Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent

Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Sidney Wroth, and their Genealogical Cultures

Marie H. Loughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032168159
• eBook ISBN: 9781000539707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth's use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England's rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry.

In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world's genealogical discourses.

1Mary Sidney Herbert’s Genealogical CulturesFamily, Household, Community

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003263029-2

1.1 Being a Sidney/Being a Herbert: Mary Sidney Herbert’s Flexible Genealogies

Like many of her elite peers, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert (1561–1621; hereafter, MSH) had to negotiate the ways in which her personal, familial, and wider social identities shifted in relation to those genealogical events that, as the introduction suggests, have particularly powerful gendered valences: marriage, conception, birth, and death. According to John Aubrey, MSH’s husband, Henry Herbert (1538–1601), the 2nd earl of Pembroke, was “a great lover of heraldrie, and collected curious manuscripts of it […] and bookes of genealogies, all well painted and writt.” In one of these manuscripts, Herbert situates his ancestry in the context of a series of “beautiful hand-colored drawings of the arms of various notable personages, including [his patrons] Burghley […] and Essex,” as well as “a long series of Welsh lords,” emphasizing Herbert’s own Welsh connections, and concluding with “all his titles, his two marriages (the marriage to Katherine Grey is conveniently omitted), and his four children, as though all were then living.” The herald finishes the manuscript with the wish, “I pray god longe to continue [the Herberts] in prosperouse estat” (Hannay, Philip’s 48–9). As several scholars have demonstrated, the shaping of genealogical charts, trees, and notices through active choices of inclusion, exclusion, and contextualization that have little to do with “pure” standards of historical fact was an unremarkable practice in early modern Europe (Klapisch-Zuber 114–15; 122–9; Woolf, Circulation 122–37). However, MSH would have seen in this volume’s shaping, particularly in its final genealogical record of Herbert, his marriages and offspring, a promise, a warning, and a threat: Henry and Mary’s dead daughter Katherine (1581–1584) is included, which emphasizes that a child’s gender and early death (at the age of three) are no bar to her inclusion among a family’s honoured deceased, but at the same time, no person is easier to erase from a family tree than a dead wife who has given her husband no progeny and has indeed become a political liability to remember and memorialize. In Henry Herbert’s final genealogical self-presentation, his second wife, Katherine Talbot, daughter of George, 6th earl of Shrewsbury, is silently remade as his first wife, included even though, like his true first wife, Katherine Grey, she had given him no issue. Obviously, it is Katherine Grey’s childlessness combined with her father Northumberland’s stain as a traitor that makes her persona non grata in the Herbert family tree.¹ In contrast, MSH could contemplate the many textual and material inscriptions of her exemplary success in helping construct the genealogical fabric of the Sidney-Herbert families, including her celebration as the mother of Pembroke’s long-awaited heir, William, commemorated in an elaborate plaque in St. Mary’s Church, Wilton:

Be it remembered that at the Eight Day of April 1580 on Friday before twelve of the Clock at Night of the Same Day was Born William Lord Herbert of Cardiff first Child of the Noble Henry Harbert Erle of Pembroke By his most Dere Wyfe Mary Daughter to the Right Honorable Sir Henry Sidney Knight […] and the Lady Mary Daughter to the Famous John Duke of Northumberland and was [christened] the 28th day of the same month in the Mannour of Wilton The Godmother ye Mighty and most Excellent Princis Elizabeth by the Grace of God Quene of England by her Deputye the most Virtuous Lady Anne Countice of Warwick and the Godfathers were the noble and Famous Erle Ambrose Erle of Warwick and Robert Erle of Lycester both Great Uncles to the Infant by the Mothers Side Warwick in Person and Lycester by his Deputye Phillip Sidney His Uncle by the Mothers Side to the forenamed Young Lord Herbert of Cardiff whom the Almighty […] God blesse with his Mother above named with prosperous Liye in all Happiness in the Name of God Amen.

(qtd. Hannay, Philip’s 50–51)

This unusually fulsome tablet speaks both to Herbert’s enormous relief that he finally had a male heir—he provided a celebratory dinner to which he invited the entire parish (51)—and to the focus on the successful birth’s contribution to the Herberts’ lineage, alliances, and influence; with the exact date and time recorded, William Herbert’s birth notice confirms the event’s importance, and provides the necessary information for a horoscope to be produced. This tablet publically commemorates MSH’s success at securing the Herbert family line at the beginning of her contributions to the network of kinship and alliance relationships that increased the power and prestige of both her Sidney birth family and her Herbert marital family. However, this celebratory inscription contrasts with the chilling “spectacle” of Katherine Grey’s alternative genealogical destiny: silenced, erased, forgotten.

MSH’s early inculcation into her elite culture’s genealogical thinking and practices seems at first glance, then, both entirely conventional and highly patrilineal. The Sidney and Dudley pedigree rolls, those images that would have been familiar to her as part of her family culture and history, were early lessons, however, not simply in early modern elite genealogy’s compulsory patrilinearity, but in familial genealogy’s flexibility. Admittedly, these most ubiquitous of the period’s material signs of descent were also highly conventional, and depending on when we date Sir Henry Sidney’s commissioning of his family’s genealogy, this roll might mean very different things: commissioned in preparation for his marriage in 1551, this pedigree roll might testify to Henry Sidney’s desire to elevate his descent in a way that would allow him to dignify rather than be absorbed within the far more ancient and influential family of his bride Mary Dudley, sister of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester; commissioned closer to the date when it appears in Henry Sidney’s financial records (1568), some seventeen years after his marriage, the roll might instead have been partly a response to his own mortality, prompted by his ill health and coupled with his fear that the Queen’s insistence that he return to Ireland for a second term as governor would worsen it, as well as a desire to provide his growing children with a record of their specifically Sidney antecedents, as in that year his thirteen-year-old son and heir Philip was entering Gray’s Inn, a year that may also have marked the beginning of his studies at Oxford (Brennan and Kinnamon 23), and his full entry into adult responsibilities and duties; if we accept Katherine Duncan Jones’ later dating, the commissioning of the Sidney pedigree roll may have even broader political implications, constituting part of Henry Sidney and Leicester’s joint countering of the status conscious rebuke that Elizabeth I issued to Sir Philip Sidney’s “Letter” (1579) opposing her contemplated marriage with the Duc Alençon (Kuin 116–17). Moreover, MSH’s maternal pedigree roll, commissioned by her uncle Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, reinforces the conventional patrilineal treatment of origin and descent that such rolls often focus on. The Dudleys had, after all, in some accounts, already traced their origins back to the very birth of England itself, with the first earl of Warwick being Arthegall, a knight of Arthur’s Round Table (Richmond 183, 189–90; Stewart, Double 11); this Dudley pedigree roll identifies the family’s founder as the only slightly less legendary Guy of Warwick. Represented as a David-figure standing triumphant over the Goliath-like corpse of Colbarne the Danish Giant, Guy’s victory allows “the kinge [to bring] the Realme into one monarchie” (qtd. Richmond 189), and effectively proclaims the Dudleys’ virtues of loyalty, service, and dedication to the Crown. With the tree of his family springing Jesse-like from his chest and branching off into the shoots representing his three sons, Guy explicitly conveys through his body to his descendants the very virtues that Robert Dudley wished to see himself as embodying (McCoy 35–8).²

Moreover, Sir Henry Sidney’s attitude towards ancestry mirrors the balancing between virtue and lineage that was so much a part of early modern England’s genealogical imaginary. In his urging of the eleven-year-old Philip to remember his obligation to his mother’s noble blood through his cultivation of virtue, we see a commitment to this kind of reciprocity, where blood is both a gift and a debt, that which one inherits and that which one is obliged to enhance, and where nobility balances between its lineal and ethical meanings. “Remember my Sonne,” Henry Sidney wrote in April 1566, “the Noble bloud you are discended of by your mothers side, & thinke that only by vertuous life and good action, you may be an ornament to that ylustre family, and otherwise through vice & sloth you may be accompted Labes generis, a spot of your kin [i.e., a blemish upon the family], one of the greatest cursses that can happen to man.” Mary Dudley Sidney’s postscript reminds her son Philip that lineal pride is not only natural, but also a social convention that could be easily abused in allotting to those of noble rank some larger portion of moral, ethical, and spiritual enlightenment than those who lacked this birth privilege, a notion that had particular resonance for a rising gentry family like the Sidneys: “Your Noble and carefull Father,” Mary Dudley Sidney adds, “hath taken paynes with his owne hand, to give you in this his letter, so wise, so learned, and most requisite precepts for you to follow” (P. Sidney, Correspondence 1.3–5).

Sir Henry Sidney’s own example showed MSH how important the talented individual could be to a family’s natal and marital genealogical identity. Capitalizing on his and his father’s personal relationship with Prince Edward, later Edward VI, Henry Sidney possessed royal friendship and favour that underpinned his genealogical capital, with the young king not simply supporting his longtime friend’s marriage with Mary Dudley, but authorizing Henry’s new heraldic emblem, which saw “his wife’s badge, the Dudley bear and ragged staff” added “to his own crest, the porcupine” (Hannay, Philip’s 5). Even Sir Philip Sidney’s famous declaration that his Dudley descent is his chief ancestral pride places this declaration in a context that celebrates his maternal and paternal lines. “I am a Dudlei in blood,” Philip writes, “that Dukes daughters son and do acknowledg though in all truth I mai justli affirm that I am by my fathers syde of ancient and allwaies well esteemed and welmatched gentry yet I do acknowledg I sai that my cheefest honor is to be a Dudlei and truli am glad to have caws [i.e., cause] to sett foorth the nobility of that blood whereof I am descended,” emphasizing the Dudleys’ lineal nobility as “a hows [i.e., house] now noble long since noble, with a nobility never interrupted seated in a place which thei have each father and each son continualli owned” (Defence of Leicester, 3.65–6, 68). Philip subsequently discusses the reciprocal relationship between the Dudleys’ nobility in blood and forwardness in virtue. Both this discussion and Philip’s insistence on the value of his father’s own “ancient” descent—supported first by its high social reputation, and second by its thoughtful network of marriages (its “welmatched” nature)—align Philip’s concept of honour and genealogical identity firmly with that of his father, uncle, and broader culture (3.68–9).

However, just as a deeper investigation of Sir Philip Sidney’s “ancestral pride” (McCoy 55) has indicated that the connection between ancestry and virtue remains highly vexed in many of Sidney’s writings, so a similar investigation into the Sidney-Herbert families’ genealogical cultures suggests that these cultures were highly flexible and subject to multiple and sometimes highly critical uses. Philip’s ambivalent representation of descent and power appears in his “doubtful [and in fact highly ironic] tributes to Elizabeth’s hereditary and peaceful reign” in the Arcadia and the 1579 “Letter”, in his careful negotiation of patrilineal descent in Defence of Leicester (comp. ca. 1584–5), and in his assessment of the very compromised ‘success’ of King Basilius’ rule in the Arcadia (Worden 261–2, 3–16, 132–52). Sidney’s Defence of Leicester contains a highly conflicted representation of woman’s power over lineage, descent, and genealogical continuity. Sidney struggles with the reality of his claims for nobility and influence as grounded in his maternal Dudley line, just as Leicester’s own genealogical honour relies on his maternal line as well. As Elizabeth Mazzola has suggested, Philip’s Defence of Leicester “upholds a patchwork model of a patriarchal order,” wherein his celebration of maternal descent is entirely self-serving, wherein his “propaganda for mothers becomes propaganda for himself” (Favorite 25–6; cf. Kuin 120–1). Philip notes that “the singular nobiliti of his mother nothing avail him if his fathers blood wear not in all respectes worthy to match with hers […]” (3.67). The very flexibility of Philip’s deployment of genealogical rhetoric, images, and ideas serves as a signal example of the Sidney-Herbert families’ own imaginatively wide-ranging genealogical cultures, and yet another lesson for MSH’s own shaping of and forays into and beyond these cultures.

As an unmarried girl, Mary Sidney was unsurprisingly largely subject to patrilineal genealogical expectations that fashioned her as a prospective contributor to family network expansion and lineal continuities; at the same time, the flexible deployment of the narratives and rituals that surrounded these expectations indicates MSH’s delicate balancing between being the object and subject of her family’s and age’s genealogical culture. As a maiden, the fourteen-year-old Mary appears as a marriageable asset to the Sidneys most dramatically at Queen Elizabeth’s entertainment at Woodstock (1575). As part of the entertainment’s “lottery pageant,” where each female attendee received a posy that spoke to her particular qualities (Kolkovich 107–108), Mary’s “first poetic tribute” represents her as young, beautiful, intelligent, and linguistically accomplished, and these valuable attributes are represented not only as springing from her bloodline, but also as dependent for their development on her will, reflecting once again that Erasmian accommodation of blood and the cultivation of honour that was, as we have seen, at the heart of Henry Sidney’s early counsel to his young heir Philip: “Tho yonge in yeares yet olde in wit, a gest dew to your race,/If you holde on as you begine who ist youle not deface?” (qtd. Hannay et al., Introduction, Collected 1.4). “Wit” refers not simply to intellect and rhetorical skill, but to their employment in competitive social contexts (Zucker 3); these accomplishments and their canny political deployment are also specifically a “gest dew to [her] race,” since they promise greater things to come, and that these greater things spring from her bloodline or “race.” They are “dew” to it, and are also a debt she owes to her ancestors, living relations, and future descendants, something “dew” to them. Tellingly, this representation of blood as symbolizing both rightful inheritance and debt is one that Mary will revisit later in her most complex genealogical work, “To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Phillip Sidney.”

Mary Sidney’s Woodstock posy is one of only two for the gathered noblewomen that focus on “less gendered or even masculine traits” (Kolkovich 112), but as will be the case throughout her life, MSH’s prodigious talents are couched as her rightful inheritance and as a property that she should and will leave enriched to her descendants. At the same time, their legitimate use in the interests of the Sidney family and its allies testifies that they have indeed been legitimately inherited, supporting the past, present, and future of the Sidney line. If this posy is, then, partly an advertisement of Mary’s marriageability, it suggests that her potential and value as a bride reside less in her mirroring of any tired conventional ideal of Renaissance Protestant womanhood (chaste, silent, and obedient), and more in the declaration of her inherited intellectual qualities, abilities, and virtues as a Sidney, her potential to develop these, and her family’s support of her present and future contributions to family, court, and nation. “Gest,” with its far older meaning of a notable action, deed or exploit, glances also at the marriageable Mary’s deployment of her linguistic accomplishments, intelligence, and beauty as the early modern equivalent of the “gest” of some long-dead warrior-ancestor on the battlefield, a proleptic imagining that finds its echo in the chivalric self-fashioning of Sir Philip Sidney’s participation in jousts and tilts, not to mention the adventures of his Arcadian knights (McCoy 55–78). The posy forges a link between the young Mary Sidney’s speech, intellectual abilities, and the ancient “gests” of the Sidney family. Like her father Sir Henry Sidney’s preferred Sidney family founder, the chamberlain of Henry II (1133–89), Sir William de Sidne (Brennan and Kinnamon xx), or her uncle Leicester’s celebrated David-like warrior ancestor, Guy of Warwick, Mary Sidney stands on the verge of a field of family honour, a marital field appropriate for women, but no less significant than the martial field on which these ancestors won acclaim for themselves and their line. She is imagined, after all, as “defac[ing]” her rivals, implying perhaps, that as she matures her person will (in comparison) make the persons of other young women appear marred and devalued, with an obvious glance at the beauty of the “face.” The posy’s genealogical context even implies that Mary as the inheritor of the Sidney family intellectual abilities may outshine all her peers and eventually deface them, in the older sense of “blot[ting] [them] out of existence, memory, or thought” (OED, “deface,” v. 3b). The posy emphasizes court culture’s conception of the Sidney woman’s genealogical identity: deeply embedded in personal and intellectual qualities which in their effective social deployment create the potential for marital and other exogamous alliances (Kolkovich 109–112). Presented as part of a contest, however, expressed in the language of womanly beauty and ancestral martial combat, the posy suggests the lineal significance of the ideal Sidney woman’s ability to construct alliance networks.

Married just two years later to the widowed, mid-forties Henry Herbert, 2nd earl of Pembroke, Mary experienced intimately the pressure to fulfil her “primary duty […] to produce an heir for the Pembroke estates,” and as a very young bride her early marital identity was, as many critics agree, an anxious one (Hannay et al., Introduction, Collected 1.5); she was, after all, the indispensable reproducer of her new family’s future, of its continued genealogical vitality and thus its political vitality as well, just as her brother Robert’s wife Barbara Gamage possessed the wealth, fertility, and alliances that would later guarantee the continuation of the Sidney family line after the death of Mary’s brother, Philip. As a wife, mother, and widow, MSH was also a successful and active contributor to the endogamous and exogamous networks that, as I indicated in the introduction, were women’s peculiar contribution to the genealogical culture of their natal and marital families, particularly since the “the Sidneys’ rise into important court and country positions” was largely due to the links they forged with prominent families, particularly the Dudleys and the Herberts. These links were “confirmed through marital...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Spelling
• Introduction: Living in a Genealogical Age: Women and the Early Modern Cultures of Ancestry
• 1 Mary Sidney Herbert’s Genealogical Cultures: Family, Household, Community
• 2 In the Hands of Others: Mary Sidney Herbert as Morientis Imago Philippi
• 3 Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1591, 1592) and Mary Sidney Herbert’s Mythographic Genealogical Communities
• 4 Revising Reproduction, Descent, and Midwifery in Thomas Moffet’s The Silkewormes, and their Flies (1599)
• 5 In Her Own Hands: Mary Sidney Herbert’s “To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Phillip Sidney”
• 6 Mary Sidney Wroth’s Genealogical Cultures: Family, Household, Community
• 7 In the Hands of Others: Mary Sidney Wroth’s Genealogical Imagining
• 8 Ordinary Remembering, Confusing, and Forgetting in Urania’s Genealogical Archive
• 9 Extraordinary Remembering and Forgetting at the Urania’s Leucadian Rock
• Conclusion: Whither Genealogy?
• Works Cited
• Index