He was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and President
of Wales, a person of great parts, and of no mean grace with the Queen;
his mother was sister to my Lord of Leicester, from whence we may
conjecture how the father stood up in the sphere of honour and
employments, so that his descent was apparently noble on both sides; and
for his education, it was such as travel and the University could afford
none better, and his tutors infuse; for, after an incredible proficiency
in all the spheres of learning, he left the academical for that of the
Court, whither he came by his uncle’s invitation, famed after by noble
reports of his accomplishments, which, together with the state of his
person, framed by a natural propensity to arms, soon attracted the good
opinions of all men, and was so highly praised in the esteem of the
Queen, that she thought the Court deficient without him; and whereas,
through the fame of his desert, he was in election for the kingdom of
Pole, {138} she refused to further his preferment, it was not out of
emulation of advancement, but out of fear to lose the jewel of her time.
He married the daughter and sole heir of Sir Frances Walsingham, the
Secretary of State, a lady destined to the bed of honour, who, after his
deplorable death at Zutphen, in the Low Countries, where he was at the
time of his uncle Leicester’s being there, was remarried to the Lord of
Essex, and, since his death, to my Lord of St. Albans, all persons of the
sword, and otherwise of great honour and virtue.
They have a very quaint conceit of him, that Mars and Mercury fell at
variance whose servant he should be; and there is an epigrammatist that
saith that Art and Nature had spent their excellences in his fashioning,
and, fearing they could not end what they had begun, they bestowed him up
for time, and Nature stood mute and amazed to behold her own mark; but
these are the particulars of poets.
Certain it is he was a noble and matchless gentleman, and it may be said
justly of him, without these hyperboles of faction, as it was of Cato
Uticensis, that he seemed to be born only to that which he went about,
_vir satilis ingenii_, as Plutarch saith it; but to speak more of him
were to make them less.