Sidney, Philip (1554–1586)

English poet and incompetent soldier. He wrote the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591), Arcadia (1590), a prose romance, and Apologie for Poetrie (1595). Politically, Sidney became a charismatic, but hardly powerful, figure supporting a ‘forward’ foreign policy that would help the Protestant Netherlands against the Spanish.

Sidney was born in Penshurst, Kent. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he rounded off his education by a tour around Europe in the company of Hubert Languet. He entered Parliament in 1581, and was knighted in 1583. In 1585 he was made governor of Vlissingen in the Netherlands, and died at Zutphen, fulfilling his desire of fighting the Spanish.

Sidney's reputation, which was high among a few writers and politicians (like Edmund Spenser) in his life, increased immeasurably after his death. He provided the nearest thing the English Calvinists had to a martyr for their cause; his life was mythologized by Fulke Greville.