The Correspondence (c. 1626–1659) of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester

Michael G. Brennan, Noel J. Kinnamon, Margaret P. Hannay, Margaret P. Hannay

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351892339
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

The letters of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester, dating predominantly from about 1636 until 1643, cover a wide range of issues and vividly illustrate her centrality to her illustrious family's personal and public affairs. These c.100 letters are here for the first time fully transcribed and edited. The edition includes a biographical and historical introduction, setting the context of the Sidneys' family and political activities at the time of Dorothy's marriage to Robert in 1615 and then tracing the major events and involvements of her life until her death in 1659. A key to the cipher used in the letters to disguise identities of individuals is also supplied. Following the introduction is the complete text of each of Dorothy Percy Sidney's letters to her husband, Robert, second Earl of Leicester, and to and from William Hawkins, the Sidney family solicitor, along with several others, including letters from Dorothy to Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Holland. Her husband's account of her last moments in 1659, and testamentary directions relating to her will, are also included. The letters are arranged in chronological order and supported by a series of footnotes that elucidate their historical context and briefly to identify key individuals, places, political issues and personal concerns. These notes are further supported by selective quotations from Dorothy's incoming correspondence and other related letters and documents. A glossary supplies more detailed information on 'Persons and Places.' Dorothy Percy Sidney's letters eloquently convey how, even with her undoubted personal potency and shrewd intelligence, the multifaceted roles expected of an able and determined aristocratic early modern Englishwoman-especially when her husband was occupied abroad on official business-were intensely demanding and testing.

Introduction
Dorothy Percy Sidney’s Life and Writings

Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester, is both passionate and practical in her correspondence. She is not afraid to tell her husband that her bed is lonely while he is away on embassy to France, or to instruct him in how to gain favour at court or handle finances. Her deepest concern is for her family – their health and safety, her husband’s career, her daughter Doll’s marriage. Dorothy Sidney bore fifteen children and saw eight of them die. During her husband’s long absences, she managed the family estate at Penshurst and supervised the construction and furnishing of their London home, Leicester House. Although her life seems to have been largely untouched by the scientific revolution, it was shaped by war. During the civil wars her sister, Lucy Percy Hay, was imprisoned; two of the royal children lived with her; her husband was betrayed by the king; her daughter’s husband, Henry Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, was slain in battle; her son Robert went into exile with the court and had an affair with the king’s ex-mistress, and her sons Algernon and Philip supported Parliament against the king. Dorothy’s relationship with her husband was severely tested by long years apart and, particularly during the English civil wars, a series of family deaths and disasters. They quarrelled and even considered living apart just before the onset of her final illness, but after her death her husband was inconsolable. Her correspondence is a vivid reminder of what a seventeenth-century English aristocratic woman could, and could not, achieve in court politics, and how much her life was dependent on the careers of her father, brothers, husband, and sons. Throughout their married life, Robert Sidney depended heavily upon his wife Dorothy for personal, political and, during times of duress, psychological support, although his personal reserve and hasty temper often made such loyalty a very testing duty for her. Her letters, particularly in the early years of their marriage, are affectionate, but only once does she mention that his made her blush. He seems to have rebuked her efforts to advise him about court politics, a subject that she, at the English court, knew much better than he could in France. Nevertheless, Dorothy’s letters to her husband reveal her to have been a loving and supportive spouse, constantly alert to matters relating to his personal welfare and the promotion of his court career, as well as always keen to look after the needs of her growing family and closest relatives.

Women in Dorothy Percy Sidney’s family were renowned both for their beauty and for their intelligence. Dorothy’s grandmother, Lettice Knollys Devereux Dudley, Countess of Leicester, was a famous beauty; her maternal aunt, Penelope Devereux Rich, celebrated in Sir Philip Sidney’s songs and sonnets as his beloved Stella, was known for her wit, her dark eyes, and her golden hair. Dorothy’s mother, Dorothy Devereux Percy, Countess of Northumberland, who had attracted the attention of a great earl instead of a poet, was equally attractive. young Dorothy herself had both wit and beauty, but she was eclipsed by her younger sister Lucy, a flirtatious girl often accounted the most lovely in England. And in later years Dorothy’s own daughter, Dorothy Sidney (‘Doll’), was celebrated by the poet Edmund Waller as his incomparable ‘Sacharissa’.¹

When Dorothy married Robert Sidney the younger, she thereby became related to two of the most important English women writers of her time. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, celebrated as poet, patron, and translator, was her husband’s affectionate aunt; Dorothy habitually spent winters with her and with other members of the Sidney and Herbert families in the Pembroke London home, Baynard’s Castle.² Also wintering at Baynard’s Castle were Dorothy’s three Sidney sisters-in-law: Lady Philippa Hobart; Barbara Sidney Smythe, later Viscountess Strangford, and Lady Mary Wroth. Wroth was the author of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, a sequence of songs and sonnets; The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, a prose romance, and Love’s Victory, a pastoral drama. These young Sidney women gathered at Penshurst in the summer months, and Dorothy’s sister Lucy Percy Hay sometimes joined them. Dorothy may thus have been among the first readers of Wroth’s works, as they circulated among the family. Dorothy’s own letters recall those of her husband’s father, which we edited in this series in Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, first Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester.

Childhood and Family Heritage

Born in 1598 to one of the richest and most powerful families in England, Dorothy Percy had a tumultuous childhood in a family known for its opposition to the throne. When she was three, her maternal uncle, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was beheaded for treason against Queen Elizabeth I. On the Percy side of the family, execution for treason was almost a family tradition, foreshadowing the 1683 execution of Dorothy’s son, the famous Republican Algernon Sidney. Dorothy’s great-great-grandfather, Sir Thomas Percy, had been put to death at Tyburn in June 1537 for his involvement in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Dorothy’s great-grandfather, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, had joined the rebellion of the northern earls in support of Mary Queen of Scots and was beheaded in August 1572. Her grandfather, Henry Percy, eighth Earl of Northumberland, had also been involved in intrigues with Mary Queen of Scots and was sent to the Tower, where he reportedly committed suicide in June 1585 by shooting himself through the heart, although he too may have been killed.³

Dorothy Percy’s father, Henry Percy, then succeeded as the ninth Earl of Northumberland. He married in 1594 Lady Dorothy Devereux Perrott, whose father-in-law, Sir John Perrott, had been Lord Deputy of Ireland (1584–88), a post previously held by Sir Henry Sidney (1565–71, 1575–78). Their marriage was a troubled and often tempestuous one. Following the deaths of two infant sons in 1597 and the births of Dorothy in 1598 and Lucy in 1599, they temporarily separated from October 1599 until December 1601. After their reconciliation two further sons followed: in 1602 Algernon, later tenth Earl of Northumberland, and in about 1604 Henry, later Baron Percy of Alnwick.⁴ Dorothy Percy’s father was a scholarly individual, and his well-stocked library contained many books on medicine, science, astronomy, military affairs, travel, architecture, and the classics. He had a notoriously short temper and had been briefly imprisoned in 1587 for his behaviour during a dispute at his mother’s house. He was also not averse to threatening to resolve disagreements through duels, most notably with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, in 1597 and (even more foolishly) in 1602 with the renowned soldier and swordsman Sir Francis Vere, a long-time antagonist, who was also an opponent of the elder Sir Robert Sidney, later Dorothy’s father-in-law.

Both the Percys and the Sidneys were keen to see the peaceful succession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne following the death of Queen Elizabeth I, but the positions of their respective families after his accession were in stark contrast. The Sidneys had been carefully cultivating James since he was nine years old, when in 1575 Philip Sidney had sent, via a Scottish courtier Sir John Seton, his expressions of respect and hopes to be of loyal service to him. Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Philip’s younger brother, Robert (our Dorothy’s father-in-law), had been sent on a successful embassy personally to thank James VI for his assistance in resisting the Spanish threat against England. He clearly made a strong personal impression on the young Scottish king. years later, when James became King of England, the Sidneys began to reap the rewards of this political perspicuity when on 13 May 1603 Robert Sidney was created Baron Sidney of Penshurst and appointed as Queen Anne’s Lord High Chamberlain and Surveyor. For the christening on 4 May 1605 of Princess Mary – the first of the royal couple’s children to be born in England – Robert Sidney was again honoured by being raised to the rank of Viscount Lisle.

Dorothy’s father, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had also been eager to demonstrate his personal loyalty to King James VI and, soon after the downfall in 1601 of his wife’s brother, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, he was complicit with Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Walter Ralegh and others in making secret overtures to the Scottish king in response to Queen’s Elizabeth’s obviously declining physical state. His intermediary in establishing these contacts was his distant cousin and trusted factor on his northern estates, Thomas Percy, who as a Catholic was also hoping to elicit from James VI a promise of toleration for English Catholics (which was never forthcoming). As Queen Elizabeth’s health went into a rapid decline in March 1603, Northumberland was invited to join the Privy Council for some of its discussions and he was duly sworn in as a member of King James’s first Privy Council in April 1603, as well as being appointed as captain of the gentlemen pensioners, the ceremonial royal bodyguard, in the following May. Northumberland allowed himself to be identified as a supporter of Catholic toleration at the English court, and although this was not a fatal error it did temper his growing intimacy with the new and scrupulously cautious king of England. Because of his irascibly proud temper, however, his position at court collapsed entirely in July 1603: to James I’s great personal distaste, he spat in the face of his old adversary Sir Francis Vere during yet another of their arguments. He was immediately banished from the royal presence and spent the next two years attempting without success to rebuild his reputation at court and his intimacy with the royal family.

After the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605, the discovery that one of the leading conspirators was Northumberland’s cousin and close associate, Thomas Percy – and that they had dined together on the evening of 4 November – proved damning to his reputation. It was also discovered that Northumberland had appointed Thomas Percy as a gentleman pensioner without ensuring, as required by royal decree, that he take the oath of supremacy. Although Northumberland protested that he and Percy had only met to discuss estate business, Thomas Percy was killed soon afterwards when resisting arrest, and it became impossible either to prove or disprove Northumberland’s complicity in the conspiracy. Although Northumberland escaped the axe, he was committed to the Tower of London on 23 November 1605 and in June 1606 Star Chamber fined him £30,000, deprived him of all of his offices and imprisoned him in the Tower during the king’s pleasure; he was to remain there until June 1621, in relatively comfortable conditions in his own suite of rooms in the Martin Tower.

Thus, from the time when Dorothy was seven until she was twenty-three, her father was imprisoned. Dorothy and Lucy were raised by their mother and saw their father only on formal visits to his luxurious rooms in the Tower, where he was permitted his own furnishings, books, and scientific instruments. In contrast, the imprisoned earl, sometimes termed ‘the wizard earl’ for his scientific knowledge, took it upon himself to play a major role in the education of his son and heir, Algernon, whose tuition he personally supervised and who was often with him in the Tower from age seven (‘to wean him from his nursery company and his mother’s wings’) until he went to university as a teenager in 1615.⁵ Northumberland’s unenlightened but representative male views on the capabilities of women were eloquently encapsulated in a long letter of ‘Advice to My Son’.⁶ His various tenets of advice delineate the social constraints and limitations eventually faced by Dorothy Percy Sidney herself when she was a married woman with a husband who was often away from home for long periods on court and diplomatic duties. Northumberland begins by instructing his son always to ‘understand your Estates generally better than your Officers’. But this reasonable advice is then immediately followed by a stern decree that ‘you never suffer your Wife to have Power in the Manage of your Affairs’ – somewhat i...