Quarrel with the King (13 page)

No: the shepherd needed to love his sheep; just as the lord needed to love his tenants, and they him in return.

For Languet, who might have been speaking of Henry Pembroke and his diminished condition, the modern tyrannical state had eaten away at the nobility that was the guarantee of a real freedom and had dressed them up in the fancy clothes of the tiltyard and the tournament:

Here, already quite clearly articulated but sixty years early, are the phrases that would be used in the English Civil War. The state had put collars on its dogs, and an emasculated nobility felt tyranny creeping across the land. This was not about democracy but the fears of the old ruling class sensing the growing power of the state. An uncontrolled crown would destroy the customs of England. Only with balance, and the organic integrity of a country that had head, body, and limbs in harmony, would England be what it always had been.

This Arcadian heartland is a mysterious place for us: consciously élitist but fiercely Protestant in religion; prepared—just—to countenance the overthrow of kings, but courtly to a degree in manner and self-conception; political in its removal from the political world; aris
tocratic, community-conscious, potentially rebellious, literary, martial, playful, earnest, antiquarian, English, Italianate, and nostalgic. But this is the essence: Arcadia sees an aristocracy not as an element of a controlling establishment but as an essential organ in a healthy state, a check and balance on the centralizing power of the crown and the true source of authority and care in the lands it owns. The vision of Arcadia is not far from the desire for wholeness that the communities of the chalkland valleys wished to embody in their elaborate and ancient constitutions.

Alongside his written versions of
Arcadia
—they were never printed during his lifetime but circulated in manuscript—Sidney also enacted his vision of courteous rebellion and independent purity at court. Before the French ambassador, on Whit Monday and Tuesday, in the early summer of 1581, Sidney, his friend Fulke Greville, and two other young men, who were prepared to spend their fortunes on the performance, put on a show in the tiltyard in Whitehall. They called themselves “The Four Foster Children of Desire,” that word
desire
glowing in the context of Elizabethan show as an acceptable and oblique stand-in for what in the language of Arcadia it really meant: rebellion, or at least self-removal from the structures of power.

They had the gallery at the end of the tiltyard, in which the queen would stand, redecorated and called the “Castle or Fortresse of Perfect Beautie.” It was a game of mock rebellion by young men who believed that the queen and court, then considering a French and Catholic marriage for Elizabeth, were neglecting the habits and structures of an older England, even moving toward a kind of tyranny that the land of desire could never tolerate. Sidney had written a speech dense with scarcely concealed meanings addressed to the Fortress of Perfect Beauty:

This extraordinary pantomime of mock rebellion stands midway between the realities of 1549 and 1642. The same elements were at stake: patrimony; nobility; a crown that seemed to betray the best of a noble inheritance; courteous men in some ways desperately dependent on the crown for their standing, and in other ways proudly independent of it, holding the crown to account, showing no respect, threatening violence. Here was a game whose frisson depended on its approach to reality. The four knights sent a boy to issue their challenge to the queen as she came from chapel. “Without making any precise reverence at all, he uttered these speeches of defiance, from his masters to her Majestie. These foure…do will you by me, even in the name of Justice, that you will no longer exclude virtuous Desire from perfect Beautie.”

It was, they said, in a breathtaking double bluff, “a plaine proclamation of warre”:

The speech tells it straight. The queen and her government were proud and disdainful. Their cruelty consisted in refusing a place or a role to Philip Sidney and others like him who not only owed the country their duty but had the strength, the independent strength
within them to attack that fatal fortress and its hideous obstinacy with the sword of faithfulness—that is, the Protestant religion—and, in an astonishing yoking together of disparates, “the fire of affection,” which is to say, Arcadia's burning desire. Here, quite clear, even if buried under ceremony and courteousness like a dramatized version of a jewelled New Year's Day emblem, was the rebellion of the Arcadian lords. Needless to say, this show was so weak and so marginal that it had no effect at all. Any impact would have to wait for different circumstances in the following century.

Sidney's
Arcadia
had argued for action and for giving powerful and glamorous roles to the nobility and their supporters. Elizabeth's reluctance was motivated by a desire not only to avoid war and its expense but to avoid giving her great subjects ideas above their station. Finally, in 1586, after years of pleading and under the command of Leicester, an English expeditionary force, paid for with Dutch money, went over to the Netherlands to fight for the Protestant Dutch against the Spanish. Sidney was appointed governor of Flushing, one of the three ports the English received from the Dutch as guarantees against their paying the costs of the expedition.

It was in a small engagement in that war, at Zutphen on September 23, 1586, that Sidney was wounded. He had left off his thigh armor either, as his friend and biographer Fulke Greville said much later, as an act of theatrical courage, so that he would be no better protected than the other gentlemen around him, or because a lighter armor would give him some added mobility on the battlefield.

As the wound became gangrenous, Sidney turned to God. The wound was “a loving and fatherly correction” from the source of loving justice. In the light of this lesson, Sidney promised to “addict myself wholly to God's service, and not to live as I have done. For I have walked in a vain course.”

Those words cast a chill over the delights at Wilton. But they were the words of a wounded and dying man. The truth is that as an inheritance, as a dead man, Sidney—and his association with the free-flowing landscape of Arcadia, with its combined vision of Protestant freedom and noble authenticity, in a world away from the corruptions and failures of the court—was more potent than he had been when alive. In death, for England as much as for his family, he became “an Angell Spirit”—the phrase was his sister's—“so rare a iewell of vertue and courtesie.”

Theatricality did not desert Sidney in death. His body was taken back from the Low Countries covered with a pall of black velvet. The pinnace that brought him home, right into the pool of London, where his body was disembarked at the Tower, had “all her sayles, tackling and other furniture coloured black and black cloth hanged round about her with Escouchions of his Armes.” It was the ship of sorrow and the death of hope. But this image was the guarantee that Sidney's beliefs would survive him. He had made the Arcadian amalgam central to the English nobility's view of themselves as the inhabitants, at least in potential, of a sweet and beautiful world, free of tyranny, whose freedoms were guaranteed by their own independent virtue within it. He had transmuted the quarrel with the king into an act of beauty.

In the reign of his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, Wilton would become the focus and reliquary of that ideal.

M
ARY
P
EMBROKE'S
C
OURT AT
W
ILTON
1586–1601

M
ary Sidney, the glamour queen of a pugnacious Arcadia, took up the cudgels. She gathered around her at Wilton, as her own armory, a company of wits, poets, thinkers, and scientists. She and they made Wilton the center of Renaissance England. Almost the entire family was writing poems. Her other brother, Robert Sidney, who became governor of Flushing on Philip's death, wrote a sequence of poems addressed to Mary. Her son William and her niece, also called Mary Sidney, both became poets. The only silent members of the household were the increasingly ill and curmudgeonly Henry, and Mary's younger son, Philip, both of them devoted to their hawks and hounds.

Mary had not been admitted to Philip Sidney's funeral, and afterward she withdrew to Wilton in her grief for two years. Philip Sidney had made her his literary heir. She was in possession of the manuscripts of
Arcadia, The Defence of Poesy
, and the sonnet sequence
Astrophel
and Stella
. Over the coming years, from her base at Wilton, she would oversee the publication of all of them. But her role was far more than a keeper of the flame. Before his death, Sidney had been translating the Psalms into sophisticated English lyrics. He had reached Psalm 43, and Mary set herself the task of completing the remaining 107. In doing so, she helped shape the religious lyric of the seventeenth century, steering the atmosphere at Wilton away from the rather flat-footed hunting and hawking to which Henry, her husband, was devoted, and toward a higher, more spiritualized condition. But that heightened world at Wilton was not inert or passive. Its elevated tone was intended to be a model for what a court might be.

“Religion,” John Donne, a friend and admirer of both Sidneys, would say in a sermon, “is a serious thing but not a sullen,” and the translations of the Psalms that Mary Pembroke would make over the next few years were acknowledged by Donne and others as the most ingenious and richly poetic of any done in English. Donne certainly drew from them, as would George Herbert for the great religious poems he would write here in the early 1630s when vicar of Bemerton.

In the part courtly, part Protestant world of Wilton, the translation of the Psalms was a fusing of those universes. The task of the poet, as Ben Jonson said of translation, was “to draw forth out of the best and choicest flowers, and turn all to honey,” and that is what, at least in part, Mary Sidney did with the Psalms, applying the sweetness of Arcadia, its courtly concern for graceful precision and sophisticated invention, to the great poetry of the Hebrew Bronze Age. Religious verse, in her hands, as it would be in George Herbert's, did not exist in a compartment separate from urbanity and courtesy; it was an extension of those qualities, not a denial of them.

The Psalms were thought to be the work of King David, royal poems, and that high religious and kingly standing played its part
in the Wilton Psalms. “Hee,” Mary wrote later, meaning her brother Philip,

She was binding her life in with her dead brother's, both of them in service at a court at which no Tudor monarch held sway, the highest court of which man could conceive. Here, in the Arcadian-Protestant amalgam, is another subtle form of subversion, a demotion, at least by implication, of all the pretensions to greatness that a worldly court might make.

Mary Sidney would have had before her the Psalms as translated by Miles Coverdale in 1535 and distributed throughout the country in the Great Bibles that Henry VIII and Archbishop Cranmer required each parish to hold. Here is the language of Coverdale's Psalm 139, addressing the power of God:

Mary Sidney took that plain and workmanlike statement and gave it a kind of dancing elegance, at the same time elevating and refining its tone, making it courtly, maintaining its seriousness but banishing its sullenness, eliding Calvin with Castiglione:

“In dancing,” Castiglione had written in
The Courtier
,

This is the heartland of sprezzatura, the nonchalance that stems from discipline and rigor. The apparently effortless movement of the dancer is just the effect Mary Sidney was aiming for here, not as a form of worldly refinement but as an aspect of prayer and worship.

The Sidneyan Psalms are far more than a mere sweetening of the sacred note. They put on a bravura display of different voices and tonalities, different verse forms and rhyme schemes, a compendium of inventiveness that veers from coyness to savagery, from the most stylish of dance tunes to the most unforgiving of homilies. Psalm 52, as translated by the Geneva Bible of 1587, was a traditional puritan exercise in straight talking to the great of the worldly world:

Mary Pembroke had no difficulty in outstripping the Presbyterian divines in the uncompromising attack of her translation:

This is the counterpoint of that earlier dancing lightness: the hammering, puritan contempt for the corruption and vanity of power, spoken with the authority of a countess, her own court around her, and the moral strength of her dead martyred brother allowing her no compromise in language or grammar. Truth telling of this kind can largely dispense with verbs and adjectives. The psalm in Mary's hands has become a naked, noun-based charge sheet of worldly failing.

The poets Samuel Daniel, Abraham Fraunce, Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton and Thomas Nashe all became part of the Wilton orbit. They lauded Sidney's sister as the “Arabian Phenix, wonder of sexe,” “the inheritor of his wit and genius,” the mi
raculous reappearance of his genius in another guise, “the happie and iudiciall Patronesse of the Muses,” of whose patronage, needless to say, these poets were the grateful recipients. The slightly desperate and wayward minor poet and anthologist Nicholas Breton, whose career wavered from one patron to the next, left an account of life at Wilton under Mary Pembroke that at least hints at its combination of courtliness, literariness, and piety. It was the nearest England had ever come to the gatherings of genius around Elizabetta Gonzaga, the Duchess of Urbino, celebrated in Castiglione's
The Courtier
. “Who hath redde of the Duchesse of Vrbina,” Breton wrote to his patroness,

Breton, for whom life did not always run smooth, had been “a poore Gentleman in the ruine of his fortune,” but when Mary Pembroke took him in, he found Wilton to be a “little Earths kind of Paradise.” It was everything of which an Elizabethan literary man might dream:

Everything was as it should be, “God daily serued, religion trulie
preached, a table fully furnished, a house richly garnished, honor kindly entertained, vertue highly esteemed, seruice well rewarded, and the poor blessed relieued.” Despite this lavish larding of praise, Breton, for some reason or other that remains obscure, fell out of favor. Such gatherings of dependents in large and highly emotionalized households, as Wilton clearly was, will drift into argument and rivalry. There are suggestions that Breton may have been something of a drinker. His own account blamed “the faction of the malicious, the deceitful working of the enuious, and the desart of his owne unworthinesse.” The fateful moment came on a winter's day when, as he described in the third person, he had decided to leave the pressurized Wilton household and go wandering on the downs:

That's all he says. Had he been drunk? Or sunk into a kind of ridiculous melancholy, not looking where he was going, bringing dishonor on the household? It was certainly the most Sidneyan of mistakes, a wandering man, out on the wide snowy plains of Wiltshire, dreaming of a better world than this. Whatever his misdemeanor, only after a few years of apology and crawling was Breton readmitted to the charmed circle.

Others, more confident in this challenging world, survived more easily. Sir Walter Raleigh's brother, the slightly sinister inventor and “chymist” Adrian Gilbert, joined the household, as did Dr. Thomas Muffet (or Moffet or Mouffet), physician and entomologist, a school
friend of Edmund Spenser's, graduate of Basle, a follower of the Earl of Essex, the first man to write authoritatively about the migratory habits of English wild birds, and the editor and compiler of the first English study of insects. His heavily worked Latin manuscript is now in the British Library—one real moth that was flying around the park at Wilton in the 1590s survives squashed between its pages—decorated in the margins with Muffet's beautifully observed drawings of bees, worms, flies, beetles, butterflies, gnats, mosquitoes, the long-legged flies called “shepherds” in Wiltshire, and many, many spiders. These were later reproduced as woodcuts in the 1634 edition of his book the
Theatrum Insectorum
, or
Theatre of Insects
.

Muffet wrote a charming verse tale for his beloved countess about his passion for bugs (“I sing of little Wormes and tender Flies”), but he also turned his hand to some elaborate Latin verses in memory of Philip Sidney. They were written in 1593, on Mary Pembroke's instructions, as a homily to young Will Herbert, the thirteen-year-old heir to this huge cultural inheritance. It was the year he went up to Oxford. The weight of expectation imposed on the boy's shoulders was immense. He would carry the burden of his family's expectations. If the family was to continue to maintain its principled independence of the crown, the duty would fall to him. It is clear that Will Herbert was not entirely happy with the burden being placed on him. Again and again, Muffet tells Will that his uncle, the famous Philip Sidney, when he was a boy, preferred his books to his games. At school “his bedroom was plastered with elegant epistles of choice Latin which he had stuck up on the walls.” Twice he became ill through studying too much—a habit of Mary's, too—and when he was at university and then at court, Sidney kept his passions under control. Sloth, greed, self-seeking, and sensuality: all of them this paragon avoided. He was not without lust, but he controlled it.

Muffet did admit that the young Sidney spent far too much on
“Christmas festivities and joustings, at which he was magnificently appointed, and then, with ceaseless liberality, on learned visitors.” But he was both modest and regal, and rose by his seriousness as well as by “wit, grace, elegance, learning and influence.” Other courtiers—more sidelong glances at Will—“chose to live in clover at home, to hunt wild animals, to follow a hawk, to wallow in every sensual pleasure.” Only our hero, it seemed, gave up “love, poetry, sport, trappings, lackeys, pages and carriages inlaid with ivory” for the sake of helping a neighbor country “where without fear he ran into fire as soon as he reached the foreign shore.” It doesn't take much to imagine the thirteen-year-old groaning under the propriety of the model being held out to him. Will was the “growing shoot.” He was “the flower of the Sidneys.” He was given, as his own
impresa
, the motto
Stat messis in herba
—the harvest is in the green stalk. He was the second Sidney, their perfect man in embryo. “Therefore,” Muffet, with his eye of course more on the mother than the child, told the boy, “do you embrace and cherish him, your second self.”