Querre-Muhau: Sir Philip Sidney and the New World.

We [Philippes de Mornay and Charlotte Arbaleste, Seigneur et Dame du grand Plessis Marly] request Master Jacques de St. Germain our son-in-law, and our daughter [Lady] of Fontenay his wife, to take with them Ibora our adult Indian, to continue his instruction in the true Christian religion, and to have him baptised when he is ready for it; nevertheless they may pass him on to Monsieur de la Ravardiere if the latter asks for him for the Indies voyage, and promises to have him instructed and baptised as indicated above; and we request the same of Master Jacques des Nouhes, also our son-in-law, husband of our daughter [Lady] of La Tabariere, as regards Atoupa, brother of the said Ibora, and furthermore, since he is younger, to have him learn whatever letters his mind may absorb; this because these our sons-in-law live in regions not far from the sea, where they [Ibora and Atoupa] may be useful.(1)

- Saumur (France), 6 February 1606

Where, in 1606, did du plessis get two Indian brothers? When scholars try to answer an unfamiliar question, they make landfall in a new world. As I was led to the Tupinamba of Brazil, I remembered also Du Plessis's friend Philip Sidney, godfather of "our daughter of Fontenay," who (it was often said) had had a certain gold-driven, Spaniard-baiting interest in the Transatlantic new world. New worlds invite the search for passages, and inspire a bold but tentative cartography. What follows is an attempt to collect the available but scattered evidence, and thus to map Sidney's experience, his motive, and the landscape of his growing concern. This concern thus reveals itself, I submit, as lifelong, inescapable, and neither foolish nor knavish, but integrated into a remarkable understanding of the international political situation.

I. ATOUPA

Sidney's connections with the New World are not limited to his adult life: there was never a time for him when it was not a presence and an idea. The first book on the New World in England was published a year before his birth and dedicated to his grandfather. The second was printed a year after his birth and dedicated to his godfather. The fifth, appearing when he was thirteen, was dedicated to his father by the bookseller who had himself translated and published the third and fourth.(2)

While Philip attended Shrewsbury school, Sir Henry was occupied viceregally with Ireland. Ireland, the perennial Other, was not a new world: it was a colonized quagmire on the fringe of the old settled for centuries, unsettled perennially by rug-headed kerns and ambitious Earls, rebellious by vocation and temper. Sir Henry's most feared commander there, on excellent terms with the Sidney family, was the choleric Humphrey Gilbert, who was at this time starting to meditate more distant "plantations" in the New World.

In February 1568, Philip, thirteen years old, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. In August Sir Henry came up to receive his M.A.; Philip left with him to go to Wales (of which Sir Henry was also Lord President), and spent a month with his parents.(3) It is an assumption, but in my view a justifiable one, to suppose that he there read his father's new copy of the first book ever dedicated to Sir Henry. There is no date more precise than "1568" for either licensing or printing. The dedicatee's copy would have been delivered promptly; and the arrival of this 142-leaf octavo, "the which after your great and waighty affaires, it may please you to use" (as Hacker had written to the elder Sidney), can reasonably be considered to have constituted a minor interlude of pleasure in the life of a much-troubled family, and to have interested a spirited and bookish thirteen-year-old.

The new found worlde, or Antarctike, wherin is contained wonderful strange things, as well of humaine creatures, as Beastes, Fishes, Foules, and Serpents, Trees, Plants, Mines of Golde and Silver; garnished with many learned authorities, travailed and written in the French tong, by that excellent learned man, master Andrewe Thevet. And now newly translated into Englishe, wherein is reformed the errours of the auncient Cosmographers.

Here Philip might find not only Gibraltar, the Canaries, Africa and Ethiopia, but especially - after a bold but magnificently awkward bridge-passage mixing Madagascar, Indian asses, "Neigers," the strange bird Pa, unicorns, and whales - a new key of authenticity and confidence:

After that by devine providence, with so many travailes common and ordinarie to so long a Navigation, we were come to the maine land, not so soone as our hearts desired, which was the tenth day of November, and in stead of taking our rest, it behooved us to discover & seeke out proper places, to make or reare newe siedges [installations], being no lesse astonied or amazed, than the Troyans were at their arrival into Italie. (chapt. 24; [31.sup.v])

This introduced a long eyewitness account of the first French colony at Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro), Brazil, and of its Tupinamba natives. Andre Thevet, France's Cosmographer Royal and former friar, had in fact been there, though for no more than ten weeks (November 1555 to January 1556), most of which he had spent sick in bed; and he wrote with attractive verve of such things as "the maner and custome of living of these Americans, aswell men as women"; "against the opinion of those that thynck the wilde men to be heary [hairy]"; "how these barbarous and wild men put their enimies to death that they have taken in the warres, and howe they eate them"; and "of a byrd named Toucan."(4)

Such tales - and Thevet, whatever his faults (and they were many and increasingly obvious), was a born raconteur - are poesy. Thevet the poet came to young readers such as Philip with a tale and kept them for a moment from play.(5) The newfound worlde is "food for the tenderest stomachs" and its author indeed the "right popular philosopher" (ibid.). Like all good poets, he leads the young into more serious matters. By chapter 65, they are taught "Howe the landes of the King of Spain, and of Portingall are separated," and (chapter 66) "the devision of the West Indies in three partes": from the Strait of Magellan to the "river of Amazones"; from that river up to Florida; and from Florida to "Canada" and "Newfoundland", where there are once again whales and where the natives dress in the skins of "sea Wolves."

The consequences of the Treaty of Tordesillas were not, by 1568, an especially comforting thought for English Protestants, and were to be even less so after the Papal bull Regnans in Excelsis of 1570. But there was comfort in the thought that England was beginning to rouse herself. Hacket, in his dedication to Sir Henry, wrote these stirring words:

How muche are they to be praised, that for their Countrey sake refuse no imminent perill, leaving the Pleasaunt bedde of Delicacie, and the seate or cradle of Sensualitie, their landes and goodes, their Wives and children, which in dede, are dearest unto them, to abandon themselves and their swetest lives to the favour of the boystrous seas, to the hap of the unconstant windes, to the chayre of fortune, and finally to a thousande imminent evills, onely to encrease the fame and good renowme of their countrey . . . . But alas, the greater number of men are given to idelnesse or sensualitie . . . . Among the number of a great many, and in the middest of aboundance and pleasure, we meditate nothing else but only securitie, almost abhorring to heare the name of travell or payne."(6)

Thevet's was the most important book on the New World in England until Hakluyt's: eight years after this first appearance in English, it was still carried in two editions - this and the French original - in the meager ship's library of Martin Frobisher's Gabriel for the American voyages.(7) For Philip, we can see it as the "food for the tenderest stomachs" that which, first among written texts, was present to whet his interest and stimulate his further appetite.

It was supported by numerous other voices surrounding his youth. The newe India, from Munster's Cosmography, we remember, had been dedicated to his Dudley grandfather the Duke of Northumberland, who had been the chief sponsor of the earliest English voyages.(8) Since then, the Dudleys had maintained an interest, especially Philip's uncle Ambrose, the Earl of Warwick, and his wife Anne, the Earl of Bedford's daughter: they invested in the Frobisher voyages together with the Sidneys. Moreover, Edward Dyer, the man who gradually became one of Sidney's two best friends, to whom he bequeathed his library, was an old friend of the Sidney family,(9) and his brother Andrew was a mariner who was later appointed Pilot on Frobisher's 1577 flagship the Aid.(10)

In August 1570 there arrived at Christ Church an older undergraduate of eighteen or so: Richard Hakluyt. Sidney at fifteen was to go down the following spring, so that the two young men's Oxford contact cannot have exceeded two terms. But Hakluyt was already passionate about geography. He had contracted his enthusiasm while a schoolboy at Westminster, in the same year as Hacket dedicated Thevet's book to Sir Henry, during a visit to his eponymous older cousin the lawyer, then a "gentleman of the Middle Temple." The lesson he had there received, he recalled later, "took in me so deep an impression, that I constantly resolved, if ever I were preferred to the University, where better time, and more convenient place might be administered for these studies, I would by God's assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature, the doors whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me."(11) And so, indeed, it happened:

At Christchurch in Oxford, my exercises of duty [perhaps a pun: the main undergraduate text was Cicero's Offices] first performed, I fell to my intended course and by degrees read over whatsoever printed or written discoveries and voyages I found extant, either in the Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugal, French, or English languages, and in my public lectures [Hakluyt stayed at Oxford for twelve years altogether] was the first that produced and showed both the old imperfectly composed, and the new lately reformed maps, globes, spheres, and other instruments of this Art. (Op.cit., 59)

Sidney, of course, knew him during his first two terms, which were very much taken up with the performance of his exercises of duty; but given Sidney's own background and his known dislike for Oxford Ciceronianism, Hakluyt's already-knowledgeable enthusiasm for this topical discipline cannot have left him indifferent. Hakluyt later addressed him as one who "hath been alwaies so readie to pleasure me and all my name."(12)

By November of this year, his seventeenth birthday, then, Sidney had had every opportunity to learn the grammar and accidence of exploration. The New World was a part of the landscape of his spirit. The evidence suggests that there was, by this time, planted in his mind the enduring structure of an other world, a parallel, an alternative, which would gradually change its shape, its structure and its importance, but which would not die until replaced at last by a deeper and more urgent fulfilment.

Of course, we should not exaggerate. Not only was the New World not, at this time, an overriding preoccupation for Sidney, as it was for Hakluyt: Sidney was well aware that his own destiny lay elsewhere. He was not only Sir Henry Sidney's son but the nephew and heir of the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The latter, as Philip wrote to him, "made me a courtier," and the young man knew he was called to serve his country at a higher level than his geographer-friend. He also knew that such service was not easy, and could be miserable, unrewarded, destructive, and ruinous: his parents' experiences in Ireland and the Queen's callous disregard of their service had not been hidden from him. But it is in part because of this that one of the shapes the New World would have for Sidney nearly to the end was that of a place of greater safety, an experience and a service of greater singleness, purity, and efficacy, far from the capricious reach of a Machiavellian prince.

II. MARA-PE PEROUAGERRE-RERE? (IN TUPI: "WHAT ARE YOUR ENEMIES' NAMES?"): THE TURNING-POINT(13)

The year 1572 changed Philip Sidney's life for good. In May he crossed the Channel with the English envoys for the Treaty of Blois's ratification, with a project for further travel, and so headed straight into the reality of international politics. From then on, his relation to the New World began a process of change and development. In Paris, during this memorable summer, all the threads of his involvement with it - past and future - were gathered together. It is a crucial time, and it merits close attention. If we pause to reflect on this very young (he was seventeen), intellectual but fashionable courtier's successive encounters and experiences there, we can see these as being of three kinds.

First there was the Court and its festivities. During the month of June these were connected with the ratification-ceremonies; when the English envoys had left and Philip stayed behind, the Court moved into the preparation for the politically crucial wedding planned for late August. The official allegresse barely concealed underlying anxieties. Charles IX, twenty-two years old and already ill, was close to the Huguenot Admiral de Coligny; Catherine de' Medici, frustrated and irritable, was trying with the marriage plan to bring peace to the realm; while Henri de Guise, darling of the Catholic extremists, energetically preyed on the fears of the stupid. As the preparations gradually revealed to a wider audience Catherine's attempt to heal religious strife, and Paris got ready to marry her tres catholique daughter Marguerite to the Protestant heretic King of Navarre, the tension between the two ideological camps grew, and descended to the streets; some kind of catastrophe became inevitable.

Philip, during this time, was a Royal guest and lodged at the Louvre. Charles appreciated his connections but also liked him personally, and created him a French Baron; oddly enough, it may well have been in the King's company that he began the second of his encounters: that with the Huguenots. Charles saw his beloved "father" Coligny frequently, and was known to lean toward the Protestant position.

Sidney's chief Huguenot meeting was of course with Hubert Languet.(14) His adoption by the older bachelor as a spiritual son marks, one might say, the philosophical turning-point of Sidney's life. All his relations with Continental Protestantism for the next eight years, until Languet's death in 1581, would be anchored by this friendship; and after that date, by two men inextricably linked with Languet: William the Silent and Du Plessis.

Languet had himself been a great traveler in his earlier years. He had visited Spain and North Africa, had studied at Padua, and had traveled in England, Sweden, Eastern Europe, and the Netherlands. Much of this had been done on behalf of his spiritual father, Philipp Melanchthon, who had done so much to win over the educated and civilized to the Reformation. Languet, based mostly in Vienna where he was the Elector of Saxony's diplomatic representative, taught Sidney the Melanchthonian strain of Protestant humanism. Most of the French Huguenots, on the other hand, fighting for their lives and faith, were cast in a harder, Calvinist mold. What is crucial to the present argument is that in France it was precisely these men who for most of the sixteenth century were the principal actors in regard to the New World.

Coligny had inspired the mixed faith Guanabara colony named after him, which Thevet had visited. The second attempted colony, from 1560 to 1562, had been an entirely Protestant one in "Terra Florida" (north-east Florida and southern South Carolina). Roberval, the first man to try to colonize Canada, was also a Huguenot.

Languet was not himself particularly involved in the Westward movement: he was a man of European politics, who strongly felt that the Reformation's future was in Europe, and that its energies should be chiefly directed there. His influence on Sidney in this respect, accordingly, was twofold: he introduced him to many Huguenots who were involved with the New World, yet his influence also ensured that for Sidney the ultimate priority would always be the Protestant cause in Europe.

The man through whom Sidney met Languet was the presiding genius of Philip's third group of encounters in this Paris summer: the English. Francis Walsingham had been for two years the resident ambassador, with a house on the Quai des Bernardins in the Faubourg St. Germain. He believed, not separately, in the Protestant faith and in statecraft. Visitors at his house did not always advertise their business: Walsingham was also at this time creating England's first professional espionage service, which he ran with discreet dedication until his death.(15)

The St. Bartholomew's Massacre that followed the Royal wedding is not here my concern, except for two factors: its effect of intensifying Sidney's experience, and the further English encounters it provoked, which moreover it associated in his mind with the suffering of the Huguenots. When the massacre began he was, as a Royal guest, certainly in or very near the Louvre. During that bloody Sunday, 24 August, he was taken with one or two other prominent Englishmen to Walsingham's by one of Catherine's trusted "Italians": Louis de Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers. They did make a detour through the Rue de Bethisy to be shown the elderly Coligny's stabbed, defenestrated, and desecrated corpse before crossing the Seine by the Pont aux Meuniers and the Pont St. Michel, and so had ample time to see the slaughter in the streets.

This experience, I submit, determines where Sidney's life was going at the time of his death, though it took time to work out its full consequences. We should not forget that he was seventeen years old. Spectacles such as this did not occur in England, though Irish stories must have prepared him. But the sheer furia, the raging political madness, against his co-religionists and his new friends; the frightful perfidy against those whose safety had been guaranteed; and the obvious hand of authority, including the very hand that had, not a fortnight before, made him a Gentleman Ordinary of the Bedchamber and Baron de Sidenay; gradually deepened and hardened politico-religious convictions which, while never fanatic toward individuals, made him ever more implacable about nations.

He was delivered to the Quai des Bernardins. Here, for between one and two weeks, a group of Englishmen (and a few Protestant foreigners) took shelter. Security was officially guaranteed (by Nevers, acting for Charles and Catherine) but not entirely trusted: Walsingham himself did not go out until his official protest-mission to the Louvre on Monday, 1 September. Timothy Bright, the medical man, long afterward remembered the suburban sanctuary with gratitude:

Among all your honourable favours, that especial protection from the bloody massacre of Paris, now sixteen years past, yet (as ever it will be) fresh with me in memory, hath always since bound me with all bonds of duty and service unto your Honour. The benefit as it was common to many (for your Honour's house at that time was a very sanctuary, not only for all of our nation, but even to many strangers then in peril and virtuously disposed), so it was therefore the more memorable and far more honourable, and bindeth me with straighter obligation of duty and thankfulness, who thereby had cause to rejoice, not only for mine own safety, but for so many of my countrymen, partly of acquaintance and partly of the noble houses of this realm, who had all tasted of the rage of that furious tragedy, had not your Honour shrouded them, and now are witnesses with me of that right noble act and companions of like obligation."(16)

During this very frightening fortnight, there is evidence that Sidney had three other important encounters that, in the context of such a forced proximity and its necessarily long hours spent in talk, could not fail to affect him.

Whether the son of "Lady Lane," frantically recalled by his mother,(17) was related to Ralph Lane, later governor of the Roanoke colony and friend of Sidney's, is not known; but one Englishman who narrowly escaped the Massacre and cannot easily have done so elsewhere than at Walsingham's, was Richard Eden.

Eden was just over fifty years old at the time. He had been private secretary to Cecil, worked in the English Treasury of the Prince of Spain, and had for ten years now been in the service of Jean de Ferrieres, vidame of Chartres, a very prominent Huguenot whom he had served in London, Paris, and Germany, and a good friend of Walsingham's. Eden was also the most important early English geographer. He was the author of the Munster translation that had been dedicated to Sidney's grandfather; two years later he had published his expanded version of Peter Martyr's Decades, dedicated to Sidney's godfather, Philip of Spain, and Mary Tudor; and in 1561 he had followed this with an influential Englishing of Martin Cortes' Arte de Navigar.(18)

Another man of interest to Sidneians who was passing through and later claimed, in a Latin poem, to have been caught up in the "Gallicanos neces" was Richard Willes (or Wills). This former Catholic from Dorset - who had been to Winchester, studied at New College, Oxford, and at Louvain, proceeded M.A. at Mainz, taught Greek at Trier, been incorporated at Perugia, become a Jesuit, undertaken a pilgrimage to Rome in 1570, converted to the Reformation, obtained release from his vows in the spring of 1572, and was now on his way back to England - was still only in his mid-twenties.(19)

Willes had a double interest for Sidney. He too was a geographer who was to carry on Eden's work after the latter's death in 1576, publishing in 1577 the important History of Travayle (printed by Richard Jugge, dedicated to Willes's patroness Bridget, Countess of Bedford), and adding three articles from his hand - on China, Japan, and the North-West Passage - to Hakluyt's Voyages.(20) But he was also a neo-Latin poet who, the following year, in his Poematum liber (Tottel, 1573; STC 25671, dedicated to Burghley) not only became the first Englishman to write shaped poems (an egg, a Pan pipe, a sword, wings, an altar), but he also included a Disputatio de re poetica which was a Defence of Poesy in the form of a forensic oration.(21) Needless to say, this lends him a considerable interest as a precursor of Sidney's Defence, usually thought to have been written around 1580.(22)

What makes the likelihood of contact between Sidney, Willes, and Eden in the Faubourg St. Germain in August-September 1572 particularly intriguing is that, while one of the geographers may have given him the idea for the Defence's form, the other almost certainly provided part of the book's content. In Eden's Decades, f. 125, there is the following passage about the Amerindians of Hispaniola:

They give them selves chieflye to two thynges: As generally to lerne thoriginall and successe of thynges: And particularlye to reherse the noble factes [deeds] of their graundefathers great graundefathers and auncestours aswell in peace as in warre. These two thynges they have of owlde tyme composed in certeyne meters and ballettes [ballads] in their language. These hymnes or ballettes, they call Areitos. And as owre mynstrelles are accustomed to synge to the harpe or lute, so doo they in lyke maner synge these songes and daunce to the same, playinge on tymbrelles made of shels of certeyn fysshes.

As early as 1924, Robert Cawley - unaware that its translator and Sidney had been together in Paris - identified this passage as the source for the mention of areytos in Sidney's Defence.(23)

It is clear that for Sidney's relation and attitude to the New World, this summer in Paris was a turning point. Plunged into the maelstrom of the French wars of religion, with the constant background reality of Spain, the seventeen-year-old Sidney met and observed the principals and other movers and shakers of the time. He had dined with the King and Queen Mother of France, met the King of Navarre and the Duke of Guise, and talked with the Admiral Coligny. With Walsingham as his mentor, he had learned to interpret the behavior of political friends and enemies, and the rising tension in the Louvre and in the streets. He had made, in Languet, the older friend many young men need. And he had witnessed the ultimate in betrayal, narrowly escaping the violence of the mob after seeing the naked corpse of the venerable Coligny - whom he had met and admired - stabbed and thrown into the gutter.

The Admiral, in retrospect, is perhaps the pivotal figure. It is in Coligny that the militant Reformation was first related to the New World. He who nearly converted the King of France, whose young son and nephew remembered Sidney and wrote to him the following year,(24) was also the instigator of the Brazilian Refuge and of the Florida project.

In talking with Coligny and witnessing his death, and in his subsequent meetings with Eden, Willes and the devious and uncompromising Walsingham, Sidney could not help but feel that his New World underwent a change. No longer was it the exotic haunt of a "Cocodril . . . of the greatnesse of a good calfe" (Thevet, f.[50.sup.v]), of a green bird with blue feathers on its head "which the wilde men doe name Marganas" (f.[75.sup.v]), and of "auncient men [who] after their sleepe in the night, doe no other thing but declare auncient stories to the young men" (f.[82.sup.v]). It began to be a new New World, one where the victims of cruel and unjust power could live according to their faith - or might do so, were it not that this innocent world of wonders was also a battlefield, where roamed an enemy more organized and more dangerous than the Paris mob: the Spanish army.

III. IBORA: MATURITY

When Sidney came home after three years on the Continent, his new sense of the world had been refined, nuanced, and deepened. In Vienna, Padua, Hungary, and the Palatinate, he had been received by the extraordinary network Languet had built up over the years, and was hailed everywhere as the embodied promise of an awakening England. There is no sign that he spent much time thinking about the New World as he explored the Old. It was, rather, a time for discovering friendship, government, political philosophy, Italian literature.

One significant encounter during these years was with Philippe de Mornay du Plessis, Languet's elder spiritual son, who had just married the personable young widow Charlotte Arbaleste and was in the process of transferring his service from the Duke of Bouillon to King Henry of Navarre. Soon he would be, as an enemy called him, "the Pope of the Huguenots." A tireless, witty, ugly, charming, overwhelmingly intelligent, and wholly upright man, he gradually became (I have argued elsewhere) Sidney's role model as well as his deeply affectionate friend. Du Plessis was foremost among those in France who were beginning to set the Reformed faith in a global, geopolitical frame.

A. Frobisher

The next act of Sidney's New World involvement, in which Du Plessis and his ideas played a major part, has an apparently very homespun prelude in the three Northern voyages of Martin Frobisher. Frobisher, who knew Sir Humphrey Gilbert (who knew Sir Henry Sidney), approached the Sidneys and the Warwicks for pledges to finance his voyages to discover a North-West passage to the Orient. With the management assistance of Michael Lok, the new Cathay Company raised something over [pounds]800, which Lok then doubled out of his own purse. Richard Willes wrote and published a publicity tract, For M. Cap. Furbyshers passage by the Northwest, dedicated to Sidney's aunt, Lady Warwick; and Frobisher's ships - or "eggshells" as McFee calls them, referring to the Gabriel (25 tons), the Michael (20 tons), and a pinnace - sailed in the spring of 1576. Philip had pledged [pounds]25, as had his mother, his aunt and uncle Warwick, and Edward Dyer.

Sidney himself spent the summer in Ireland with his father; but upon Frobisher's return, he wrote to Languet about the excitement that ran around London. His first letter is lost, but he elaborated on it the following year, when Frobisher came back from his next voyage (in which Sidney and the others had doubled their investment to [pounds]50 and Andrew Dyer was Pilot of the flagship, the Queen's Aid). This letter, as well as Languet's very thorough reply, have often been quoted but the relevant passages have rarely been printed in full. Their importance for the study of the mentalites involved is such that I may perhaps be forgiven the extra space taken in doing so. Sidney writes:

Last year I wrote to you about one Frobisher who, rivalling Magellan, has investigated the strait which, he thinks, washes the Northern part of America. The story is amazing. As he had started out too late last year, so that it was autumn when he sailed past Baccalaos [Newfoundland] and an island he judged to be as great as the "Friseland" found by Zeno of Venice(25), he landed at a certain island in order to refit both his own ship and the others. And here, by total chance, a certain youth from among his crew picked up a piece of rock which he saw glitter, and showed it to Frobisher. The latter was busy with other things, and [in any case] did not believe that there could be precious metals so far North; so he attached little importance to it. But winter was approaching, and he returned home. The youth hung on to the rock as a sign of his labours (for he'd no other intimations about it), until he should get back to London. It was only there, when one of his young friends remarked that it really did glitter very brightly, that he performed an experiment, and found that it consisted of exceedingly pure gold, mixed with no other metal. So much so that Frobisher went back there the following summer, having been ordered to examine that island and not to go farther if it lived up to expectations. This he has done, and is now returned. He has brought back the three ships that were all he had (and small ones at that), [fully] laden: it is said (for so far they have not been unloaded) that they have carried two hundred tons of ore. This ore shows sure signs that the island is so metal-rich as far to surpass the regions of Peru, at least as they are now. There are also six other islands near this one which look like having a similar yield. So now we are starting to think how these exceedingly fruitful undertakings of ours may be protected from the rapacity of other nations. The main ones to worry about would seem to be the Spaniards and the Danes: the former because they claim all Western lands for themselves by Papal right, the latter because being more Northerly they are closest to it, and Iceland offers the passage best fitted for that voyage. Also they are said to be skilled enough in navigation.

So I should like you, for our friendship's sake, to give me your opinion on this, and at the same time to give me an idea of a good way to work those mines. You promised to send me the Gutenberg Laws: please do this as soon as possible. Perhaps they can shed some light [on what we have to do]. For we know that we are scarcely more skilled in that art than we are in wine-making.

You will remember to write in such a way as to live up to your reputation, which here is enormous. For if you will permit it, I will show your letter to the Queen. This business is indeed of great importance, and it may perhaps at some point serve those who profess the true religion. I have written you three times about that great matter of ours: so you must, I imagine, be satisfied.(26)

Languet's reply needs to be given extensive treatment also and to be looked at with care; for this exchange tells us something, not only of the two men and the moods of 1577, but of different attitudes toward the New World which are of great importance for understanding the development of Sidney's subsequent position. Languet writes:

If what you write about your countryman Frobisher is true, I have no doubt that his fame will eclipse not only Magellan's but even that of Christopher Columbus himself. Who could have hoped that that farthest North would in the end furnish us so abundantly with such spurs to evil? Soon you [plur.] will comfortably despise voyages to India, having fallen upon the most harmful and destructive thing Nature has [ever] offered mankind: its desire and greed drive most men mad, to the point of abandoning reason and hurling themselves foolhardily into danger. Many years ago you converted your ploughlands into pasture: that did a bad turn to your country, which you depopulated in the process. Your Princes acted foolishly also in allowing you to do so: the state has no wealth so reliable as the multitude and abundance of its men. I am very much afraid that England, seduced by desire for gold, will throw itself entirely upon those islands recently discovered by Frobisher; and how much English blood do you think will need to be shed not to let them be taken away from you? Not a nation that lives near our ocean but will contend with you for their possession. Once some citizens of Carthage, sailing on the Atlantic sea, were driven by storms to places so pleasant and fertile that when, back home again, they described them marvellously in public, the senate spirited them away. They feared that the people would be so enchanted by these places' reported delight and fertility that they would leave their homeland and [try to] sail there. So they removed those who described them: so that, if any did want to sail there, they would have no guides.

So do you think [I mean to tell you] that the good things God offers us out of His benevolence should be neglected, and that we should blame their Maker? That is not what I mean at all: on the contrary, I hugely praise Frobisher's greatness, his industry and even his good fortune, and I think he deserves the highest honours. For doubtless the authors of that difficult and dangerous voyage he has undertaken (whether himself alone or others) were thinking of the riches the Spaniards and Portuguese have amassed for themselves by their distant voyages? And so, as he has hit the target he shot at, who would be such an unfair judge of his case as not to feel that he merits great praise?

But I am thinking of you and your rejoicing at this business, as if it was the best thing that could have happened to your country; just as last spring especially I criticized in you a certain desire to undertake such a voyage. And if back then that vain hope Frobisher had conceived of finding a passage could [so] agitate your mind, what will those mountains of gold, or rather whole islands of gold, do: float before your eyes day and night? Beware, I beg you, or (as the Poet says) that sacred hunger for gold will creep into your soul,(27) into which so far you have admitted nothing but the love of virtue and the desire to deserve well of all men.

You are wrong if you believe that men get better as they get older: that hardly ever happens. Often they simply become more careful, and learn to hide their soul's vices and depraved desires. So if you know some old man in whom you think some integrity remains, bear in mind that he was at his best as a youth. Therefore whenever some brand new emotion agitates your soul, do not give in to it at once, even if the goal it drives you to seems laudable; but before you allow it in, think carefully what it is that is agitating you. Otherwise you incautiously begin something and finding yourself having to turn back where you go wrong; or (which is much worse, and happens often) you are too ashamed to admit you have erred, and so you go right on where you were heading.

Why am I upsetting you this way? So that, if those golden islands have possessed your mind too deeply, you may exorcise them thence before they take you over completely; and so escape unharmed to serve your country and your friends in better causes. For if it is the desire to cover yourself with praise and glory that makes you restive about the leisure you will soon be enjoying, meditate on those old Chandoses and Talbots, the imitation of whom will load you with greater praise and glory than the possession of all the wealth the Spaniards have brought over from the New World. All Europe's peoples have learnt to distrust them; and by their arrogance they have so alienated everyone that even they are beginning to feel (and may soon feel even more) that perhaps they have badly calculated their own best interests.

I wish you had written what the latitude of those islands is: for from that one can work out whether the neighbouring regions are suitable for agriculture, and for supplying sustenance for men, and materials for building. Cows can be fed, and even other cattle, on plants that grow beyond the Arctic Circle, which eventually even bear fruit. Their cows give milk all summer long in far greater quantity than ours do, and with a much higher fat-content. Beyond the 70th parallel one finds virtually no trees suitable for building: they are so nipped by the cold that they cannot grow to a great height. Some say, though, that they [higher trees] do grow in valleys sheltered from the North wind.

If that hope of gold that is tempting you has not led you astray [entirely], you will need to establish some port where your ships may have anchorage: because if those lands do turn out to be suitable for cultivation, it would be far wiser to build a town than forts in which garrisons will have to be fed - which last will cost a great deal without being much use to those whose labour you will need to work the gold-seams. For them, a town would provide the things they need, which merchants, spurred by hopes of profit, would transport there. The Portuguese experienced the greatest difficulties in the Indies before they founded the Goa colony: when that got going, everything was much easier for them than before, for now they could buy with money things that would otherwise have had to brought from Spain.

Even if those places lack other resources to sustain life, at least the great abundance of fish will nourish you; and anyone who might live there would be able to make a profit from the fishery, as we see being done by the Icelanders and the Norwegians, who supply huge quantities of frozen fish [lit. fish hardened by cold] to the Germans and neighbouring peoples.

The Gutenberg Laws which you ask me for I do not know if I can obtain, but I will write about it to some friends I have in Bohemia. I hardly think, though, that they can be much use to you - the whole technique of mining metals [lit. the craft of working metals] there is so completely different from that which you will need to learn. For Gutenberg lies in a highly agricultural region, and no Prince works the gold seams there at his own expense: they are worked by private men, who pay ten per cent. to the Prince.

I strongly advise you to read the writings of Georgius Agricola [14941555] on the origins and causes of all that lies underground, and on mining metals. He was a most eminent scientist, and far outstripped those who had written on those subjects before. If his works are not available there, I will send you them next spring: for at present they are not available here.

Notice how mesmerised my thoughts are by that gold of yours: such a heap of trifles I have been able to amass. Let it show you that I do not lack the will to write to you even when I lack matter . . .

- Frankfurt, 28 November 1577(28)

This exchange, read in its entirety (and the Languet letter in particular has usually been misleadingly excerpted), shows precisely where the modulation of Sidney's motive begins.(29) Nevertheless, we should take both sides seriously. Sidney's was not a vulgar and foolish gold fever, even at the height of the Frobisher excitement and his own financial troubles; and such persons as Ambrose and Anne Dudley, Sir Henry and Lady Mary Sidney, and Edward Dyer were not exactly frivolous either. Gold would not only solve pressing personal problems; it would balance the perceived advantages of Spain, and create a greater independence for individuals, for their country, and for their religion.

Languet, who as always takes with a classical serieux his role as mentor, comes down exceedingly hard on all desire for gold; this much has been often noticed and repeated. What is much less commonly remembered is that immediately following this long diatribe he begins to give practical advice for exploiting the islands, recommending better texts on mining than the one Sidney had asked for, and giving crisp counsels on the preference for a trading city over expensive forts full of idle and hungry soldiers. Notable in the long run is the fact that Languet is here moving his protege's spirit from considerations of quick exploitation towards those of colonisation. And it is this movement, which is not only characteristic of the next stage of interest everywhere but especially of the Huguenot mentality, that is now starting to recommend itself to Sidney, well ahead of most of his countrymen.

B. New Cosmographies: The Huguenot Connection

Clearly this movement, going far beyond exploration and mapping and cataloguing a world of wonders, could not long be content with the prattle, the fantasies, the embroideries, the outright lies and the never-ending self-aggrandisement of the irrepressible Thevet. Frank Lestringant has shown how, from the late 1570s on, those seriously concerned with voyages, the New World, and colonization from a Protestant point of view increasingly rejected and even execrated Thevet, who had, moreover, allied himself with the Guise faction.

The Protestants who increasingly despised him would soon find a couple of geographers of their own: Jean de Lery and Urbain Chauveton. These two very different men - Lery an autodidact, Chauveton a scholar - were Huguenot ministers and friends. Lery had been a member, many years before, of the same Brazilian expedition as Thevet, and had also written a book about it (the Histoire d'un voyage; see below, n. 14), but which was not printed until 1578. His account, however, corresponds far better to a more modern, less fabulous, more particular and more "scientific" regard - it is not for nothing that Claude Levi-Strauss, as late as 1955, called the Histoire d'un voyage the "ethnologist's breviary."(30) Chauveton used the older method of translating and expanding preexistent work, in his case the writings of Girolamo Benzoni, which he published, with an extensive and influential commentary citing Lery, as the Histoire nouvelle du Nouveau Monde in 1579. The difference between the two authors is that while Lery - writing, with a certain nostalgia, about a voyage nearly twenty-five years past - still shows the expeditionary mentalite, Chauveton is already reacting to current events and thinking of colonization.

The spur for such thoughts, and also their link with Sidney, is of course the 1572 Massacre. This decisive event compels Protestant thought in France to turn toward an alternative, not only a new but an other world "ici-bas," here below, that I mentioned earlier with regard to Sidney. Henceforth "le Refuge" becomes a concept to the more outward-looking of the Huguenots (as "le Desert" is to be to the homespun ones a century later). It is never an easy solution: the Coligny colony was riven by dissension between Catholics and Protestants (whose respective clergymen actually came to blows on shipboard) and finished off by the Portuguese; Jean Ribaut's Calvinist effort in Florida lasted less than three years before Menendez de Avila's Spanish troops slaughtered nearly a thousand Huguenots at Matanzas Inlet. But such massacres also fed both the growing leyenda negra, the Black Legend, of Spain's implacable and ubiquitous evil, and the determination and conviction of the Protestant thinkers.

Among these last was Philippe de Mornay, Sieur du Plessis, who was in England with his wife and family from 1577 to the summer of 1578 and there deepened his friendship with Sidney, to the joy of their common "father" Languet. Du Plessis, the chief religious and political strategy adviser to Henry of Navarre, was meditating at this time his major work, De la verite de la religion chrestienne, which eventually appeared in French and Latin versions in 1581 (and which was to be Sidney's major preoccupation as a writer until his departure for the Netherlands). Lestringant has valuably reminded us that this massive and now underestimated work contains, inter alia, "une geopolitique protestante," based on Chauveton, which was to have a widespread influence - the more so because France's crushing naval defeat by the Portuguese at Terceira in the Azores on 26 July 1582 put an end to all French colonial activity for a generation, and focused Huguenot hopes upon England.

Mornay's "geopolitics" are contained in Chapter VIII of the Verite: "When the world had his beginning." Having discussed the origins of human arts and sciences, Mornay continues: "the sayd inventions gathering together into one tyme, doe leade us to some one certeine Countrie as to a Centre, where mankind hath first sprong up, and afterward spred it selfe abroade as to the outermost partes of all the Circle" (117). The world, in fact, "was not peopled all at once, but . . . as folke overswarmed in a place, and chanced to hit upon a man that was adventrus, they spred themselves further and further under his guyding, into the Countries next unto them" (120). The point from which this centrifugal movement begins is either "Mount Taurus where it is called Caucasus" (Ararat), or "the playne of Sennaar, where Moyses sayth that the Languages were confounded," or else "some place of Mesopotamia" (ibid.). The movement then spreads out via Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, France and Germany; "and Spayne which heretofore was counted the uttermost part of the World, is now become the first discoverer of the newe World" (ibid.). The extremities, of course, meet: "in very deed, like as Ireland, a part of Scotland, Laplond, and Groneland, being the uttermost parts of our side of the World, are as good as savage: so also be the uttermost inhabiters of the Westindies, namely Canada, Baccalea [Newfoundland], Brasilie, and Petagon, which are descended of the Eastindies" (120-21). He continues, "In following the Coastes, men have found many Countries even yet unpeopled. And also that even in the best peopled places of all their Countries, they have not found the tenth part of so much people as the Countries being manured were able to beare; whereas on the contrary part, in our Countries the Nations doe pester one another" (121).

The whole chapter is filled with what Lestringant rightly calls "this vision where the theological demonstration of the unity of the human race directly supports a bold geopolitical extrapolation"(HS 122). This theory, in the first place, allows Du Plessis to do away with the origin of the races in the three sons of Noah - which also removes the stigma from the "sons of Ham," just as Lery had approached these same sons with a far greater sense of common humanity than had Thevet. Second, in starting from one center, Du Plessis explains and valorizes the Westward expansion of Europe:

Applying an elementary principle of fluid mechanics, the author of the treatise Of the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion discovers that the demographic currents on the globe's surface have sprung from a single centre, that they have spread out in successive waves through the ages, insinuating themselves via the isthmuses and the straits, spreading out without regard for terrain into the continents; and especially that they are still spreading out equally into the immense natural receptacle sketched by the general and coherent configuration of the newly-emerged lands. Henceforth the political action of nation-states must accompany and organise this unfinished movement . . . The invitation to colonise is explicit, which will privilege a necessary homeostasis, peopling the empty spaces with an oekoumene broadened by Providence, and moreover by the same token unburdening of their excess population the overcrowded countries of the older, because more central, Europe (HS 123).

To recapitulate and support this point, a brief summary of facts for this period is relevant. On 10 March 1578, Sidney wrote to Languet (a propos of Du Plessis's anticipated empty-handed return to France): "I must say, unless God opposes it with His power, I seem to see the Cause being destroyed, and I am seriously considering something in the Indies [aliquid jam Indicum mecum meditor]" (Feuillerat, iii, 121). In May Frobisher set out on his third and final voyage, with fifteen ships and two hundred miners, in which Sidney invested [pounds]67/10/-; during this trip, the assayers pronounced the ore worthless.(31) On 1 June, Sidney stood godfather to Du Plessis's second daughter Elisabeth in the French Church in London's Threadneedle Street. Lery this year published his Histoire d'un voyage en terre de Bresil. In November, Sir Humphrey Gilbert set out on his first voyage, while in France Nicolas Pithou published his translation of Dionysius Settle: La Navigation du Cap. M. Forbisher (Geneva: A. Chuppin), in which he performs a little careful and characteristic navigation of his own, avoiding defense of the Spanish conquista while exalting and encouraging the English expeditions. This last was, ultimately, a Protestant defense, even of gold-fever (an argument which, interestingly, Sidney in his letter to Languet hinted at but which Languet did not take up): "for by a secret inclination, He leads men to this reason, even though their first conception is not such, but only to enrich themselves; using them without their knowledge, to plant a seed of religion in the hearts of those poor barbarians."(32) In 1580 there was a second edition of Lery, and a part of his history of the Coligny colony was embedded in Beza's Histoire ecclesiastique des Eglises Reformees au Royaume de France, which helped to spread Lery's experiences and mentalite more widely in the "Protestant International" in which Beza was a leading figure. In September 1581 Languet died in Antwerp, attended by Charlotte, Du Plessis's wife, and with as last request a mention in the Verite's Preface.

From now on until his departure for the Netherlands, and indeed until his death, Sidney's New World focus was no longer on gold. Under the influence of Languet's memory and Du Plessis's friendship, his thoughts were all of the geopolitical Protestant struggle: for the faith and against Spain, the great enemy both in Europe and the Americas. This focus is a double one: colonization and warfare.

To appreciate this movement fully, we should first consider Sidney's literary direction from this time on. In 1579 he had written the letter to the Queen on her marriage project to Alencon, the son of "the Jezebel of our age." The Astrophil and Stella and the Old Arcadia were, as he later pointed out, the fruits of his leisure at Wilton, whether enforced or not; but the Arcadia's unfinished revision was accompanied by a whole body of new work, all of it left unfinished and some of it lost, which marked a new direction.(33) The versification of the Psalms was meant for Huguenot-style assemblies: "Psalm-singers" was the popular stereotype of Protestants. The major work of this period was the translation of Du Plessis's Verite as The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion. Finished by Arthur Golding, this was published in 1587 by Thomas Cadman (STC 18149).(34) In view of the Verite's importance with regard to the New World, Sidney's preoccupation with it is a valuable clue to the direction of his thinking at that time.

The third work that occupied him also links him to the French Huguenots. John Florio, in dedicating Book II of his Montaigne to Sidney's daughter Elizabeth, Lady Rutland, and to Lady Rich in 1603, wrote that had seen Sidney's rendering of "the first septmane of that arch-poet Du Bartas." This translation is now lost; but Du Bartas's Seconde Sepmaine (of which the first eight poems were printed in 1584), dealing with the world's history since the Creation, not only mentions "Mylor Sydne" whose song, like the swan's, tames Thames's proud waves, which carry it to the ocean, and the ocean throughout the world; but this second Week also contains, as part of its second Day, a section on Les colonies which, Lestringant claims with some plausibility (HS, 122), has its source in Chapter VIII of the Verite: "Tout ainsi les macons de la superbe tour / S'en vont, esparpillez, acaser a l'entour / De Mesopotamie; et peu a pen leur race, / Frayant heureusement, fleuve apres fleuve passe, / Saisit terre apres terre, et si le Tout-Puissant / Ne va de l'univers les jours accourcissant, / Il ne se trouvera contree si sauvage / Que le tige d'Adam de ses branches n'ombrage."(35)

On 28 February 1581, Thomas Washington's translation of the great French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay's Navigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkie (4 [degrees] in 8's, Thomas Dawson, STC 18574) was entered in the Stationers' Registers. It was dedicated to Sir Henry and Philip Sidney both, and confirms their continuing interest in militant Protestantism as well as navigation. For it was "printed in English at J. Stell's cost and charges" by Thomas Dawson; and Johannes Stell was a Dutchman who, together with Dawson, had two years previously dedicated to Sidney the notorious and incendiary Beehive of the Romishe Church by Marnix of Ste. Aldegonde.

The year 1582 marked another new departure, when the lessons of France began to be applied in an English framework. On 21 May, Thomas Woodcock entered Hakluyt's first book, the Divers voyages, which he dedicated to Sidney. This not only introduced to an English public Ramusio's version of Zeno the Venetian and Friseland, which we saw in Sidney's letter to Languet, and the 1563 French text about Jean Ribaut's Protestant colony in Florida, but also contained a set of fascinating notes on colonization thought to have been prepared for Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578.(36) In the dedication Hakluyt reminds Sidney that he has always been "so readie to pleasure me and all my name," and hopes that he will "continue and increase [his] accustomed favour towarde those goodly and honorable discoveries" (sig. [para]4, 11).

C. Colonization: The Gilbert Project

It was also in 1582 that the colonization concept first became realized in Sidney's involvement with the project of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.(37) To sum up usefully this very complex story, of which not all the factors are known, we have to turn to the Catholics. In 1581, under pressure from the arrival of undercover Jesuits and the continued plotting of Mary, Queen of Scots, the government had enacted a new recusancy law (23 Eliz. c. I), raising the fines for nonconformity to a ruinous [pounds]20 a month. It was now that Walsingham, implacable enemy of Catholics and increasingly close to Philip (who the following year became his son-in-law), stepped in. Walsingham, who knew that the Sidneys, while politically reliable, were tolerant, trusting, and good friends with many Catholics, seems to have sought Philip's cooperation for a sort of reverse-Huguenot colonization scheme. The principal Catholics were Sir Thomas Gerrard and Sir George Peckham; the executive manager was Antony Brigham; and the man in charge of the "navigation" and the proposed colony itself was Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

On 7 July 1582, Sidney received a grant of three million acres from Gilbert, out of the latter's virtually-unlimited land grant from the Queen. These lands were part of North America, and still to be discovered. Gerrard and Peckham received similar grants.(38) There existed an elaborate set of rules for the eventual administration of these territories, which were all intended as part of a vast colonization scheme. Sidney's case, though, stands alone: while Gerrard and Peckham received the authority over their lands in part "in consideracion that the same Sir Thomas and Sir George have disbursed divers sommes of money and adventured the same as principall adventurers with the said Sir Humfrey towards his howe intended vyoge for discoverye and habytinge of certeyne parts of America" (HG, 247), in Sidney's grant this financial clause was omitted. Why?

Gilbert promised he "shall doe his best endevor to procure and obteyne her Majesties leave and good lykinge that all those who hath or shall adventure with the said Sir Humfrey and Sir George or any of them . . . maye freely passe into those Countries theire to remaine or retorn backe at his or theire or any of theire will and pleasure" (HG, 254). In Sidney's contract, Philip also promised "that he . . . shall doe his best endevor to procure and obteyne her Majesties leave and good lykinge that all those whoe have or shall adventure with the said Sir Humfrey, Sir Thomas Gerrard and Sir George Peckham knights the said Philipp or any of them into the said Countrie . . . may freelye passe into those Countries there to remayne' (HG, 264-65).

The point here is that while Gilbert was the overall instigator and organizer, only he and Sidney were seen as able to procure the Queen's permission and goodwill, in order that the other - Catholic - participants could safely leave England or return, as they pleased. This last point, implying as it did the non-confiscation of their property, was not something to be taken for granted, and if Philip could mediate its acceptance, such service merited reward. This detail renders more believable (discounting, as always, some of the terminology) Spanish ambassador Mendoza's dispatch of 11 July: "As I wrote to your majesty some days since, Ongi Gilberto [Humphrey Gilbert] was fitting out several ships for a settlement in Florida and as this was not only prejudicial to your Majesty but also to the English Catholics as giving advantage to heretics, Walsingham put it secretly to two spendthrift Catholic gentlemen who have some land that if they helped Ongi Gilberto in his expedition, they would escape losing life and property, by asking the Queen to allow them, in consideration for this service, to live in those parts with freedom of conscience and enjoy the use of their property in England - for which purpose they might rely on Phelippe Sideney."(39) Two points need to be made about this. In the first place, Sidney did not personally have with the Queen the kind of influence that would accomplish such a scheme or even significantly smooth it. But as Walsingham, whose protege Sidney had become by this time, was behind it, one assumes that Sidney's mediation would have passed through him. The second point to make concerns the Protestant party's backing for a partially Catholic colonization project. Here we should remember that both Sir Henry and Sidney were humanly unprejudiced men who were always personally friendly toward Catholics. Sidney had been asked, in 1581, to intervene with "Mr Secretarie" Walsingham for the Catholic Lady Kytson on behalf of Sir Thomas Cornwallis, and had written her a comforting letter on 28 March, telling her not to despair because there was "a present intention of a general mitigation, to be used in respect of recusants" (Feuillerat iii, 134-35). But what is more, such a project would accord directly with the point Hakluyt made to Sidney in the Preface to Divers voyages, viz. that colonies would productively make use of those undesirable in the motherland (sig. [para]1, 5). It is this reasoning which was doubtless Walsingham's; and it is intriguing to see that the otherwise not overly-brilliant Mendoza immediately recognized it as in any case not beneficial to the King of Spain.

By 1583 Sidney had joined with Sir George Peckham. Walsingham had drafted a circular letter to potential adventurers, saying, "I am of opinion you shall doe well to harken unto suche offers as Sir Philipp Sidney and Sir George Peckham will make unto you who have sufficient Aucthoritie by and under her Majesties lettres patentes to performe theffect of your Desire."(40) In July of that year Philip drafted a grant of 30,000 acres (or 10 percent) out of his own grant to Peckham, to furnish a ship for the next expedition.(41) And Walsingham (who, wearing a different hat, was also backing his step-son Christopher Carleill in a venture with the Muscovy Company) invested [pounds]115 of his own money in the expedition - a very considerable sum.

E. Planting and Warfare

In September of 1583 Philip married Frances Walsingham, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert was lost at sea. These two events mark a sort of turning-point: a final development, decisive in retrospect, in Sidney's engagement with the New World as an aspect of the Cause, the carrying on of the Protestant dream, the Westward drive into the straits and estuaries and bays of the land that would make the Refuge possible. Sidney, ironically, had come closest to participation in a colony through a scheme devised in part for Catholics - a scheme unthinkable in Du Plessis's France where the Catholics were the power structure, but a logical adaptation for a beleaguered Protestant nation where Catholics were, or were feared to be, the Fifth Column. The scheme was not quite over. Peckham carried on for about a year, but was then (in a burst of typically contradictory official action) jailed for Catholic activities. The man who seems to have been originally intended to lead Peckham's first expedition after Gilbert's loss was Frobisher: Hakluyt, by now in Paris as chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford (meeting Thevet and filching a manuscript from him), wrote to Walsingham on 1 April 1584 that he understood Frobisher would be leaving in May (HG, 93).

This is also, though, the time when Elizabeth first began to realize that participation in a war against Spain was probably inevitable, and that it would begin in the Netherlands. Sidney had for some time belonged to the party that considered this was not only likely but desirable, and indeed England's moral obligation.

Two factors mark the development of Sidney's involvement at this time. He had received a preliminary posting to the Ordnance, of which his uncle the Earl of Warwick was Master, and he would eventually share the mastership. In doing so he was in effect moving toward involvement in the European theatre of what he and his ilk considered a world war. Second, he was more than ever disgusted by his Sovereign's compulsive dithering. The Peckham continuation of the Gilbert project remained alive, and Sidney was still considering it. "Her Majesty seemes affected to deal in the Low Contrey matters," he wrote disconsolately from Court to Stafford in Paris, "but I think nothing will come of it. We [himself and, possibly, Greville] are haulf perswaded to enter into the journey of Sir Humphrey Gilbert very eagerli; whereunto your Mr. Hackluit hath served for a very good Trumpet" (21 July 1584).(42)

The New World was increasingly an other world, an alternative world; which was now undergoing its final change of shape and significance in Sidney's mind. In its first form it was a world of wonders and a stage of discovery, next a scene for deeds and a potential passage to Cathay, then a place for mining gold and thus a source of power, and most recently a field for "planting" as part of the Westward destiny of the human race in general and the True Faith in particular. Now, increasingly, it became also the Western Theater in the world war against Spain.

Fulke Greville, writing his Life of Sidney a generation later from his own memories and presumably his notes described this last conception:

Now though this justice of the Almighty be many times slow, and therefore neglected here on Earth; yet - I say - under the only conduct of this star, did Sir Philip intend to revive this hazardous enterprize of planting upon the main of America: projected, nay undertaken long before - as I shewed you - but ill executed in the absence of Sir Philip; with a design to possess Nombre de Dios, or some other haven near unto it, as [fortified] places, in respect of the little distance between the two seas, esteemed the fittest rendezvous for supply or retreat of an army upon all occasions. And besides resolved to circle in his [the Spaniard's] wealth and freedome, with a joynt fore-running fleet in the South sea; to the end, that if the fortune of conquest prospered with them, yet he should infallibly pay the charge of both Navies, with infinite losses and disreputation to the Spaniard.

And in this project Sir Philip proceeded so far with the United Provinces, as they yeelded to assist and second the ships of his sovereign, under his charge, with a Fleet of their own. Which, besides a present addition of strength, he knew would lead others by example.

Again, for supply of these armies, he had - out of that naturall tribute, which all free spirits acknowledge to superior worth - won thirty gentlemen of great bloud and state here in England, every man to sell one hundred pounds land, to second and countenance this first Fleet, with a stronger.

Now when these beginnings were by his own credit and industrie thus well settled: then to give an excellent form to a reall work, bee contrived this new intended Plantation, not like an asylum for fugitives, a Bellum Piraticum for bandits; or any such base ramas of people: but as an Emporium for the confluence of all nations that love or profess any kind of virtue, or Commerce.(43)

This sentiment and these plans on Sidney's part seem to have belonged to the period of 1584-85. As for the joint-force plan with the Netherlands, or the backing of the thirty English gentlemen, there is no evidence to support either of them - unless the Thirty represented Greville's confused memory of the Peckham scheme; or - and this is both more plausible and a genuinely fascinating possibility - both it and the joint-force plan referred to an undercover extension of Sidney's final New World adventure: the Drake expedition of 1585.

F. The Drake Expedition

This event was surrounded by many uncertainties, a cloud of contradictions, a fair amount of prevarication, and a few plain lies. It is important to review the evidence and to try to arrive at a reasonable interpretation. There are two possible versions of what happened. The first is as follows: Sidney, who was at last to be allowed to go to war in the Netherlands where Elizabeth was sending aid in return for three towns held as cautions by English garrisons, had asked for the command of Flushing (Vlissingen), the most important town of the three. In August 1585 he had been officially proposed for this command,(44) but a week later the Queen seemed once again to be changing her mind, and (according to one source) ready to give the position to another. Sidney then totally and monumentally lost his temper. Drake was about to leave on his notorious West Indian guerrilla expedition, where he would sack Nombre de Dios, Cartagena and a number of other places. As Walsingham wrote despairingly to Davison on 13 September:

Sir Philip hath taken a very hard resolution to accompany Sir Francis Drake in this voyage, moved thereto for that he saw her Majesty disposed to commit the charge of Flushing unto some other;(45) which he reputed would fall out greatly to his disgrace, to see another preferred before him, both for birth and judgment inferior unto him. <This resolution is greatly to the grief of Sir Philip's friends, but to none more than myself. I know Her Majesty would easily have been induced to have placed him in Flushing, but he despaired thereof, and the disgrace [The despair thereof and the disgrace] that he doubted he should receive have <hath carried him into a different <desperate course.(46)

In other words, Sidney, accompanied by the usually more-than-cautious Greville, left Court abruptly and went to Plymouth. The pretext for leaving the Court was a rumor that Don Antonio, the Portuguese pretender and an ally, was about to land for a secret visit, and that Sidney and Greville would go and "conduct him up." But John Stanhope wrote to the Earl of Rutland on 12 September, one day before Walsingham's letter to Davison:

Sir Philip Sidney's departing with Sir Francis Drake was so fully advertised her Majesty as it pleased her to command Mr. Vice-Chamberlain to write three letters, one to himself to command his immediate return, the other to Sir Francis to forbid him the receiving of him in his fleet, the third to the Mayor of Plymouth to write him to see this performed accordingly; and that if they were already gone some bark should be sent after with the letters. This messenger was one Hyts whom I think your Lordship knows, one serving my Lady Drury, who was despatched accordingly, and when he was within 4 miles of Plymouth he was surprised by four mariners and his letters taken from him; the which being opened and read were sent him again. Since when, one Prynne, who attendeth Don Antonio, is come from thence with letters from his master and Sir Philip, and now it is said that Sir Philip never meant to go, but stayeth there to see the ships set forth. Yet the bruit runneth on stilts in London and amongst many courtiers that Sir Francis is gone and Sir Philip too.(47)

Sidney left us no account of this imbroglio, and neither did Drake. But the third participant has, and his version is radically different. In the case of this so-memorable event it may be useful to look afresh at Greville's memoir. In Chapter VII of the Life, the latter states categorically that the plan we think of as Drake's "was an expedition of [Sidney's] own projecting: wherein he fashioned the whole body, to become head of it himself. I mean the last employment but one of Sir Francis Drake to the West Indies. Which journey, as the scope of it was mixt both of sea and land service; so it had accordingly distinct commanders, chosen by Sir Philip out of the ablest governors of those martiall times. The project was contrived between them in this manner: that both should equally be governours, when they had left the shore of England; but while things were a preparing at home, Sir Francis, was to beare the name, and by the credit of Sir Philip have all particulars abundantly supplyed" (71). Greville candidly admits that Sidney kept his role in the project secret because he would not have been allowed to go. Drake, he says, joined in because Sidney's connections would "add both weight and fashion to his ambition." The greatest secret, he claims, was the "particular of this plot," i.e., the objective that the Spaniards would not know which places to defend. Drake then left for Plymouth with his ships, "vowed and resolved that when he staid for nothing but a wind, the watchword should come post for Sir Philip. The time of the year made haste away, and Sir Francis to follow it either made more haste than needed, or at least seemed to make more than really he did. Notwithstanding, as I dare aver that in his own element he was industrious; so dare I not condemn his affections in this misprision of time. Howsoever a letter comes post for Sir Philip, as if the whole Fleet stayed onely for him, and the wind" (73-74). Thus, says Greville, Sidney decided on the Don Antonio pretext, left Court, went to Plymouth, and "was feasted the first night by Sir Francis, with greate deale of outward pomp and complement" (74). Yet Greville claimed that he himself - Sidney's oldest friend and now his "Achates in this journey" - mentioned that night in bed the "discountenance and depression" he had seen in Drake's face, "as if our coming were both beyond his expectation and desire" (ibid.). Sidney dismissed this; but within the next few days he discovered that Greville was right. The ships were far from ready, and Drake was stringing them along, while - Greville suspects - secretly warning the Court. He then told the story of the ambushed messenger, and continued with the "more imperial mandate" that offered Sidney employment in the Low Countries under Leicester but ordered him to leave the Fleet forthwith. Greville, ever admiring, claimed that Philip then left in a gallant manner, dealing plainly with the whole army, thus saving "Sir Francis Drake from the [public] blastings of Court" to maintain his authority with the troops, while pointing out that his own going to the Netherlands proved the Queen is now irrevocably engaged in both theaters of the war (76-77).

The stories cannot both be true. Stanhope's letter agrees broadly with Greville's account. Walsingham's letter to Davison is that of a political man who has just seen his protege do something almost unforgivably stupid. Yet Greville - for all his idealizing and for all the time-lapse - knew Sidney better than anyone; and Greville was there. Moreover, the credibility of his version is heightened by his recording that he did not, at a crucial moment, agree with his venerated friend.

Let us suppose for a moment that Greville was right, and that the previously-mentioned joint-force scheme with the Dutch was in some way an inchoate part of this expedition. We then have two largely incompatible men - Drake and Sidney(48) - planning a large New World military project which (from Sidney's point of view) followed exactly Languet's advice about protecting the Baffin Island mines. First seize a base, then make it a self-sufficient colony, then use it as a center from which to conduct your operations.

It was not a bad plan at all. In Chapter X of the Life, Greville explained in detail Sidney's geopolitical strategy against Spain. Flanders was actually the worst place to attack this powerful and vicious enemy, as it was his main theater of war. Carry war, said Philip, "into the bowels of Spain" and take Seville or Cadiz; or, even better, "assail him by invasion or incursion - as occasion fell out - in some part of that rich and desert West-Indian Mayne" (110). Plant a colony there, and harry him; "either . . . stop his springs of gold" and so starve his armies; or deny all security to his transport of it.

This was a war aim, but the plan for the colony itself he describes in the passage I have quoted above. May we, then, conclude that both the joint force project with the Dutch and the venture of the thirty gentlemen formed part of a scheme so effectively kept secret that even Walsingham, Sidney's father-in-law and head of England's by-now quite effective intelligence service, had no inkling of it? Where the possibility has even been mentioned, it has usually been dismissed.(49) What I want to suggest here is that it merits a very serious second look.

First of all Greville was probably, beside Drake, the only other man in on the full project. (The 1585 fleet, remember, was to be only the beginning.) Second, it was the last great moment he had shared with Philip before the latter went off to the Netherlands: this makes it much less likely that his memory of it had faded. Third, Greville would not have lent himself to a year-long journey out of another's sudden fit of pique - even Philip's. And finally, it is entirely possible that Walsingham was privy to the plan, and that his letter to Davison was in the nature of disinformation - even, perhaps, intended to be read by the Queen.(50)

The question remains of Drake's betrayal which, if we accept Greville's version, is certainly the worst anyone ever perpetrated upon Sidney. Why, if he had accepted the project, did he now scupper it in such a deviously efficient way? In the absence of Drake's own memoirs, we can and must speculate, as intelligently as possible. Drake, let us not forget, was a national hero, which Sidney was not yet but was soon to become as well. Heroes, as Lord Kenneth Clark said, do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes. Drake, moreover, was a self-made hero with, first and foremost, a career to look after. He had been knighted at Deptford, and he was to get almost the sole credit for defeating the Armada. At this mid-point between the two, it is clear that he wanted to go and raid - not to plant colonies, but to shoot, sink, pillage, burn, run, come home tired, sunburnt, bloodstained, and rich, all the while basking in the Queen's favor. Drake was the sort of man who would not have appealed to Languet at all, and perhaps not even to Du Plessis. But he would, one suspects, have appealed a great deal to Henri IV (who, in the crunch, let Du Plessis sink without a qualm), as he did to Elizabeth. The latter seems as genuinely and strongly to have disliked Sidney as much as everyone else had liked him.(51)

Drake, who was (up to a point) perfectly on the Queen's wavelength, cannot have been unaware of this. The business of secrecy, of concealing Sidney's involvement, must to him have seemed self-defeating and increasingly detrimental, even dangerous, to his own interests. To set out on a new voyage, with the Queen's Great Favorite's nephew and heir not only illegally aboard but shortly to be revealed back home as his long-time co-conspirator, was a major risk. True, he could not be intercepted, and a few sacked Spanish cities and captured Spanish carracks might ransom all ill deeds; but then again, they might not. Earnest moral nobles might easily die out there; and then what would he say to the Bear and Ragged Staff on his return? Drake had taken Sidney (who, we should remember, was Joint Master of the Ordnance and thus could allot much useful material) for all he could get; but as for joint command on the actual voyage, he had clearly, by September, changed his mind.

The plan, though, as Greville recounted it was the perfect summing-up of what we have seen to be Sidney's lifelong but changing relation to the New World. It fully acknowledged war-time conditions and their overriding importance. Spain, it said, must be resisted and, if possible, defeated. However, this goal was set, first of all, in the context of an extraordinarily nuanced analysis of the international geopolitical situation in the 1580s (Chapters VIII-X), which anyone conversant with Sidney's correspondence can recognize as congruent with his experience and with the ideas prevalent in his Continental circle. And second, the Spanish-directed war objective was throughout recognized as a limited one, set in the context of a further goal. That goal was summed up in the "emporium for the confluence of all nations that love or profess any kind of virtue or commerce":

Wherein to incite those that tarried at home to adventure, he propounded the hope of a sure and rich return. To martiall men he opened the wide doore of sea and land, for fame and conquest. To the nobly ambitious the fayre stage of America, to win honour in. To the religious divines, besides a new apostolicall calling of the last heathen to the Christian faith, a large field of reducing poor Christians, mis-led by the idolatry of Rome, to their mother primitive Church. To the ingeniously industrious, variety of natural richesses, for new mysteries and manufactures to work upon. To the merchant, with a simple people, a fertile, and unexhausted earth. To the fortune-bound, liberty. To the curious, a fruitfull womb of innovation. Generally, the word gold was an attractive adamant, to make men venture that which they have, in hope to grow rich by that which they have not.

What the expectation of this voyage was, time past can best witness; but what the success should have been - till it be revived by some such generous undertaker - lies hidden in God's secret judgements, who did at once cut off this gentleman's life, and so much of our hope. (118-19)

IV. QUERRE-MUHAU (IN TUPI: "ONE WHO IS POWERFUL IN WAR, AND VALIANT IN HIS UNDERTAKINGS"): THE OLD WORLD (52)

"From the ashes of this first propounded voyage to America, that fatall Low Country action sprang up, in which this worthy gentleman lost his life," wrote Greville (119). In any case, the two were alternatives. In a sense, the European Theatre engagement was Sidney being called home: home to the cockpit of Europe where the stakes were ancient and absolute; home to the initial lessons of his dearest and wisest friends - Melanchthon, whom he had never met, Melanchthon's pupil and Sidney's mentor, Hubert Languet, and Philippe de Mornay du Plessis. Finally he was called home to the unambiguous organizing, governing, surviving, and fighting of a just war in known surroundings. Gone was Thevet; gone was Lery; gone was the dream of a new, other, purer, victorious and peaceable kingdom. He might have gone back to it: Ralph Lane, the governor of Roanoke, wrote to him in that same year 1585, begging him to come and "attempt" San Juan and Hispaniola, "only fit for yourself to be chief commander in."(53) But for the moment there were the fortifications and garrisons of Flushing to organize; there was Axel to take by storm; there was a new Prince of Orange, far more military than his father, to work with; and there was, at last, the work to do in God's cause. The Psalms, the Semaines, the Trewnesse, the New Arcadia; all were broken off, with no sign of regret.

Ibora died two years after he was mentioned in Du Plessis's will. The New World, in the end, made way for - even became - "the old made explicit, understood." Yet together with Sidney, its advocate, it would remain to influence a future generation: "a symbol perfected in death."

Tyre coih apouau, ienderoua gerre-ari. ("Let us lead these with us against our enemies.")

YORK UNIVERSITY

1 [Jean Daille] Testament, codicille, dernieres actions, et mort heureuse de Philippes de Mornay, Sieur du Plessis Marly, devant gouverneur de la ville & Chasteau de Saumur ([Saumur] 1624), 14 (my translation).

2 The books are: 1) Richard Eden, A treatyse of the newe India (Edward Sutton, 1553; 8 [degrees], STC 18244), a translation of Sebastian Munster's Cosmographia; 2) Eden's Decades of the newe world or West India (William Powell, 1555; 8 [degrees], STC 645), from Pietro Martire d'Anghiera's Decades; 3) Thomas Hacket's translation of Jean Ribaut's 1562 text, The whole and true discoverye of Terra Florida (30 May 1563, T. Hall, f. T. Hacker, 8 [degrees], 23 pp. pamphlet, STC 20970); 4) N. Le Shalleux [sic: N. Ie Challeux], A true and perfect description of the last voyage or navigation, attempted by Capitaine John Rybaut, deputie and generali for the French men, into Terra Florida, this yeare past, 1565 (tr. and pub. T. Hacket, 1566; 8 [degrees], STC 15347); 5) Andrew Thevet, The Newe Found Worlde, or Antarcktike (H. Bynneman f. T. Hacket, 1568; 8 [degrees], STC 23950).

3 See Wallace: "To all of them it must have seemed a blessed interval." His account of Sir Henry's (and Lady Mary's) troubles in Ireland (72ff.) amply explains Philip's subsequent touchiness in his father's defence.

4 On Thevet, see chiefly the excellent work of Lestringant, 1990 (henceforth HS) and Lestringant, 1994.

5 See Sidney's Defence of Poesy in van Dorsten and Duncan-Jones, 87 and 92.

6 Thevet, sigs. *ijv - *iij.

7 Frobisher paid 6/8 for them. Only five books were taken: "a book of cosmographie in French" ([pounds]2/4/-), "an English Bible greate volume" ([pound]1), "a cosmographicall glasse and castill [of] Knowledge" (10/-) and "a New World of Andreas Thevett, Englishe and French" (6/8). W. McFee.

8 See McCann, 99-101.

9 On Dyer, see Sargent.

10 Cf. Collinson, 122; and passim for Edward Dyer's importance as "venturer."

11 Quoted in Parks, 35-36.

12 Epistle Dedicatorie to Divers Voyages, Hakluyt's first publication (Thomas Woodcock, 1582; 8 [degrees], STC 12624), sig. [para]4.

13 From the "Colloquy" in Lery, 183.0.22.

14 For Languet, see Nicollier-De Weck.

15 See Read, passim; and Plowden, 49-55 and passim.

16 Timothy Bright, epistle dedicatory to Walsingham in John Foxe, An abridgement of the booke of Acts and monumentes . . . by T. Bright (J. Winder in the assignment of T. Bright, 1589; 4 [degrees] in 8's, STC 11229), cited in Conyers Read, i. 221n. (My italics.)

17 See Thomas Smith to Walsingham, September 9, in Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador (T. Newcomb, f. G. Bedell and T. Collins, 1655; [f.sup.o], Wing 1453), 252-53.

18 For Eden and his importance, see Taylor, 19-23 and 37-39.0.22

19 That he was also at Walsingham's is made still likelier by the fact that two years later it was to Walsingham - "formerly his friend" - that he addressed a letter stating his beliefs and requesting an attestation of his Protestantism. See Fowler's edition (below, n. 2), 15.

20 On his significance as a geographer, see Taylor, 38-41.

21 De re poetica has been separately reprinted: tr. and ed. A.D.S. Fowler, Luttrell Reprints no. 17, with an excellent introduction on Wills 1-42.

22 Van Dorsten and Duncan-Jones in their 1573 edition of the Defence, do not mention Willes; Fowler (21 and n.) does mention Sidney, though with no hint of a direct or causal link.

23 R.R. Cawley. The passage in the Defence (76) reads: "Even among the most barbarous and simple Indians where no writing is, yet have they their poets who make and sing songs, which they call areytos, both of their ancestors' deeds and praises of their gods."

24 Francois de Coligny, comte de Chatillon (1557-91) and Guy-Paul de Coligny, comte de Laval (b. 1555): their letters to Sidney, of 5 June 1573, are in the Osborn Collection at Yale (translations printed in Osborn, 93-94). They entertained the geographer Jean de Lery in Berne the following year (see Lery/Whatley, xviii).

25 The southern tip of Greenland, long thought to be a separate island. The reference comes from Ramusio, whose text was printed in English by Hakluyt in his Divers voyages, dedicated to Sidney, in 1582, where the references to Friseland are on sigs. B[4.sup.v]-E[1.sup.r] (60-77). Sidney may have had the Zeno reference from Hakluyt personally.

26 Feuillerat, iii, letter 31: 116-17.

27 "Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames!" (Virgil, AEneid 3.57-58.)

28 Languet, 291-98

29 By 1 March 1578, when the ore had been tried and found wanting, the Government went back to thinking about the strategic advantages of a Northwest Passage. Sidney by this time no longer believed in it, and wrote to Languet:" . . . Our Frobisher gold, assayed at last, is not producing as much in the way of riches as it had promised. Still, the islands near the sixty-second parallel are not to be despised; but this they are keeping extremely secret lest, as you know, the opportunity be snatched away. Indeed, they hope at that latitude to be able to go through a passage: such nonsense is that 'great world' described by the cosmographers. If a passage does turn up at that level [pun; also: if truly the excitement - falls to that moderate level], you can see that it will be of great help" (Feuillerat iii, 120).

30 Tristes Tropiques, 89.

31 For Frobisher and his ore, see Alsford; Fitzhugh; Boreham; Stefansson.

32 Pithou, Preface, sig. [Aiv.sup.r]; quoted in Lestringant, HS 127; my translation. The text is printed in the Bulletin de la societe pour l'histoire du Protestantisme francais (BSHPF) 30 (1881): 225-35.

33 It is intriguing that nowhere in either version of the Arcadia is there any allusion to the New World. One can more usefully see the romance and America as parallel "other worlds," each of which was originally an escape, an alternative, but each of which he was in the process of revising to bring it closer to life's urgent and serious affairs.

34 Du Plessis had two copies of this translation in his own library: these have recently been found in Croatia, and bought by the museum of Saumur Castle, where Du Plessis was governor. The copy of the 1587 edition is in Du Plessis's own binding, with his hand-painted bookplate. It is not known how much of the translation was completed by Sidney: all evidence is internal and/or circumstantial. What concerns me here is the fact that this was the (substantial) work to which he chose to devote his energies.

35 Lines 239-46: Du Bartas, iii, 153. "Even so th'ambitious Babel-building rout / Dispearst, at first goe seat themselves about / Mesopotamia: after (by degrees) / Their happy Spawne, in sundry Colonies / Crossing from Sea to Sea, from Land to Land, / All the greene-mantled nether Globe hath mann'd: / So that, except th'Almighty (glorious Judge/Of quick and dead) this Worlds iii dayes abridge, / There shall no soyle so wilde and savage bee, / But shall be shadowed by great Adams Tree." Sylvester, i. 449, lines 253-62. On the origin of the New World peoples, see Holmes et al., lines 371-464, 157-61. For Du Bartas in England, see Prescott, 167-234.

36 See Woodcock.

37 See Quinn (hereafter HG).

38 The agreement's original is in Close Roll, 25 Elizabeth, part 7, C 54/1153, m. 12-14; the text is printed in full in HG, 260-66.

39 Quoted in HG, 278; the source is listed as Navarrete, Documentos ineditos, 92, 346-8. Extract, translated, CSP Sp. 1580-86, 275.

40 SP Domestic Eliz., SP 12/165, 35. Draft. Quoted in HG, 376.

41 SP Domestic Eliz., SP 12/161, 44. Draft. Quoted in HG, 377-78.

42 Feuillerat, iii, letter 62: 145; original at Penshurst.

43 Greville, 4, 116-18.

44 See Walsingham's letter to Davison of August 26, quoted in Wallace, 330.

45 Duncan-Jones (274, n.) suggests this was Thomas Cecil, "Burghley's talentless eldest son," who instead became governor of the Brill.

46 The passages in angle-brackets are quoted by Duncan-Jones (274) but not by Wallace (331), who prints instead the passages reproduced in square brackets. Wallace's reference is to CSP Dom. Eliz., 13 Sept. 1585; Duncan-Jones' to CSP For. 1585-6, 23-24.

47 Wallace, 331-32; orig. in HMC XII, Appendix 4, i, 178.

48 Although the previous year they had sat together on the Parliamentary Virginia Committee: cf. Buxton, 144.

49 Only Wilson, 227, accepts Greville's story: Wallace, Howell, and Duncan-Jones prefer the explanation of pique and impulse.

50 This would explain the letter's curious insistence that the Queen would easily have been persuaded to grant Sidney Flushing. Letters were regularly intercepted; and occasionally, if interception was foreseen, they would deliberately be written in such a way as to convey what the adversary was intended to read. It was, of course, Walsingham himself who had perfected such techniques in the long struggle with Mary Stuart and her fifth column.

51 "I see her Majesty," wrote Walsingham to Leicester, "very apt upon every light occasion to find fault with him." (Correspondence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester . . . 1585 and 1586, ed. John Bruce, London, 1844, 345; quoted in Wallace, 372.)

52 Lery, 190.

53 Wallace, 319.

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