The great country house of Penshurst and its estate was referred to in the entry on Ben Jonson, whose poem praising the comforts of the place, and the generosity of its owner, was probably written a few decades after the birth of Philip Sidney there in November, 1554. Sidney, who was to die after being fatally wounded in battle at the age of only 31, lived a number of different careers. He was a statesman, diplomat, soldier, and, though recognition for this only really came after his death, a poet and writer. `The Defense of Poesy’, published posthumously around 1590, served as the classical defence of the relationship between literature and virtue – something that has woven a tortuous path to the modern era. It was also to serve as one of the prime inspirations for attacks on the what was seen by some at the time as the `immoral’ works of contemporary figures writing for the stage like Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Sydney was educated away from Kent at Shrewsbury school, and then at Oxford. He was to witness the massacre of Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 during an extended tour of Europe. This led him over the following two years to Venice, Heidelberg, to study in Padua and Florence. In 1577, he was sent to Prague as ambassador. While here he met the Catholic priest Edmund Campion, who was to end up cruelly martyred in Britain a number of years later.
A courtier to Queen Elizabeth, he married the 16 year old daughter of the creator of her intelligence service Sir Francis Walsingham in 1583. He was appointed the member of parliament for Kent in 1584. In 1584, working in the Ordnance Office, it seems he had a special focus on strengthening the fortifications of Dover. A year later he was appointed by the Queen to be governor of the town in Flushing in the Netherlands. While on military manoeuvres approaching the town of Zutphen he was wounded by musket shot in the thigh and died of infection. His funeral was at St Paul’s in London.
Sidney’s work is the quintessence of courtly love. The masque, `The Lady of May’ is a peon of praise to the Queen. His sonnets contains a line of complaint, `Though I be hers, she makes of me no treasure’ which typifies the note of pained perpetual frustration which was one of the most common in the work Sidney and those he influenced produced. `I yield, O love, unto thy loathed yoke’. And yet the yoke was all too often put on again. `A woman’s words to a love that is eager/In wind or water stream do require to be writ.’ The complaints of love’s pain never ceases:
`My muse therefore – for only thou canst tell –
Tell me the cause of this my causeless woe,
Tell how ill thought disgraced my doing well,
Tell how my joys and hopes thus foully fell
To so low ebb, that wonted were to flow.’
`Astrophel and Stella’, and `The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’ were to influence Shakespeare and subsequently the novelist Samuel Richardson. `The less I love, I live the less’ might serve as an motto of sorts for this writer, born in the splendour and generosity of Penshurst, dead in battle in the Netherlands, whose work was to shape the sensibilities of the Elizabethans after him, and through them, have influence to modern times.