CHAPTER 30
The Sidney family, of whom the Tudor poet Sir Philip Sidney is the most famous, also made speedy progress under the new dynasty of the Tudors. The first to come to notice was Sir William Sidney, who at the Battle of Flodden (1513) commanded the right wing of the English army. Henry VIII, delighted by this victory over the Scots, knighted him immediately. He was also rewarded with the Lordship of Kingston-upon-Hull and the manor of Myton, previously the property of a leading Yorkist pretender who Henry had executed in 1513. In 1514, Sir William Sidney witnessed the coronation of the King’s sister Mary after she married Louis XII, the King of France. As the bridegroom was an old man at the time and died a few months later, she was soon free to marry again. This time, it was to Sir William’s cousin Charles Brandon, 1st Earl of Suffolk. As with the Herbert family, these royal connections did Sidney’s career no harm at all. In 1517, he became Henry VIII’s ‘Knight of the Body’, and in 1520, he accompanied the King to the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’, an extravagance that nearly bankrupted the Royal Exchequer.
In 1538, after further loyal service, he was appointed Steward and tutor to Henry’s son Prince Edward, then one year old. This appointment was to prove especially fortuitous, not just for him personally but for the future of the entire Sidney family. Edward was seven years younger than Sir William Sidney’s own son Henry, but the two became friends and were often together. This again proved advantageous. In 1539, Henry VIII gave William land in Kent and Sussex in exchange for his estates further north. The old King died eight years later in 1547 and was succeeded by his son, who, although still only a boy, was crowned Edward VI in 1552. His de facto regent was John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who had previously been Chief Minister to Henry VIII. Dudley’s eldest daughter, Mary, married Edward’s friend, Sir Henry Sidney, in 1551. No doubt guided by Dudley, the boy King rewarded his old tutor, Sir Henry Sidney’s father William, by giving him Penshurst Place, a magnificent country house and estate near Tonbridge in Kent.
Perhaps none of the parties involved – the Tudors, the Herberts, the Sidneys and the Dudleys – realized it at the time, but together, in the next generation, they would change the world. Indeed, the scene was now being set for the cult of the Tudor Roses to give birth to what is sometimes referred to as the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.