Quarrel with the King (12 page)

Sidney's life was strung between literature and politics. He was born with a gift for fluency, a rhythmic ease that flooded English sensibility with a new and extraordinarily influential feeling for the beauty of the flowing phrase. Largely through him the current of English poetry and romance turned from the blocky, rough-cut directness of mid-sixteenth-century poetry to something sweeter and more liquid. He thought of himself as someone on whom the service of his country and his faith lay as a duty. He was an elegant man, but pockmarked, his face scarred by smallpox contracted when he was a boy, as his mother's had been. Among the mottoes he would later carry as a knight in the tiltyard was one that said of him, “Spotted to be known.” Ben Jonson thought his appearance revolting, “Sir P. was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples and of high blood and long.”

By his mid-twenties Sidney was already chafing at his failure to be more engaged with a serious career. He took to arguing, angrily, with other courtiers over matters of status and honor. He even spoke forthrightly to the queen herself over her neglect of the dignity of gentlemen such as he at court. By the late 1570s, his frustrations finally led him away from court, where he was unwelcome, and to Wilton, with its delights and consolations. In 1579, an argument over precedence with the Earl of Oxford, who had rudely ejected him from a tennis court at Greenwich mid-game, and over his authorship of a manuscript letter arguing that the queen should not marry a Catholic
Frenchman, led to his banishment to the country. He was already attuned to the power and potential of the pastoral, and in that same year he had given the queen, as a New Year's present, a cambric smock, the dress for a shepherdess—an invitation to the simplicities of Arcadia.

At Wilton, his sister, Mary Pembroke, who loved him immoderately, took him in. Aubrey's strange, half-transmuted, gossipy memories had it that the two of them slept together and that Philip, who would become the fourth earl, was their misbegotten son, named after his father-uncle-godfather. That cannot be true, but the gossip, as ever, addresses a deeper truth. There is something warmer, closer, and more loving in the relationship of Mary Pembroke and Philip Sidney than there ever was between Mary and Henry, the hunting-and heraldry-obsessed earl who'd married her. It was Philip, through his pen, who took up the quarrel with the crown.

There are several versions of
The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia
, probably begun in 1578 but revised over several years. The first version was a gentle romance in which an undertone of politics played throughout the pastoral; the second, a more violent and less clear-cut epic; and the third, completed by Mary after Sidney's death in 1587, something of mishmash between the two, perhaps with additions of her own. All of them were dedicated to her. It had begun with a challenge from her to him: she dared him to write a romance in English, something to match the
Arcadia
written by the Neapolitan Sannazaro almost a century before, and which Sidney had bought on his Italian travels. “You desired me to doe it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment,” Philip wrote. “Now it is done onely for you, only to you.”

Mary had been involved from the start. It was “but a trifle, and that triflingly handled,” Sidney wrote with conventional self-deprecation, a “modesty tropos.” “Your deare selfe can best witnes the manner,
being done in loose sheetes of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheetes, sent vnto you, as fast as they were done.” It was written, then, partly at Wilton, partly in London, perhaps partly at the Sidney house at Penshurst, in Kent.

The first earl's threat to the crown had taken the form of an army ranged up on the London road, with its intention to do violence perfectly clear. Philip Sidney's challenge to the crown took the form, at least to begin with, of a vision of escape. His Arcadia is a land of fertile valleys and rich pastures, where the houses are “lodges of stone built in the form of a star.” The inhabitants—and it does not take much to translate this into the circumstances at Wilton—are either great princes or poor shepherds. There is nothing much to do but fall in love and have adventures. Olive trees grow here, and there are sandy beaches by turquoise seas. From time to time the wandering knights might come on a “sleeping lyon” or “a she Beare not far from him, of litle lesse fiercenes,” but that is not the dominant tone, which is one of sweetness, conversation, ease in the shade, time for love, some “burning kisses,” “sweete kisses,” “cold kisses,” “many kisses,” “kisses oft,” and all under “the Palmetrees, (which being louing in their own nature, seemed to giue their shadow the willinglier, because they held discourse of loue).”

This unthreatened, easy perfection was a place where the grief and tension of existence had been eased away and stilled. Sweetness was the face it showed to the world. So often do honey and sweetness appear in Sidney's
Arcadia
that they seem at times a joke. The grass on which the sheep nibble is sweet, the words the princess murmurs through “the cherry of her lips” is invariably sweet and increasingly honeyed. She is, according to the stricken knight, “the sweetest fairnesse and fairest sweetnesse: with that word his voice brake so with sobbing, that he could say no further.” Her “breath is more sweete then a gentle Southwest wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed
waters in the extreme heat of summer, and yet is nothing, compared to the honey flowing speech that breath doth carry…. She had no sooner ended with the joining her sweet lips together, but that the shepherd who lay before her recorded to her music this rural poesie”:

It is an Edenic world of wish-fulfillment. A young prince finds himself naked but “this nakedness was to him an apparel.” Scene after scene unfolds in the liquid language that became one of the Elizabethan idioms. Handfuls of words pour forth as smoothly continuous as the broad backs of the downs over which Sidney had been wandering. It is all slightly absurd, the mind on holiday. One can only guess what the old earl might have made of it. But, that said, there is also a ballet-like sensation, that this is a realm in which beauty for once might be allowed its freedom. It is the language and the images of youthfulness and release, emerging from under the carapace of a tough-headed, Polonius-like generation of elders, a generation that had been all too insistent for all too long on the proprieties and duties and self-improvements and self-controls to which older generations are chronically prey. This, for all its weakness and oversweetness, is the freedom of writing as if the writing itself were making a new world, discovering a lighthearted engagement with some freely invented thing (the models for which Sidney had, of course, read in Virgil and Theocritus, and seen on the walls of the Italian villas and places he had visited a couple of years before).

“Reade it then,” he told his sister,

Not, intriguingly, of the Pembrokes or the Herberts, whose violent, vulgar, grasping Welshness perhaps did not compare with the noble refinement of the Dudley-Sidneys. For something that Sidney revised and struggled over for years, this is the pose of sprezzatura, an assumption of ease laid over a life of hidden purpose.

As Virginia Woolf wrote in her affectionate essay on the
Arcadia
,

Founded on the autonomy of desire, Sidney's Arcadia is fiercer than a mere soft-edged dreaming of a sunlit holiday. He was a disappointed man. To his friend Edward Denny he wrote from Wilton that “the vnnobl constitution of our tyme doth keepe vs from fitte imployments.” The queen would not let him have a position at court; nor with the Protestant armies in Europe, where he had been offered the governorship of the Protestant provinces of Holland and Zeeland by William of Orange; nor even in the New World, to all of which he was drawn. The experience of authority in sixteenth-century England was one of either uncertain success or certain humiliation. Arcadia, of its
essence, was a place in which to escape authority and enter the world in which desire was king.

Desire, which colors page after page of the romance, is a world beyond power. Both beneath power and indifferent to it, desire was where the self could find an unadulterated and uncompromised being, a form of life beyond the humiliations of hierarchy. Queen Elizabeth's dogs may have worn her collars, but not in Arcadia. Arcadia was beyond the submission to a predefined destiny. It was a form of transcendence into a world of beauty whose essence was freedom. In the romance, there is a deep and pained longing, expressed far more intently than the warblings of shepherds and their oaten pipes, for an age before consciousness, before moral codes, before grief and sorrow, before a man could be disappointed by his life:

But that desire to escape into the world of desire Sidney knew to be not enough. In his great sonnet sequence,
Astrophel and Stella
, probably also written at Wilton, he dwelt, as any number of melancholic Elizabethan young men would also dwell, on his disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, on the triviality of his life and occupations. His great friend and mentor the French Protestant divine Hubert Languet had written to ask him if it was “honourable for you to be lurking down
where you are, while your country is begging for the help and support of her sons.” Sidney answered in a sonnet:

This is the seriousness of Arcadia, buried inside its sugar. A sense of honor and conscience drove him toward a political life, which he felt it was his duty to take up. The knowledge that he came from a governing family was a powerful force for Sidney. In families like his lay the guarantee of freedom for the country. Only a powerful, crown-denying nobility could keep the country free from tyranny. His brother-in-law Henry Pembroke may have been meekly submitting to the crown's control of noble power, but for Sidney and the many readers of his manuscripts among the élite, that submission was not enough.

No question in the sixteenth century was more alive than the relationship of the crown to the governing class. All over Europe, it seemed clear, ancient limitations on the sovereign, largely guaranteed by an ancient nobility, were under threat. The great struggle for the Low Countries, out of which the glories of the Dutch Republic would come in the seventeenth century, was precisely this conflict between an assertive Spanish state and the old liberties of the Dutch dukedoms that Charles V, the Habsburg king of Spain, had inherited. In Italy, one small principality after another had been transformed from a con
sultative, self-limiting form of government to one in which the prince, having read his Machiavelli, imposed his absolute will. In France, that same influence had had its play. “Is it better to be loved than feared, or the reverse?” Machiavelli had asked in
The Prince
. “The answer is that it is desirable to be both, but because it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer for a Prince to be feared than loved.” Fear and an abandonment of the assumption of good intent, which was behind the layered structures of the inherited medieval custom, were the foundations of tyranny. “It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it,” Machiavelli had written in the
Discourses
, “to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.” That was not the custom of the manor. Fulke Greville, Sidney's friend and disciple, had heard Sidney himself bewail the influence of modernity on France, “how that once well-formed monarchy had by little and little let fall her ancient and reverend pillars—I mean parliaments, laws and customs—into the narrowness of proclamations or imperial mandates.” That is precisely what Sidney, his uncle Leicester, his father-in-law the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, and others of the Protestant party in England feared. A modern, absolutist monarchy would lift England away from “her ancient legal circles” and “our ancient customs and statutes.” The custom of the manor, the very mutuality of the ancient workings of the country, was a model of the workings of Arcadia. And the environment at Wilton, for all its self-delusions, was a model of the ideal state. Hubert Languet, the only real person named in
Arcadia
, had in his great book
Against Tyranny
, published in 1579, addressed the central political Arcadian question to a tyrant: