Episode 083 of the Renaissance English History Podcast is about Mary Sidney Herbert. There’s not a lot of information easily available about her life, but Melita Thomas from Tudor Times shares with us what she’s found.
One interesting tidbit is that she took a younger … erm … companion when she was a widow. Because she could. Rock on, Mary. Rock on.
Suggested links:
Tudor Times feature on Mary Sidney
The Poetry Foundation entry on Mary Sidney Herbert with links
Wilton House, Mary Sidney Herbert’s home
International Sidney Society which is geared towards Sir Philip, Mary’s brother, but they have information on Mary there, too.
Here are a few poems from Mary Sidney Herbert:
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Transcript: Tudor Times on Mary Sidney
Heather:
Welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and a deeper connection to our own humanity.
This is Episode 83. It’s another joint episode with Melita of Tudor Times on Mary Sidney. Just a quick note that the Renaissance English History Podcast is a proud member of the Agora Podcast Network. You can discover lots of great new podcasts at Agorapodcastnetwork.com and the podcast of the month is The Cannon Ball. The Cannon Ball is a monthly podcast co-hosted by two well-educated autodidacts who are attempting to read all the books in the appendix to Harold Bloom’s the western canon. Learn more at thecannonballpodcast.wordpress.com.
Also, I need to thank a very special group of people right now. My lovely Patreon patrons so I have a really special Patreon drive going on right now in August. It’s kind of like an NPR fundraiser but more Renaissance-y so if you sign up at the $3 episode level or higher anytime during the month of August, you will get one of the 2018 Tudor planners for free in mid-November when I ship them out and that’ll be your thank you gift so you could either keep it for yourself or you could give it as a present.
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So now let me introduce you to Melita Thomas. Melita is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times, a website devoted to Tutor and Stuart history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at Tudortimes.co.uk. Melita, who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970’s series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson, also contributes articles to the BBC History Extra and Britain magazine and she’s going to be speaking at the upcoming free Tudor Summit on September 3 and 4.
Learn more at tudorsummit.com. It’s totally free. It’s going to be two days of talks by some of the leading podcasters, historians, bloggers on lots of different aspects of Tudor history, and Melita is going to be talking about her new book on Mary Tudor. So check that out.
So we’re going to talk about Mary Sidney. But before we do, I just want to address an elephant in the room as it were in the last episode on Margaret Pole. Melita used the word “niggardly” to describe Henry VII in terms of how he dealt with Margaret Pole. And the word means “miserly”. There were a couple of people who were curious about it, and there were a couple of people who found it offensive. So it’s really important to note that the etymology is completely different than the racial slur. It is in no way related to the racial slur, I would never, I would never say that.
Also in the UK, there is no controversy about this word at all. I had no idea that there’s even was a controversy about it. But then a couple people sent me emails and posted it on the Facebook page. And I realized, like I looked it up, and I saw that there’s apparently a controversy around using that word. So, we just kind of wanted to make it clear for anybody who still had lingering feelings of feeling offended or uncomfortable, that it’s not that word.
Okay, so here’s Melita.
Melita:
I was very sorry to hear that I’d used a word that some people may have found questionable or even possibly offensive. It was absolutely not my intention to use any word that people could be offended by. And I’m terribly sorry if using a word that’s acceptable in the UK has other connotations in the US that I was unaware of.
Heather:
Obviously, we would never want to offend anybody. Everybody’s welcome in Tudor England.
Moving on then to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. What can you tell me about her?
Melita:
Well, it’s actually quite hard to tell you anything about her. What I’ve really discovered is how little is known about Mary Sidney herself. I was aware of Mary Sidney as she has been described as the most important non-royal woman in literary terms of the Tudor and Renaissance period, because so much work was dedicated to her. She’s mentioned in connection obviously largely with her brother’s, Philip Sidney, but also for some of her own work.
But actually finding anything out about her is quite difficult. There aren’t an awful lot of records giving information about her as an individual. She’s always an adjunct to somebody else. But what I have found out about is, she came from a family that on both sides was very close to Elizabeth I.
Her father, Sir Henry Sidney, had been a companion of Edward VI and Edward had actually died in Henry’s arms and her mother Mary Dudley, was the sister of Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s what should we say? Her friend, her companion, probably not her lover, but the man she was undoubtedly deeply attached to. So the marriage of Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley was a marriage between two families that Elizabeth was close to.
Mary herself, she was born in 1561, in the old palace of Tickenhill near Bewdley, and Worcestershire. Her father Henry, at that time, was Lord President of the Council for Wales and the Marches. The family spent most of their time in that area. So they lived at Tickenhill and they also spent time in Dublin during Mary’s youth as Henry was posted there as Lord Deputy of Ireland as well.
Mary’s youth was, she traveled a fair bit in the Marches of Wales and in Ireland, as well as living at the family home of Penshurst in Kent. There are four or five siblings in the family. No, actually, sorry, there were seven siblings initially, but only three lived to full adulthood. Mary herself and her two brothers, Philip and Robert. Phil was about six years older than Mary, seven years older than Mary. She wouldn’t have seen much of him during their youth because he went to school at Shrewsbury. Then he went off to university at Oxford.
Her closest companion was probably her sister Ambrosia, who died in 1575, when she was about 15. This was the spurt of Queen Elizabeth offering Mary a place at court as a gesture to …as parents in their grief to comfort them. Elizabeth offered to have Mary at court, possibly to avoid infection.
So in 1575, at the age of 14, Mary Sidney went to the court of the Queen. She was probably at Kenilworth in the great pageant of 1575, where her uncle Robert made one last ditch attempt to persuade Elizabeth to marry him. Within a couple of years of joining the court, Mary was betrothed to Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
He was considerably older than her. He was about 38 when she was 15, so rather a large age gap. In his youth, he had been briefly married to Lady Catherine Grey, but the marriage was annulled after the failure of the coup attempting to put Jane Grey on the throne. So Henry Herbert had married the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter but had no children. He was keen to find a second wife who could give him a son. But also he wanted to be further associated with the Earl of Leicester and the Dudley family.
I got absolutely no information at all about what their personal relationship was like. On the positive side, Pembroke himself was a learned man. He was interested in books and drama. So we can see that they had some tastes in common. Whether she already had those tastes or whether she developed them in conjunction with her husband, because obviously at 15, she was quite in an impressionable age, isn’t clear. Later, there are indications that Pembroke was a man of particularly violent and difficult temper. But you know whether he ever treated Mary harshly with, there’s absolutely no information at all.
They had four children, two boys, two girls. The first little girl died the day after her third birthday, which obviously was very distressing for her parents. The second daughter lived into her early 20’s but disappeared from the record when she’s about 23. Nobody seems to know quite what happened to her. But the other two sons, William and Phillip reached full adulthood and played an important part at the Stuart court.
So there’s Mary living as Countess of Pembroke in one of the most beautiful houses in England, Wilton House. It’s been significantly changed since Mary’s day, but it’s a place well worth visiting. Very, very, very beautiful. They had a house in London, they were extremely well off. Their descendants are still in possession of Wilton House which has never had to go to the National Trust or anything like that. So they had a good deal of money.
In 1580, Mary’s brother Philip having begun a very successful career at court, fell into disgrace with the Queen. He had been part of the negotiating team for Elizabeth’s possible marriage to the Duke of Anjou but Philip was very much against the marriage and he wrote a letter to the Queen which was publicized with his objections to the marriage.
Whether Elizabeth ever intended to marry the Duke of Anjou isn’t certain. She probably didn’t but she certainly didn’t want Sir Philip Sidney who was a fairly junior member of the court publicly criticizing her policy. So he was banished from court and he went to Wilton to stay with his sister and it’s probably at this time that he introduced her.
She was about 19, he was 26, to his literary friends so Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey of Fulke Greville, a whole range of renaissance poets and writers. Also in the household was a chap called Thomas Moffet, possibly the origin of the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet about his daughter, but possibly not. So that said, there was quite a circle of young poets and playwrights in Wilton House and it was there that Philip started his poem The Countess of Pembroke Arcadia which he dedicated to Mary.
Time passed and we don’t hear anything much more of what Mary was up to until 1587 which was a terrible year for her. Her father died. Her mother died. She herself was very ill with something that sounds like Quinsy, an abscess in the throat which even today they can only cure by lancing it and that’s what happened to Mary. So you can imagine a doctor with a sharp knife in your throat. That’s what Mary had to deal with.
But she was very ill and the doctor wrote to Philip who was by then in Flushing, he was Governor-General of the Port of Flushing as they called it an English. Vlissingen I think it is in Flemish. As part of the English support for the Dutch attempt to cast off the shackles of Spain. So Philip got this letter saying that his sister was terribly ill which he was very concerned about but shortly after the Battle of Zutphen, Philip was severely wounded in the thigh and he was not as lucky as his sister. He got gangrene and died again pretty horribly I think.
So that was that. It was a tough year for Mary. He was already despite his being only in his mid 20’s … for the top as we might say now. He was highly thought of for both his literary work and also for his political skills. He was very close to the more Puritan end of Elizabeth’s advisors, the Earl of Leicester. Sir Francis Walsingham was his father-in-law and he was a strong supporter of the protestant rebellion in the Netherlands.
Mary couldn’t go to his funeral. Women didn’t go to funerals of men in those days. She was very concerned to make sure that his literary legacy was properly cared for and she began by annotating, improving, putting together a what you might call an authorized edition of his Arcadia. An early edition had been published in 1590 not long after his death.
Then in 1593, Mary organized a second publication of what became known as the New Arcadia because it contains a good deal more material than the first one and it was at this time that she began publishing her own works starting off with translations. She did a couple of translations from the French from Philippe de Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death.
Also perhaps more interestingly a translation of a French play called Marc-Antoine by a chap called Robert Garnier as she translated into English as Antonius. This is the first play translated or written by a woman to be published in English and what was interesting about it was the start of a fashion for making current political points through the medium of Roman or Greek history.
So the original play by Garnier was really all about the French religious wars which he was a Huguenot. So again Mary would have been aligned with the Huguenots, so it was quite an interesting selection of a play to translate.
Her first translation work is also considered very erudite, was one of Petrarch’s triumphs. Petrarch had written a cycle called The Triumphs. The Triumph of Love, The Triumph of Chastity, The Triumph of Death, and so forth. Mary translated The Triumph of Death. Mary was then working on her most famous work, the versification, or the verse translation of the Psalms. This was a work that had been started by her brother Philip.
It’s not clear whether it was always a joint work and that he began it, and she worked with him on it, or whether he started it, and she was just a sounding board. But then when he died, and he done up to Psalm number 43, she completed it.
Now what’s interesting about her translations and versification, is the style of them. Rather than just being straightforward translations from Latin or Greek or Hebrew or whichever language she chose as her model into English, they were what’s been described as aesthetic translations, because they are concentrating on the poetry and the lyrical symbolism of the Psalms themselves. They’ve been described as sacred parody.
The idea being that, that they are love poems, rather than just religious works with the idea being that the reader or the psalmist could love God as much as a romantic with all the fervor of romantic love. The basis of her translation was the Geneva Bible translation, which was the preferred text for the Puritan end of the Protestant church in England, rather than the Bishops’ Bible, which was the official Anglican translation.
She also drew heavily on Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms as part of her work. She looked at using different rhyme schemes. Somebody who’s done a great deal of analysis, a woman called Margaret Hannay into Mary Sidney’s work has identified 126 or 128, different verse forms in the Psalms that she translated. So they were a religious work, but they were also a great literary showcase of Mary’s talents as a poet. They were not published in her lifetime. They were dedicated to the Wueen, but that’s the work for which she is best known.
During all this period at work, other works continued to be dedicated to her. But we don’t hear a great deal more about her in her life. Her husband died at the end of January 1601. That was another difficult time for Mary because her son was still underage, which meant that the Pembroke estates went into wardship, which was always an expensive business.
William her oldest son was also disgraced because he had an affair with one of Elizabeth’s maids of honor. The girl Mary Fitton was pregnant and William absolutely point blank refused to marry her. Elizabeth was incensed. She kept it and she tried to give a very high moral tone at court as a “virgin queen”. It wasn’t appropriate for her attendants to have affairs and become pregnant outside marriage.
Pembroke as he now was, William, because he refused to marry, he was sent off to the Tower to think about it. But he still point-bank refused to marry her. It wasn’t actually a crime so he couldn’t be kept in the Tower indefinitely. But he was then sent away from court to Wilton. So Mary obviously was upset and angry that her son had disgraced himself with the Queen. Then the death of Elizabeth in 1603.
Both William and Mary’s other son Philip, were high in the favor of the new King James, who also appears to have liked Mary. He and his wife Queen Anne visited Wilton on at least two occasions and spent some time there. The daughter of Mary’s cousin, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, was Queen Anne’s most senior lady-in-waiting. So Mary was again close to court circles even in the early years of King James.
As time passed, she retired a little from court, like she no longer lived at Wilton. She had her dower properties. She lived at Cardiff Castle, was one of them, which is a very interesting place to visit. In 1612, she went abroad for her health and she spent some three years in Belgium. It’s a place called Spa. There she became friendly with Dr. Matthew Lister who later rose.
He became a physician to the king and lived well into his 90’s actually, very, very long life. There was a rumor that they were secretly married but there’s no evidence of that. But I think one could infer they were slightly more than friends.
She came back to England in 1615. The king granted her a rather nice estate in Bedford near Ampthill where she built the delightful Houghton house, which was probably the model for John Bunyan’s House Beautiful and The Pilgrim’s Progress because he came from the area of Bedfordshire and she, as far as we can tell, because there’s no more information, she divided her time between Houghton and the London property in where she died in 1621. In Aldersgate Street, she died of smallpox.
She had a very grand funeral in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Then she was carried by a torchlit procession to Salisbury Cathedral where she was buried. That was the end of Mary Sidney.
Heather:
So when did her writing start to become popular? Was she always respected in her own right? Or did it kind of go through phases?
Melita:
She was always respected, yes. From the decade or the sort of 15 years in which she was doing the translations and the Psalms, she was highly respected. Then there were the usual arguments about how much she’s done, how much her brother had done, and so forth. But yeah, she’s always been held up as a great example of female literary talent.
She had a lot of influence on her niece, Lady Mary Roth, who was a writer of the next generation. And another one, Elizabeth Carrie. So she was another writer of the next generation, Emilia Lanier included Mary in her long poem that she did about prominent, women starting from the queen and working downwards.
Yeah, so she’s always been very highly regarded. I mean, I myself certainly find her letter style, there are very few letters … but sort of half a dozen mostly on business. But there are two or three that are what you might call letters of compliment to the Queen, which are so convoluted, and in the style of the time, very similar to the style in which Elizabeth herself wrote, full of double meanings and repetition of the same word to have it have a different meaning. It’s actually is really quite hard to make head or tail off. But they were very much admired at the time and given as they were used as examples in books of how to write beautiful letters.
Heather:
Can you tell me a little bit about, I know, it’s kind of something that happens a lot with, there was an artist, it was a Nicholas Hilliard, who had a sister and they say that possibly some of his miniatures were actually painted by her. I know there are stories like these.
When you’ve got a woman and a man who are either husband and wife or a brother and sister who are close, you get these controversies around authorship. What was there with her with that?
Melita:
Really, it was about how much she changed or altered the Arcadia. So that it would appear from both Philips’s work and Mary’s work that they were the kind of people who constantly tinker with it. They’re in so far as people can tell from putting together bits of the manuscript here and there, there are lots and lots of revisions of everything that they did.
So Philip, it appears, wrote a poem called Arcadia. He then made quite a few revisions to that and added some different endings or a more complex ending. The first publication of it, which we’ll call the Old Arcadia seems to have been based on his original manuscript. Then the publication of 1593 that Mary took charge off, became known as a New Arcadia which had this new ending and some other changes. The question is, did she make up that ending or does it actually come from the notes and the manuscripts that she had of his?
Current thinking seems to be that it was his work and that she used his annotations to make the changes with the Psalms. He is always attributed at for the first 43 and she did the subsequent ones. But how much they discussed his 43 before he died and whether she input into those or whether they just talked about them is unclear. John Donne, the other great poet of the era, he wrote an ode praising them both as the translators of the sonnets as Moses and Miriam, biblical allusions there. So yeah so she was always well thought of in her time.
Heather:
There’s something I read about her family as well, was that they supported one of the early theater troops?
Melita:
Yes, well I mean, at that time, actors could only act if they were sort of officially belonged to somebody suitable. So there were the Lord Chamberlain’s men and there were Lord Pembroke’s players and there were a few others. Anyway, so Lord Pembroke’s players who may in the early days have included Shakespeare, the jury’s still out on that one, then they will …the lord chamberlain’s players who did include Shakespeare and they were certainly patronized by Mary and played at Wilton and it’s likely or certainly possible.
But the first rendition of As You Like It was performed at Wilton by Shakespeare and his company. It was to Mary’s sons William and Philip that First Folio, of Shakespeare’s work was dedicated. So yes, there was a good deal of support of drama we could infer from that.
Heather:
Why did you choose her as the person of the month and what is it about her that is worth knowing about and studying?
Melita:
We chose her because well partly to have a different perspective from just politics. Although of course, looking at what we do know of her work on her you can’t get away from the politics in that particularly, the Psalms. Religion was a political act in those days. The relationship between Mary’s sort of political affiliations, the Dudleys’ and the Sidneys’ as being more radically Protestant and very much more inclined to intervention in the Netherlands than some of the other members of the Elizabethan court.
Certainly much more than Elizabeth herself ever wanted to get involved. She really didn’t want to get involved at all. But she was forced into it eventually by circumstance and also by constant pressure from those who are in favor of it. So it’s interesting to try to find out more about it, about somebody else, the different perspective.
But the tricky bit of course, is because she was a woman and she helped, didn’t hold any high office and she wasn’t a Queen. Information about her is not much comprehensive. I think it’s an interesting period generally when I suppose the generation Mary was in was probably the last of the generations that were highly educated for a long time. So female education came to the … in the late 15th century and then really gathered pace in the 1520’s and 30’s.
The two queen regnant Mary and Elizabeth were both very highly educated and there was a great passion for it in the middle of the 16th century which lasted probably until early in the 17th century. After which female education even amongst the elite seemed to slip back somewhat. I mean there were outstanding examples but it wasn’t as widespread as it was in Mary’s generation.
Heather:
Sure yeah, I think about that whole time period even starting with Katherine of Aragon‘s mother and Katherine of Aragon and Mary’s education was such an important–
Melita:
Yes, but by the time you get to the mid 17th century, James II’s daughters who became queens themselves, Queen Mary II and Queen Anne, they could barely write. I mean that’s a bit of an exaggeration but you know it wasn’t considered at all necessary for them to be educated.
Heather:
Okay, so where can we find out more about her?
Melita:
With great difficulty I have to say. I have been trawling and trawling all over the place to find out information. I mean there is as always her stuff in the calendars of state papers from the reigns of Elizabeth and James, biographies by Philip, it mentioned her. But it’s mostly by reading learned articles in literary and academic journals about literature that the odd facts come to light.
The most comprehensive one dates back to the early 20th century. It’s by Francis Young, I think it is. So if you can get your hands on a copy of that, obviously. We’ve done a piece on Tudor Times website and there is a bibliography, which will give some ideas as to where you can look.
Heather:
Perfect. Anything else that I should be asking?
Melita:
Don’t think so. It’s funny, I have very little sense of her personality, because there’s just not enough to know really. I’m glad she had a lover in old age, who apparently she didn’t leave a will. Her …just went to her sons but they rather kindly gave Matthew Lister a pension. One of the descriptions of her funeral, somebody comments that he was well worn in the counter service. Yeah, so that’s just one little snippet of her character.
Heather:
Thank you again to Melita Thomas for taking the time to tell us about Mary Sidney. For more information on her go to Tudortimes.co.uk or you can also see the resources available on the Englandcast site at Englandcast.com. Remember, if you like this show, the biggest way you can help it which is totally free is to leave a review on iTunes and to tell a friend about it seriously, you tell your friends to listen right?
In the next episode in two weeks actually, I was gonna do food. I’m skipping I know you guys hate it when I do this. I’m really sorry. I try not to do it more than once or twice a year. I want to talk more about food. But because the solar eclipse is happening in the US, I really have been wanting to do an episode on astronomy and on science in Tudor England anyway. I think that now is kind of the timely time to do it.
So I’m working on an episode on astronomy and on science in general in Tudor England, it was such a time of Copernicus and moving from Earth-centered universe to the sun-centered universe or galaxy solar system. I’m working on an episode on that. So stay tuned for that and then we’ll go back to food and dining and manners and things like that. Stay tuned for that.
Also remember the very special Patreon deal for those of you who support me during my Patreon membership drive. Thanks so much for listening, you guys and I will talk with you again in about two weeks. Bye, bye!
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
