The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500–1700

Michael G. Brennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351881920
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Sidneys rank amongst the most influential families in early modern England, and can count amongst their number many leading lights of the Tudor and Stuart period. From the Elizabethan poet and soldier Philip, to the republican Algernon, the Sidney family were intimately bound up with the political, cultural and courtly life of early modern England. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume offers an overview of the Sidneys across several generations. By analysing various individuals and their writings, an intriguing new perspective is offered, not only on the culture of English politics, but also on the self-perception and ambitions of a leading renaissance family. During the Tudor period their long and fruitful (but sometimes problematical) association with the Dudley family in court and royal affairs is reassessed with regard to their relations with Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. During the Stuart period the Sidneys intimacy and loyalty to James I, Queen Anne and Charles I is contrasted to their more neutral (even hostile) attitudes to Charles II and James II. Against the backdrop of this shifting royal favour and religious and political upheaval, the Sidneys' political and domestic tactics used to preserve the family's reputation, estates and property are explored. The first book length study of the Sidney family's relationship with the English monarchy, this work will be welcomed by all those with an interest in English political and cultural history. Drawing upon both historical and literary sources it offers an absorbing insight into the self-perceptions of a leading renaissance family and how they adapted to the vicissitudes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century world.

Chapter 1

The Sidneys, Brandons, Guildfords, and Dudleys, 1500–1554

The Rise of the Sidneys and the Battle of Flodden (1513)

An influential Tudor family’s retrospective narrative of its own rise to public prominence was often a useful element in confirming its current social status. The Sidneys were no exception in that by the second half of the sixteenth century the courtly and military distinction of their forebears was well defined and systematically maintained. For the generation of Sir Philip Sidney and his siblings, two key elements of their family’s historical identity mattered above all else: the ancient respectability of the paternal Sidneys and the aristocratic potency of the maternal Dudley line. ‘I am by my father’s side of ancient and always well esteemed and well matched gentry’, insisted Philip’s ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester’ (c. 1584/5); but his ‘chiefest honour’ was that he was ‘a Dudley in blood’, and he was determined to live up to the ‘nobility of that blood whereof I am descended’.¹ So proud were the Sidneys of this connection that when Philip’s father Henry had married his mother, Mary Dudley, on 29 March 1551 he was granted permission to quarter his own family crest, the porcupine, with that of his wife, the bear and ragged staff (appropriated in 1547 by John Dudley from the fifteenth-century Beauchamp Earls of Warwick). This combination of heraldic devices was to define symbolically the fortunes of the Sidneys for the rest of the sixteenth century.

For upwardly mobile Elizabethans, genealogy could offer a utilitarian blend of diligently researched antiquarianism and myth. As far as is now verifiable, the Sidneys possessed an entirely respectable lineage for a gentry family, traceable back to one John de Sydenie, a Surrey yeoman from the parish of Alford during the reign of Edward I. One of his descendants, Nicholas Sidney (the father of Sir William Sidney to whom Penshurst was granted in 1552), married Anne Brandon, the aunt of Charles Brandon, Viscount Lisle, later Duke of Suffolk and the husband of Henry VIII’s sister Princess Mary. This was a connection of conspicuous distinction but some time before 1580 Sir Henry Sidney also commissioned a detailed family genealogy from the (inventively fraudulent) herald Robert Cooke. He claimed to have traced the family back to one William de Sidne, supposedly a personal servant of Henry II in Anjou before his accession and later his court chamberlain. There was a specific calculation in this newly coined ancient family tradition of royal service in that it neatly prefigured the service of Sir Henry’s own father, Sir William Sidney, who had acted as chamberlain to Edward VI before his accession. Sir Henry may innocently have been duped by Cooke or he could have been making a deliberate purchase of distinguished royal connections for his ancestors.² But this question remains secondary to the fact that the late-Elizabethan Sidneys considered themselves as the maintainers of a long-established family tradition of royal trusted service.

For the aspiring courtier of this period, the quality of a man’s royal service could be displayed on two key fronts: competence and trustworthiness in the performance of duties within domestic and diplomatic contexts and through the valorous bearing of arms on the tiltyard and battlefield. This potent combination of civic and chivalric loyalty was to be espoused by the Sidneys for over two hundred years. According to Arthur Collins in 1746 and later historians of the family, Sir William’s defining moment of glory came when in 1513 he commanded the right wing of the English army at Flodden with conspicuous distinction. As an esquire of the King’s house, William Sidney had already served in the English expedition under the command of Lord Darcy sent in May 1511 to aid Ferdinand, King of Aragon and Castile (Henry VIII’s father-in-law), against the Moors and he had been lavishly entertained at the royal court at Madrid. Holinshed notes, however, that he diplomatically turned down the honour of being personally knighted by the king.³ In 1512/13 he also held two naval commands during the war with France in the fleet under Lord Edward Howard, High Admiral of England, culminating in a resolutely English knighthood (18 April) after a short but bloody engagement off Brest in March 1513. During the action Admiral Edward Howard was drowned but was succeeded in this post by his younger brother, Sir Thomas.

Later in the same year came Sir William Sidney’s participation in the Battle of Flodden against the Scots. James IV – despite his marriage in 1503 with Henry VIII’s sister, Princess Margaret – had formed a secret pact with the French king Louis XII (who in 1514 married another of Henry’s sisters, Princess Mary). Primarily to hamper the invasion of France by Henry’s main army, James IV had crossed the border on 22 August 1513 with over 40,000 soldiers and artillery. The redoubtable English commander in the north, Thomas Howard (1443–1524), Earl of Surrey and Earl Marshal of England, then seventy years old and a veteran of Bosworth Field (1485), rapidly pulled together a smaller opposing force, mainly drawn at such short notice from shire levies rather than the regular militia. Following a formal challenge, a bloody conflict ensued during the afternoon and evening of 9 September, resulting in a magnificent victory for the English forces and the valiant death of James IV, along with numerous Scottish noblemen and bishops, as he personally led the final Scottish charge. Through his exceptional valour at Flodden, fighting alongside the illustrious Howards, Sir William epitomized the ideal of the heroic warrior-courtier that was to become so central to the experiences of Philip and Robert Sidney in the Low Countries some seventy years later.

But is this glorious picture entirely accurate? No contemporary source confirms the claim that Sir William Sidney, formerly a mere esquire of the King’s house who had been knighted only a few months earlier, was endowed with the remarkable honour of leading the right wing of the English forces. Certainly, the chronicles of Edward Hall, completed and published by Richard Grafton (1548), are unequivocal on this matter and confirmed by later accounts offered by John Stow and Raphael Holinshed. (Sir William’s son Henry owned a copy of Hall’s chronicles and was a friend of several of the contributors to Holinshed, suggesting that their information about the battle would have been well known to the Sidneys.) Hall clearly states that Sir William served with honour alongside other knights in the vanguard formation of the English attack under the command of Sir Thomas Howard, the Earl Marshal’s son. This would have been his natural place, given that his naval commands of 1512/13 would have already allied him personally to the Howard brothers, Edward and Thomas, as successive Lord Admirals. Sir Thomas had joined up with his father’s northern army at Alnwick on 4 September, bringing with him a small force of highly trained men originally intended for service with Henry VIII’s army in France. This was undoubtedly the élite military unit to which Sir William Sidney belonged.⁴

Hall clarifies that another Howard brother, Edmund, was the individual who led the right wing. Other contemporary and modern accounts of the battle also agree with Hall’s designation of the leadership of the vanguard and right wing of the English militia.⁵ And yet Sir William’s reputed command of the English right wing at Flodden has long been an unquestioned element in biographical studies of the Sidneys, ranging from Arthur Collins in 1746 ([Sidney] ‘commanded in the Right Wing of the Army under the Earl of Surry’, I.77); and Malcolm Wallace in 1915: (‘In the battle of Flodden he commanded the right wing of the English army’, 4); to, most recently, Alan Stewart in 2000: (‘the battle of Flodden Field, in which he led the right wing of the Earl of Surrey’s army’, 15); and Wallace T. MacCaffrey in 2004 in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: (‘In 1513 he commanded the right wing at Flodden’).

To complicate matters further, modern historians agree that almost as soon as the Scottish guns fired their first volleys, the foot soldiers of the English right wing broke ranks and began to flee. Fortunately, the left wing under Sir Edward Stanley held firm and, alongside Lord Dacre’s horsemen and the vanguard advance, played a major role in securing ultimate English victory at Branxton Hill (the site of the ‘Flodden Field’ conflict). Two contemporary accounts, the poems Scotish Feilde and Flodden Feilde, were penned soon after the battle largely as pro-Stanley propaganda, glorifying their family’s role in the battle.⁶ Similarly, but over two centuries later, Arthur Collins seems to have claimed for Sir William Sidney a far higher level of command at Flodden than was really the case – thereby contradicting the evidence of Hall, Stow, and Holinshed, all of which place Sidney under Sir Thomas Howard’s command in the vanguard formation.

While there is no reason to doubt in general terms the record supplied by Collins (drawn largely from the same three Tudor chroniclers) of William Sidney’s earlier military and naval distinctions, his exact contribution to these campaigns also remains elusive. The proposed war against the Moors in 1511 was a grandiose crusade-like concept but in actuality soon became an abortive disaster with the ramshackle and often drunken English forces never even reaching North Africa. Similarly, the naval action off Brest (March 1513) was little more than a petty strategic gesture since the real aim of the mission – to reclaim Guinne which had been lost during the Hundred Years War – entirely failed and the invasion soon petered out when its Admiral, Edward Howard (the elder brother of Sidney’s commander at Flodden), fell overboard and drowned during the boarding of a French galley.⁷ This is not to say that Sir William Sidney was anything other than an heroic warrior on the battlefield and at sea. But it seems, in historical retrospect, that his military reputation was carefully tempered to match the dynastic ambitions of his monarch, Henry VIII (‘ever desirous to serve Mars’, Edward Hall noted), who utilized visible demonstrations of military prowess both as an instrument of domestic policy and as a means of establishing England’s potency on the international stage. Certainly, the king was impressed enough with Sir William’s military service by July 1514 to award him a life annuity of 50 marks per year.⁸ It is clear that by associating their family’s origins so publicly with the long-remembered glories of Flodden Field, the late-Tudor Sidneys knew exactly what they were doing. While Henry VIII was away at his wars in France, popular legend recounted, James IV had treacherously attempted to seize the throne of England. But through the valour of his loyal servants, led by the Howards and including Sir William Sidney, the constitutional integrity of the Tudor kingdom had been heroically preserved.

At the centre of memories of Flodden Field was the remarkable aged warrior, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose military repute was matched by his personal significance to the Henrician regime. He was described by Polydore Vergil as vir prudentia, gravitate et constantia praeditus (‘a man endowed with prudence, dignity, and firmness’) and he provided the later Sidneys with their first inspirational model for the chivalric warrior-courtier. Originally famed for his loyal military service to Edward IV, he had gone on to serve dutifully his brother, Richard III. As a veteran of Bosworth Field, where his own father the Duke of Norfolk had been slain, he had been captured, attainted, and imprisoned in the Tower. But after three years his release led to his firm alliance with the new regimes of Henry VII and his son Henry VIII, who raised him to the positions of Lieutenant of the North, Lord Treasurer, and Earl Marshal of England.⁹

The personal triumphs of the Earl of Surrey and his sons Sir Thomas and Edmund at Flodden were taken as an overt reassertion of the political validity of the Henrician regime and its aristocratic hierarchies. The later Sidneys, an acutely ‘family-conscious family’ (Roger Kuin), would have well understood from the example of Surrey and his sons how familial blood bonds, carefully nurtured within the great houses of the aristocracy and tested on the battlefield, readily transferred into the self-interested family networks of Tudor court politics. While the powerful personal loyalties of the Scottish clansmen at Flodden were already the stuff of legend (some eighty-nine members of the Hay family alone were reputed to have fallen during the battle), the Sidney-Dudley axis at the English court during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign sought to operate in a similar fashion. Sir Philip Sidney’s proud and defiant boast that he was ‘a Dudley in blood’ was intended not merely as a genealogical association but rather as the proclamation of a powerful bond of familial allegiance and loyalty, a chivalric gesture which his grandfather, Sir William Sidney, would have appreciated.

Sir William Sidney and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk

Whatever the factual details of William Sidney’s activities as a naval commander and soldier during the first two decades of Henry VIII’s reign, during the 1530s and 1540s he went on to enjoy an outstandingly successful career at the court of Henry VIII. Two key personal connections – with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and John Dudley, later Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland – were the major elements in easing his rise to prominence and positions of trust within the royal household. But the Sidneys quickly learned that political events sometimes rendered it as necessary to be able to slide over past familial associations as to celebrate them openly. No doubt during the 1520s and 1530s the Sidneys were proud of Sir William’s naval and military service with the Howards. But during the mid-1540s this association grew steadily more problematic.

Sir William’s commander at Flodden, Thomas Howard, by then Earl of Surrey and Duke of Norfolk, was ruthlessly ousted from favour by Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Norfolk’s son, the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was executed in January 1547 on a frivolous charge of treason. Norfolk himself was condemned to death but reprieved at the last moment when Henry VIII died, although he remained in the Tower until the accession of Queen Mary in July 1553. Similarly, Henry Grey (the son-in-law of Sir William’s former patron and jousting partner, Charles Brandon) was created Duke of Suffolk in October 1551 on the same day that Henry Sidney received his own knighthood. But the Grey family name was soon to be tainted by John Dudley’s conspiracy to place Suffolk’s daughter, Lady Jane (who married Dudley’s youngest son, Guildford, on 25 May 1553), on the throne of England, leading to Suffolk’s own execution on 23 February 1554. It must have seemed especially ironic (or simply bewildering) for the aged Sir William Sidney to find that his former commander at Flodden, Thomas Howard, now released from the Tower by Mary, had been chosen to preside over the trial and execution of the Duke of Northumberland (the father of his daughter-in-law, Mary Dudley). By the mid-1550s, the Sidneys’ glorious and productive prior associations with the Howard, Brandon, and Dudley families were all proving highly problematic.

The fact remains, however, that the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500–1700
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Table: The Sidney Family
• Table: The Dudley Family
• Introduction
• 1 The Sidneys, Brandons, Guildfords, and Dudleys, 1500–1554
• 2 The Dudleys and Sidneys, 1554–1572
• 3 The Ascendancy of Philip Sidney, 1572–1577
• 4 Great Expectations for the Sidneys, 1577–1585
• 5 The Last Years of Queen Elizabeth, 1585–1603
• 6 The Sidneys and King James I, 1603–1621
• 7 The Sidneys and Royal Service, 1621–1644
• 8 The Survival of the Sidneys, 1644–1700
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index