PHILIP SIDNEY was born at Penshurst, in Kent, on the 29th of November,
1554. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, had married Mary, eldest daughter of
John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and Philip was the eldest of their
family of three sons and four daughters. Edmund Spenser and Walter
Raleigh were of like age with Philip Sidney, differing only by about a
year, and when Elizabeth became queen, on the 17th of November, 1558,
they were children of four or five years old.
In the year 1560 Sir Henry Sidney was made Lord President of Wales,
representing the Queen in Wales and the four adjacent western counties,
as a Lord Deputy represented her in Ireland. The official residence of
the Lord President was at Ludlow Castle, to which Philip Sidney went with
his family when a child of six. In the same year his father was
installed as a Knight of the Garter. When in his tenth year Philip
Sidney was sent from Ludlow to Shrewsbury Grammar School, where he
studied for three or four years, and had among his schoolfellows Fulke
Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, who remained until the end of Sidney’s
life one of his closest friends. When he himself was dying he directed
that he should be described upon his tomb as “Fulke Greville, servant to
Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip
Sidney.” Even Dr. Thomas Thornton, Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, under
whom Sidney was placed when he was entered to Christ Church in his
fourteenth year, at Midsummer, in 1568, had it afterwards recorded on his
tomb that he was “the tutor of Sir Philip Sidney.”
Sidney was in his eighteenth year in May, 1572, when he left the
University to continue his training for the service of the state, by
travel on the Continent. Licensed to travel with horses for himself and
three servants, Philip Sidney left London in the train of the Earl of
Lincoln, who was going out as ambassador to Charles IX., in Paris. He
was in Paris on the 24th of August in that year, which was the day of the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was sheltered from the dangers of that
day in the house of the English Ambassador, Sir Francis Walsingham, whose
daughter Fanny Sidney married twelve years afterwards.
From Paris Sidney travelled on by way of Heidelberg to Frankfort, where
he lodged at a printer’s, and found a warm friend in Hubert Languet,
whose letters to him have been published. Sidney was eighteen and
Languet fifty-five, a French Huguenot, learned and zealous for the
Protestant cause, who had been Professor of Civil Law in Padua, and who
was acting as secret minister for the Elector of Saxony when he first
knew Sidney, and saw in him a future statesman whose character and genius
would give him weight in the counsels of England, and make him a main
hope of the Protestant cause in Europe. Sidney travelled on with Hubert
Languet from Frankfort to Vienna, visited Hungary, then passed to Italy,
making for eight weeks Venice his head-quarters, and then giving six
weeks to Padua. He returned through Germany to England, and was in
attendance it the Court of Queen Elizabeth in July, 1575. Next month his
father was sent to Ireland as Lord Deputy, and Sidney lived in London
with his mother.
At this time the opposition of the Mayor and Corporation of the City of
London to the acting of plays by servants of Sidney’s uncle, the Earl of
Leicester, who had obtained a patent for them, obliged the actors to
cease from hiring rooms or inn yards in the City, and build themselves a
house of their own a little way outside one of the City gates, and wholly
outside the Lord Mayor’s jurisdiction. Thus the first theatre came to be
built in England in the year 1576. Shakespeare was then but twelve years
old, and it was ten years later that he came to London.
In February, 1577, Philip Sidney, not yet twenty-three years old, was
sent on a formal embassy of congratulation to Rudolph II. upon his
becoming Emperor of Germany, but under the duties of the formal embassy
was the charge of watching for opportunities of helping forward a
Protestant League among the princes of Germany. On his way home through
the Netherlands he was to convey Queen Elizabeth’s congratulations to
William of Orange on the birth of his first child, and what impression he
made upon that leader of men is shown by a message William sent
afterwards through Fulke Greville to Queen Elizabeth. He said “that if
he could judge, her Majesty had one of the ripest and greatest
counsellors of State in Philip Sidney that then lived in Europe; to the
trial of which he was pleased to leave his own credit engaged until her
Majesty was pleased to employ this gentleman, either amongst her friends
or enemies.”
Sidney returned from his embassy in June, 1577. At the time of his
departure, in the preceding February, his sister Mary, then twenty years
old, had become the third wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and
her new home as Countess of Pembroke was in the great house at Wilton,
about three miles from Salisbury. She had a measure of her brother’s
genius, and was of like noble strain. Spenser described her as
“The gentlest shepherdess that lives this day,
And most resembling, both in shape and spright,
Her brother dear.”
Ben Jonson, long after her brother had passed from earth, wrote upon her
death the well-known epitaph:—
“Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Learn’d, and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.”
Sidney’s sister became Pembroke’s mother in 1580, while her brother
Philip was staying with her at Wilton. He had early in the year written
a long argument to the Queen against the project of her marriage with the
Duke of Anjou, which she then found it politic to seem to favour. She
liked Sidney well, but resented, or appeared to resent, his intrusion of
advice; he also was discontented with what seemed to be her policy, and
he withdrew from Court for a time. That time of seclusion, after the end
of March, 1580, he spent with his sister at Wilton. They versified
psalms together; and he began to write for her amusement when she had her
baby first upon her hands, his romance of “Arcadia.” It was never
finished. Much was written at Wilton in the summer of 1580, the rest in
1581, written, as he said in a letter to her, “only for you, only to you
. . . for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, triflingly handled.
Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of
paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as
fast as they were done.” He never meant that it should be published;
indeed, when dying he asked that it should be destroyed; but it belonged
to a sister who prized the lightest word of his, and after his death it
was published in 1590 as “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.”
The book reprinted in this volume was written in 1581, while sheets of
the “Arcadia” were still being sent to Wilton. But it differs wholly in
style from the “Arcadia.” Sidney’s “Arcadia” has literary interest as
the first important example of the union of pastoral with heroic romance,
out of which came presently, in France, a distinct school of fiction.
But the genius of its author was at play, it followed designedly the
fashions of the hour in verse and prose, which tended to extravagance of
ingenuity. The “Defence of Poesy” has higher interest as the first
important piece of literary criticism in our literature. Here Sidney was
in earnest. His style is wholly free from the euphuistic extravagance in
which readers of his time delighted: it is clear, direct, and manly; not
the less, but the more, thoughtful and refined for its unaffected
simplicity. As criticism it is of the true sort; not captious or formal,
still less engaged, as nearly all bad criticism is, more or less, with
indirect suggestion of the critic himself as the one owl in a world of
mice. Philip Sidney’s care is towards the end of good literature. He
looks for highest aims, and finds them in true work, and hears God’s
angel in the poet’s song.
The writing of this piece was probably suggested to him by the fact that
an earnest young student, Stephen Gosson, who came from his university
about the time when the first theatres were built, and wrote plays, was
turned by the bias of his mind into agreement with the Puritan attacks
made by the pulpit on the stage (arising chiefly from the fact that plays
were then acted on Sundays), and in 1579 transferred his pen from service
of the players to attack on them, in a piece which he called “The School
of Abuse, containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players,
Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the
Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their
Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, Natural Reason, and Common Experience: a
Discourse as pleasant for Gentlemen that favour Learning as profitable
for all that will follow Virtue.” This Discourse Gosson dedicated “To
the right noble Gentleman, Master Philip Sidney, Esquire.” Sidney
himself wrote verse, he was companion with the poets, and counted Edmund
Spenser among his friends. Gosson’s pamphlet was only one expression of
the narrow form of Puritan opinion that had been misled into attacks on
poetry and music as feeders of idle appetite that withdrew men from the
life of duty. To show the fallacy in such opinion, Philip Sidney wrote
in 1581 this piece, which was first printed in 1595, nine years after his
death, as a separate publication, entitled “An Apologie for Poetrie.”
Three years afterwards it was added, with other pieces, to the third
edition of his “Arcadia,” and then entitled “The Defence of Poesie.” In
sixteen subsequent editions it continued to appear as “The Defence of
Poesie.” The same title was used in the separate editions of 1752 and
1810. Professor Edward Arber re-issued in 1869 the text of the first
edition of 1595, and restored the original title, which probably was that
given to the piece by its author. One name is as good as the other, but
as the word “apology” has somewhat changed its sense in current English,
it may be well to go on calling the work “The Defence of Poesie.”
In 1583 Sidney was knighted, and soon afterwards in the same year he
married Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. Sonnets written by
him according to old fashion, and addressed to a lady in accordance with
a form of courtesy that in the same old fashion had always been held to
exclude personal suit—personal suit was private, and not public—have led
to grave misapprehension among some critics. They supposed that he
desired marriage with Penelope Devereux, who was forced by her family in
1580—then eighteen years old—into a hateful marriage with Lord Rich. It
may be enough to say that if Philip Sidney had desired her for his wife,
he had only to ask for her and have her. Her father, when dying, had
desired—as any father might—that his daughter might become the wife of
Philip Sidney. But this is not the place for a discussion of Astrophel
and Stella sonnets.
In 1585 Sidney was planning to join Drake it sea in attack on Spain in
the West Indies. He was stayed by the Queen. But when Elizabeth
declared war on behalf of the Reformed Faith, and sent Leicester with an
expedition to the Netherlands, Sir Philip Sidney went out, in November,
1585, as Governor of Flushing. His wife joined him there. He fretted at
inaction, and made the value of his counsels so distinct that his uncle
Leicester said after his death that he began by “despising his youth for
a counsellor, not without bearing a hand over him as a forward young man.
Notwithstanding, in a short time he saw the sun so risen above his
horizon that both he and all his stars were glad to fetch light from
him.” In May, 1586, Sir Philip Sidney received news of the death of his
father. In August his mother died. In September he joined in the
investment of Zutphen. On the 22nd of September his thigh-bone was
shattered by a musket ball from the trenches. His horse took fright and
galloped back, but the wounded man held to his seat. He was then carried
to his uncle, asked for water, and when it was given, saw a dying soldier
carried past, who eyed it greedily. At once he gave the water to the
soldier, saying, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Sidney lived
on, patient in suffering, until the 17th of October. When he was
speechless before death, one who stood by asked Philip Sidney for a sign
of his continued trust in God. He folded his hands as in prayer over his
breast, and so they were become fixed and chill, when the watchers placed
them by his side; and in a few minutes the stainless representative of
the young manhood of Elizabethan England passed away.