Life of Sir Philip Sydney by Fulke Greville

Life of Sir Philip Sydney by Fulke Greville is in Stewart Books.

In 1652 the Life of Sir Philip Sydney by Fulke Greville was first published by the Clarendon Press.

Stewart Books, Life of Sir Philip Sydney by Fulke Greville Introduction

Sir Philip Sidney is so familiar and so attractive a name, and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, so little known outside the libraries of scholars, that the book which is here republished requires a word or two of introduction for the reader who is not already versed in the subject. It was first published in 1652, twenty-four years after its author's death; and the title, 'The Life of the renowned Sir Philip Sidney ' (with other matters; see the title-page), was given to it presumably by the unknown P. B., the editor, certainly not by Greville himself In a manuscript copy of the work, of which we shall hear more hereafter, the title is simply ' A Dedication '; and Greville's primary object was to dedicate his poems, "these exercises of my youth," as he calls them, "to that Worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed." The Dedication spreads out, in the unchannelled abundance of our earlier prose and the retired soliloquizing of Greville's older age, into a ' Treatise ', in which the primary object is clean forgotten in the rush of the writer's memory of those two subjects of so much greater importance, his friend, Sir Philip, and his mistress, Queen Elizabeth. The treatise is indeed our first authority for some of the well-known stories of Sidney, notably that of the cup of water at Zutphen, and that of the quarrel with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court (Greville, however, does not give the earl's name); but it is at once much less and much more than a regular biography of Sidney. There are no dates, no details of personal appearance, place of abode, habits, mends and acquaintances; nothing of marriage; scarcely anything of life at court; nothing even of Sidney's literary pursuits, except an interesting criticism of the Arcadia solely from the point of view of the political philosopher.

Here, in fact, we have the matter in a nutshell. In all that he writes, except the love poems of the series named Caelica, Greville writes as a political philosopher and moralist. Even in Caelica the thinker dominates the lover, and often banishes the artist: the rest of the poems, including the plays, are, even avowedly (cp. Life of Sidney, chs. 14 and 18), political philosophy in verse. The bulk of them are called 'Treatises' - 'a Treatise of Religion'; 'a Treatie of Humane Learning'; 'an Inquisition upon Fame and Honour'; 'a Treatise of Monarchy', which is divided into 'sections' with such titles as 'Of weak-minded Tyrants', 'Cautions against these weak extremities', 'Of Lawes', 'Of Commerce.' These treatises 'were first intended', Greville writes (Sidney ch. 14), 'to be for every act [in the Tragedies] a chorus': but 'with humble sayles after I had once ventured upon this spreading Ocean of Images, my apprehensive youth [i.e. youth which naturally grasps at whatever it sees], for lack of a well touched compasse, did easily wander beyond proportion'. The tragedies themselves were political, especially the one which Greville destroyed, Antonie and Cleopatra', many members in that creature (by the opinion of those few eyes which saw it) having some childish wantonnesse in them, apt enough to be construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors and government.' The object in all three of them was 'to trace out the high waies of ambitious Governours, and to shew in the practice, that the more audacity, advantage, and good successe such Soveraignties have, the more they hasten to their owne desolation and ruine ' (ch. 18). Similarly very much the greater part of the Life of Sidney consists of reflections upon the political problems of Elizabeth's reign, upon Sidney's views on this subject, upon Elizabeth's methods of government. Greville, like Sidney and Drake and most of the 'stirring Spirits ' (ch. 8) of that time, was strongly anti-Spanish and anti-Papal. His denunciations of Spanish ambition and Papal subservience are so persistent that only the abundance and the quaintness of his language save them from becoming monotonous. There can be little doubt that part of the scorn and displeasure, with which in his later years he alludes, in terms however general, to the degeneracy of the times, was due to his memory of the days of his early manhood, when the struggle with Spain worked together with the commercial enterprise, fostered by the discovery of the New World and the intellectual awakening of the Renaissance, to give a zest to political life, which was more and more lacking in the reign of James I, and even in the last years of Elizabeth herself Not that Greville was ever, in all probability, a very light-hearted optimist or an adventurous man of action. One pictures him as usually throwing his influence on the side of prudence in his relations with his two more brilliant friends and kinsmen, Sidney1 and, afterwards, the rash and unfortunate Essex. His own career, too, was that of a man who was more apt to fill useful and more or less lucrative employments and to steer clear of the extremes of partisanship than to put his fortune to the touch in any daring scheme of ambition. He had his strong sympathies, and they were not with the Cecils2; but he had no open breach with them, and he filled various posts while they still lived, though he evidently blossomed out again in his old age after the Earl of Salisbury's death in 1611. The following pages will show that he was genuinely devoted to Queen Elizabeth; and it is clear that she regarded him with favour as a courtier who could be trusted. He started his political career wuth offices in the principality of Wales, of which his friend's father. Sir Henry Sidney, was Lord President. He received various grants of land and emoluments, was knighted in 1597, and made Treasurer of Marine Causes in 1599-1600. Bacon records that 'Sir Fulke Grevill had much and private access to Queen Elizabeth, which he used honourably, and did many men good: yet he would say merrily of himself 'That he was like Robin Goodfellow': for when the maids spilt the milk-pans or kept any racket, they would lay it upon Robin: so what tales the ladies about the Queen told her, or other bad offices that they did, they would put it upon him"'. Whatever they said about him, he was, as another writer tells us, 'a constant courtier of the ladies'; and the fact that he never married no doubt contributed to his having ' the longest lease and the smoothest time, without rub, of any of her [Elizabeth's] favourites3 '.' In the second year of James I he was granted Warwick Castle, then a ruin, which he made into the splendid pile which it still remains. Internal evidence and the probabilities of the lease point to the time between the death of 'Henry IV of France4 in 1610 and that of the Earl of Salisbury in 16125, as that in which the so-called Life of Sidney was composed. Soon after the later of: these two dates Greville was made Under-Treasurer,

Note 1. Cp. p. 74, where Greville relates how he inspired ' that ingenuous spirit of Sir Philip's' with suspicion of Drake's whole-heartedness in their projected enterprise.

Note 2. Cp. pp. 217 foll., and the story of the fall of Essex, pp. 156 foll.

Note 3. Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia (1642), p. 30: quoted, with the passage from Bacon (Spedding, vii, p. 158), by Grosart, Lord Brooke's Works, vol. i, p. Ixx.

Note 4. Cp. p. 31.

Note 5. From the manner in which Salisbury is spoken of on pp. 217-9, combined with the absence of any allusion to his death, I think it probable that he was still alive when the treatise was written. The fact that Greville's tragedy Mustapha was, perhaps piratically, published in 1609, may have some significance in connexion with the date of the Dedication of his poems to the memory of Sidney.