The Elizabethans (39 page)

One man who had tried to sail with Drake’s voyage was Leicester’s nephew, the thirty-one-year-old Philip Sidney.

For some years Sidney had longed for the New World. In the revised version of his
Arcadia
there is a characteristic account of the two princes putting out to sea, which is both a ‘poetic’ description of the process of a sail catching the wind and a vivid expression of wonder that such a process could actually work!

They recommended themselves to the sea, leaving the shore of Thessalia full of tears and vows, and were received thereon with so smooth and smiling a face, as if Neptune had as then learned falsely to fawn on princes. The wind was like a servant, waiting behind them so just, that they might fill the sails as they lifted; and the best sailors showing themselves less covetous of his liberality, so tempered it that they all kept together like a beautiful flock, which so well could obey their master’s pipe: without sometimes, to delight the princes’ eyes, some two or three of them would strive, who could, either by the cunning of well-spending the wind’s breath, or by the advantageous building of their moving houses, leave their fellows behind in the honour of speed: while the two princes had leisure to see the practice of that which before they had learned by books: to consider the art of catching the wind prisoner, to no other end, but to run away with it; to see how beauty and use can so well agree together, that of all the trinkets, wherewith they are attired, there is not one but serves to some necessary purpose.
⁷

It is a beautiful passage, as elaborately spun as a polyphonic part song by Byrd, as encrusted with jokes, clever thoughts, allusions and visual delight as might an Elizabethan dress on a great lady gleam with a variety of fabrics, jewels, facets and surfaces. But it is landlubber’s prose, which believes it possible for two young men, if sufficiently well born and well educated, to master navigation from what ‘before they had learned by books’. This alone would have been enough to make Drake shudder. But Drake, lately promoted from pirate ruffian to admiral in the Royal Navy, did not want to incur Royal displeasure; and anxious letters from court, forbidding the admiral to take Sidney aboard, could not be gainsaid. Walsingham, Sidney’s father-in-law, attributed the young man’s yearning for America to pique at not being made governor of Flushing.

Sir Philip Sidney hath taken a very hard resolution to accompany Sir Francis Drake in this voyage, moved hereunto for that he saw Her Majesty disposed to commit the charge of Flushing unto some other; which he repeated would fall out greatly to his disgrace, to see another preferred before him, both for birth and judgement inferior unto him. This resolution is greatly to the grief of Sir Philip’s friends, but to none more than to myself. I know Her Majesty would easily have been induced to have placed him in Flushing, but he despaired hereof, and the disgrace that he doubted he should receive hath carried him into a desperate course . . .
⁸

It appears that the Queen was going to give the governorship of Flushing to Thomas Cecil – ‘Burghley’s talentless eldest son’,
⁹
as Katherine Duncan-Jones calls him. If so, the dig in Walsingham’s letter about Sidney’s superiority of birth has a distinctly acid flavour. Sidney was, as it happened, eventually sworn in as the governor of Flushing on 22 November 1585. He had ten months left to live and they were all spent in the Low Countries. He missed the baptism of his daughter Elizabeth (at St Olave, Hart Street, on 20 November – the Queen attended in person as a godmother), his father’s death on 5 May 1586 (the Queen refused Philip leave to come back to the deathbed), his mother’s death on 9 August and the illness of his beloved sister, the Countess of Pembroke.

Sidney was confronted in the United Provinces by chaos, caused by lack of organisation and exacerbated by the Queen’s parsimony. The troops stationed there were sick, many of them starving. It was a period when Protestant refugees were flooding from the southern Netherlands into Holland and Zeeland, rents and food prices were high, shortages acute; it was obvious that in such circumstances starving English and Welsh soldiers would turn into marauders. One of the English members of the Council of State (
Raad van State
), Thomas Wilkes, admitted, ‘So great is the lack of discipline among the garrisons, especially of our nation, that I am ashamed to hear the continual complaints which come to the councell-bord against them . . . We beginne to grow as hatefull to the people as the Spaniard himself who governeth the townes of conquest with a milder hand than we doe our frends and allyes.’
¹⁰

Leicester’s remit was an impossible one: it was to defeat, or hold at bay, the Spanish in the Low Countries; and it was to ‘bring the rebel provinces under the benign protection and control of a foreign ruler’
¹¹
himself. The disadvantages with which he contended included: a recalcitrant population who disagreed among themselves; a formidably powerful Spanish army under a superb general, Parma; a capricious queen, who was not prepared to spend money on the campaign and was prepared secretly to negotiate for the destruction of the Dutch. She wanted to make peace, and her ever-volatile relationship with Leicester was going through one of its volcanic phases. The fact that he had brought his still-loved second wife to London to see him off scarcely improved Elizabeth’s mood. When the States offered Leicester the governorship of the new republic, and he accepted it, this was a sure sign that her creature was getting above himself. He was ‘one of her own raising’, she stormed. Rumours that Lady Leicester was setting out for the Low Countries in fine clothes and carriages, as a Dutch First Lady, exacerbated Elizabeth’s fury: ‘The Earl and the States had treated the Queen with contempt’ . . . either the world would ‘refuse to believe that a creature of her own would have presumed to accept the government contrary to her command, without her secret asset’ or it would be thought that she could not rule her own subjects.
¹²

While Elizabeth played out these comic operatic tantrums at home, to the flinching of courtiers and the cowering of ambassadors, the campaign limped on. Sidney was not enjoying cordial relations with his uncle; Leicester, in his turn, did not think highly of his nephew’s capabilities, ‘despising his youth for a counsellor, but withal bearing a hand upon him as a forward young man’.
¹³
Sidney, who was made colonel of a Zeeland regiment, tried to shift the role of English forces from defence to offence. He took part – with his brother Robert and Count Holenlohe – in attacks on the Spanish army around Breda; with Prince Maurice, he successfully besieged Axel. He narrowly escaped Spanish capture during a miserable little battle at Gravelines, and as summer ended he took part in another successful siege: of Doesburg, this time fighting alongside his uncle, Leicester. Then, on 14 September 1586, the English army moved off towards Zutphen, having heard that Parma and the Spaniards were on their way there. It was on 22 September, a thickly misty day, that Sidney rode out against the Spanish army outside Zutphen. The enemy were more numerous than, in the mist, the 200 English and Dutch horsemen and 300 or 400 foot-soldiers had realised – numbering 2,200 musketeers and 800 foot-soldiers.
¹⁴
Sidney was not wearing thigh armour and was hit by a musket-shot just above the knee. The skirmish failed to stop the Spanish relief of Zutphen. Sidney, accomplished in the tilts, kept his saddle – ‘The foe shall miss the glory of my wound.’
¹⁵
The seriousness of his wound was hard to assess. Leicester was now impressed by his nephew’s courage. Sidney was taken by barge down the River Issel to Arnhem, where he lay at the house of Mademoiselle Gruithuissens. He lay there for twenty-five days. His mind was lucid and, we are told, he wrote a large epistle to Belerius, the learned divine, in very pure and eloquent Latin – alas, it is now lost and scholars do not know who Belerius was. But Sidney, in death, as in life, like the twentieth-century poet, could ‘teach the free man how to praise’. As in later examples of squalid wars, nothing is remembered of Leicester’s disgraceful and unsuccessful Netherland’s campaign – nothing but the death of a poet. Sidney’s wound developed gangrene, and on 17 October he died.

He left unfinished his great book, the revised
Arcadia
. It is a much richer, more complicated, more satisfying reading experience than the simpler version (known as the
Old Arcadia
). He purged the story of improprieties – Pyrocles does not, as in the old version, sleep with Philoclea, nor is Musidorus tempted to rape Pamela. The comedy is still there: the inherent absurdity of the older characters, Basilius and his wife Gynecia, both being in love with Pyrocles in drag is exquisitely worked out. And the scene in which Basilius thinks he is sleeping with ‘Zelmane’, but in fact makes love to his own wife in the dark, is both hilarious and deeply touching. The device, taken up and imitated by Shakespeare in his comedies, of Zelmane, disguised as a pageboy and loving Pyrocles, is extremely affecting: her death one of the finest things in English literature. To the old version is added a much sharper sense of menace, especially in the character of wicked Cecropia. Then there are all the exciting fights and tournaments, with their extraordinary pageantry – ‘Argalus was armed in a white armour, which was all gilded over with knots of woman’s hair, which came down from the crest of his head-piece and spread itself in rich quantity over all his armour . . .’
¹⁶

You never feel the emotions in the
Arcadia
are fake. These are real young people with real passions, real sexual frustrations, and real anguish in a grown-up world not of their making. It is a sexy world – think of the extraordinary pageant with six bare-chested maids – ‘their breasts liberal to the eye; the face of the foremost of them in excellency fair and of the rest lovely, if not beautiful’.
¹⁷
It is shot through with visual and moral realism. It is a world in which fighting, in however elegant an armour, ends with the eye seeing the truth and ‘all universally defiled with dust, blood, broken armours, mangled bodies, took away the mask, and set forth horror in his own horrible manner’.
¹⁸
It is a book aware of the realities of the sordid political world: spies are ‘the necessary evil servants to a King’.
¹⁹
It mingles high rhetoric with homely and humorous idiom – ‘You shall see (if it come to the push’ – and the multifaceted and variegated prose is interrupted at regular intervals with verse of dazzling proficiency and glittering variety, and with images that are often both homely and devastating in their accuracy – as when Sidney sees the God of Love as:

Though thousands old, a boy entitled still

Thus children do the silly birds they find,

With stroking hurt, and too much cramming kill.

Sidney’s funeral did not take place for four months. The body was brought back to England in November and lay in the Minories while Walsingham tried to sort out his son-in-law’s chaotic finances. It is said to have cost him £6,000.
²⁰
Eventually, on 16 February 1587, the mourners processed from the Minories to St Paul’s Cathedral for the burial. There were 700 people in the procession.

It is usual to think of great funerals as endings and a time of looking back. No doubt there was that element to this extraordinary pageant, recorded for us in Theodore de Bry’s thirty-two plates in which the mourners, haltered and robed, walked; the knights, the aristocrats and the hooded heralds in their tabards preceded the coffin, emblazoned with the arms of this young embodiment of a Renaissance Man; followed by Sidney’s Dutch and English comrades in arms; by Members of Parliament, muffled drummers and halberdiers with trailing pikes. The panorama stretches to thirty-five feet in length.

Yet Sidney’s funeral did not spell the end of an age. Rather, it reminded many, and especially the poets, of what he and his sister had initiated. The quite prodigious change in English literature that occurred in the third decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign was not an accident. During the reign of Richard II the King and certain cultivated aristocrats gave patronage to poets. The result was a brief glory-phase in literary history:
The Canterbury Tales
,
Piers Plowman’s Vision
,
Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight
. During the fifteenth century, while the aristocracy all but destroyed England with their internecine wars – the Wars of the Roses – patronage, and poetry, went dead. The first half of the sixteenth century saw, likewise, relatively little literary interest on the part of patrons. One of the Latin poet Martial’s epigrams explains it: ‘
Sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones.
’ If you have patrons (like Maecenas) you will get good writers (like Virgil).

Literature, just as much as music and architecture, is created by demand; and not simply by a market, important as it is that poets, composers and architects should be able to eat and feed their children while they work. Had the market alone determined Elizabethan literary output, the poets would all have written for the stage and there would have been no Daniel, no Drayton, no Gascoigne, no Campion, no Churchyard, no Barnfield, no Spenser, no Donne, no Dyer, no Wotton, no Chapman. There were more than 230 Elizabethan poets, pouring out a prodigious quantity of songs, narrative poems, pastorals, satires and epigrams. No other period of literature in the English language matches it, and the reason is simple: the Elizabethan aristocracy, tiny and for the most part cultivated as it was, patronised literature. In the mock-heroic, but semi-serious dedication of his hilarious novel
The Unfortunate Traveller
to the Earl of Southampton (Henry Wriothesley), Thomas Nashe wrote, ‘unreprievably perisheth that book whatsoever to waste paper, which on the diamond rock of your judgement disasterly chaneth to be shipwrecked. A dear lover and cherisher you are, as well as of the lovers of poets themselves . . .’ A cheeky, camp joke referring to Southampton’s obvious delight at being fancied by male poets such as Shakespeare. But when Nashe wrote his dedication he also meant it: ‘a new brain, a new wit, a new style, a new soul will I get me to canonise your name to posterity . . .’
²¹
The taste of the patrons determined the quality of the literature. Sidney and his aristocratic contemporaries were well read in the classics and in the Italian poets, which they esteemed almost as highly. They were conscious of England acquiring a new glory under Elizabeth. Such a new civilisation needed a new style and a new soul: an English Virgil to create an epic that would match the Latin poet’s glorification of the new Augustan republic; an English Ariosto who could provide discerning readers with a great narrative in which their queen, the Protestantism, their patriotism, their love of pageant, were fashioned in a new
Orlando Furioso
.