Chapter 3
Carried Away in Arcadia

She hath allowed me to be one of that most noble Order of the Garter whereof I have been a Companion, and I am sure the poorest Companion that ever was, now full nineteen years.

Sir Henry Sidney¹

Following the Northern Rebellion of 1569, Parliament passed a bill of attainder against the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland and several dozen followers. It contained a savings clause and several rudimentary provisions against fraudulent conveyances. Northumberland’s estate was preserved for his brother Henry Percy, who was assured of any properties that might pass to him by “any gift, grant or letters patent whatsoever heretofore made” (13 Eliz., c. 16). Since these grants included a patent of 1557 issued by Philip and Mary, Henry was duly rewarded for his loyalty. The other provisions worked somewhat negatively: The bill said that all conveyances made “before the said several treasons by the said several offenders” were valid for everyone except those people attainted. The statute presumed that a conveyance made to a conspirator was invalid, but one made to anyone else should stand. Five years later 18 Eliz., c. 4 specifically addressed “frauds in certain conveyances and assurances made by the late Rebels in the North.” It enhanced the administration of the law by calling for registration within two years of any property conveyed from the rebels, thereby allowing the justice system to consider more deeply the possibility of fraud.

By contrast, Sir Henry Sidney drafted a bill of attainder against Shane O’Neill in Ireland in 1569 that did not include any provisions for fraudulent conveyances. The bill only referred, in a general way, to English tradition on the subject of high treason: “And the person or persons therein offending, and being attainted, shall suffer and sustain such pains of death, forfeitures of lands, and goods, as in cases of high treason by the laws of this realm hath been accustomed and used” (11 Eliz., c. 1 [Ireland]).²

The lack of provision against fraudulent conveyancing in Sidney’s Irish statute gives us insight into the ambivalent attitudes of society towards the practice. This ambivalence reveals itself in the course of Sidney’s several tenures as Lord Deputy of Ireland, in his family’s relationship to the Crown, and in the artistic practice of his talented son Philip, particularly in his prose masterpiece, the Arcadia. Both the father and son were exemplars of a certain moral rectitude, or even fastidiousness, and both professed to be devoted servants of the queen, yet each in his own sphere recognized the moral dissembling of even virtuous people. For Henry Sidney there was a gap between his regal conception of himself as governor of Ireland and his actual performance on the ground. For Philip, whose tenuous financial position gives point to the images of debt found in his poetry, there is a certain dissonance between the complex conceptions his imagination was able to entertain and what many critics have seen as the inability of his fiction to accommodate his vision.

Henry Sidney as Draftsman

Like so many other newly important families in sixteenth-century England, the Sidneys benefited from royal favor, marriage, and Henry VIII’s seizure of church properties. Henry Sidney’s father William fought at Flodden Field in 1513. “On the dissolution of the monasteries he obtained large grants of land in Kent and Sussex, and, at Edward’s birth, was appointed tutor, chamberlain and steward to the household of the Prince.”³ Sidney was born in 1529, eight years before King Edward VI, with whom he lived as a companion and from whom he received various estates. As Edward was only 10 when he became king in 1547, the country was governed by a council dominated by two regents, Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, soon to become duke of Somerset, and John Dudley, earl of Warwick, who would later be duke of Northumberland. In 1551 Henry Sidney married Northumberland’s daughter, the Lady Mary Dudley. After vying with Somerset for several years, Northumberland fabricated charges and had him executed in 1552. It is obvious which side the Sidneys were on. Forfeitures followed Somerset’s treason, and William Sidney was granted Penshurst, which had to belonged to Sir Ralph Fane, a Somerset supporter.

The cultural scene in which our fraudulent conveyancing laws developed was one of dizzying exchanges of property, where royal gifts were expected and fought for; nonetheless, an invisible line separated courtship from fraud. William died at Penshurst a few months before Edward VI’s own death, on July 6, 1553, just over a year before Philip Sidney was born on the family’s new estate. While the young king was ill, Northumberland forced him to compose a will that overlooked his sisters Mary and Elizabeth and passed his royal inheritance to Jane Grey, the wife of Northumberland’s son Guildford Dudley. It might be too much to say that Northumberland’s plot failed because the English people recognized that a testamentary provision produced by a dying man under duress was a form of fraud and the conveyance of property could be rescinded by a court. Northumberland had enemies, Mary had strength, and so the plot failed. But Northumberland had also crossed a line that separated acceptable from unacceptable conduct. No one supported him.

We are told that Queen Mary was not vindictive. Of 60 people involved in the plot, only seven went to trial and only Lady Jane Grey, Northumberland, Guildford Dudley, and two others were executed.⁴ But it seems just as likely that Mary was able to accept a certain amount of reprehensible behavior because English society had a tolerance for it. Henry Sidney was a beneficiary of this ambivalence. He was the first to receive a pardon, although he had signed his name as a witness to “the illegal instrument by which Edward VI was made to set aside the Act of 1533 and transfer the succession from his father’s daughters to the descendants of his father’s sister.”⁵ The explanation given is that the queen had an affectionate memory of Henry’s sisters Mabel and Elizabeth Sidney, who had died in her service.⁶ His escape from a traitor’s death at the age of 24 is the sort of experience that might explain his lack of support for fraudulent conveyancing laws. We must keep in mind Henry’s personal attitudes as we review his political role as an enforcer of Crown policies in Ireland for the next 30 years. He knew what it meant to be at the mercy of the Crown and of creditors.

The aftermath of the failed Northumberland plot involved Sidney in yet another situation where only the practices of the culture could determine the line between asset management and fraud. The duke’s wife had also been pardoned, although she had played a key role in trying to convince Queen Jane to nominate Guildford as King. But the attainders that followed Northumberland’s execution meant that members of his family could not inherit property, since his treason had corrupted their blood. The duchess soon realized she needed to change her will to avoid leaving her children as her heirs in the event she died. “My three sons, and my brother Sir Andrew Dudley, standing presently attainted of High Treason,” she wrote at the time, “my said will cannot take place according to my meaning in all things.” She therefore had a new will drawn up, a form of conveyance that would protect her property by keeping it out of the reach of the royal treasury in the event of her death. She left everything to other heirs or in the hands of several executors, including Henry Sidney. Eventually her children fought under Pembroke at the siege of St. Quentin and, as a reward, had their blood restored. In the meantime the success of the conveyance depended on the trustworthiness of the new beneficiaries. It was prudent asset management by the duchess, buttressed by the loyalty of Henry Sidney, that saved the family patrimony.⁷

Despite his own pardon, within a few years Sidney felt that he was not “liked as I had been,” and he sought service abroad. We learn his attitude, and so much else about his several tenures in Ireland, from a long letter that he wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham in 1583, when, desperate for money, he was negotiating his son’s marriage to Walsingham’s daughter. Ireland offered opportunities for advancement. Service abroad, moreover, was also a recognized way of defeating creditors, like taking sanctuary or being elected to Parliament. Sir Henry may not have been in debt yet, but he soon would be. Penshurst was expensive to maintain, and Sidney’s involvement with government finances would give him other, more complicated opportunities to spend, if not reap.

Sidney was appointed vice-treasurer and receiver-general in April 1556, in the service of his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Radcliffe, Viscount Fitzwalter (named earl of Sussex in 1557), who was concurrently appointed Lord Deputy. Historians have regarded the viceroyalty of Sussex (the same man who later suppressed the Northern Rebellion) “as a turning-point in Anglo-Irish relations because of his association with the policy of plantation – highlighted in the parliamentary statutes.” The sixth act of the Roll of Sussex’s parliament (which ended March 10, 1558) affirmed the right of the king and queen to authorize the Lord Deputy to grant estates or lease to English and Irish subjects in certain counties where lands had been taken from dispossessed rebels driven out by Sussex, with exemptions for lands of the earl of Kildare and some ecclesiastics.⁸ There were rumors about the idea of an English plantation in the northeast, and on Sussex’s advice, royal approval was given for plans for an English settlement on the eastern shores of Lough Neagh. Sidney tried to build up an estate in the Lecale area (it was known as Lough Sidney for a while), but he did not succeed.⁹ Although these arrangements seem similar to the later English policy of plantations, at least one historian believes that England’s efforts, spearheaded by Sussex, are better seen as a part of an Anglo-Spanish alliance, based on Spain’s colonial enterprises in the New World. In light of the association of fraudulent conveyance laws with English policies in Ireland, the subject of the following chapter on Spenser, it is interesting that English land policies and pressures were not at this time related to religion. They could not be, since England was Catholic. The main enemy in Ireland, from the English point of view, were the Scots.

After the death of Mary and the elevation of Elizabeth in November 1558, English and Spanish interests diverged. Sussex had been brought back to England in the crisis over the loss of Calais, while Sidney, at first the temporary head of government, was named Lord Justice of Ireland on December 13, 1558.¹⁰ Once in office, Elizabeth restored Sussex as Lord Deputy on August 30, 1559. She sent instructions that he and Sidney peruse the laws passed by Parliament, confer with the Irish Council, “and upon determination which of them may seem meet, for that realm, either as they be or with other alteration.”¹¹ The Irish Council was to consider a “variety of cases.” The members included the earls of Kildare, Ormonde, Desmond, and Clanricard, as well as Sussex, Fitzwilliams, Stanley, and Sidney. As in England, membership on the Council was to a large extent determined by the same rationale that underlay the English jury system: it consisted of people who would already have knowledge about the affairs before it.

From the beginning the queen was concerned with the disposition of property, and she called for a new survey because “extraordinary leases have been made upon surmised and corrupt values.”¹² She also faced, right away, the problem of Tanastry, the custom of Ireland by which land passed not to the oldest surviving male, but to any powerful, often pre-selected, member of a clan. The question was broached with regard to O’Neill, whose bill of attainder Sidney composed 10 years later, “Whether might not O’Neill, before the country was made an earldom, by a rebellion forfeit the country to the Prince?” An objection was offered that O’Neill could forfeit no more than the interest he had during his life. After his death, it was the right of the country to make a new O’Neill. The queen’s advisers countered that “O’Neill’s rebellion was not only the offense in his own person, but all his captains, gallowglass, and kerne aided him in the rebellion, and so it was a rebellion of all the people of the country; and so the rebellion of the whole made a forfeiture of the whole.” From the English perspective, the whole system of Tanastry operated like some nightmare form of fraudulent conveyance to keep land from the grasp of the Crown. But the English forces were not in control on the ground and the issue remained unsettled, even as the queen pressed Sidney to attaint O’Neill. On June 11, 1567, she wrote to Sidney of her desire to hear of the extirpation of Shane O’Neill and her resolve to plant people in Ulster.¹³ Two years later Sidney gave the queen what she wanted.

The purpose of a bill of attainder is to confirm the forfeiture of property that follows from treason and by the doctrine of corruption of the blood, to cut off future claims by would-be heirs. Today in the USA the Constitution prohibits bills of attainder (Article I, section 9 [3]), and even in cases of treason, no attainder “shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted” (Article III, section 3 [2]). Spenser complained that the Irish practiced fraudulent conveyance to cheat the queen of the benefit of their attainder. Sidney, however, faced a preliminary, or threshold issue. In England all land had been held from the Crown since the time of William the Conqueror, and on that basis, the queen had a right to forfeitures. But William had not conquered Ireland; therefore Sidney first had to establish the queen’s right to forfeitures. His attempt to do so has notable literary features.

Sidney’s bill begins with a series of rhetorical and historical accounts designed to assert England’s dominion over Ireland. Starting with an ethical appeal, which included promotion of himself as an expert on the subject, Sidney conjures a vision of England’s past glory in Ireland, when there were “populous, rich and well governed regions, welthy subjects, and beautifull cities and towns,” before the “iniquitie of times” impaired them until they were “utterly lost” (p. 309).¹⁴ He himself appears in the law, as “your Majestie’s Deputy Sir Henry Sidney.” He blames Ireland’s destruction on “insurrections, rebellions & horrible treasons” and offers his services to prove that the queen has title to the “dominion and territories of Ulster as a foundation layd for your highness to plant and dispose the same” (p. 310).

Sidney’s literary flair continues to characterize his law as he justifies the queen’s rightful intervention as an attempt to save the land from “so great and cruell a tyrant,” for O’Neill is a “vile, abhominable, and sedicious person” (p. 310) whose title is based on the murder of his predecessor and usurpation of his lands. His depredations were stopped only by “the diligent ministery, actuall war, and politique persecutions of your Majestie’s painefull, prudent, and well disposed Deputie Sir Henry Sidney, knight of your honourable order, a man most fit for the reformation of this your realm” (p. 313). Having blackened O’Neill’s character and promoted his own, Sidney then proves that the queen should have “prioritie of title to hold and possess anie part of the dominion or territorities of Ulster” (p. 315).

A notable scholar, Sidney ransacked books in Latin, English, and Irish to establish various claims and ancient titles that justify English rule. On the theory that if it is written, it must be true, he starts with the notion that a former king of Britain made a grant of the land to the progenitors of the Irish, who were then living in “Biscan,” the area around Bayonne in France.¹⁵ Later, according to Geraldus Cambrensis, Henry II established dominion, first when he received Dermot MacMurrough, prince of Leinster, and again when the Irish kings submitted to him in 1162, after Henry landed in Ireland. Henry then gave the country to his youngest son John, who “came in person into Ireland, and held the same land” (p. 316). The conquest was confirmed by the clergy who gathered at Armagh and declared that English rule was “decreed and deemed” due to the “sin of the people of the land.” Yet another title derived from Richard II, who landed in Dublin and other places and received the voluntary submissions of many Irish captains. Finally, the people themselves accepted English rule because they were “persuaded by the just and gracious dealing of your deputie here” (p. 317). That deputy, of course, was Sidney himself.

The Irish statute Sidney composed is not a little reminiscent of the pompous style parodied by Henry’s son in the Arcadia when Philanax, also a royal deputy, prosecutes Musidorus and Pyrocles, the heroes of the story, charged with attempted rape and murder.¹⁶ Both Philanax and the preamble are overly prolix. The preliminaries to the statute are far from finished when Sidney begins to list the various occasions under Henry VIII when, under the policy of surrender and regrant, the inhabitants of Ireland exchanged their customary tenures for English titles to property (p. 319). There is a little digression as Sidney praises himself for abolishing “coign and livery” (the practice of quartering men and beasts instead of paying regular rents). Then he hits the main theme of the statute, the forfeiture of the estates of O’Neill and his “adherents” to the queen that follows from his attainder for treason (pp. 321–322).

With its literary flare, Sidney’s bill against O’Neill contrasts with an earlier, more workmanlike bill, 28 Henry VIII, c. 1 (Ireland), that attainted the earl of Kildare. That bill negatively exempted from Kildare’s forfeitures “any sale, gift or payment without any fraud, deceit or collusion… made to or by the said Earl” (p. 83). A long-arm provision in the same bill barred fraudulent conveyances of Irish property by anyone convicted of treason in England. It again used a negative formulation, exempting “any sale, gift, or payment without any fraud, deceit or collusion had not been made to or by them or any of them” (p. 86). The bill also voided trusts “conveyed from any of the said persons attaynted or to be attaynted in forme aforesaid, sithence or after the day of the offences” (p. 87). This earlier statute gave Sidney a precedent for including fraudulent conveyance language when he composed his own bill of attainder, but Sidney left it out. It is possible that Sidney relied on an earlier 1310 law against fraudulent conveyance in Ireland, but I do not think so.¹⁷ He preferred to tell a story about an evil man and legitimate justice.

The story Sidney did not buy into was one about the evils of avoiding creditors. A few years later, in 1571, he sat as a Member of Parliament that passed 13 Eliz., c. 5, against fraudulent conveyances to defeat creditors and others, as well as the bill against fraudulent conveyances by fugitives and the bill against clergy who sought to avoid responsibility for repairing property. We have no record of his votes on these measures. But Sidney was very possibly the target of a bill aimed at debtors to the state. Sir John Popham, the member for Bristol, introduced the bill that became 13 Eliz., c. 4, an act to make people in his position “liable for the payment of their debts.”¹⁸ He is probably the same Popham who later decided Twyne’s Case and who, moreover, three years before that heard Giles Allen’s suit against Cuthbert Burbage for tearing down the Theatre.¹⁹ According to the Anonymous Journal, Popham was assisted by Doctors Lewes and Yale, who were sent from the Lords with a bill to this effect, “that treasurors, receavers, collectors, etc. should not convert her Majestie’s money to their own private use, nor wilfully to consume the same, which if they should do then that offence to be felony, provided that the debt must be above 300^li.” There follows, as Lewes and Yale appeared in Parliament for the government like two attack dogs, the legal French that is the true sign of the English common lawyer: “Enter auters le cause de ceo est le faite de le S^or Treasurer per 30000li enstall et ceo fait discovert per Brinigam de Ireland per grand parte” (among other reasons for the bill was the £30 000 due from the Treasurer of Ireland, as reported by Bingham) (p. 218). “The specific reference appears to be to Sir Henry Sidney,” notes T. E. Hartley, the editor of the Parliamentary debates.²⁰ We have no record of a comment on this embarrassment, but Sidney would have blamed his enemies for it, not his own malfeasance.

Owing money to the government was not an untypical situation for government treasurers and collectors of subsidies at the time, or later. Officials were regularly able to spend government cash before accounting for it. It was not uncommon, therefore, for them to die in debt. J. E. Neale explains why:

Holders of Crown moneys seem to have postponed accounting as long as possible, meanwhile employing the cash in their private transactions…. The Crown might be said to have been acting, willy-nilly, as a benevolent, non-interest-charging, all-risks-bearing bank to supply its officials and others with capital. Some – perhaps most – of those cases of public servants dying heavily in debt to the Queen, which have drawn from posterity many tears and barbed criticism of royal ingratitude, derive from this type of fraud.²¹

Henry Sidney would seem to fit Neale’s analysis, yet he would have justified his spending. In his 1583 letter to Walsingham, he complains that he has three sons and “if I dy tomorrow next I should leave them worse than my father left me by £20,000, and I am now fifty-four yeres of age, toothless and trembling, being five thousand pounds in debt, yea and £30,000 worse than I was at the death of my most deere king and master, King Edward the VIth.”²² Sidney regarded a regal presence, which cost money, as a way of asserting English power.

Like other office holders, Sidney believed he put to good use the funds he withheld from the queen. During his years in Ireland he led military expeditions and rode circuit in inclement weather: “and how pleasant a lief it is that tyme of the yere, with hunger, and after sore travaill to harbour long and cold nights in cabins made of boughs, and covered with grass, I leave to your indifferent judgement,” he told Walsingham.²³ When he was not sleeping under a bush in the rain, Sidney preferred to travel in style, with a standard bearer, trumpeter, surgeon, horsemen, ordnance, and foot soldiers. He had a chair of state set in a regal tent that he used to receive homage from Irish lords. In 1566 he spent £13 000 in half a year. His phrasing in a letter to the queen indicates that he regarded his expenses as minimal, since he traveled with “mine own household, but fifty English spears, fifty English shot, and fifty gallowglass; these footmen I always kept about me in my journey as my guard.”²⁴ However he handled the queen’s money, Sidney regarded himself as an upright servant.

It is hard to say where Sidney drew the line in managing or manipulating his assets to avoid creditors. During years when the great lawyers of the realm like Popham, Egerton, and Coke were amassing fortunes in real estate, Sidney seems not to have increased his holdings in land. He ran an ironworks, but in 1572 he turned down an offer of a barony from the queen because he did not believe he had the resources to support the spending the position would require. His refusal is all the more notable, since an earl could not be sued for debt. In 1583 he assured Walsingham that he expected to find himself in debtors’ prison and forced to sell lands. Yet the motive behind the letter, which by certain phrasings and the circumstances one suspects Philip had a hand in composing, is to excuse Henry from making a substantial settlement to benefit Walsingham’s daughter, who was to marry his son.²⁵ Marriage was an honorable way for a gentleman to finance himself, and despite the appearance that Sidney engaged in the endemic accounting frauds of the times, there is more than a little truth to his reputation for honor and honesty.

Although Sidney’s own ambivalent position, typical of the times – as a man who had been under the shadow of treason, and one whom the queen allowed to slide into debt – may account for his omission of a fraudulent conveyancing clause from the 1569 bill of attainder against Shane O’Neill, he may also have regarded the provision as superfluous, since it was only with difficulty that English law reached O’Neill’s northern territories. A non-concept within the system of Tanastry, fraudulent conveyancing was viable only within the framework of English law. A law against the practice required English judges to enforce it, and the courts in Ireland were ill equipped for the task. Desmond’s fraudulent conveyance in 1574 was the exception that proved the rule: he held his lands according to English custom and had cutting-edge legal advice. (He was also regarded as a friend of Sidney, who suffered at court because he did not like Desmond’s main enemy, the earl of Ormonde.) Such circumstantial evidence again supports the view that Sidney regarded conveyancing as a sign of prudence, not fraud. Yet even he seems to have known the ways of the world.

We can see that Sidney was not ignorant of the need for laws against land fraud (which usually involved some form of fraudulent conveyancing) when, two years later, he praised the Queen’s surveyor, Lancelot Alford, for his work on the escheated lands of Condon of Armoy, who had been attainted. Sidney claimed that “More has been done for the recovery of the Queen’s decayed rents and embezzled lands than was ever done in the memory of man.” In Munster, he said, two professors of law, James Dowdall and Nicholas Welshe, had done as much as “was to be looked for of men of their quality, wanting men of war and force to execute their orders, arrests, and decrees.” On April 27, 1576, Sidney asked the Queen for 300 horse, 700 soldiers, and, he added, three lawyers to be Chief Justices of three principal and common benches and one more to be Attorney General. His request was turned down. On July 6, the month Philip came to visit, the Privy Council answered that “such opinion is conceived of the barbarism there, and so small are the gains and entertainment there, as at all times when any have been chosen to be sent thither, they do ever make some means to her Majesty whereby they may be stayed.”²⁶ Jurisdiction, a good case for the Queen’s prerogative, and force were more useful for recovering forfeitures than the courts.

It would be too much to say that Henry Sidney sympathized with Shane O’Neill. But he knew what it was to owe money. Always pressed, in 1578, he was embarrassed to be recalled from Ireland. His son Philip sent him advice on how to procrastinate, to give his friends, especially his wife, time to work. But Philip himself, it seems, had to carry his father’s accounts to the queen.²⁷

Philip Sidney’s Debts

Whether Philip Sidney inherited his father’s ideal of public service or his disinterest in accumulating wealth, his finances were never certain. He borrowed money during his grand tour (1572–1575), and Edward Wotton – who shared riding lessons with Sidney while they were at the emperor’s court in Prague – witnessed the deed in which Sidney borrowed the life-savings of Hubert Languet.²⁸ In his letter to the queen advising her not to marry, Sidney makes the otherwise odd comment that papists are often rich “because the affairs of the state have not lain on them,” presumably in contrast to the Sidneys.²⁹ Later in the letter he notes that a good prince should possess “virtue and justice,” then “religion and equity,” and then the same thing again but with an addition, “piety, justice, and liberality.”³⁰ On August 2, 1580, Sidney pleads “the curse of my poverty” for staying away from court. In his “Defence of Poetry,” he is poignantly sensitive to how comedy can sting, for if the form makes us laugh at the faults of others, “Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se / Quam quod ridiculos homines fecit” (the worst of poverty is that it makes men look ridiculous).³¹

Not unaware, it seems, of Sidney’s financial problems, nonetheless Thomas Moffett, in a letter written in 1593 to Philip’s nephew William Herbert several years after Sidney’s death, pointed out that debt did not diminish Sidney’s honor, for it indicated a lack of greed: “Our Philip, indeed, judging that not all money is honourable or necessary to a man, a thousand times preferred that he should be ruined and lose his head than that he should increase his own gains by public losses or stain his conscience and his honour…. For he saw how unbecoming to a man is such greediness.” Philip had good credit, despite his expenses for embassies, Christmas festivities and jousting, clothes, and liberality to others, including learned visitors: “however much was wanting, citizens continued to lend as much to the borrower in his pecuniary need.”³² Moffett overstates his case, since Sidney was not immune to financial incentives, but he makes his point about Sidney’s adherence to a code of honor.

What is revealing for an investigation of attitudes towards fraudulent conveyancing is that Sidney’s financial misfortunes usually involve both moral awareness and circumstances that darken his conduct. After Sidney returned from his grand tour in 1575, he invested £25 in Martin Frobisher’s first voyage, despite the warnings of his scholarly mentor Hubert Languet: “Do not let the cursed hunger after gold, which the Poet speaks of, creep over that spirit of yours, into which nothing has hitherto been admitted but love of goodness and desire of earning the good will of all men.”³³ Thinking he had found gold, Frobisher sailed again in 1577; this time Sidney invested £50 for his stake. Frobisher’s third voyage to Hudson Bay concluded what turned out to be a financial disaster. He brought home 200 tons of worthless rock. The receiver, Thomas Allen, charged Sidney and Dyer with unpaid debts for stock and levied on them on April 25th, 1579. That means Sidney had signed his name but not paid in. He must not have thought he was doing anything wrong, but circumstances worked against him.

After the Frobisher episode, Sidney became involved with Humphrey Gilbert in a scheme to colonize North America, from which he stood to control 3 000 000 acres of land. Where Frobisher brought back only worthless rock, not gold, Gilbert died during his expedition of 1583; otherwise Sidney might have made a fortune in America.

Sidney’s involvement with Gilbert not only involved greed for gold. It directly involved him with laws against fraudulent conveyances. Gilbert had a grant from the queen for almost unlimited land yet to be discovered in North America. Walsingham, according to Roger Kuin’s reconstruction, had a scheme for ridding England of Catholics by sending them out as colonists. The problem was that the law against fraudulent conveyances by overseas fugitives (13 Eliz., c. 3) would prevent the two principal Catholic backers of the scheme, Sir Thomas Gerrard and Sir George Peckham, from leaving the country. They had planned to make arrangements for others to run their estates at home and forward proceeds abroad – money that would be necessary to operate the new colonies. It was up to Sidney to convince the queen of the unfairness of the law in this instance, for which service, Kuin proposes, he received the grant from Gilbert on July 7, 1582.³⁴ Once again Sidney is on the side of the conveyor and debtor.

Part of the Sidney hagiography is that he lacked an “eye for the main chance.”³⁵ His friend Fulke Greville portrays him as a courtier overlooked by the queen, who failed to give him the political appointment he believed he deserved as a statesman dedicated to the glory of God and a Protestant league. It is often said that the single most important event in his life was his death at Zutphen. In that Dutch town his thigh was shattered as he bravely led a charge against a Spanish supply train that emerged from the morning mist, revealing a line of soldiers far longer than his band of adventurers had expected. He died of gangrene after making generous provisions in his will and was given the largest funeral of the century in London. The other side of the picture is that Sidney knew exactly why his career was stalled. His definition of moral philosophy, as he said in a letter to his brother Robert, was the study of the effect of the passions on the virtues and vices. Its purpose, like that of poetry, was virtuous action, but action in a sense that contrasts with the doings of a more practical man like Humphrey Gilbert. In a proposal for a college in Ireland, Gilbert defined moral philosophy as the study of what is needed for conquest – military strategy and supply, for example.³⁶ Sidney differed. He was above all a student of people, and as an observant young man, he must have learned something about the real world from his involvement with Walsingham. Like many scholars, he never made money.

Sidney’s acquaintance with Walsingham could only reinforce for him how blurred the line was between prudence and deceit, which was already a feature of his written but unpublished fiction. As Kuin points out, Walsingham hardly needed Philip Sidney to intercede with the queen to suspend the law against fraudulent conveyances by fugitives. He probably used Sidney’s role as an excuse to extract the 3 000 000 acre-grant from Gilbert. But that was not all. A year later, in July, 1583, Sidney granted Peckham 10 per cent of the land in his grant in exchange for Peckham’s furnishing a ship for the next expedition. The narrator of “Astrophel and Stella” bemoans the uselessness of “great expectations,” and we usually think of Sidney’s disappointment that, with the birth of a son to Leicester in 1581, he was no longer heir to his uncle’s fortune. In the real world, however, Sidney continued to use expectations to meet the objections of the investors who were putting up real money. As Moffett said, Philip’s credit was good, despite his debts.

Sidney’s debts cut one way on his attitude toward creditors, but his dependence on royal favor cut the other. The contrast, so reminiscent of his father’s, between his sympathies for the disinherited and for the needs of his own friends characterize a letter of recommendation he wrote to Christopher Hatton, urging him to arrange a grant of Powerscourt, the beautiful estate south of Dublin, to his friend Edward Denny. In urging the suit he could not overlook the fortune of the man who would be dispossessed: “As for him, that sues for it in the Court, he is indeed a good honest fellow, according to the brood of that nation; but being a bastard, he hath no law to recover it, & he is much too weak to keep it.”³⁷ In a similar letter, often cited to demonstrate Sidney’s sympathy for Catholics, he writes to assuage Lady Kitson about “a present intention of a general mitigation, to be used in respect of recusants.”³⁸ He himself was reluctant to accept forfeited lands, in contrast to Walter Ralegh, or Sidney’s friend Edward Dyer, who was involved in schemes to detect concealments, or Edmund Spenser, who was accumulating and trading estates in Ireland while Sidney was writing the Arcadia or attending at court.

A model courtier, Sidney regularly participated in entertainments and tournaments, including one with Ralegh in 1579, but 1581 was an especially busy year. He jousted in a tournament in January and on Accession Day that autumn, and his expenses mounted. His most elaborate, and costly, outing occurred on 16 April, when Sidney, Fulke Greville, and two others appeared at Whitehall as the “Foster Children of Desire.” According to the published account, Sidney was dressed

in very sumptuous manner, with 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 had four pages that rode on his four spare horses who had cassock coats and Venetian hose all of cloth of silver, laid with gold lace and hats of the same with gold bands and white feathers, and each one a pair of white buskins. Then had he thirty gentlemen and yeomen and four trumpeters who were all in cassock coats and Venetian hose of yellow velvet laid with silver lace, yellow velvet caps with silver bands and white feathers, and every one a pair of white buskins.³⁹

With such expenses, it is not surprising that a letter to his uncle Leicester on December 28, 1581 reveals that Sidney owed £3000. He was resorting to usurers and several times mentions that he is encumbered by debts.⁴⁰ He had asked Burghley for £100 a year in “impropriations” and apparently pressed the queen to accept his service. She seems to have responded by offering him recusants’ lands. These lands were the subject, of course, of laws against fraudulent conveyances. Katherine Duncan-Jones captures Sidney’s mood and moral dilemma in her biography of the poet: Sidney feels ashamed for being willing to profit from persecuted Catholics, but feels scorn for his own poverty:

I know not truly what to say, since Her Majesty is pleased so to answer for as well may Her Majesty refuse the matter of the Papists and then I have both shame and scorn…. Truly I like not their persons and much worse their religions, but I think my fortune very hard that my reward must be built upon other men’s punishments.⁴¹

Sidney’s poetry reflects his personal convictions. In poem 18 of his poetry sequence Astrophel and Stella, he compares unbridled passion to financial mismanagement, two things to which he was susceptible. The poem has been praised for its strong verbs, action, movement, and the way it combines the parables of the talents and the prodigal son.⁴² In this poem, his poetic persona has been devoted to reason and learning but wants only to lose “more” of what heaven “hath lent” to him:

With what sharpe checkes I in my selfe am shent,

  When into Reason’s audit 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 owe:

  And which is worse, no good excuse can show,

But that my wealth I have most idly spent.

  My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,

My wit doth strive those passions to defend,

Which for reward spoile it with vaine annoyes.

I see my course to lose my self doth bend:

I see and yet no greater sorrow take,

Than that I lose no more for Stella’s sake.⁴³

This poem makes no sense if the narrator believes that misspending on Stella is not in some sense immoral but at the same time, prudent. We may add that it was a form of fraudulent conveyance for a bankrupt to continue payments to one creditor, thereby defrauding others. A similar trope occurs in sonnet 52, when the poet grants “Stella’s selfe” to “Vertue” as long as “Vertue” will “graunt” her body “to us.” The poem may offer a witty conceit for Stella’s body, but the conceit is based on the seriousness and lack of qualm in the desire for it, resulting in a moral indeterminacy. The same witty use of profligacy underlies sonnet 62: “Deare, love me not, that you may love me more.”

Sidney’s poetry sequence was written after 1581, when he attended the third and last session of Elizabeth’s Fourth Parliament. Even if he had never heard of the practice before, he would have learned something about fraudulent conveyancing at that session, since the issue was raised in several forms and on several occasions. The queen herself, in a surprising addition to protocol, mentioned the problem of debtors’ evading creditors in her opening response to the House Speaker’s disabling speech. A new Speaker traditionally offered to withdraw himself as unworthy of the queen. By disabling himself, the Speaker rhetorically allowed the queen to confirm his election by the House. The Speaker – in this case, Mr. John Popham, Solicitor General, of Bristol – also included “three petitions,” for freedom from arrest for the members and their servants, for liberty of speech in the House, and for his own access to the queen. On this occasion the queen added a novel condition to her grant of freedom from arrest, when she said that she “would not have any purposely become of the House or retain servants indebted to defraud other creditors of the due debts.” As Neale observes, she was probably thinking of Smalley’s case from the previous session in 1576.⁴⁴ But it was not only the queen who was concerned about the parliamentary immunity from arrest for debt.

The case of Smalley is instructive because it illustrates the growing problem in those years. It happened that a man named Edward Smalley was sued for a battery. He had cut open another man’s cheek and was ordered by a jury to pay £100 in damages. Smalley, however, had sureties whom he wanted to protect. His scheme was to have himself arrested for debt, then have his master, Arthur Hall, claim a parliamentary privilege from arrest. Due to a legal technicality, the plaintiff could not then get a second writ of execution. The plan went forward, and the House was therefore faced with the dilemma of defending its ancient privilege from arrest for debt. The members either had to hand Smalley over to the sheriff or countenance an obvious fraud. To the Speaker’s dismay – and Popham was a lawyer who believed the law should not be interfered with – the House favored its privilege. It ignored the justice of the plaintiff’s suit and voted to have Smalley released. It was this fraud of a creditor that bothered the queen, and her attitude toward the incident lends support to the thesis that 13 Eliz., c. 5 had not been solely inspired by politics.⁴⁵

Whether Sidney thought Smalley should have been allowed to evade his creditors may be judged by his own behavior in 1584, when he sat in the first session of Elizabeth’s Fifth Parliament. During this term, his own servant John Pepler was arrested for debt, and Sidney – like Smalley’s employer Arthur Hall – used his parliamentary privilege to free him. On Monday, March 15, 1585, “It was ordered upon a motion this day by M^r Recorder of London that a Warrant for a Writ of Priviledge be awarded for setting at liberty of John Pepler now prisoner for debt in the Counter in London, servant unto Sir Philip Sidney a member of this House.”⁴⁶ His privilege benefited Sidney in two ways: he showed himself a friend to his servant, and the debt could be delayed. Once again we find Sidney on the side of debtors and conveyors. Did he act with prudence, or was there a whiff of intent to defraud creditors?

If Sidney was at all attentive in Parliament – and we have little record of his activities there – he could not help but have been aware of the ethical debate that framed itself around conveyances by debtors and others. The central business began with a speech by Sir Walter Mildmay that would prompt a new recusancy bill, which naturally involved fraudulent conveyances. In his attack on recusants, Mildmay listed six proofs of what he called the Pope’s “implacable malice”: 1) the Northern Rebellion; 2) his maintenance of rebels and other fugitives; 3) the bull of 1570 that excommunicated the queen; 4) the invasion of Ireland by James Fitzmorrice; 5) Desmond’s rebellion; and 6) the invasion of strangers and fortifying of Ireland, which referred to events at Smerwick, in Ireland. Mildmay observed that recently priests and Jesuits had been sent to England, whose principle errand was “by creeping into the Houses of men of behaviour and reputation, not only to corrupt the Realm with false doctrine, but also… to stir up sedition.” He called for laws to constrain obedience, a strong navy, and support for the army in Ireland, using native levies, not mercenaries, which he condemned, saying it was a sorrowful practice on the Continent. Sidney served on the committee assigned to devise an appropriate bill.⁴⁷

Three features of the “due obedience” bill that finally passed concern our story. First, it contained a fraudulent conveyance clause. Second, it was this bill that created the pressure on Catholics to make fraudulent conveyances – pressure that Glenn believed existed 10 years earlier. Third, the bill that passed was milder than the one introduced. The first version of the bill that emerged from the committee on which Sidney sat was, Neale observes, a severer version of a 1571 bill that the queen had vetoed. She was willing to allow a penalty for failure to attend church, but refused to punish failure to receive Holy Communion. She did not believe consciences should be forced, and as Francis Bacon observed, did not seek a “window on men’s hearts.”⁴⁸ The measure that passed in 1581 followed the queen’s policy. It was hope of this milder measure that Sidney apparently referred to in his letter of March 28, 1581, to Lady Kitson.

Parliament’s recalcitrance is noteworthy, because by 1581, the nature of the Catholic threat had changed.⁴⁹ Exiles had founded a seminary at Douai, which by 1574 had begun sending missionaries into England. The Jesuits arrived in 1580, and Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons were hunted men. Sidney had known Campion at Oxford in 1569, and the two reunited in Prague in 1574. Campion considered Sidney a “poor wavering soul,” and believed that Philip’s conversion would “astonish his noble father, the Deputy of Ireland, his uncles the Dudleys, and all the young courtiers, and Cecil himself.”⁵⁰ A few months after the end of Parliament, Campion was captured, examined personally by the queen, and finally executed for treason on December 1, 1581. Despite its anti-Catholic feeling, however, Parliament at least partly disfavored not only the financial pressures applied to Catholics but the use of conveyancing laws to enforce them.

The fraudulent conveyance clause the bill contained also indicates the unsettled state of the law. It refers back to 13 Eliz., c. 5, either because the clause in the bill is redundant or, more likely, the authors of the bill believed 13 Eliz., c. 5 was not sufficient of itself to stop fraudulent conveyances by recusants, and that this combination sufficiently broadened the earlier law:

And be it likewise enacted and declared, that every graunt, conveyance, bond, judgement, and execution, had, or made, since the beginning of this Session of Parliament, or hereafter to be had, or made, of covenous purpose to defraud any interest, right or title, that may or ought to grow to the Queen, or to any other person by means of any conviction or judgment, by vertue of this statute, or of the said statute of the sayd xiii. yere, shall be, and be adjudged to be utterly void against the Queen, and against such as shall sue for any part of the said penalties in form aforesayd. (23 Eliz., c. 1; my emphasis)

Valuable as they are, the parliamentary records do not reveal all we might want to know. First, the journals give no other indications of Sidney’s work. Second, despite many references to various fraudulent conveyance measures, the terms of the debates are hard to identify. A bill against “secret conveyances and deceitful sale of land” was read on March 7 and again on March 14, but it was dashed in the Lords and a new bill had to be proposed. It too never passed, but the debate probably indicates the controversy that preceded passage of 27 Eliz., c. 4 in the next parliament. Some of the other unclear references may have concerned a provision that was included in the “due obedience” bill. What is important is that Sidney was present as these various measures were introduced and read once, twice, or three times, according to parliamentary procedure. Proximity, if nothing else, connects the “bill for avoiding of encumbrances against purchasers,” which was read for the second time on January 26; a bill for the speedy recovery of debts, which was read for the first time the next day; and a bill, never passed, also read on January 27 “against secret and stolen contracts of children without consent of parents.” But there is more, since these measures cohere to form a picture of a cultural obsession with the problem of fraudulent conveyancing. The last bill, in particular, relates directly to Sidney’s Arcadia, whose plot turns on stolen children.

The Ravishment Plot

It was Sidney’s genius in the Arcadia to develop a plot that could represent the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyances. The problem was how to balance the interests of creditors, including the state, who sought to counter fraud with the desire of men in varied circumstances to retain control of their lives and property. Sidney’s solution, which has often been misread as an artistic flaw, takes the form of the separate ravishments committed by the heroes of the story.

The plot of the Arcadia involves two princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who arrive in Arcadia and fall in love with the daughters of Basilius, the local duke or king, depending on the version. Basilius has ignobly retreated to the countryside because he fears an oracle that says his elder daughter Pamela will be “stolen,” while the young daughter Philoclea will “embrace / An uncouth love.”⁵¹ To woo Pamela, Musidorus secretly disguises himself as a shepherd. Similarly, to approach Philoclea, Pyrocles dresses as an Amazon. Both suitors have obstacles to overcome as well. Basilius has assigned a foolish shepherd named Dametas to keep a vigilant eye on Pamela, while Philoclea’s parents keep an eye on their younger daughter themselves. Pyrocles suffers a further misfortune when Basilius falls in love with his Amazon disguise, while Gynecia, Basilius’s wife, falls in love with the man hidden underneath the disguise. Eventually Musidorus deceives Dametas, the guardian shepherd, and leads Pamela on horseback toward a seaport to take ship, promising he will marry her. That very day Pyrocles finally solves his dilemma by devising a plot to deceive Philoclea’s parents. He has his bed moved to a cave, allegedly to escape the heat of the country, then arranges separate assignations with Basilius and Gynecia. They each meet the other instead of the lover they hoped to find. Meanwhile Pyrocles creeps into their daughter’s room, locks the door, and in the Old Arcadia, apparently makes love to Philoclea (OA 211 and 237, NA 395). Pyrocles thus ravishes Philoclea literally while his cousin Musidorus only ravishes Pamela in the broader sense of making off with her.

Both sets of lovers are caught. During a pause in their elopement, Musidorus holds an internal debate, typical of Sidney’s style, in which his passion conquers his reason. Unable to control himself, Musidorus does his best to rape Pamela as she sleeps, but some unruly peasants interrupt him. Pyrocles, too, is discovered, and both princes go on trial for having violated the local law of Arcadia “which, without exception, did condemn all to death who were found… in act of marriage without solemnity of marriage” (OA 251, NA 737). Their trial is held conjointly with the murder trial of Gynecia, who had brought a potion into the cave where she unexpectedly met her husband. Basilius seems to die after drinking it, and Gynecia is arrested.

Set in a legal context by these courtroom trials, Musidorus’s flight with Pamela is referred to as a conveyance three times, twice by Philanax and once by Musidorus, and it is closely linked to Pyrochles’ sexual intercourse with Philoclea. During his prosecution of the princes for various infractions – as “disguisers, falsifiers, adulterers, ravishers, murderers, and traitors” – the prolix Philanax accuses Musidorus of trying to have “conveyed away the undoubted inheritrix of this country” (OA 335) and then again of trying to “convey away the lady of us all” (OA 345, NA 830–831). Musidorus throws the term back in his face by belittling the idea that he “conveyed away the princess of this country” (OA 347, NA 833). How could he convey one who was a princess? His persuasion could not be treason, only error, since the final decision was hers. When Sidney revised his story, he extended the trope to the other pair of lovers.⁵² In the New Arcadia Pyrocles no longer sleeps with Philoclea but instead asks her to run away with him to his kingdom of Macedon. She answers that she will do so “if you can convey me hence in such plight as you see me” (NA 688, my emphasis), and then she faints. Sidney’s attention to language signals the close connection between ravishment and fraudulent conveyance, retaining, even in revision, the ambivalent attitude toward his heroes that duplicates the difficulty in devising fair laws that faced English jurisprudence.

Ravishment is the form of fraudulent conveyance appropriate to the pastoral form of the Arcadia, where problems of commerce would violate decorum. The princes in the story never worry about money. These creatures of Sidney’s fantasy are wealthy young men who travel with a treasure chest that is always available when they need it. They dress in gorgeous jewels at their trial, where Musidorus adorns his dark hair with rubies and Pyrocles wears diamonds on his white velvet cloak and a single white ribbon binds his auburn locks (OA 325, NA 808).

If the princes are debtors, it is because they believe they owe all their love to the daughters of Basilius, a debt that Philoclea calls in when Pyrocles threatens to kill himself to save her honor after the pair are discovered in flagrante. During a long debate on suicide that follows, Pyrocles argues that he owes a debt to Philoclea because of the trouble he has caused her. His life is all he has to pay: “the infiniteness of your goodness being such as it cannot reach unto it, yet doing all I can and paying my life, which is all I have, though it be far (without measure) short of your desert, yet shall I not die in debt to mine own duty” (OA 256, NA 742). Philoclea counters that he is only acting out of passion. By dying he presumes to know what God wants, but God’s purpose is inscrutable. She in effect accuses him of a fraudulent conveyance, since by throwing away his life, he is really retaining the use of it, and thereby avoiding the true debt he owes to her – his life. Philoclea is appalled that Pyrocles would give his life away rather than pay his debt of love to her. Pyrocles is impressed that this young girl reasons so well, but in a telling response, he ignores her logic and makes another attempt to kill himself. What looks like fraud to Philoclea is an act of honor to Pyrocles.

It may have been Sidney’s own experience that connected the topics of ravishment and fraudulent conveyance in his imagination. They arose on the same day in Parliament in 1581. They were also deeply implicated by English law, which connected problems of debtors with various attempts to defraud the Crown of its revenues. As little kingdoms in themselves, families had similar protections against men who would convey or carry away their women. One term or the other occurs in a series of laws that begin with 13 Edw. I, c. 34 (1285), which made it a felony to “ravish a woman married, maid, or other, where she did not consent.” Some women did consent, and so the statute added “And of women carried away with the goods of their husbands, the king shall have the suit for the goods so taken away.” Others were coerced: 31 Hen. VI, c. 9 set out in its preamble the problem of men who took women “into their possession, conveying them” into places where they have most power, and forcing them to sign indentures of servitude. The act allowed a judicial inquiry, and upon examination of the parties, the obligation might be declared “void, and of no force nor effect.” 3 Hen. VII, c. 2, restated the penalty for “carrying a Woman away against her will that hath lands or goods,” affirming that the crime was a felony.⁵³ Finally, 4 & 5 Ph. & M., c. 8, set out in its preamble the problem of “maidens and women children of noblemen, gentlemen, and others,” especially “heirs apparent of their ancestors,” who by “flattery, trifling gifts, and fair promises” be “often times taken and conveyed away” to the “displeasure of Almighty God, disparagement of the said children, and extreme continual heaviness of all their friends.” It established that it should not be lawful “to take or convey away, or cause to be taken or conveyed away any maid or woman child unmarried, being within the age of sixteen years” against the will of the father or such person as the father has appointed by his last will and testament. (The penalty was attainder, two years in prison or payment of such a fine as shall be assessed by the queen’s council in Star Chamber.)

The laws against the ravishment of women are related to, and use the language of, fraudulent conveyance, because to ravish a woman, particularly an heiress, was tantamount to defrauding a family of its property interest in her. In Sidney’s Arcadia, Euarchus bases the punishments he metes out to the princes on this principle, the defense of the family, not the violence of rape – in the sense either of kidnapping or having carnal knowledge – or the statutory law of Arcadia, under which the princes could be condemned to death for being “found in act of marriage without solemnity of marriage” (OA 251, NA 737). Therefore even though Euarchus finds Philoclea not guilty of the charge of intercourse and spares her life, he sentences her to a nunnery on the vague conclusion that she is “not altogether faultless” (OA 329, NA 812). Euarchus has read his Aristotle and points out that judgment cannot be applied “by a free discourse of reason and skill of philosophy, but must be tied to the laws of Greece and municipal statutes of this dukedom.” Philosophy is too general and leaves “to every man a scope of his own interpretation,” he says, but laws provide “assured bounds, which once broken, man’s nature infinitely rangeth” (OA 350, NA 835). Nonetheless, he makes a decision based not on the law but his own morality. This ambiguity mirrors the ethical dilemma of fraudulent conveyancing laws, which must judge whether a free gift may outweigh another duty.

Implicitly recognizing a gap between strict morality and the law, Euarchus gropes with the problem of how to punish Pyrocles. Since he cannot find Pyrocles guilty of intercourse without staining the reputation of Philoclea, whom he has already found technically innocent, Euarchus must find some other penalty for the prince. He does so by ruling that Pyrocles “offered violence to the lady Philoclea, an act punished by all the Grecian laws with being thrown down from a high tower to the earth.” But what violence? I do not think we are ever clear what exactly Eurarchus punishes. Is it what we today would call an assault – an act that puts a victim in fear of harm although no battery occurs – or does Euarchus react because it is an assault on a princess? The punishment of being tossed off a tower is meant to be suitable to the crime – a sort of contrapasso–but the imagery is more suggestive than enlightening. It may be that the guilty Pyrocles must fall because he aspired too high. It may be that he must be dashed into the earth because of the physical character of rape. Most likely, I think, his fall is meant to illustrate the “general ruin” (the Latin root of “ruin” means “to fall”) that follows from rape, because rape does two things. It makes parentage uncertain, causing “confusion” and unsettling society. And it allows the delinquent’s offspring to inherit whatever forms of property are available to the woman. Despite obvious affection for his hero, Sidney allows a sense of right to enter his story.

Although his story eventually sides with the princes, who must live for there to be a happy ending, Sidney does not mock Euarchus, whose name means “good leader.” When Euarchus condemns Musidorus, he clarifies his belief that the princes’ true crime, to his stern eyes at least, is that of interfering with a father’s right to dispose of his daughter, his property:

The other young man confesseth he persuaded the princess Pamela to fly her country, and accompanied her in it – without all question a ravishment no less than the other; for, although he ravished her not from herself, yet he ravished her from him that owed her, which was her father. That she was heiress to the state elevated the crime. This kind is chastised by the loss of the head, as a most execrable theft; for if they must die who steal from us our goods, how much more they who steal from us that for which we gather our goods. (OA 351, NA 836–837)

Unlike Pyrocles, Musidorus never admits he tried to use force. He is sentenced to lose his head, because he ravished the head of state. But his crime, if there is one, was against Pamela’s father, not Pamela. Musidorus is the classic conveyor: we root for him, even though we know what he does is wrong.

The Intractable Ending

The ethical dilemmas raised by Sidney’s work – for 200 years the most popular piece of original English prose fiction – have been the subject of vigorous debate over whether the plot collapses under their weight. This debate centers on the ending of the story. Critics have long noticed that the revival of Basilius, who takes over from Euarchus and pardons the princes, does not logically explain why he should condone their behavior, other than that Basilius is glad to be alive. According to William Ringler, the ending of the story “completely undercuts the heroic adherence of Euarchus to ‘sacred Rightfulnes,’ for the princes escape punishment, not by any revelation of a change in the nature of their offence, but by coming before a less impartial and less idealistic judge.” Ringler believed that “Sidney himself apparently became aware of the ethical ambiguity of this scene,” and he made two changes. First he eliminated “the heroes’ attempts upon the chastity of the princesses.” Second, Sidney changed his story to show that the princes were married before the trial took place, thereby eliminating the charge of abduction as well.⁵⁴ In the older version an oracle had warned the duke that

Thy elder care shall from thy careful face

  By princely mean be stolen and yet not lost;

Thy younger shall with nature’s bliss embrace

  An uncouth love, which nature hateth most.

(OA 5)

In the new version, the oracle adds a line, telling Basilius (who is now a king), that his daughters will already be married to the defendants when they are tried for his murder:

Both they themselves unto such two shall wed,

  Who at thy bier, as at a bar, shall plead

  Why thee (a living man) they had made dead.

(NA 395)

But as Roger Howell has pointed out, there was not a great moral fuss about “marriage by consummation on the basis of private betrothal” in Sidney’s England.⁵⁵ Similarly, Michael McCanles has objected that “the elopement is just as surely predicted in the new Arcadia version as it is in the original version. In short, the two versions of the oracle predict the same conclusion, that given in old Arcadia Books 3–5.”⁵⁶ The upshot is that the ending of the New Arcadia, in the text as we have it, must be doing the same work as that of the Old Arcadia. (Sidney died before his revisions reached this portion of the story.)

Most scholars believe Sidney finished composing the Old Arcadia in 1580, a year when he resided from March to August with his sister Mary, to whom the work is dedicated. In October he wrote to his brother Robert, on the Continent, that he hoped to send him a copy by February. Ringler believed the book was therefore at the scriveners, but according to Jean Robertson, “the evidence suggests that the first draft was more or less completed by the spring of 1581,” which puts the completion after the meeting of Parliament that year, an interlude, along with the court entertainments that cost Sidney so much money, that may have delayed his completing the work.⁵⁷ But it hardly matters whether Sidney’s attitude toward conveyancing preceded or followed from his time spent among the lawmakers; he was intimately part of the culture within which the conveyancing debate was taking place.

As a political thinker, Sidney was obsessed in both versions of the Arcadia by the implications of Basilius’s foolish retirement in fear of the oracle. But the errors of the duke cannot justify political rebellion, nor can the revival of Basilius relieve the princes of responsibility for their behavior toward the princesses. Instead, Sidney’s art “cultivates an ambivalent response,” according to Ann Astell, and it is up to the reader to develop self-knowledge and humility by weighing moral precepts against the “circumstances and the necessity to act.”⁵⁸ It follows that despite the objections of commentators who find the plot of the Arcadia too slender to support the weight of moral inquiry it has to carry – the question of how to respond to a retiring prince, and justifications for rebellion, lying, cross-dressing against class and gender lines, as well as ravishment – the elopements in the Arcadia illustrate a class of ethically ambiguous activities such as the law grappled with under the rubric of fraudulent conveyances.

The debates over fraudulent conveyances in Parliament condemned practices Sidney must have approved of – the way the Dudleys handled their property as they faced treason charges in 1553, the reluctance of men of his father’s class (the higher nobility) to strengthen the government’s ability to prevent even an O’Neill from taking steps to protect his estate, the slightly dishonest protection that service in Parliament afforded to servants in debt – and suggests that the morally elusive ending of the Arcadia aims at a more specific target than just the general malaise of a young gentleman whom the queen chose not to trust. While the English lawyers slowly refined their statutes and cases on conveyancing, Sidney’s art made a case for the passions that drove conveyors and provided counterarguments to the reasons that would rein them in.

The ethical conflict between generosity and integrity – paying a debt before giving a gift – determines when a conveyance is fraudulent. It also determines what love is honorable. After Sidney’s Arcadia appeared, this conflict commonly manifested itself in Renaissance literary works depicting young ladies who might be tempted to open their chaste treasures instead of honoring the debt they owed their families. The connection may seem strained, but George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie specifically mentions the use of debt imagery in love poetry. Discussing the difference between a metaphor and a catachresis, Puttenham explains that a metaphor occurs when a word is wrested from its own signification and transported (carried over; meta + phorein) to “another not so natural but yet of some affinitie or conveniencie with it.” An example he gives is “as the man of law said, I feel you not, for I understand not your case, because he had not his fee in his hand.”⁵⁹ A catachresis, however, is a form of metaphor “without any just convenience.” It is a “plain abuse,” as in the verse “I lent my love to losse, and gaged my life in vaine.”

Whereas this word lent is properly of mony or some such other thing, as men do commonly borrow, for use to be repaid again, and being applied to love is utterly abused, and yet very commendably spoken by virtue of this figure. For he that loveth and is not beloved again, hath no less wrong, than he that lendeth and is never repayde.⁶⁰

Puttenham’s choice of debt as an example of catachresis is doubly interesting in light of his own behavior: he married the widowed Lady Windsor and defrauded her by conveying away her manor of Heriard: John Throckmorton, who was in trouble as a Catholic and previous supporter of Queen Mary, helped with the conveyance.⁶¹ Like Henry and Philip Sidney, Puttenham sided with the conveyors.

A literary ravishment is an inexact metaphor for a fraudulent conveyance but not less effective for that. When Sidney wrote the Arcadia, it would probably have been felt as a catachresis; by the time the topic reached Spenser and Shakespeare, it was common enough to be a metaphor. Later authors were probably not aware of Sidney’s attitudes or circumstances, yet they picked up the association he made in his fictional plot between elopements and conveyances – between passion, or necessity, and reason. If Sidney’s plot creaks, he was nonetheless a model for poets as talented as Spenser and Shakespeare. The Faerie Queene continues the metaphoric connection between ravishment and fraudulent conveyances. In The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo ravishes Jessica even as she carries away her father’s moneybags.

Sidney’s own impecunious circumstances, his father’s involvement with bills of attainder, and his attendance in Parliament where men spoke both for and against laws against fraudulent conveyances may be sufficient to explain the curious feature of his Arcadia, that its heroes Musidorus and Pyrocles engage in a form of fraudulent conveyancing, the ravishment of heiresses, and yet go unpunished. But it was Sidney’s brother Robert, one of the earliest readers of the Arcadia, who first applied what might be learned from the story. What he did reminds us that the laws against the vigorous pursuit of heiresses went against the grain for many adventurous men who sought to wive it wealthily. Robert, whom Malcolm Wallace said “had an eye for the main chance which was foreign to” his brother, married the wealthy Barbara Gammage, age 22, after his return from touring Europe. Her father had died on September 8, 1584, and she was at once inundated with offers. The queen tried to keep her from the entanglements of marriage, but her royal mandate arrived too late. Robert had already married his heiress. “The ceremony was performed,” on September 23, “two hours before the arrival of the Queen’s messenger forbidding it.”⁶² The queen was thwarted, but the ceremony was lawful, and Robert, having carried away the bride, barely avoided a charge of defrauding the queen’s interest.

In Contrast, Edward Dyer

Sidney’s poetry associates extravagant spending with uncontrollable passion, and the same attitude informs his fiction, his theory of poetry, his father’s politics, and his brother’s marriage. Yet his friend Edward Dyer and his acquaintance Edmund Spenser held very different views. Unlike Sidney, they aligned themselves with those government measures that other men felt obliged to circumvent.

The association of Spenser, Sidney, and Dyer is one of the most tantalizing in Elizabethan literary history. In October 1579, Spenser wrote to Gabriel Harvey that Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer “have me, I thank them, in some use of familiarity.”⁶³ We usually speculate about whether Spenser really had the opportunity to sit with Sidney, his social superior, and discuss poetry. But we might also wonder if they discussed their careers, which in any aristocratic circle would have meant how to attain an income-producing estate. In that case the more interesting conversation might have been that between Spenser and Dyer.

We have seen that Sidney was too morally troubled to accept without reservations the forfeitures of poor men who had run afoul of the law. Yet his uncle Leicester, who would probably be more obviously shadowed in Spenser’s Faerie Queene had he not died in 1588, seems to have helped Spenser do just that when he arranged for him to obtain a post with Lord Grey. A year later Spenser was in Ireland picking up escheated estates, something Sidney himself found distasteful. At the same time Sidney’s boyhood friend and biographer Fulke Greville was in the navy off the coast of Munster, reporting on the spoils to be had there.⁶⁴ And Dyer was ruminating, not for the first time, on a plan to search for concealments. “Concealed lands,” as A. L. Rowse explains, “meant lands, usually monastic or chantry, which should have come to the Crown by the Dissolution, but which had somehow been concealed and withheld.”⁶⁵ Already in 1574 Dyer had a license for lands to the value of £100, and more was to come later.⁶⁶

Edward Dyer’s granduncle was Sir James Dyer, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. His father was a “gentleman steward” of the household of Henry VIII, who in February 1540 received property from the suppressed Glastonbury Abbey. Edward, born in 1543, went to Oxford in 1558 and to court, with Leicester, in 1567. In 1576, as a reward for his Song in the Oak, he received a license to control tanners, one of the first monopolies Elizabeth issued.⁶⁷ After the queen rejected Sidney’s advice on her proposed marriage to Alençon, Sidney and Dyer retired from court in January 1580. While Sidney was writing his Arcadia, Dyer returned to court, where he participated in “commissions, legal appointments, financial responsibilities.”⁶⁸ He also obtained a loan from the queen for £3000, for which he mortgaged his estates. The debt burdened him for life. In a letter to Walsingham, the Portuguese ambassador said Dyer was little better than a bankrupt. In 1586 the Exchequer threatened proceedings to collect.

Faced with ruin, Dyer once again positioned himself to search for concealments. In March 1588, he received a patent from the queen, good until 1593, to discover any property that either through confiscation or failure of heirs ought to have reverted the Crown.⁶⁹ He would investigate titles to land and buildings, and if he discovered any, he would declare them, make certain payments to the Crown, and keep the rest for himself. First, however, he had to pay £4000 to buy out Sir Edward Stafford, who had previously held the grant. One wonders what Sidney would have thought, had he been alive, of his friend’s occupation. Even as corrupt a figure as the earl of Northampton (Norfolk’s brother, who became a favorite of King James), decried a project for discovering concealed lands, noting to Robert Carr the evil of allowing one subject to fleece another in the name of the king.⁷⁰ In the event, landowners outwitted Dyer’s agents, and Burghley refused to extend his patent. The Lord Treasurer started to seize Dyer’s lands but died before the process was completed. Robert Cecil, who succeeded his father, granted Dyer an extension for the £3000 he had owed since 1580 and also extended his patent for concealments, but although Dyer’s agent William Tipper made over £2000, Dyer never was out of debt. He died in 1607, owing the huge sum of £11 200.

Dyer’s impecunious demise is both similar to and different from that of Sidney 20 years earlier. As gangrene lethally infected the thigh wound Sidney received in his heroic charge at Zutphen, the dying poet penned a will that left lavish bequests to friends, family, and doctors. Unfortunately Henry Sidney and his wife had died only a few months previously, and Sidney probably did not realize the poor condition of his estate. His father-in-law Francis Walsingham wrote that it “doth greatly afflict me, that a gentleman that hath lived so unspotted a reputation, and had so great a care to see all men satisfied, should be so exposed to the outcry of creditors. His goods will not suffice to answer a third part of his debts already known.”⁷¹ Although Sidney died in debt, he was honored for his generosity and for his integrity. He had not, like Dyer, sought out concealments, and unlike Spenser, he never railed against fraudulent conveyances.

Notes

¹ “Sydney’s Memoir of His Government in Ireland,” a letter written in 1583 to Sir Francis Walsingham, as he and Sidney negotiated their children’s marriage, printed in The Ulster Journal of Archaeology 8 (1860): 179–195, 192.

² The statute can be found in The Statutes of Ireland (Dublin, 1621), pp. 309–324. The passage cited is from p. 321. A year later in the parliament of 1570, another bill of attainder was passed for Thomas Queverford, but again, there is no language to prevent fraudulent conveyancing.

³ Mona Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney (London: Duckworth, 1931), p. 18.

⁴ Conyers Read, The Tudors: Personalities and Practical Politics in Sixteenth Century England (New York: Henry Holt, 1936), p. 126.

⁵ Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, p. 20.

⁶ Ibid., p. 21.

⁷ For further on this episode, see Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 9.

⁸ R. Dudley Edwards, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors: The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilization (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), p. 85.

⁹ Ibid., p. 88. Edwards is the historian referred to in the next sentence.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 89.

¹¹ Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts Preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, ed. J. S. Brewer and William Bullen (London, 1867–73), 3: 280.

¹² Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, 3: 281. Lists survive of people who petitioned for property. The queen authorized the use of more surrender and regrants “in tail male” (p. 293) and asked the Exchequer to prepare a “breviate” of debts owed to the Crown (p. 295).

¹³ David Beers Quinn, The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1939–1940), 1: 118.

¹⁴ 11 Eliz., c. 1, printed in The Statutes of Ireland (Dublin, 1621). Page numbers in the text.

¹⁵ The source is probably Geoffrey of Monmouth. See Edwards, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, p. 122.

¹⁶ There have been several critical attempts to relate the style of Philanax’s oration to Philip Sidney, but not usually to his father. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), calls Philanax an “exceptional counsellor” (p. 146), “whose public spirit earns him the hostility of private-spirited men” (p. 147). Warden asks, “Has Philanax ever been in love?… Had Philip’s father Sir Henry? Could Sidney have shared the kind of wit that illuminates the Arcadia with any of these men?” (p. 329).

¹⁷ The statute itself is not well documented in contemporary sources; most scholars rely on the version published in 1621 in The Statutes of Ireland. Spenser does not seem to think there is any earlier, controlling law on fraudulent conveyances. If the law against fraudulent conveyances was honored in the breach, that is, known to exist in Ireland but ignored, there was all the more reason for Sidney to restate it.

¹⁸ It is possible that the Popham from Bristol was John’s brother Edward; see J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559-1581 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), p. 219.

¹⁹ Charles William Wallace, The First London Theatre (1913; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), p. 164.

²⁰ See T. E. Hartley, Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 3 vols. (Leicester, 1981), 1: 219, n. 85, for April 22, 1571. “Two of Sir Henry Sidney’s debts appear on sheriff John Smith’s shrieval account for Kent for the year 1600–1.”

²¹ Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559–1581, p. 219.

²² “Sydney’s Memoir of His Government in Ireland,” printed in The Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 8 (1860): 194.

²³ The Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3 (1855): 42.

²⁴ Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, 2: 46. My emphasis.

²⁵ The Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 8 (1860): 194: “And now, deere Sir and brother, an end of this tragicall discourse, tedious for you to read, but more tedious it would have been if it had come written with my own hand as first it was: tragicall I may well tearme it, for that it began with the joyfull love and great lyking with likelihood of matrimoniall match between our most deere and swete children, whom God bless, and endeth with declaration of my unfortunate and hard estate.” My emphasis.

²⁶ Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, 2: 53.

²⁷ Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, Political Discourses, Correspondence, Translations, ed. Albert Feuillerat, vol. 3 of The Works of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962), p. 123: Sidney writes to his father, who is upset about his early removal from a term governing Ireland in 1578, that he is sent for to the queen, “being armed with good Accounts and perfitt Reasons for them, &c.”

²⁸ This occurred in January 1575. See James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney: 1572–1577 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 278.

²⁹ “A Letter Written by Sir Philip Sidney to the Queen Elizabeth, touching her marriage with Monsieur,” in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 48.

³⁰ Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, pp. 54 and 56. My emphasis.

³¹ Ibid., p. 116.

³² Thomas Moffett, Nobilis or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney, trans. Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1940), pp. 79 and 82.

³³ Sidney-Languet Letters, trans. with an introduction by S. A. Pears (London: Pickering, 1845), p. 126. Languet refers to Virgil’s Aeneid, III, 57: “auri sacra fames.” The brother of Sidney’s new friend Edward Dyer sailed with Frobisher in June, 1576.

³⁴ Roger Kuin, “Querre-Huhau: Sir Philip Sidney and the New World,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 549–585.

³⁵ Malcolm William Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1915; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1967), p. 310. See also p. 323 (“The truth is that Sir Philip’s judgment of men was by no means profound”) and p. 402 (“he was constantly possessed by a double sense of the reality on the one hand, and on the other the unreality of all human striving”).

³⁶ See Beers Quinn, The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1: 28.

³⁷ Feuillerat, The Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 3: 137.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 134.

³⁹ Roger Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), pp. 86–87, citing Henry Goldwell, A Brief Declaration of the Shewes (London, 1581).

⁴⁰ For the references to “usurers” and “combres,” see the letter to Lord Burghley of October 10, 1581, in Feuillerat, The Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 3: 136.

⁴¹ Feuillerat, The Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 3: 139. See Feuillerat, The Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 3: 136–137, and the summary by Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991): “Painfully, [Sidney] was still appealing to Hatton for aid. Campion was dead, and the authorities were cynically accumulating more and more fines and goods from those who had the courage to continue to practice the old religion. Sidney could not afford to be too squeamish about this…. It seems that an earlier bid for office had collapsed. Perhaps the Queen had deliberately substituted for it the offer of forfeited goods, to force Sidney into the anti-Catholic camp…. Presumably this means ‘shame’for his willingness to profit from the persecuted Catholics and ‘scorn’ for his continued poverty” (pp. 219–220). In an earlier letter to Christopher Hatton, December 18, 1581, Sidney had written, “some of my friends counsel me to stand upon Her Majesty’s offer, touching the forfeiture of Papist’s goods. Sir, I know not how to be more sure of Her Highness in that, than I thought myself in this. But though I were, in truth, it goeth against my heart, to prevent a prince’s mercy: my necessity is great: I beseech you vouchsafe me your honorable care and good advice.”

⁴² Richard McCoy summarizes new-critical readings of the poem in Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 80.

⁴³ The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 173–174.

⁴⁴ The following summary is indebted to Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559–1581, pp. 333–345.

⁴⁵ The problem was compounded by the argument that the sheriffs who arrested Smalley might become liable for his debt, as well as the difficulty of determining just which official should procure his release. Lack of precedent paralyzed the process. The crisis continued because Hall refused to compromise. He had a pamphlet published about the quarrel that was “shocking to the self-esteem of the Elizabethan House of Commons” (Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559–1581, p. 345). Neale says Hall wrote it, but it was obviously composed by a lawyer and is as good an example of a statement-of-facts from a legal brief as can be found in print. See Arthur Hall, A Letter Sent by F.A. Touchyng a Quarell betwene A. Hall, and M. Mallerie (London, 1576).

⁴⁶ See Sir Simonds D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal of the Votes, Speeches and Debates, Both of the House of Lords and House of Commons Throughout the Whole Reign of Queen Elizabeth of Glorious Memory (London, 1693; rpt. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1974), p. 368. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 315, observes that the petition was granted to Sidney even though a similar favor was denied the servant of another member, because it appeared that the man had arranged to become a servant precisely in order to escape arrest. An earlier suit for debt resulted in a finding of contempt against Anthony Kirle, who ordered the arrest of a servant of Alban Sepneth, a member of the House (D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal, pp. 347–348). A later case, in 1589, involved a subpoena brought in the matter of a contested election, not a debt, by a respected lawyer and former member of the House (D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal, p. 432).

⁴⁷ D’Ewes, A Compleat Journal, p. 285; Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1559–1581, pp. 382–385.

⁴⁸ The remarks of Francis Bacon are cited by Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559–1581, p. 394.

⁴⁹ See A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth: The Structure of Society (London: Macmillan, 1951), p. 440: there was little persecution of Catholics during the first 10 years of Elizabeth’s reign, but Pius V nonetheless approved the excommunication of the queen; Philip II and the emperor were dismayed. In 1570 scores of Catholic families sent their sons to study at Louvain and Douai, and they seeped back into the country as priests. The Society of Jesus took over in 1580. Rowse notes that Lady Egerton (the great lawyer’s foster mother, for he was a bastard), was a recusant. The way around recusancy fines was for the head of the family to go to church occasionally, while the wife and children abstained. Recusant women were a difficult problem: they were more obstinate than men, according to Rowse, and had no property to get hold of. The obvious move for the men was a fraudulent conveyance: “members of the family got a lease where possible, to keep the lands in the same hands. Or Recusants made over their lands to other members of their family before they became liable to forfeiture…. In Lancashire – and doubtless elsewhere – the practice grew up of J.P.’s and even ecclesiastical commissioners themselves taking grants of Recusants’ lands and goods in collusion, while the recusant retained the use of them. All was fair in this kind of war; thus when Sir John Bridgewater, the author of Concertatio Ecclesiae Anglicanae, a well-beneficed man and a chaplain of Leicester, went abroad to become a Jesuit, he had the financial prescience to lease out his livings before going” (p. 451).

⁵⁰ Campion’s letter cited in Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 178.

⁵¹ For convenience I cite from Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katharine Duncan-Jones, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), referred to in parentheses as OA, and from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), referred to as NA, but I have checked for variants in the standard editions, the wrongly titled Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Sidney’s Old Arcadia was not published until the twentieth century. After he died, his friend Fulke Greville edited the 1590 edition, which went as far as his revisions extended in Book 3. In 1593, Sidney’s sister Mary, the countess of Pembroke, printed the New Arcadia and added the remainder of the story from the Old Arcadia, beginning roughly where Sidney’s revisions had stopped in Book 3. She made several editorial changes to minimize the disruption, such as updating the aliases of the heroes, which Sidney had changed. Dorothy Connell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker’s Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 128, n. 1, argues, rightly I think, that we should not use the title “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” since Ringler showed that most of the changes in the text were authorial, that it was Philip, not his sister, who removed sexual material from the elopements of the princes with the princesses, and that the countess did not know about the revisions until Fulke Greville revealed them to her.

⁵² Ringler, The Poems, p. 376, argues convincingly that Sidney himself rewrote the Philoclea–Pyrocles seduction.

⁵³ It was passed at the same time as 3 Hen. VII, c. 4, a fraudulent conveyance law that voided all deeds of gift made to defraud creditors, and 3 Hen. VII, c. 13, a statute on conspiracy to murder.

⁵⁴ Ringler, The Poems, p. 379. For a further summary of views on the unsatisfactory ending, see Robert E. Stillman, Sidney’s Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p. 23; Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 70 (Berry finds unsatisfactory closure due to “an underlying lack of commitment to his ‘idle work’ itself” and his role as an author); and Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue, p. 367, who suggests that “Sidney may not have wanted a rounded ending. Or he may judge it unfitting, or find it impossible, to give a capacity for depth of virtue to Basilius, on whose failings the public theme of the Arcadia has turned.”

⁵⁵ Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight, p. 168.

⁵⁶ Michael McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 205.

⁵⁷ See Jean Robertson’s introduction to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), p. xvii.

⁵⁸ Ann Astell, “Sidney’s Didactic Method in The Old Arcadia,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 24 (1984): 39–51, 48–49. To explain the old Arcadia’s problematic ending, critics have either argued for a “harmonious synthesis of seeming opposites in the finale,” usually by finding some kind of Platonic or Christian love to resolve the “paradoxes of the human condition,” or they have argued that Sidney creates a debate that he leaves unanswered, showing “the irreducible complexities of the experienced life.” Astell has resolved this debate by showing that Sidney’s didactic theory of art, which leads not only to well-knowing but also to well-doing, goes beyond the mere plot and depends on a dialogue between the author and the reader.

⁵⁹ George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, (Cambridge: The University Press, 1936) pp. 178–180.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 180. My emphasis.

⁶¹ A. L. Rowse, Sir Walter Ralegh: His Family and Private Life (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 74, supplies this information. He suggests that the conveyance perhaps accounts for the laudatory appearance of Sir John in this treatise, which is otherwise unexpected and corroborates Puttenham’s claim to authorship. According to Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker, in their introduction to The Arte of English Poesie, p. xxii, Puttenham – a lawyer admitted to the Middle Temple in August, 1556, at the age of 27 – was consistently represented by his enemies as a forger of deeds, addicted to covenous practices, and an exploiter of legal graft.

⁶² Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 312.

⁶³ See “Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters,” dated 1580, in Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912).

⁶⁴ See Vincent Carey and Clare L. Carroll, “Factions and Fictions: Spenser’s Reflections of and on Elizabethan Politics,” in Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography, ed. Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David Richardson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 36.

⁶⁵ A. L. Rowse, Eminent Elizabethans (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 192, n. 8.

⁶⁶ C. J. Kitching, “The Quest for Concealed Lands in the Reign of Elizabeth I,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 24 (1974): 63–78, believes that concealment was due to legal problems of identifying land from dissolved monasteries, not religious rebellion, but it is hardly unlikely that a good bit of self-justified fraud was involved.

⁶⁷ Ralph M. Sargent, The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 35.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 73

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 133.

⁷⁰ According to Kitching, “The Quest for Concealed Lands,” p. 70, finders typically kept half to a third. For Northampton’s corruption, see Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982). His comment may be found on page 169. For Northampton’s character, see Rowse, Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 101: “Anyone who knows anything about Lord Henry Howard knows what a reptile he was. A clever man, learned, devious, secretive, the dead Norfolk’s brother, he was as false but far more talented. A crypto-everything by nature, crypto-papist he was also a crypto-homosexual; that gave him a bond with James I, with whom he was in high favor and whose mind he sedulously poisoned, in Elizabeth’s last years, against Ralegh.”

⁷¹ Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 392.