In the hagiography of the Elizabethan age Sir Philip Sidney was built up as the English Bayard, but his achievements as a soldier were nugatory. He was, however, one of those "gallant losers" England likes so much and by dying of a wound received at Zutphen in the Netherlands in 1586, just a few days short of his 32nd birthday, he qualified for heroic status on the nil de mortuis nisi bunkum principle. His real achievements were literary: the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, the prose romance Arcadia and the Defence of Poesie, perhaps the earliest work of literary criticism. Impressed by his subject's duality as poet and man of action, Alan Stewart, in this thoughtful and erudite biography, has largely neglected the man of letters to concentrate on the soldier-diplomat.
Philip Sidney travelled widely as roving ambassador in 1572-75, visiting France (where he witnessed the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre), Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy (where he was painted by Veronese). Already a diplomatic veteran at the age of 20, he thereafter had a chequered career. Two points were salient: he was not much liked by Elizabeth I and he was the designated heir of her favourite Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Philip's uncle. Leicester knew well enough that he would forfeit all his influence with the queen if he married and begat an heir, so instead threw his influence behind his nephew. When Philip married the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, his niche in elite circles seemed secure.
But Elizabeth never cared for him. The knighthood she bestowed on Philip was a reluctant one: she awarded the Order of the Garter to Casimir Johann, younger brother of the Elector Palatinate, and when Casimir nominated his friend Philip Sidney to receive the decoration as his proxy, protocol demanded that the recipient had to be a knight. Elizabeth frowned on the marriage to Walsingham's daughter, as it seemed to create an over-powerful dynasty, and she took pains to cut Philip down to size. When Sidney was insulted by Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford, the queen took Oxford's side and forbade Sidney to call him out. Tired of the queen's disfavour, Sidney tried to join Drake's 1585 voyage to the New World, and had actually cleared from Plymouth on the ship when he was summoned back to London post haste by Elizabeth in one of her "neglect this at your peril" letters. To assuage the humiliation, the queen appointed him governor of Flushing, ostensibly to help his uncle in the war effort of the Dutch States Generals against the Spanish. But she gave Leicester secret instructions that he was not to campaign. A frustrated Philip Sidney lost his life in a minor skirmish that failed in its objective: the "glorious victory" of Zutphen was entirely a creation of English propagandists.
Philip Sidney's other important role was as assistant to his father, who was Lord Deputy in Ireland. Philip was a dyed-in-the-wool English Protestant - indeed, Stewart suggests his Protestantism was more important than his Kentish birth, and that he would have been happier as a cosmopolitan leader of the Counter-Reformation than as an English patriot. It is not surprising, then, that he had no sympathy for the Irish and believed in savage repression of all dissent and rebellion in John Bull's Other Island. Although Stewart's biography is committed and sympathetic, its scholarly virtues do not dispel the impression that Sidney was ultimately an overrated and overhyped figure. The merits of this biography are not entirely matched by the intrinsic importance of the author's hero.
Frank McLynn is an author whose recent work includes lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Napoleon