Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (29 page)

The contemplative life was never the aim of Sidney’s courtly ideal; ‘for as Aristotle sayeth, it is not Gnosis, but Praxis must be the fruit’. The retirement to Wilton was but a pleasant episode in a life devoted to service. And for Sidney, service of the arts demanded that he become an active patron, a helper not only of the great poet Edmund Spenser, whom he guided to a post in Ireland, but also of modest scholars like William Temple, who became his secretary, and Abraham Fraunce, who was directed by
Sidney to study Ramus and Aristotle and who replied with an endearing dedication ‘to the right Worshipful his very good Mr and Patron, Mr P Sidney’. The correspondence with the learned men of the continent continued. His old mentor Languet died in 1581, but other famous scholars, French, Italian, German and Dutch, were anxious to share their thoughts with the Englishman. They were captivated by the qualities which Giordano Bruno perceived. ‘The poetry in the book’, he wrote in the dedication to his
De gli Eroici Furori
, ‘is under the criticism and protection of a poet; the philosophy is nakedly revealed to so clear an intellect as yours; and the heroic matters are directed to a heroic and noble mind, with which you have shown yourself to be endowed.’

Service to the arts and service to the State were but two kinds of action, different expressions of the whole man. By the spring of 1581 Sidney was back in London. He sat in Parliament and took his place on two committees for the suppression of papists and for the control of sedition against the crown. He attended once agan at court and indulged his love of ceremony at the royal entertainments. In April, at a show for the French ambassador, he appeared in ‘armour part blue and the rest gilt and engraven, with four spare horses having caparisons and furniture very rich and costly, as some of cloth of gold embroidered with pearl, and some embroidered with gold and silver feathers very richly and cunningly wrought’. He was attended by four pages, thirty gentlemen and four trumpeters. This extravagance, in a sense the natural outpouring of a generous mind, was extremly unwise, for Sidney was not rich; and all his life his striving towards a noble and grand ideal was checked by the crude realities of finance. His father, Sir Henry, had nearly ruined the family by his efforts on the Queen’s behalf in Ireland. Sidney had returned to court partly in an attempt to find employment, and therefore income. At this time he was reduced to some undignified shifts in his search for money. Elizabeth had promised to do something for him but, as usual, was slow in keeping her word. Sidney wrote several times to Hatton begging him to give the Queen a tactful reminder, or he would have to petition Elizabeth directly, for ‘need obeys no laws and forgets blushing’. At last Elizabeth, with what seems like cynical ingenuity, offered Sidney a sum taken from recusant fines and from the sale of forfeited Catholic goods. Sidney had scruples about accepting—‘I like not their persons and much worse their religions,
but I think my fortunes very hard that my reward must be built upon other men’s punishments’—nonetheless to his discredit he did accept and received £3,000. His poverty was also eased by the sprinkling of official positions that at last began to come his way. He was Steward to the Bishop of Winchester, joint Master of the Ordnance with his uncle Warwick, and in 1583 General of Horse. In the same year he was knighted so that he could represent John Casimir at the installation of the German prince as a Knight of the Garter. And in the same year again his financial problems were finally solved by marriage to the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. The Queen’s secretary agreed to pay the debts of his son-in-law to the extent of £1,500, and to lodge the young couple in his house at his expense. The acquisition of such a brilliant son-in-law was an expensive honour for Walsingham. When Sidney was killed three years later, Walsingham very honourably cleared up the huge debts left behind.

Perhaps it was the need for money that first turned Sidney’s eyes toward maritime exploration; for nearly every Elizabethan of rank at one time or another looked on England’s sea voyages as a means to riches. He had contributed £25 to Frobisher’s first journey in 1576, £50 to the second voyage and £67 10s. to the third. The money was all wasted, for Frobisher made no profit. But the search for wealth was not his only interest in exploration. Drake’s circumnavigation had caught his imagination, as it had that of all England; in 1580 he wrote to his brother Robert that the return of Drake was the only talk of the town. The success of Drake altered the balance of sea power in the Americas and Sidney, like his political tutors Leicester and Walsingham, was quick to see the favourable implications for England and for the Protestant alliance against Spain. Walsingham and Sidney were the chief promoters of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s plans for colonization, attracted especially by the proposal to encourage English Catholics to emigrate, thus ridding the country of their objectionable influence. Sidney purchased from Gilbert the rights to three million acres of land which he then assigned to the Catholic Sir George Peckham. These plans foundered and sank on 9th September 1583, when the
Squirrel
carried its bold captain Sir Humphrey Gilbert beneath the ocean.

The failure of Gilbert did not end Sidney’s interest in the New World. When Parliament met in November 1584, Sir Philip served
with Drake on the committee which confirmed the grant of lands in what became Virginia to Sir Walter Raleigh. With Drake, he also planned an expedition to the West Indies, which came to nothing, and then another expedition to join Ralph Lane in Virginia. Sidney and Fulke Greville were eager for the voyage. In August 1585 they arrived at Plymouth with high hopes and were received ‘with a great deal of outward pomp and compliment’. But the Queen’s permission had not been obtained. To Sidney’s great disappointment he was summoned back to London, and his discontent was only eased by the thought that at last Elizabeth had a task for him worthy of his powers: he was appointed Governor of Flushing.

For the last act in this short life Sir Philip Sydney returned to the Netherlands where some years before he had been acclaimed by William the Silent, and where his reputation for Protestant chivalry stood as high as anywhere in Europe. Sidney’s heart was entirely with the Dutch in the fight against their Spanish overlords, but the signs were ominous when he entered his new command. He took the oath at Flushing on 21st November 1585. ‘I find the people very glad of me’, he immediately wrote to his uncle Leicester, but ‘the garrison is far too weak to command by authority.’ Elizabeth in her usual way had failed to make proper provision for the garrison; the numbers were too few and two hundred of them were sick; they were ill paid, ill housed, ill fed, and the fortifications of the town were in disrepair. Sidney was forced to do what his father had done in Ireland—find his own money to finance the Queen’s campaign. He borrowed £300 at high rate of interest for the poor soldiers who were ‘scarce able to keep life with their entire pay’. This debt was one of many which his father-in-law inherited. Leicester was the aggresive voice that had persuaded the Queen to wage a limited war in the Low Countries, and he was given command of all the English forces. But matters did not improve when he arrived in the Netherlands. He was a poor general and Elizabeth distrusted his ambition; the suspicion of the Queen naturally undermined Leicester’s influence with the Dutch.

Some of the displeasure with Leicester fell also on the head of Sidney, his nephew, especially as Sir Philip was outspoken against the Queen’s meanness: ‘If the Queen pay not her soldiers’, he wrote, ‘she must lose her garrisons, there is no doubt thereof.’ The
fighting in the Netherlands, being in the cause of both religion and nationalism, was notoriously brutal and Sidney could find no honour in the exchange of atrocities. Long ago Languet had written to him of the ferocious madness in the Low Countries, and condemned those who looked for reputation in bloodshed. He begged Sidney to use his humanity ‘for the preservation and not the destruction of man’. Now that he was drawn into the terrible affair, with his usual high purpose he determined to look beyond the slaughter, the misery and Elizabeth’s mean calculations, to see the task as God’s holy work in the Protestant cause which could go on despite the Queen. ‘For methinks I see’, he wrote to Walsingham in March 1586, ‘the great work indeed in hand against the abusers of the world.’ And he continued: ‘I know there is a higher power that must uphold me or else I shall fall.’

He was trying to reconcile himself to the pain of being there, to the pain of seeing men die miserably neglected in a squalid war. He was anxious to bear his part in the fighting. When Leicester finally decided to face the Spanish at Zutphen, having spent the summer avoiding them, Sidney left his own troops safely at Deventer and joined Leicester. When the attack of the Spaniards came on 22nd September, Sydney with the same intrepidity went out without the thigh-pieces of his armour; for he had seen his colleague Sir William Pelham go out without his, and he would not take the advantage over an old man. One horse was shot under him. He mounted again and at the second charge a shot penetrated his unprotected thigh, smashing the bone. He was carried off bleeding profusely and called for a drink; then, in the famous scene made immortal by Greville’s account, ‘as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine”.’ For twenty-five days he endured, but mortification had set in; he died in his thirty-first year on 17th October 1586.

Before Sidney left England to take up his post in Flushing, he had written to the Queen asking her ‘legibly to read my heart in the course of my life, and though itself be but of a mean worth, yet to esteem it like a poor house well set’. England judged him in this sense. The funeral, which was long delayed while Walsingham
settled the complicated debts of the estate, took place on 16th February 1587 with solemn majesty and before a huge crowd. Seven hundred mourners followed the coffin and they could hardly pass through the streets to St Paul’s because of the press of the London populace. After the service in the black-hung cathedral, the body was buried by the choir while a double volley echoed in the churchyard. The respects, the lamentations, the memorials came from all over Europe, even from Philip of Spain who remembered that the younger Philip was his godson. The most affecting of the tributes very fittingly came from his friend and fellow-poet Edmund Spenser:

He grew up fast in goodness and in grace,

And doubly fair wox both in mind and face.

Which daily more and more he did augment,

With gentle usage, and demeanour mild;

That all men’s hearts with secret ravishment

He stole away, and wittingly beguiled.

At the distance of time, history judges him more severely. Gabriel Harvey declared that ‘his sovereign profession was arms’; but his experience of war was extremely limited and he had no success on the battlefield. He had the gallantry of a good soldier, but not the prudence of a good general. In the arts, though his achievements are important as the first of their kind in England, he was soon overtaken.
Astrophel and Stella
was certainly an extraordinary work, for though Wyatt and Surrey in the reign of Henry VIII had assimilated Italian forms and set the poetry of the English Renaissance on its way, Sidney had refined and disciplined their somewhat uncertain attempts. That Spenser and Shakespeare built grander edifices on the foundation he had laid is a part of his credit. But the
Arcadia
, with too much sentiment and too little characterization, has been taken as a mistake—a wrong direction—in English prose fiction. Milton called it ‘a vain and amatorious poem’. He wrote fine, musical songs and dignified translations of the Psalms; but Thomas Campion was soon to write better songs, and his Psalms would not displace those of the Authorized Version.

His contemporaries, however, could not look at him in this critical way. For them, Sidney was an extraordinary manifestation
of an Elizabethan ideal, greatness in action, putting virtue and talent disinterestedly to the benefit of the community. That was how his oldest and best friend Fulke Greville saw him. ‘The truth is’, he wrote, ‘his end was not writing, even while he wrote; nor his knowledge moulded for tables, or schools; but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great. In which architectural art he was such a Master, with so commanding and yet equal ways amongst men, that wheresoever he went he was beloved and obeyed.’ And this, it seems, was how Sidney saw himself. ‘I would rather be charged’, he once said, ‘with lack of wisdom than of patriotism.’ He was merely an instrument for the good of England, and to inspire goodness in her countrymen. Even Elizabeth, in his view, was only an agent in a great Protestant cause which would well continue without her. He wrote to Walsingham from Utrecht shortly before his death: ‘If her Majesty were the fountain I would fear, considering what I daily find, that we would wax dry but she is but a means whom God useth.’ Though from time to time, especially in letters to Languet, Sidney admitted self doubt, and though in his poems he sometimes put on the fashionable dress of melancholy, the whole of his life gave evidence of a great hope for humanity, and a confidence in the working out of God’s will.

Many regarded Sidney as the exemplar of an English gentleman, but even in his own time there were signs that his life was far out of touch with reality. Ideals must be paid for; Sidney’s were expensive ones, and he could not have pursued his grand design, in an inflationary age, without the support of his unlucky father-in-law who was left debts amounting to £6,000. His impatience with the intrigues and subtleties of government disqualified him from important office. The Queen grieved at his death but in his life showed him no favour. No man seemed to have more talent or a better preparation to serve the State. His father Sir Henry, as honest an official as the Tudors ever had, trained him well. His own brilliance and integrity were without question; his love of his country was profound. But no worthwhile employment came his way. Elizabeth, offended by his unyielding and impractical spirit, seemed deliberately cold to him. When the Earl of Oxford insulted him on the tennis court in front of the French envoy, Sidney challenged the nobleman to a duel. The Queen prevented
this, pointing out that it was not for a gentleman to challenge an earl; such a disregard for the nobility, she said, taught the peasants the spirit of revolt. It is one of the little ironies of history that Philip Sidney, the chevalier par excellence, was only knighted so that he could stand substitute for a German prince in the ceremony of the Garter.