THE MAKING OF THE PEMBROKE ARCADIA 1570–1586
No earl of Pembroke would ever again enjoy the untrammeled authority wielded by the great founder of the dynasty. On his death in 1570, the long rearguard action began. How would the Pembrokes maintain their standing as powers in the land when the currents of authority were running so consistently against them? How would the Pembrokes survive the Tudor state? From the beginning it seemed clear that the first earl’s successor, his son Henry, the second earl, was too weak for the task. He was by inheritance the richest man in England, but his qualities as a man scarcely matched the role his genes had given him.
He had been used by his father as a tool in the advancement of the family. First, in 1553, as part of the great plot to disinherit Mary Tudor and to install Lady Jane Grey on the throne. He had been married to Lady Jane’s sister, Catherine, and then, just as rapidly unmarried from her, on the grounds that the marriage had never been consummated. Henry, as an unattractively loyal son, had written cruelly to the poor girl, telling her without any kindness that she had no claim on him. Next, he had been married to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter, Katherine Talbot, for her money. Quite smoothly, the willow principle at work, the old man had steered his son around the labyrinth of aristocratic lands and royal influence.
Katherine Talbot died young, and for his third wife, Henry Herbert married the most brilliant woman of her generation. Mary Sidney was so sparkling a catch that according to Aubrey’s salacious and voyeuristic gossip, Henry’s father, the old trimmer himself, thought she was bound to cheat on him. “The subtile old Earle did see that his faire and witty daughter-in-lawe would horne his sonne, and told him so, and advised him to keepe her in the Countrey and not to let her frequent the Court.” As often with Aubrey’s tales, this one is impossible. The old earl had been dead seven years by the time Henry married Mary Sidney, but there is a poetic and emotional truth to the tale that goes beyond the simple facts. Henry’s personality disappears under his wife’s intense glamour. It is she, in alliance with her brilliant and difficult brother, Sir Philip Sidney, who takes up the long quarrel with the crown. Henry shrinks and shrivels in their shadow.
Under the new regime, Wilton turns from being the creation of a canny and potent dynasty maker to the setting and frame for the sparklingly jewel-like presence of Elizabethan England’s greatest woman patron and poet. Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, drew around her a dazzlingly literate court. She became the dedicatee, sponsor, completer, and publisher of the greatest prose romance of the age, a distinguished translator of the Psalms, the author of political tragedies, the champion of Spenser, the friend of Shakespeare, and the sustainer of a newly empowered Arcadian vision.
Her father, Sir Henry Sidney, had been an impoverished but distinguished servant of the state. Brought up as a classmate of Edward VI, he had held the boy king in his arms as he died. Henry Sidney had been unable to accept a peerage because he did not have the income to support the condition, but he was a member of that rising upper-middle band of intelligent, vividly Protestant Englishmen who became the vertebrae of the Tudor state. On her mother’s side, Mary Sidney was connected, dangerously, to greatness. Her mother’s father was John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland who had attempted with Pembroke to make Lady Jane Grey queen of England, whom the 1st Earl of Pembroke had deserted at the crucial moment, and who, together with his son Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey, had been executed by Mary Tudor. Mary Sidney’s uncles, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and their sister, Katherine, Countess of Huntingdon, had been disgraced, imprisoned, and impoverished, but had survived to flower again in the sunshine of Elizabeth’s reign. This Dudley inheritance—attuned to power, close to the throne, increasingly attached to the fervent cause of active and aggressive Protestantism both in England and in Europe, thinking of themselves as the core of that interest in England—was Mary Sidney’s inheritance. Using the enormous wealth of the Pembrokes, she would make Wilton the heart of that other England, a place dedicated to preserving the country against the erosions of an increasingly powerful court and crown. It was under Mary Sidney’s influence that Wilton became the heartland of the English Arcadia.
Her co-champion and co-promoter of the cause was the man who gave this enterprise its name, her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, the author of Arcadia, the greatest prose romance of Elizabethan England, which was written largely at Wilton and dedicated to his sister, the woman who was in effect its queen, or as the poet Gabriel Harvey would call her,
the dearest sister of the dearest brother, the sweetest daughter of the sweetest Muses, the brightest Diamant of the richest Eloquence, the resplendentest mirrour of Feminine valour; the Gentlewooman of Curtesie, the Lady of Vertue, the Countesse of Excellency, and the Madame of immortall Honour.
Over two generations in this family, the women whom the bluff, difficult, and choleric Herbert men married were the ones who brought the civilization of Renaissance England into the rooms and garden walks at Wilton. Anne Parr had brought humanist grace to William Herbert’s drive. Mary Sidney brought Renaissance glitter to Henry’s conformity. She had been educated to the highest level: fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, with a smattering of Greek and Hebrew. The medieval discipline of rhetoric—figures of speech, the understanding of decorum, the different forms of language suitable to different purposes and different occasions—complemented theology and a reading of the classics. She could sing and play the lute and was famous for the lace she wove.
She was more than twenty years younger than her husband, and it was no love match. Mary had been at court two years, since 1575, a handmaiden to the queen, when her uncle Leicester had arranged her marriage to the thirty-nine-year-old Henry in 1577. The dowry the Pembrokes required was an enormous £3,000—Mary’s father had to borrow a large chunk of it from Leicester himself.
As for Henry Pembroke, he seems, if anything, a little overawed by the massive, remembered presence of his father. As a young man, he had behaved as required, welcoming as a thirteen-year-old the Spanish envoys to Wilton with an elegance that was noticed at court, acting with the propriety his bullying father would have insisted on, but doing little more in the end than maintaining the role he inherited. No very distinguished image of him survives; nothing compared with his father’s, mother’s, wife’s, sons’, or grandsons’ portraits. In the one picture that survives at Wilton, the man himself seems slightly shrunken inside his clothes. He wears the ribbon of the Garter; he has a little sword; his sleeves are fashionably puffed. Nothing is larger in the landscape than that huge inherited coat of arms. Neither handsome nor authoritative, he looks like a man acting a role with which he does not quite identify. It is inconceivable that this figure could ever have held the future of England in his hands.
Instead, Henry found a role as the agent of royal power in the western provinces where the Pembroke lands lay and where his father had raised armies and decided fates. He became Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, Shropshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and twelve Welsh counties. He was Lord President of the Council for Wales, responsible, with the sheriffs, for the performance of justice, the preparation of the muster rolls by which the militias were called out, the summoning of those trained bands, and supervision of the military stores. He was, in other words, the local agent of central power, accepting the diminution of the nobility against which his father had railed. The difference between the first and second earls of Pembroke is the difference between a very late medieval warlord and a very early modern official. “My dogs wear my collars,” Elizabeth had said. Henry Pembroke was one of those dogs.
The state papers are peppered with complaints about Henry’s hopelessness and with his own slightly querulous notes in reply. Local Wiltshire gentlemen badger him to become his deputy. “All men cannot be deputy lieutenants,” Henry writes back. “Some must govern, some must obey.” The Privy Council in Westminster intervenes. Henry needs more than one deputy lieutenant because he is “for the most part resident in Wales.” The Privy Council took to appointing captains of the trained bands in Wiltshire without consulting him. Henry complained, removed the Westminster appointees, and put his own in their place. Without hesitation, the Council told him to reinstate the originals. He was ticked off for the inadequacy of the Wiltshire militia, hopeless in both men and equipment. Henry said that the Wiltshire gentlemen didn’t want to contribute money or men. He was told to “be more earnest with them.” He was carrying a great name and title, but was he up to the task? England was now at war with Spain; some vigor was required.
Henry, as his father had done, organized the representation of Wiltshire in Parliament, trying to ensure that he always had a body of MPs who would act as his pressure group at Westminster. But even this he allowed to slip out of control. Sir John Thynne, an ambitious north Wiltshire gentleman, cheated and bribed his way into one seat against Henry’s wishes and against the candidature of Henry’s steward George Penruddock of Compton Chamberlayne, the son of the first earl’s great standard-bearer. Henry wrote Thynne a sad and spineless letter:
I would have all gentlemen to have their due reserved unto them, which from tyme to tyme as Parliaments fall out to be chosen: now some and then some, as they are fit, to the end they may be experimented in the affairs and state of their country, not thinking that you meant to be one, for that you were last and latelie,…if you have a liking to be of the house I shall willingly further you to any place I have or can gett for you.
This is good behavior, concerned with the balance and regularity of the political community, even treating the gentlemen of Wiltshire as if they were his sons to be educated in the ways of the world, but it is scarcely the correct response to having been outmanoeuvred by a man on the make.
Instead, Henry, when back from his summer expeditions to Wales, plunged into heraldry and bloodsports, the long-standing consolations over many centuries for grandees not quite up to making their way in the political world. “Henry Earle of Pembroke was a great lover of heraldrie,” Aubrey remembered,
and collected curious manuscripts of it, that I have seen and perused; e.g. the coates of armes and short histories of the English nobility, and bookes of genealogies; all well painted and writt. ’Twas Henry that did sett up all the glasse scutchions about the house.
A slightly pedantic nostalgia marked an ebbing of the fire.
Henry had one of the richest hunting establishments in England, an enormous enterprise: Arab stallions and mares, racehorses, horses for “stagge-hunting, fox-hunting, brooke-hawking, and land-hawking.” For hounds, the earl had the biggest, the “harbourers,” whose morning task was to find “a runnable stag” in its “harbour” in the wood. There were bulldogs, which were put in “to break the bayes of the stagge” at the end of the chase, when the animal had run itself into its final corner; there were also bloodhounds, to find the wounded deer; foxhounds; smaller harriers, “that kind of dog whom nature hath endued with the virtue of smelling, and draweth into his nostrils the air of the scent of the beast pursued and followed,” who would put up the hares; and “tumblers,” small greyhound-like lurchers, which could be set off to hunt alone and would fall or tumble in catching the rabbits or hares. “His Lordship had the choicest tumblers that were in England, and the same tumblers that rode behind him he made use of to retrieve the partridges.” There were setting dogs, or setters—“a certain lusty land spaniel”—which would put up the partridges “for supper-flights for his hawkes.” Greyhounds were kept to run in the hare warren, “as good as any were in England.”
Henry set up a famous horse race on the downs above Wilton, four miles long from the start, at the Aubrey farm in Broad Chalke, to the finish, by his father’s hare warren outside the park at Wilton. He presented a golden bell to the winner worth fifty pounds. The first to win it in 1585 was one of the great glamour men of Elizabethan England, George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, adventurer, tournament champion, passionate Protestant, enemy of Spain, and practiced robber captain on the high seas. One of Queen Elizabeth’s state-sponsored pirates, he once, after a trip to the Azores, arrived back at Falmouth and “unladed and discharged about five millions of silver all in pieces of eight or ten pound great, so that the whole quay lay covered with plates and chests of silver, besides pearls, gold, and other stones which were not registered, elephants’ teeth, porcelain, vessels of china, coconuts, hides, ebon wood as black as jet, cloth of the rinds of trees very strange for the matter and artificial in workmanship.”
That is the kind of figure with which to fill the rooms of Elizabethan Wilton, a place in which Henry, Earl of Pembroke, is present but not quite dominant. He was too much his father’s son and had not absorbed the central place that beauty and glamour had taken in the exercise of power.
It happens again and again in the history of cultures. A generation of severe, rigorous, demanding, and ambitious parents, who establish a form of order and riches, gives way, in the next generation, to a more evolved world, one more intent on fineness than propriety, happy to spend what the parents had earned, indifferent to debt, more interested in display than restraint, more attuned to brilliance and intricacy than mere obstinacy and assertion. The difference between mid-and late-nineteenth-century Britain and between mid-and late-seventeenth-century Holland appeared in the change that occurred between mid-and late-sixteenth-century England. The Wilton that in the 1580s became the dream landscape of Elizabethan England, the heart of a full-blown Arcadia, came out of the armored toughness of an earlier age. Everything William Herbert had done to his tenants and his rivals, his enemies and friends, laid the foundation for a place of the highest and most lightly conceived civilization and literary art. Under Mary Sidney’s tutelage, the Arcadian butterfly emerged at Wilton.
Roger Ascham, the humanist and educationalist, correspondent of Anne Parr, had described the men of the first earl’s generation, admiringly, as “grave, steadfast, silent of tongue, secret of heart.” Perhaps, in his shouting tempers, those words do not quite fit the first earl, but the seriousness and secrecy of purpose, the care with which the willow had to bend with the wind, the self-limitation, the imposition of will: all of that describes the making of the Pembroke fortunes; and all of it was transformed in the following generation into something that was very nearly its opposite.
You can see what happens in the portraiture. The shape of people’s mouths, from the tight drawn line in the world depicted by Holbein, the unforgiving straightforwardness of eye and jaw, the sense that each face is a mask over a mind of fixed intent, gives way, particularly in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, to something far less certain. The faces portrayed by the Elizabethan miniaturists turned from that unaccommodating and manly blankness, the defended façade of a calculating mind, to something subtler, more nuanced, and more penetrable, colored by doubt and delicacy, a feminization of the ideal. Men’s clothes became gay and brilliant; shoulders were no longer held foursquare to the viewer; a doubting finger rose to the lips; the sobriety and resistance of the difficult years had been left behind. Fineness replaced assertion as the definition of nobility. The wars, threats of war, revolts, and religious struggles engaged in by the makers of dynasties in the years of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary now became play wars in the ever more elaborate shows of tiltyard and tournament, even longed-for wars, wars not as the necessary assertion of social and political dominance but as the fulfillment of personal destiny.
Life for the Elizabethan élite was strung between these ideals: the elegance of an existence without war, increasingly nostalgic for the days of chivalry, combined with a sense that sweetness was not enough, that the world had turned away from manliness and truth and toward the honeyed, jewelled toys, the pearl-embroidered doublets, the glamour houses from which the lights at night glimmered through the branches of the surrounding woods “not unlike the beams of the Sun through the crannels [crevices] of a wall.” The medium for any quarrel with authority had moved from the reality of armies and rebellion to the realms of art and elegant display.
The height of this Elizabethan dream-glory was the moment in 1575 when the queen went to visit Kenilworth Castle, decorated by her favorite and sometime lover, the Earl of Leicester, and lit up like a liner sailing through the Warwickshire woods:
every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so high roofed within, so seemly to sight by due proportion without: by day time, on every side so glittering by glass; by nights by continual brightness of candle, fire, and torchlight, transparent through the lightsome windows, as it were the Egyptian Pharos relucent unto all the Alexandrian coast…or else radiant as though Phoebus for his ease would rest him in the Castle, and not every night so travel down into the Antipodes.
At its most self-loving moments, it seemed as if the sun had come to rest in Elizabethan England, to spend the night there, its beams stealing out from the bedroom windows and into the surrounding night, illuminating it like the candles and torches at a feast.
At the end of September 1574, Elizabeth came to Wilton, and Wilton put on its most entrancing show. A full five miles away from the house, Henry Pembroke met her in her carriage out on the beautiful downland grass, “accompanyed with many of his honourable and worshipfull friends, on a fayre, large, and playne hill, having a good band of men in all their livery coates.” As a boy, Henry had been there when his father had done the same for Philip of Spain, en route to his wedding with Mary Tudor. Henry knew what to do:
Men, well horsed, who being placed in a ranke in order, from one another about seaven foot, and about fifteen foote from the highway, occupied a great way; and another rank of the earle’s gentlemen servants, about a stone’s cast behinde their masters stood on horsebacke in like order. And when the Queen’s majesty had ridden beyond the furthermost of the earle’s men, those that began the ranke, by three and three, rode another way homeward on the side of a hill, and in like order the rest followed and lastly the gentlemens servants.
This was landscape as theater, the cast cleverly disappearing behind the scenes, only to appear, magically, at the next glorious display. As the queen arrived at the house, riding in through the gateway to the first outer courtyard,
Without the inner gate the countess with divers ladyes and gentlewomen, meekly received her highnesse. This utter court was beset on both sides the way with the earles men as thicke as could be standing one by another, through which lane her grace passed with her chariot and lighted at the inner gate.
It might have looked like the assembling of the affinity, the great gathering of the magnate’s forces, the reenactment of noble power, gracefully welcoming a sovereign; but everyone would have known the reality. Henry was a functionary. His offers to raise his troops for the defense of the kingdom would not be taken up by the Privy Council. He received letters from them telling him to attend more closely to his duties in Wales, was instructed “to reside half the year at Ludlow”—the headquarters of royal government in the Welsh marches—an instruction Henry resented “as though I wanted discretion to discharge the like trust which had been committed to all others [who had held the post previously]; or were unworthie to have any regard had of my health.”
I will not despaier of her Majesties goodness: I haue waited onlie on her: I haue not by factions sought to strengthen or by future hoopes endeuered to foster my selfe: and therefore from her Maiesty as I onely dezerwe; so by her Maiestie I only expecte to be conforted.
All he really wanted was “some princelie bountie,” which he didn’t really need and which never came. In these letters one can see something that might otherwise feel quite intangible: the growth of the state, the concentration of power in the hands of the crown, and the converting of the aristocracy into agents of regal power.
Meanwhile, the Wilton show rolled on, with the sugared crust over the rather different underlying realities. “Her Highnesse lay at Wilton house that Friday night, the Saturday and Sunday nightes following; and on Monday after dinner her grace removed to Salisbury; during all which time her majesty was both merry and pleasant.”
That final phrase carries within it the expectation that she might have been neither. Elizabeth had been schooled in the same world where the first earl had learned the lessons of survival. Her enormous and defended authority, reserving all options from foreigners and rivals for power, whether in England or abroad, was the great iceberg around which the world of Arcadia was framed. Arcadia looked for openness, mutuality, and a sense of power residing not in the crown but in the balanced organism of the commonwealth, of which the crown was merely the head.
The first earl had been appointed in 1553 to the office of warden and keeper of the park of Clarendon, to the east side of Salisbury, “that delicious parke (which was accounted the best in England),” according to Aubrey, as well as launder, or keeper, of the grazing there and lieutenant of the conies, the keeper of the rabbits. Henry had inherited the post, and the entire party went over there at the weekend. It had been the queen’s decision.
On the Saturday her highnesse had apoynted to hunt in Claryngdon Park. Where the said earle had prepared a very faire and pleasant banquett[ing house made of] leaves for her to dyne in; but that day happened so great raine, that although it was fenced with arras, yet it could not defend the wett, by meanes whereof the Quene dined within the lodge; and the lords dined in the banquet house; and after dinner the rayne ceased for a while, during which tyme many dear coursed with grey hounds were overturned, soe as the tyme served, great pleasure was shewed.
The atmosphere of this hunting party was not the red-cheeked, pink-coated high spirits we might associate it with now. There was something much more consciously elevated about this Elizabethan hunt, a heightening of the world rather than a coarsening of it, as if on the hunting field, or at least in the huge hunting world of the Wiltshire Downs and their long horizons, one could taste some element of an Arcadian reality.
Inside the park, the pursuit and killing of the delicate fallow deer—an animal from the east, which had been kept in parks in Persia when England was little but mud and wildwood, and which had traveled to Europe via Minoan Crete and Norman Sicily—was an engagement with nature on the most refined and feminine of levels. Here, with bow and arrow, is where the women of the household, or the unathletic and scholarly men, would pursue the hunt, often shooting deer that had been driven by men and hounds into convenient corners for them. They might not even engage in the hunt itself, but simply watch as the animals were killed before them.
The hunting park was in that way conceived as a place of delicious femininity, full of an erotic charge, heightened by its sense of enclosure, of a nature shut in but still quite wild. It was never more seductively or entrancingly expressed than by Shakespeare’s slightly fat, slightly old, slightly overheating Venus, trying again and again to persuade her lovely young beardless Adonis to enter the sweetness of the enclosure she had to offer. She is lying next to him on a primrose bank.
Sometimes her arms infold him like a band:
She would, he will not in her arms be bound;
And when from thence he struggles to be gone,
She locks her lily fingers one in one.
“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemm’d thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.”
To that extent, deliciousness was what the park was for. It was a place full of the ambiguities of Arcadia—power and delight, freedom and control, simplicity and sophistication—all overlapping and intersecting in the richest possible cultural landscapes. Every aspect of that Arcadian complex would have been in play when the queen came to be merry at Wilton, and in the rainy enclosures of Clarendon Park. The earl was merely her ranger there, her servant. But he derived huge income from the post, one, anyway, that he had inherited from his father. He was in control but he was there to serve her. He provided the deer for her to shoot at, but the deer were hers anyway, his hounds her hounds, his standing her standing. His need of her was more than hers of him. He might have been surrounded by hundreds of men in his livery, but he wore her collar; she certainly didn’t wear his (although she did like to wear, on occasion, a miniature of Robert Cecil, her Secretary in her last years, on her shoe).
And yet, overlying this picture of dominance, which would be less nuanced if Elizabeth had been a man, was a small charged theater of the erotic, of Diana the huntress queen, her taunting and powerful virginity somehow set in play by her role as huntress, a merging and muddling of genders and potencies. James I expressly forbade his queen, Anne, from hunting deer, but a queen regnant was different. She was, in her womanliness, even more removed from those around her than a king would be. Perhaps because of the necessary distance to be kept between male power brokers and her body, any sense of intimacy with her power was stilled at birth. No man could get close enough to be anything less than emasculated in her presence. And that denial of access to power was one of the conditions in which an appetite for Arcadia—which was the absence of tyranny—would thrive.
The Countess of Pembroke’s elder brother Philip Sidney was a proud, clever, often slightly touchy, ambitious, well-traveled, fiercely protestant, ingenious, funny, storytelling, highly educated, charming, and occasionally violent man. He once told his father’s secretary that he would “thruste my Dagger into yow” because the secretary had been opening the young man’s letters. But he was a complex figure, and Dr. Muffet, his friend and the Pembrokes’ physician at Wilton, thought Sidney “possessed a gentle, tender disposition.” One thing Sidney hated was hunting, thinking it an unnecessary and tyrannical act of brutality. According to his friend Edmund Spenser, he was capable of melancholy but he was also “made for merriment/Merily masking both in bowre and hall.”
He had been born in 1554 and was his father’s treasured son. As a young man he had swum into the mainstream of English cultural life. Sir Walter Raleigh; Raleigh’s half brother the adventurer and explorer Humphrey Gilbert; Dr. Dee, the great mathematician and cartographer of Elizabethan England; the historian William Camden; Richard Hakluyt, the chronicler of English expansionism across the world ocean; Francis Walsingham, the Protestant zealot and spymaster; the poets Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, and Edward Dyer—all were part of Sidney’s circle, which was literate, literary, politically and materially ambitious, highly Protestant, courtly, and chivalric. Sidney had traveled through Europe, where he had fallen in love with the works of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and had himself painted in the modern Italian style, and across northern Europe, where had conversed at length with Protestant princes and scholars as if he were their equal. It was the training for a life of significance.
But Sidney wasn’t much liked at court and was distrusted by the sage heads around the queen for an immoderate turn of mind, a readiness to argument, and an inflated idea of his own importance, derived from his connections to his uncle the Earl of Leicester and from the respectful treatment he had received from Protestant leaders abroad. They saw in him possibilities of an Englishman who might lead England into the religious wars against the Roman Catholic powers of the Continent. Nothing could have been more unwelcome to the queen.
Sidney’s life was strung between literature and politics. He was born with a gift for fluency, a rhythmic ease that flooded English sensibility with a new and extraordinarily influential feeling for the beauty of the flowing phrase. Largely through him the current of English poetry and romance turned from the blocky, rough-cut directness of mid-sixteenth-century poetry to something sweeter and more liquid. He thought of himself as someone on whom the service of his country and his faith lay as a duty. He was an elegant man, but pockmarked, his face scarred by smallpox contracted when he was a boy, as his mother’s had been. Among the mottoes he would later carry as a knight in the tiltyard was one that said of him, “Spotted to be known.” Ben Jonson thought his appearance revolting, “Sir P. was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples and of high blood and long.”
By his mid-twenties Sidney was already chafing at his failure to be more engaged with a serious career. He took to arguing, angrily, with other courtiers over matters of status and honor. He even spoke forthrightly to the queen herself over her neglect of the dignity of gentlemen such as he at court. By the late 1570s, his frustrations finally led him away from court, where he was unwelcome, and to Wilton, with its delights and consolations. In 1579, an argument over precedence with the Earl of Oxford, who had rudely ejected him from a tennis court at Greenwich mid-game, and over his authorship of a manuscript letter arguing that the queen should not marry a Catholic Frenchman, led to his banishment to the country. He was already attuned to the power and potential of the pastoral, and in that same year he had given the queen, as a New Year’s present, a cambric smock, the dress for a shepherdess—an invitation to the simplicities of Arcadia.
At Wilton, his sister, Mary Pembroke, who loved him immoderately, took him in. Aubrey’s strange, half-transmuted, gossipy memories had it that the two of them slept together and that Philip, who would become the fourth earl, was their misbegotten son, named after his father-uncle-godfather. That cannot be true, but the gossip, as ever, addresses a deeper truth. There is something warmer, closer, and more loving in the relationship of Mary Pembroke and Philip Sidney than there ever was between Mary and Henry, the hunting-and heraldry-obsessed earl who’d married her. It was Philip, through his pen, who took up the quarrel with the crown.
There are several versions of The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, probably begun in 1578 but revised over several years. The first version was a gentle romance in which an undertone of politics played throughout the pastoral; the second, a more violent and less clear-cut epic; and the third, completed by Mary after Sidney’s death in 1587, something of mishmash between the two, perhaps with additions of her own. All of them were dedicated to her. It had begun with a challenge from her to him: she dared him to write a romance in English, something to match the Arcadia written by the Neapolitan Sannazaro almost a century before, and which Sidney had bought on his Italian travels. “You desired me to doe it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment,” Philip wrote. “Now it is done onely for you, only to you.”
Mary had been involved from the start. It was “but a trifle, and that triflingly handled,” Sidney wrote with conventional self-deprecation, a “modesty tropos.” “Your deare selfe can best witnes the manner, being done in loose sheetes of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheetes, sent vnto you, as fast as they were done.” It was written, then, partly at Wilton, partly in London, perhaps partly at the Sidney house at Penshurst, in Kent.
The first earl’s threat to the crown had taken the form of an army ranged up on the London road, with its intention to do violence perfectly clear. Philip Sidney’s challenge to the crown took the form, at least to begin with, of a vision of escape. His Arcadia is a land of fertile valleys and rich pastures, where the houses are “lodges of stone built in the form of a star.” The inhabitants—and it does not take much to translate this into the circumstances at Wilton—are either great princes or poor shepherds. There is nothing much to do but fall in love and have adventures. Olive trees grow here, and there are sandy beaches by turquoise seas. From time to time the wandering knights might come on a “sleeping lyon” or “a she Beare not far from him, of litle lesse fiercenes,” but that is not the dominant tone, which is one of sweetness, conversation, ease in the shade, time for love, some “burning kisses,” “sweete kisses,” “cold kisses,” “many kisses,” “kisses oft,” and all under “the Palmetrees, (which being louing in their own nature, seemed to giue their shadow the willinglier, because they held discourse of loue).”
This unthreatened, easy perfection was a place where the grief and tension of existence had been eased away and stilled. Sweetness was the face it showed to the world. So often do honey and sweetness appear in Sidney’s Arcadia that they seem at times a joke. The grass on which the sheep nibble is sweet, the words the princess murmurs through “the cherry of her lips” is invariably sweet and increasingly honeyed. She is, according to the stricken knight, “the sweetest fairnesse and fairest sweetnesse: with that word his voice brake so with sobbing, that he could say no further.” Her “breath is more sweete then a gentle Southwest wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer, and yet is nothing, compared to the honey flowing speech that breath doth carry…. She had no sooner ended with the joining her sweet lips together, but that the shepherd who lay before her recorded to her music this rural poesie”:
O words which fall like summer dew on me,
O breath more sweete, than is the growing bean,
O tongue in which, all honeyed liquores be….
It is an Edenic world of wish-fulfillment. A young prince finds himself naked but “this nakedness was to him an apparel.” Scene after scene unfolds in the liquid language that became one of the Elizabethan idioms. Handfuls of words pour forth as smoothly continuous as the broad backs of the downs over which Sidney had been wandering. It is all slightly absurd, the mind on holiday. One can only guess what the old earl might have made of it. But, that said, there is also a ballet-like sensation, that this is a realm in which beauty for once might be allowed its freedom. It is the language and the images of youthfulness and release, emerging from under the carapace of a tough-headed, Polonius-like generation of elders, a generation that had been all too insistent for all too long on the proprieties and duties and self-improvements and self-controls to which older generations are chronically prey. This, for all its weakness and oversweetness, is the freedom of writing as if the writing itself were making a new world, discovering a lighthearted engagement with some freely invented thing (the models for which Sidney had, of course, read in Virgil and Theocritus, and seen on the walls of the Italian villas and places he had visited a couple of years before).
“Reade it then,” he told his sister,
at your idle times, and the follies your good iudgement will finde in it, blame not, but laugh at. And so, looking for no better stuffe, then, as in a Haberdashers shoppe, glasses, or feathers, you will continue to loue the writer, who doth exceedingly loue you, and moste moste heartilie praies you may long liue, to be a principall ornament to the family of the Sidneis.
Your louing brother,
Philip Sidney
Not, intriguingly, of the Pembrokes or the Herberts, whose violent, vulgar, grasping Welshness perhaps did not compare with the noble refinement of the Dudley-Sidneys. For something that Sidney revised and struggled over for years, this is the pose of sprezzatura, an assumption of ease laid over a life of hidden purpose.
As Virginia Woolf wrote in her affectionate essay on the Arcadia,
the life that we invent, the stories we tell, as we sink back with half-shut eyes and pour forth our irresponsible dreams, have perhaps some wild beauty; some eager energy; we often reveal in them the distorted and decorated image of what we soberly and secretly desire.
Founded on the autonomy of desire, Sidney’s Arcadia is fiercer than a mere soft-edged dreaming of a sunlit holiday. He was a disappointed man. To his friend Edward Denny he wrote from Wilton that “the vnnobl constitution of our tyme doth keepe vs from fitte imployments.” The queen would not let him have a position at court; nor with the Protestant armies in Europe, where he had been offered the governorship of the Protestant provinces of Holland and Zeeland by William of Orange; nor even in the New World, to all of which he was drawn. The experience of authority in sixteenth-century England was one of either uncertain success or certain humiliation. Arcadia, of its essence, was a place in which to escape authority and enter the world in which desire was king.
Desire, which colors page after page of the romance, is a world beyond power. Both beneath power and indifferent to it, desire was where the self could find an unadulterated and uncompromised being, a form of life beyond the humiliations of hierarchy. Queen Elizabeth’s dogs may have worn her collars, but not in Arcadia. Arcadia was beyond the submission to a predefined destiny. It was a form of transcendence into a world of beauty whose essence was freedom. In the romance, there is a deep and pained longing, expressed far more intently than the warblings of shepherds and their oaten pipes, for an age before consciousness, before moral codes, before grief and sorrow, before a man could be disappointed by his life:
Many times haue I, leaning to yonder Palme, admired the blessednes of it, that it could beare Loue without sence of paine. Many times, when my masters cattle came hether to chewe their cudde, in this fresh place, I might see the young Bull testifie his loue. But how? with proud lookes, and ioyfulnes. These beasts, like children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly; we, like bastards, are layd abroad, euen as foundlings to be trayned vp by griefe and sorrow.
But that desire to escape into the world of desire Sidney knew to be not enough. In his great sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, probably also written at Wilton, he dwelt, as any number of melancholic Elizabethan young men would also dwell, on his disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, on the triviality of his life and occupations. His great friend and mentor the French Protestant divine Hubert Languet had written to ask him if it was “honourable for you to be lurking down where you are, while your country is begging for the help and support of her sons.” Sidney answered in a sonnet:
With what sharpe checkes I in my selfe am shent [shamed]
When into Reason’s audite I do go:
And by just counts my selfe a banckrout know
Of all those goods, which heav’n to me hath lent:
Unable quite to pay even nature’s rent,
Which unto it by birthright I do ow,…
My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes…
This is the seriousness of Arcadia, buried inside its sugar. A sense of honor and conscience drove him toward a political life, which he felt it was his duty to take up. The knowledge that he came from a governing family was a powerful force for Sidney. In families like his lay the guarantee of freedom for the country. Only a powerful, crown-denying nobility could keep the country free from tyranny. His brother-in-law Henry Pembroke may have been meekly submitting to the crown’s control of noble power, but for Sidney and the many readers of his manuscripts among the élite, that submission was not enough.
No question in the sixteenth century was more alive than the relationship of the crown to the governing class. All over Europe, it seemed clear, ancient limitations on the sovereign, largely guaranteed by an ancient nobility, were under threat. The great struggle for the Low Countries, out of which the glories of the Dutch Republic would come in the seventeenth century, was precisely this conflict between an assertive Spanish state and the old liberties of the Dutch dukedoms that Charles V, the Habsburg king of Spain, had inherited. In Italy, one small principality after another had been transformed from a consultative, self-limiting form of government to one in which the prince, having read his Machiavelli, imposed his absolute will. In France, that same influence had had its play. “Is it better to be loved than feared, or the reverse?” Machiavelli had asked in The Prince. “The answer is that it is desirable to be both, but because it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer for a Prince to be feared than loved.” Fear and an abandonment of the assumption of good intent, which was behind the layered structures of the inherited medieval custom, were the foundations of tyranny. “It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it,” Machiavelli had written in the Discourses, “to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.” That was not the custom of the manor. Fulke Greville, Sidney’s friend and disciple, had heard Sidney himself bewail the influence of modernity on France, “how that once well-formed monarchy had by little and little let fall her ancient and reverend pillars—I mean parliaments, laws and customs—into the narrowness of proclamations or imperial mandates.” That is precisely what Sidney, his uncle Leicester, his father-in-law the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, and others of the Protestant party in England feared. A modern, absolutist monarchy would lift England away from “her ancient legal circles” and “our ancient customs and statutes.” The custom of the manor, the very mutuality of the ancient workings of the country, was a model of the workings of Arcadia. And the environment at Wilton, for all its self-delusions, was a model of the ideal state. Hubert Languet, the only real person named in Arcadia, had in his great book Against Tyranny, published in 1579, addressed the central political Arcadian question to a tyrant:
Just because someone has made you a shepherd for the sake of the flock, did he hand over that flock to be skinned at your pleasure?
No: the shepherd needed to love his sheep; just as the lord needed to love his tenants, and they him in return.
For Languet, who might have been speaking of Henry Pembroke and his diminished condition, the modern tyrannical state had eaten away at the nobility that was the guarantee of a real freedom and had dressed them up in the fancy clothes of the tiltyard and the tournament:
You speak of peers, notables and officials of the crown, while I see nothing but fading names and archaic costumes like the ones they wear in tragedies. I scarcely see any remnant of ancient authority and liberty…let electors, palatines, peers, and the other notables not assume that they were created and ordained merely to appear at coronations and dress up in splendid uniforms of olden times, as though they were actors in an ancient masque, or as though they were staging a scene from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round table.
Here, already quite clearly articulated but sixty years early, are the phrases that would be used in the English Civil War. The state had put collars on its dogs, and an emasculated nobility felt tyranny creeping across the land. This was not about democracy but the fears of the old ruling class sensing the growing power of the state. An uncontrolled crown would destroy the customs of England. Only with balance, and the organic integrity of a country that had head, body, and limbs in harmony, would England be what it always had been.
This Arcadian heartland is a mysterious place for us: consciously élitist but fiercely Protestant in religion; prepared—just—to countenance the overthrow of kings, but courtly to a degree in manner and self-conception; political in its removal from the political world; aristocratic, community-conscious, potentially rebellious, literary, martial, playful, earnest, antiquarian, English, Italianate, and nostalgic. But this is the essence: Arcadia sees an aristocracy not as an element of a controlling establishment but as an essential organ in a healthy state, a check and balance on the centralizing power of the crown and the true source of authority and care in the lands it owns. The vision of Arcadia is not far from the desire for wholeness that the communities of the chalkland valleys wished to embody in their elaborate and ancient constitutions.
Alongside his written versions of Arcadia—they were never printed during his lifetime but circulated in manuscript—Sidney also enacted his vision of courteous rebellion and independent purity at court. Before the French ambassador, on Whit Monday and Tuesday, in the early summer of 1581, Sidney, his friend Fulke Greville, and two other young men, who were prepared to spend their fortunes on the performance, put on a show in the tiltyard in Whitehall. They called themselves “The Four Foster Children of Desire,” that word desire glowing in the context of Elizabethan show as an acceptable and oblique stand-in for what in the language of Arcadia it really meant: rebellion, or at least self-removal from the structures of power.
They had the gallery at the end of the tiltyard, in which the queen would stand, redecorated and called the “Castle or Fortresse of Perfect Beautie.” It was a game of mock rebellion by young men who believed that the queen and court, then considering a French and Catholic marriage for Elizabeth, were neglecting the habits and structures of an older England, even moving toward a kind of tyranny that the land of desire could never tolerate. Sidney had written a speech dense with scarcely concealed meanings addressed to the Fortress of Perfect Beauty:
Forasmuch as her highnesse should be there included, whereto the said foster children layde tytle and claime as their due by discent unto them. And upon denial, or any repulse from that their desired patrimonie, they vowed to vanquishe and conquer by force who so should seeme to withstand it.
This extraordinary pantomime of mock rebellion stands midway between the realities of 1549 and 1642. The same elements were at stake: patrimony; nobility; a crown that seemed to betray the best of a noble inheritance; courteous men in some ways desperately dependent on the crown for their standing, and in other ways proudly independent of it, holding the crown to account, showing no respect, threatening violence. Here was a game whose frisson depended on its approach to reality. The four knights sent a boy to issue their challenge to the queen as she came from chapel. “Without making any precise reverence at all, he uttered these speeches of defiance, from his masters to her Majestie. These foure…do will you by me, even in the name of Justice, that you will no longer exclude virtuous Desire from perfect Beautie.”
It was, they said, in a breathtaking double bluff, “a plaine proclamation of warre”:
If beautie be accompanied with disdainful pride, and pride weighted on by refusing crueltie, then must I denounce unto you that…they will besiege that fatal Fortresse, vowing not to spare (if this obstinacie continue) the sword of faithfulnesse, and the fire of affection.
The speech tells it straight. The queen and her government were proud and disdainful. Their cruelty consisted in refusing a place or a role to Philip Sidney and others like him who not only owed the country their duty but had the strength, the independent strength within them to attack that fatal fortress and its hideous obstinacy with the sword of faithfulness—that is, the Protestant religion—and, in an astonishing yoking together of disparates, “the fire of affection,” which is to say, Arcadia’s burning desire. Here, quite clear, even if buried under ceremony and courteousness like a dramatized version of a jewelled New Year’s Day emblem, was the rebellion of the Arcadian lords. Needless to say, this show was so weak and so marginal that it had no effect at all. Any impact would have to wait for different circumstances in the following century.
Sidney’s Arcadia had argued for action and for giving powerful and glamorous roles to the nobility and their supporters. Elizabeth’s reluctance was motivated by a desire not only to avoid war and its expense but to avoid giving her great subjects ideas above their station. Finally, in 1586, after years of pleading and under the command of Leicester, an English expeditionary force, paid for with Dutch money, went over to the Netherlands to fight for the Protestant Dutch against the Spanish. Sidney was appointed governor of Flushing, one of the three ports the English received from the Dutch as guarantees against their paying the costs of the expedition.
It was in a small engagement in that war, at Zutphen on September 23, 1586, that Sidney was wounded. He had left off his thigh armor either, as his friend and biographer Fulke Greville said much later, as an act of theatrical courage, so that he would be no better protected than the other gentlemen around him, or because a lighter armor would give him some added mobility on the battlefield.
So he receiued a hurt by a musket shot a little aboue the left knee, which so brake and rifted the bone, and so entered the thigh vpward toward the bodie, as the bullet could not be found before his bodie was opened.
As the wound became gangrenous, Sidney turned to God. The wound was “a loving and fatherly correction” from the source of loving justice. In the light of this lesson, Sidney promised to “addict myself wholly to God’s service, and not to live as I have done. For I have walked in a vain course.”
Those words cast a chill over the delights at Wilton. But they were the words of a wounded and dying man. The truth is that as an inheritance, as a dead man, Sidney—and his association with the free-flowing landscape of Arcadia, with its combined vision of Protestant freedom and noble authenticity, in a world away from the corruptions and failures of the court—was more potent than he had been when alive. In death, for England as much as for his family, he became “an Angell Spirit”—the phrase was his sister’s—“so rare a iewell of vertue and courtesie.”
Theatricality did not desert Sidney in death. His body was taken back from the Low Countries covered with a pall of black velvet. The pinnace that brought him home, right into the pool of London, where his body was disembarked at the Tower, had “all her sayles, tackling and other furniture coloured black and black cloth hanged round about her with Escouchions of his Armes.” It was the ship of sorrow and the death of hope. But this image was the guarantee that Sidney’s beliefs would survive him. He had made the Arcadian amalgam central to the English nobility’s view of themselves as the inhabitants, at least in potential, of a sweet and beautiful world, free of tyranny, whose freedoms were guaranteed by their own independent virtue within it. He had transmuted the quarrel with the king into an act of beauty.
In the reign of his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, Wilton would become the focus and reliquary of that ideal.