Sidney, Sir Philip 1554-86
English poet and patron

Born in Penshurst, Kent, he was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney (Lord Deputy of Ireland). He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, and from 1572 to 1575 he travelled in France, Germany, Austria and Italy, where he spent a year studying history and ethics, and was painted by Veronese. Returning to England, he was knighted in 1582 and appointed Governor of Flushing in 1585. He spent his last year in the Netherlands, where he successfully plotted an attack on the town of Axel; he later led an assault on a Spanish convoy transporting arms to Zutphen, was shot in the thigh and died from the infection. His work, none of which was published in his lifetime, includes Arcadia (1590), Astrophel and Stella (1591) and A Defence of Poetry (1595). He bestowed patronage on a number of poets, as dedications in various works testify, the most notable being that in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar in 1579.

Bibliography: M Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney (1931)