The one thing most people know about the life of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) was almost certainly invented by the man who first told the story, Sidney’s lifelong friend and biographer Fulke Greville. Wounded in the Battle of Zutphen, and “being thirsty with excess of bleeding,” Sidney called for a drink:  

But 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.”

Greville refurbished a story Plutarch told about Alexander the Great. The Sidney myth began early, as Alan Stewart reminds us at the outset of this new biography. For centuries Sidney was an exemplar of the Renaissance polymath and prodigy, the finest flower of Elizabethan chivalry. As so often, it was left to T. S. Eliot, in “A Cooking Egg,” to supply the irony:

I shall not want Honour in Heaven,

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus

And other heroes of that kidney.

Eliot is typically obliquely subversive. Neither Coriolanus nor Sidney were straightforward “heroes.” Sidney’s bravery failed to prevent the Spanish from taking Zutphen. This may, paradoxically, account for his fame: the English admire a hero, but they adore a heroic failure.

It has been ten years since the last major biography of Sidney, Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (1991). The different emphases of the books are indicated by their titles. Stewart is deeply interested in Sidney’s diplomatic and political career, which he sets in its English and European context with a wealth—indeed, an excess—of circumstantial detail. He does not add much to Duncan-Jones in this area, beyond a few newly discovered documents. His priorities are indicated by the quiet satisfaction with which he informs us that we can now establish the exact route taken by Sidney to Heidelberg in 1572. Duncan-Jones devoted much space to Sidney’s principal literary works, the Apology for Poetry, the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, and the prose romance Arcadia, all written between 1580 and 1584. She used them, frequently and effectively, to illuminate Sidney’s life, as well as discussing them in their own right. Stewart, by contrast, offers four glancing allusions to the Apology, just over three pages on Astrophil, and about twelve on Arcadia. Yet if Sidney is a notable figure today, it is above all because of his works, not his life.

That life had an auspicious start. Both his parents were prominent in the Queen’s service. Well-educated themselves, they employed the best private tutors before sending him, aged ten, to school at Shrewsbury, a town under his father’s jurisdiction as Lord President of the Marches (the Welsh borders) and a Protestant stronghold in a still predominantly Catholic region. Protestantism was his inheritance: his mother had been sister-in-law to Lady Jane Grey, who for nine brief days, until her execution, was Queen of England after the death of Edward VI. The family had gone into eclipse during the reign of Queen Mary. Like his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney was destined to be a champion of the Protestant cause. That was partly their undoing, since they served a queen who detested religious extremism and was quite prepared to sacrifice theological conviction to political expediency if need arose.

After Shrewsbury, Sidney, aged fourteen, attended another Protestant institution, Christ Church, Oxford. Few traces of his time there survive. Leaving without a degree, he embarked on a three-year peregrination, partly as a diplomat, partly as a student, which took him, first to Paris—where he witnessed the massacre of Huguenot Protestants in 1572—and then to Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. Everywhere he made contact with leading Protestants, many of whom still hoped for a pan-European alliance, if only Elizabeth would make the right marriage. His most important personal acquaintance was the Dutch humanist Hubert Languet, who effectively completed Sidney’s education and with whom he exchanged a celebrated Latin correspondence. Languet was chief among a number of older men who acted as mentors to Sidney; he would alternately idolize and grow weary of them, for this preux chevalier was famously moody and bad-tempered, threatening to “thrust [his] dagger” into a servant he suspected of reading his private correspondence and challenging the Earl of Oxford to a duel when the earl called him a “puppy” in a public quarrel.

In 1577, after a period of aimless attendance at court, Sidney was sent to Germany on a mission of condolence following the deaths, in quick succession, of two leading Protestants, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Elector Palatine. He had the heavy responsibility of assessing the position, and trying to consolidate the future, of the Protestant cause at a time of sudden fragility. His impressive intellect and personal qualities won his hosts over; the queen was satisfied and began drafting a treaty with the Protestant powers in Germany. Yet she had also heard whispers of discontent about the sudden advancement of the Sidney family and insinuations that they might combine with foreign rulers against her. Sir Henry Sidney was recalled from Ireland, where he had been the queen’s deputy. His son played no further part in the negotiations for the treaty, which was abandoned.

In 1579, Sidney made a major blunder. In a characteristic about-turn, Elizabeth was negotiating a marriage with the Catholic Duke of Anjou, whom she invited to England. This enraged the Sidney circle. Two events then occurred, the order of which is unclear: Sidney’s row with Oxford, who, as a Catholic, supported the Anjou marriage, and his addressing an open letter to Elizabeth arguing against it. He was not the only courtier to do so, and the letter was tactfully worded, urging the queen not to obscure the glories of a reign which had stemmed from her governing alone. Languet feared that his protégé had overstepped the mark. Although no immediate reprisals occurred, and Elizabeth, having publicly agreed to marry Anjou, promptly reneged on the promise, the Oxford affair was more serious. The Privy Council forbade the duel; Elizabeth summoned Sidney. In her most stinging manner, she reminded him, according to Greville, of “the difference in degree between earls, and gentlemen,” and of “the respect inferiors ought [owed] to their superiors.” Amazingly, he answered back, retorting that, although Oxford was “a great lord by birth, alliance, and grace; yet he was no lord over him.” Elizabeth cannot have found this haughtiness to her liking.

The rest of Sidney’s political career is quickly told. Frustrated by his lack of promotion, he foolishly attempted to embark with Drake for the New World in 1585 without having sought the Queen’s consent, using his position as Master of the Royal Ordnance to supply Drake secretly with weapons and ammunition, and bypassing his formidable father-in-law, Secretary of State Francis Walsingham. Drake, however, took fright at the risk of displeasing the queen, and tipped her off about Sidney’s intentions. She commanded his return, giving him as a sop the governorship of the Netherlands town of Flushing, a position that he had earlier sought in vain. It was in this capacity that he participated in the fatal battle at Zutphen. He died one month short of his thirty-second birthday.

Sidney was at no time a major player in Elizabethan politics. He was at best a useful tool, an over-earnest prig whose inflexible principles were convenient for exploitation by others with less tender consciences. His dream of a hardline Protestant ascendancy was unrealized, both at home (where Elizabeth was too artful to favor one party) and abroad (where the balance of power was constantly shifting). His successes are not political and practical, but literary and theoretical. Although his sonnets are outclassed by Shakespeare’s, the Apology for Poetry unites prodigious learning to a style at once sinewy and supple, airy and weighty. Its strictures on popular drama are too often quoted against him; had he lived to see Shakespeare, he might have changed his mind. The sustained comparison of philosophy and history, and the conclusion that poetry unites the virtues of both with the vices of neither, is a masterpiece of rhetoric. As for Arcadia, Eliot was not wholly fair in calling it “a monument of dullness.” It has to be skimmed, and the original version is far more readable than the revision; still, it is a remarkable fusion of political philosophy, picaresque adventure, chivalric romance, and tragicomedy, a brilliant worked example of the theory of the Apology. If we want to appreciate Sidney’s total achievement, Alan Stewart’s book will not do. To borrow Sidney’s distinction between the philosopher and the poet, his world is brazen, Katherine Duncan-Jones’s is golden.

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