A Journey Through Tudor England (13 page)

‘Built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honourable representing of a firm stateliness; handsome without curiosity and homely without loathsomeness.’

‘B
uilt of fair and strong stone,’ as Sir Philip Sidney described it, Penshurst Place is a gorgeous medieval and Tudor manor house, set in beautiful gardens. Early in the sixteenth century, it belonged to Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham; he entertained Henry VIII here at exorbitant expense (spending £2,500 or the equivalent of £1.2 million) in 1519. Today, Penshurst Place is chiefly remembered as the home of the Sidney family, whose most famous representative, Sir Philip Sidney, was fêted as the perfect courtier-soldier-poet of his day, owing in part to his early death at the age of thirty-one.

After Buckingham’s untimely demise in 1521 [see T
HORNBURY
C
ASTLE
], Penshurst remained in the possession of the Crown until Edward VI bequeathed it to Sir William Sidney in 1552, who died two years later and passed it to his son, Sir Henry Sidney. Sir Henry was connected to the highest echelons of Tudor society: he had
been educated with the boy-king, Edward, and married Mary, daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. When Northumberland engineered the marriage of his son, Guildford, to Lady Jane Grey and acclaimed her as Queen in 1553 [see G
UILDHALL
], the Sidneys were lucky to escape the aftermath unscathed.

With the twists and turns of Tudor history, the Dudley connection became one of honour when Queen Elizabeth I fell in love with Mary’s brother, Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester. There are portraits of them all here: Sir Henry and Mary Sidney (the former by Hans Eworth); Leicester in older age; Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick; Edward VI; and Elizabeth in the Long Gallery. Meanwhile, Mary had given birth at Penshurst in 1554 to the first of the Sidneys’ seven children, Philip, named after his godfather, the Catholic-Spanish King of England. The young Philip would become famed at the Elizabethan court, but only really after his death.

At the heart of the house in which Philip spent his childhood is the Barons’ Hall, a marvellous room with a central octagonal hearth and a sixty-foot roof timbered with chestnut beams, constructed by Sir John de Pulteney in 1341. The hall’s wooden eavesdroppers (the word comes from the sense that the eaves might drop down to listen in) are life-size satirical peasant figures and would surely have caught the child’s eye as he sat at the two long oak refectory tables that have been here since the fifteenth century and are the only surviving examples of their kind. The Minstrels’ Gallery was then newly added and the expensive and exquisite tapestries from Tournai and Brussels were still in their first flush of colour.

Before he was six years old, Philip suffered a terrible bout of smallpox, which an early biographer described as having ‘laid waste, as with little mines, [to] the excellence and fashion of his beauty’. His mother, Mary, was also terribly scarred by the disease while nursing Elizabeth I through it in 1562.

As Lord President of the Council of the Welsh Marches, effectively the ruler or ‘pro-rex’ of Wales, Sir Henry Sidney and his family lived for a time at Ludlow Castle, though retained Penshurst as their main home. Philip was schooled at Shrewsbury School, with his future friend and biographer Fulke Greville, before going to Christ Church, Oxford.

Aged just eighteen years, Philip was given an important duty in the realm of international diplomacy. In 1572, Elizabeth I dispatched him to accompany Edward Fiennes de Clinton to Paris to sign the Treaty of Blois, which promised that neither England nor France would aid their mutual enemy, Spain. This meant that Philip was in Paris for the August wedding of King Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV of France) to Marguerite de Valois, and for the terrible massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day that followed it. Philip then spent three years on an extended proto-Grand Tour of Europe, during which he met the great and good of European society and saw the European Renaissance — painters like Titian and Tintoretto — first hand.

Philip returned to England in May 1575, glittering with cosmopolitan glamour, and possibly a little full of himself, given his widespread international recognition as the son of the ruler of Wales and nephew and heir to the Queen’s paramour, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Quite an adventure for a young man of just twenty-one. The Tudor loggia (gallery of columns) built by Sir Henry at Penshurst, which can be seen from the window of the Tapestry Room, is one of the imports from Philip’s travels in Italy. Philip joined the Queen on progress that year and witnessed Leicester’s spectacular entertainments to win her hand [see K
ENILWORTH
C
ASTLE
].

In the Solar Room and Long Gallery at Penshurst, there are portraits of Philip, showing him at around the time of his return, with his strawberry-blond hair and effete moustache, dressed in a
huge (though fashionable) ruff. English antiquary John Aubrey described him as ‘extremely beautiful’. In these portraits and the one at the National Portrait Gallery, there is no sign of smallpox devastation. There is also a fascinating picture in the Solar Room from 1581 of Elizabeth dancing
la volta
with Leicester (remember Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes in the film
Elizabeth?
), in which Philip can be seen pointing out to his uncle that the Duc d’Alençon, one of the men courting Elizabeth, has his arm around another lady.

Although Aubrey added to his description that Philip looked ‘not masculine enough’, in fact, part of the trouble during his years as a courtier was that he was a little too macho and too easily angered. At court, he quarrelled with the earls of Ormond and Oxford, and was rebuked by Elizabeth for acting with contempt to his social superiors. Had his years of entertaining kings and dukes around Europe given him a restless haughtiness when dealing with the earls of England? This may have been a reason why, along with his failure to advance the foreign interests of the Queen, he remained without an official post or knighthood until 1583. Though he was famed abroad, he was a courtier without honour in his own country.

In 1579, Philip decided to pick up his quill and write what he dubbed his ‘toyfull booke’, which he called
Arcadia
. It was an epic romance in five books with ancillary songs and poems, which he had started some years earlier. In 1579, he retired to his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke’s home at Wilton, to complete it. A year later, perhaps in response to the marriage of Penelope Devereux, once earmarked by Sir Henry as a suitable match for his son, Philip composed
Astrophil and Stella
, a sequence of 108 sonnets and eleven songs. It tells the story of the unhappy love of Astrophil (‘star-lover’) for the married Stella (‘star’). The language of Tudor courtship is replete with images of the heavens, of stars, moons and suns.

Underneath his untroubled surface, however, Philip began to despair for lack of an official position and money. What he needed to do was wed a wealthy woman and, in September 1583, he chose Frances, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. While the marriage partly alleviated his financial woes, Philip was not destined for a settled domestic life. Wanderlust struck again after a mission to Europe in 1584 had to be abandoned. This time, Philip dreamed of making a fortune in the New World. He invested in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to North America and, in return, was granted three million acres of undiscovered lands there (one can only imagine the value of such a landholding today). He also sought to join Sir Francis Drake’s voyage to the West Indies in September 1585. But his monarch had different designs for him: he was ordered to go to the Low Countries to fight with Leicester, in what turned out to be a fairly fruitless battle, against the Spanish.

On 22 September 1586, at the Battle of Zutphen, Philip was wounded. He was not wearing thigh armour and a musket ball struck him just above his left knee, shattering the bone. His friend, Greville, would later tell the story of how, injured on the battlefield, Philip declined a drink of water and offered it instead to a wounded common soldier. Twenty-five days later, he died of gangrene in the wound. His father-in-law, Walsingham, arranged a splendid state funeral for him — he was the last commoner to have a state funeral until Nelson in 1806. His funerary helm (a special helmet marking his reputation as a warrior) remains at Penshurst. With accolades to his heroism, youth and courtly poetry abounding, in death he managed to achieve the status he had not been accorded in life. We can perhaps think of Sidney as a forerunner of the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, who also travelled, lived impecuniously, dreamed large and died untimely deaths.

Other Tudor treasures to see: look out for the portraits of Philip’s brother, Robert, first Earl of Leicester (after Leicester’s death) and his wife, Barbara Gamage; a black sixteenth-century lute by Padova Vienderville; a sixteenth-century harpsichord, gilded in rococo style; a cast-lead bust of the head of Elizabeth I from the effigy on her tomb in Westminster Abbey (from 1605); an alleged fragment of Sir Philip Sidney’s shaving mirror; and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s sword of state.