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The martial adventures of the New Arcadia have produced a good deal of critical opinion about what such knightly escapades might suggest about Sidney’s political philosophy. Sidney’s position, as a well-connected courtier who opposed Elizabeth’s marriage to Anjou and who favoured a more active foreign policy in defence of the Protestant religion, provides a ready point of departure for such discussions. In this chapter, I engage with the strand of critical thought that finds there to be a mismatch between the chivalric ethos of the New Arcadia and Sidney
figures who died in these years reflect deep unhappiness with British foreign policy in general and the failures in military and political leadership. 6 While military deaths were infrequent through most of James’ reign, a single late Elizabethan one had a decades-long influence. When Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586 during a military campaign in Holland, an unprecedented abundance
, who lamented his death. However, in pursuing this aspect of the Prince’s potential future, poets were treading upon the delicate ground of prophecy and foreign policy, and suggestions of what a valiant Henry might have done could implicitly impugn the present reality of what King James was not doing . 64 In lamenting this lost potential reign of Henry, poets most often envision a time of British
speculation that the verse epistle rejects. ‘Yow men of Brittaine’, then, is similar to other attempts during King James’ reign to limit or control public discussion of what he regarded as arcana imperii . The people should refrain from attempting to read signs beyond their ken, whether those are of the heavens or of the king and his foreign policy. 35 It would seem that James
problem if the necessity of fighting should arise. Writing under James, Fletcher may have grappled with an even more fraught situation, given the king's aspiration to terminate all hostilities with foreign powers and be hailed as Rex pacificus . James's pacifism was strikingly at odds with the bellicose image the English had of their own country: a foreign policy inspired by the motto Beati pacifici made the nation appear to their eye effeminate, weak, and more vulnerable to foreign attacks. As the years went by, James became less and less popular
back to the elegies that marked the death of Sir Philip Sidney a generation earlier in similar circumstances; these serve as a touchstone to consider how the genre had developed over the decades since. While largely praising the heroic dead, the 1620s funeral elegies reflect deep unhappiness with British foreign policy in general and with specific military and political leadership, especially that of the Duke of
(1626), Ralegh’s ‘ghost’ or ‘voice’ was used to articulate an anti-Buckingham and anti-Spanish position. 89 More than in the immediate elegies, these works put aside Ralegh’s earlier image as a disliked favourite and courtier, and the animosity between him and Essex was also forgotten as the two took up parallel places in a narrative of aggressive foreign policy. Conclusion The
Government of James I’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39 (1999), 357–81; Miller, Roman Triumphs , 140–2; Paulina Kewes, ‘Julius Caesar in Jacobean England’, Seventeenth Century 17 (2002), 155–86; Jowitt, ‘Colonialism’, 475–94; Marina Hila, ‘Dishonourable Peace: Fletcher and Massinger's The False One and Jacobean Foreign Policy’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 72 (2007), 21–30; Marina Hila, ‘“Justice shall never heare ye, I am justice”: Absolutist Rape and Cyclical History in John Fletcher's The Tragedy of Valentinian
political division, nor do I wish to suggest that the Old Arcadia does not display such a consciousness. On the contrary, Sidney, as heir to the title of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, until June 1581 (when Leicester’s son was born), was acutely aware of the political struggles at court and their significance for Elizabethan foreign policy. Indeed, the international consequences of the divisions at home were of great importance to both Sidney and his sister, and they were influenced in their less pessimistic philosophical outlooks by continental Protestant activists
sought to woo Elizabeth into accepting his transnational vision. Indeed, Essex and Elizabeth often had conflicting political approaches to foreign policy (to put it mildly), and their disagreements were driven by fundamentally different philosophies. Elizabeth and key statesmen such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil viewed international affairs through a domestic lens that was rooted in