Philip Sidney

Timeline

1. 1554–1577Penshurst · KentSon of Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley, nephew of the Earl of Leicester. First attended Shrewsbury School, where he formed a friendship with Fulke Greville, then Oxford. Went to Paris in 1572, witnessing the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, afterwards travelling through Germany, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands. In 1577 he was sent as envoy to the court of the Holy Roman Empire, contacting German Protestant princes, and on his return became one of the most celebrated young courtiers of Elizabeth's reign.
2. 1579–1585Wilton House · WiltshireAround 1580 at Wilton he began writing the pastoral romance Arcadia dedicated to his sister, and composed An Apology for Poetry (also called The Defence of Poesy), answering Gosson's attacks on the theatre and arguing that poetry fuses the vividness of history with the ethics of philosophy and best stirs virtue. In the same period he completed the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. He was knighted in 1583 and married Frances, daughter of Walsingham. Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender was dedicated to him.
3. 1585–1586Zutphen · GelderlandWhen England intervened in the Dutch war of independence in 1585, Sidney became governor of the garrison town of Flushing and operated alongside Maurice of Orange and others. On 22 September 1586, while intercepting a Spanish supply column at Zutphen, he was shot in the thigh; tradition holds he removed his leg armor so as not to be better equipped than his companions. The wound turned gangrenous and he died at Arnhem on 17 October, aged thirty-one. In February 1587 his body was reburied in St Paul's Cathedral with a funeral of the greatest honors; Arcadia was first printed in 1590 and An Apology for Poetry in 1595.