Sidney, Sir Philip

Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), born at Penshurst Place, eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney (who was thrice lord deputy governor of Ireland). Between 1572 and 1575 he travelled in France, where he witnessed the massacre of St Bartholomew's day in Paris, and in Germany, Austria, and Italy. After his return to England, Sidney did not achieve any official post which matched his ambitions until his appointment as governor of Flushing in 1585. His knighthood was awarded for reasons of court protocol in 1582.

Years of comparative idleness enabled him to write and revise the Arcadia, and to complete the Defence of Poetry, The Lady of May, and Astrophel and Stella. The first Arcadia, and probably other works, were composed while he was staying with his younger sister Mary, countess of Pembroke, at Wilton. We do not know his exact relations with Penelope Devereux (later Rich), whose father's dying wish had been that she should marry Philip Sidney. Though this did not happen (Philip in 1583 marrying Frances, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham), verbal and heraldic references leave no room for doubt that she was the ‘Stella’ of Sidney's sonnet sequence. During these years Sidney also became a notable literary patron, receiving dedications from a variety of authors, the best known being that of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender in 1579. Sidney was interested in experimenting with classical metres in English, but it is unlikely that his discussion of this and other matters with Greville, Dyer, and Spenser (the ‘Areopagus’) amounted to anything so formal as an academy or learned society. The last year of his life was spent in the Netherlands, and on 22 Sept. 1586 he led an attack on a Spanish convoy bringing supplies to the fortified city of Zutphen; he died as a result of musket shot in his thigh. Sidney was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, and the almost immediate appearance of volumes of Latin elegies from Oxford, Cambridge, and the Continent testified to the great political and literary promise he had shown. Among many English elegies on him the best known, Spenser's ‘Astrophel’, was not printed until 1595, among his Complaints.

None of Sidney's works were published during his lifetime, but Greville and the countess of Pembroke seem to have taken pains to preserve the texts they thought best. Editions of the Arcadia from 1598 onwards included all the literary works except his version of the Psalms. These were completed posthumously by his sister, and not printed until 1823.