Journal Article

Introduction: monumental Sidney

Herron, Thomas, Maley, Willy

2011

Overview

Sir Henry (1529-86), only surviving son of the military hero, Moor-fighter and Knight of the Garter, Sir William Sidney and Anne Fitzwilliam; husband of Mary Dudley (sister of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester) and brother-in-law of Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex; father of Philip, Mary, and Robert (and another Mary, Elizabeth and Thomas); London-born gentleman of the privy chamber and death-bed companion of King Edward VI; diplomat, courtier, bridge-builder, administrator, colonizer, self-aggrandizer, treasurer, governor, patron of music and letters, writer.1 As the following essays demonstrate, Sir Henry's relative obscurity is unwarranted. According to Ware, Sidney wrote in English an admonition to his son and also a treatise containing a miscellany of things Irish.29 The essays collected here describe aspects of Sidney's profoundly humanistic, including antiquarian, mindset (as for example highlighted by Philip Schwyzer, below), an emphasis found also in his monuments (see the piece by Kinsella included here). Sidney patronized expert cartography in Ireland, which in turn led to further developments.33 The roots of the Jacobean Ulster Plantation lie in the 1560s, when moves already afoot to settle that unruly region were brought into sharp relief by the death of Shane O'Neill in 1567.34 The queen immediately wrote to Sir Henry Sidney urging that Ulster be properly mapped, a letter reproduced by John Hooker in the second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles in 1586.35 Robert Lythe's surveys of 1567-70, sponsored by Sidney, were followed by the failed ventures in Ulster of Sir Thomas Smith and Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, in the 1570s.36 In 1568, Sidney informed Cecil that a private venture would defray the costs of garrisons or settlements borne by the crown.37 John Davies later decried such ventures, arguing that 'when Priuate men attempt the Conquest of Countries at their own charge, commonly their enterprizes doe perrish without successe: as when, in the time of Queene Elizabeth, Sir Thomas Smith vndertooke to recouer the Ardes' 3 This did not prevent Davies from profiting directly from the Ulster settlement, however.39 The sense of Ireland as displaced center and staging post to world travel rather than provincial periphery or backwater comes through in the works dedicated to Sidney while he was governor there. [...]wheare I beganne, way well the sicke and wounded partes of your common wealth, cure the roote, regarde the foundacion, the principall piliers, the sommer postes, the stone walles; as for the roof and the tiles, if ye repaier them onelye and suffer the growndeworke to perishe, a tempeste of weather, a flawe will shake your building.60 From one perspective Sidney may be viewed as a destructive force-he and his henchmen like Humphrey Gilbert often took no prisoners and gave no quarter.

• Publisher: Sidney Journal