not fit her requirements. He was very inexperienced in the faithless affairs of princes, and perhaps too obdurate a Protestant: she always put flexibility and cunning before high principle. He was also Leicester’s nephew and she had no wish to strengthen the faction of the earl who was proud enough already: Leicester was a Dudley and the Queen knew from the history of her dynasty that it was wise to keep a tight rein on the house of Dudley. And perhaps Sidney’s qualities told against him. For public service, Elizabeth preferred plain worth to glitter; her most trusted servants were quiet, laborious men like Burghley, Walsingham and Hatton. Young Sidney was extravagant, impatient, hot-blooded—on one occasion he threatened the life of a secretary whom he suspected of intercepting letters to his father. Lastly, and most damning, Sidney was poor and had no fortune to squander on the Queen’s behalf. The modest sinecure of royal cup-bearer was the only fruit of his first attendance at court.
The ambition to do great things in the world of affairs is not easily given up and for the next eighteen months Sidney served the nation where he could. He accompanied his father to Ireland and generally approved of his country’s barbarous behaviour in that wretched land. He had a sympathy for the poor ‘who may groan, for their cry cannot be heard’, but in a Discourse on Ireland he made the characteristic English claim that lenience was no use in Ireland because the people hated their conquerors and were papists besides. In February 1577 he found more congenial employment when he was sent on a formal embassy to the Emperor Rudolph, and to the Counts Palatine, Lewis and Casimir, condoling all these men on recent family losses. He went with his friends Fulke Greville and Edward Dyer, and he proved once again his high European reputation. He captivated in turn three most dissimilar men. In Louvain he met the Catholic Don Juan of Austria, the victor of Lepanto, and the onlookers were astonished, said Greville, ‘to see what ingenuous tribute that brave and high-minded Prince’ paid Sidney. In Prague he had long talks with another earnest Catholic, the Jesuit Edmund Campion, later captured and executed in England. And on the way back, at the Queen’s command he turned aside to see William the Silent, the most resolute Protestant leader in Europe. William saw in Sidney a champion of the revolt against Spain, and offered his sister in marriage; but Elizabeth did not intend to make Sidney an instrument of destiny and forbade the match. Leicester and Walsingham, the leaders of the aggressive faction, were pleased with the embassy. ‘The honourable opinion he hath left behind him with all the Princes with whom he had to negotiate’, wrote Walsingham, ‘hath left a most sweet savour and grateful remembrance of his name in those parts.’ This young man had become a sharp tool for their purpose.
And Sidney was theirs to use. His Protestant sympathy was not in doubt. He had travelled up and down Europe and was admired by all who knew him. He was beginning to show powers of persuasion, able to put a blunt argument in elegant forms. He was bound to Leicester by ties of blood, and cut off from peaceful Burghley through dislike for the Earl of Oxford, Burghley’s son-in-law, who had insulted Sidney on the tennis court. He was the upright, outspoken innocent ready to be employed by the wiles of politicians. When Leicester needed a forceful argument against the proposed match between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, he came to Sidney who willingly complied.
The declaration he sent to the Queen was very bold indeed. He spoke of Anjou in most contemptuous terms as the ‘son of that Jezebel of our age’1 and a party to the St Bartholomew Massacre. He warned that Englishmen ‘will be galled, if not alienated, when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman and a Papist’. He showed Elizabeth the duty of a Protestant sovereign. To send such a document was hazardous; the sturdy nationalist John Stubbs, who had written against the marriage in a pamphlet, had his right hand chopped off for his temerity. Sidney escaped punishment because of his birth and position, and because the Queen herself had no intention of marrying. But the presumption, even though the advice was good, was too great fo
r any Tudor to bear. Sidney could now expect no advancement to great office.
The act that was the ruin of the politician was the making of the poet. In the ideal courtier all graces and talents were bound up. He was expected to have skill in diplomacy, administration, arms and arts. Earlier Tudor courts had been served by Wyatt, Sackville, Surrey, labouring for the commonwealth of the realm and the commonwealth of letters with equal distinction. At the court, more than anywhere else, there was the learning, wealth, leisure and interest to make the arts flourish under the encouragement of sympathetic sovereigns. Manuals on arms were written by courtiers, but so too were manuals on poetry; George Puttenham wrote his Art of English Poesy (1589) for ‘young gentlemen or idle courtiers’ and his intention was ‘to make a rude rimer, a learned and a courtly poet’. But the noble ideal of service to the two realms no longer applied in Elizabeth’s reign. The gifted amateur was excluded from government, as Sidney discovered. The English courtier, without responsibility, became an affected butterfly; Languet found the life of the English court effeminate and artificial.
Sidney agreed with his moral tutor. The mark of his mind, wrote Greville, was ‘lovely and familiar gravity as carried grace and reverence above greater years’, and such a nature, denied a place in government, could not be content with the parcel of idle, decadent loiterers about the court. He retired from court and gave himself up to the second part of his courtly endowment, the service of English letters.
In 1577 Philip’s sister Mary had married the Earl of Pembroke whose house was at Wilton near Salisbury. The house was comfortable, the countryside lovely, the company congenial; Sidney was happy to be there when he could, and he and his friends were always welcome. When he retired from court at the beginning of 1580 he went to Wilton where the pleasures of enquiry among a company of friends awaited him. He considered, wrote Dr Moffett, the doctor at Wilton, ‘that day most propitious to him upon which he might withdraw for a time from the noisy squabbles at court’ and ‘might read and dispute with a few university men, in some place where he was made welcome’. Chief among the young disputants—Sidney was in his mid-twenties and his friends not much older—were Fulke Greville, his companion from childhood, Sir Edward Dyer, who had travelled with him to the Emperor Rudolph, and Edmund Spenser, an aspiring courtier whom he had met in 1578 at Leicester’s house in London. All these young men were devoted followers of Renaissance learning, all were jealous for the dignity of English writing, and all were budding authors. The meetings of this little group were begun in London and continued at Wilton, and when they were apart their common ideals and extensive arguments were carried on in many a letter.
Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 21