(2 of 2)
It was Queen Elizabeth also who strained Sir Philip Sidney's "sweet reasonableness" to the point where he abandoned politics long enough to write his romantic novel Arcadia (a bestseller for 50 years, one of the first English books translated into French). Disgusted by her stingy, domineering, perverse attitude toward his own and his father's political career, he paid a long visit to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, wrote Arcadia to amuse her while she awaited the birth of a baby, who, says one version, grew up to be the "W. H." of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Like all gentlemen in his day, Sir Philip remained an amateur of literature (his books circulated only in manuscript in his lifetime), preferred to win glory as statesman or soldier. Having abandoned his plan to colonize a 3,000,000-acre grant in North America, he finally wangled an appointment as Governor of Flushing during the Netherlands campaign against Spain. Proving himself more brilliant than most, he was still not good enough to make his penny-pinching Queen pay him back the heavy sums he advanced out of his own pocket for the campaign. Co-author of the brilliant strategy which crushed Spain's power in the defeat of the Armada, Sir Philip Sidney met his end, at the age of 32, through a gesture romantically Arthurian. At the battle of Zutphen, throwing away his leg-armor because the commander had left his at home, he accompanied a charge of lancers against a hopelessly superior enemy force, received the fatal hip wound his armor would have prevented. His last literary work, a gay little song called The Broken Hip, was written while he lay for 25 days slowly rotting with gangrene.