Part two Sir Philip Sidney

I Leiden visits England

One should in all fairness admit that the Anglo-Dutch political alliance of 1585 was an inevitability rather than the fulfilment of a long-cherished general desire. Both partners had first exhausted all possibilities within their traditional French policies. Anjou had been a last chance, and the episode, a meeting-ground for Anglo-Dutch political and non-political interests1, had in its more promising stages seemed a happy compromise. It must have been doubly painful for Rogers to have been imprisoned at a time when all eyes were fixed on a liaison different from the one which he and his party were known to support. But that policy, too, proved a débâcle. A general re-orientation was inevitable, and became even more urgent when William of Orange was assassinated in 1584.

Dousa sailed for England immediately after that date to investigate in an unofficial capacity the chances of an English union, while at the same time Henry III of France was approached with an official offer of sovereignty over the Netherlands. The latter's refusal left the disturbed States without an alternative, and the small but persistent faction of English-minded politicians2 - Dousa among them -

whose history went back to the seventies, that is to ‘the days of Rogers’, without serious rivals. Even if the Queen refused the open commitment of a Dutch crown, an Anglo-Dutch union was only a matter of time and the Protestant Walsingham-Leicester-Sidney (-Rogers) approach the only immediate, if slightly unpopular, solution. The surrender of Antwerp - ironically by one of her great champions, Marnix - caused Elizabeth at last to decide in favour of the Protestant-league policy. The sending of Leicester and Sidney to the Low Countries, therefore, was the logical outcome of a party-policy which had been established in readiness for the day when the Queen would sign her treaty with the Dutch ambassadors1 and her historic Declaration2.

An increase of literary contacts was one of the most likely consequences of the foregoing development, especially as they had been initiated by those very men who were now to take the lead in political matters. But it is wrong to assume that political and literary contacts remained strictly interdependent. As in the days of Rogers' imprisonment when literary friends had been faithful in spite of a decreased official interest, Leicesters future loss of popularity was not to result in a termination of literary relations.

This may to some extent be explained by remembering that Dousa's circle, though central in the forthcoming Anglo-Dutch relationship, can never really be identified with the policy of an English Puritan party. The participation of liberal Leiden in the welcoming of English Protestant leaders seems the result of established affinities with English humanists rather than a mere bid for new patronage. Thus, so mixed an assembly - Lipsius, a liberal Catholic, Dousa, truly Erasmian, and the anti-Roman-Catholic Van Hout - could appear as ‘Leicestrians’ in 1586, yet avoid involvement in the embarrassing Leicester coup in Leiden of the following year and dishonour when the English episode proved an altogether unfortunate interregnum.

Moving freely within the limits of political developments, a small group of Leiden poets visited London in the summer and autumn of 1585 and were at last enabled to meet their fellow English poets. Of this group only one, Dousa, leader of the representatives of Holland, was on diplomatic business. But in his train and that of the other official speakers was a host of unnamed young men from Holland, France, and the Protestant parts of Germany and Denmark, who had crossed the sea to finish their education in the courtly setting of a foreign embassy. Among them was Dousa's oldest son with his great friend Dominicus Baudius and another close companion of their undergraduate days, Georgius Benedicti (who had already spent some time at Cambridge).

It will be necessary to isolate carefully those few who matter from the rest of that spectacular crowd. The four from Leiden to begin with, who had left a regretful Lipsius behind, found faithful Rogers waiting for them instead: ‘ye gods,’ Lipsius wrote,

how I have wanted to come, how I should still want to come. How is our Rogers? I envy you because of him, and him because of you; we would have chatted, we would have conferred, daily, whenever we could, as long as we could.1

Their contacts with Sidney were closer than ever: ‘please,’ Lipsius continued in this same letter, ‘convey all my respects and love to Burghley, Sidney, and Dyer’. To these names should be added that of Melissus who ‘had sailed from Dieppe to England in the autumn of 158[5] to offer his poems to the Queen at Richmond, and there remained with the Court that winter’2. He was to leave again early in 1586 ‘after he had visited the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the libraries with their rich stock of old books, at which journey his travelling companion was Hieronimus Groslotius Lislaeus, a French nobleman who had been educated under George Buchanan3 at the same time as the youthful King of Scotland,

James VI.’ It is evident that this Groslot(ius), too, was to play his literary part in the social engagements of these months.

Originally, Benedicti's presence in England had no connexion with Leicestrian politics at all. Shortly after Baudius had returned to Leiden in the autumn of 1583, the twenty-year old student from Haarlem had gone off to Cambridge1 where he remained until some time after the arrival of the Dutch ambassadors two years later2. The opening lines of Benedicti's epitaph - he died prematurely in 1588 - recall these Cambridge years:

At Cambridge Benedicti himself had composed his Carmina on the death of Orange which appeared in 1585. His return to Leiden did not coincide with Leicester's journey, for it would be 28 March 1586 before Groslotius had occasion to write to Dousa about ‘much beloved young Georgius Benedicti who is leaving us, much to our regret, at the bidding of his patrons.’4 But he was in England and so happened to join the chorus of Leiden poets who used the winter of 1585/86 to sing the praises of the Queen, of Leicester, and of Sidney,5

although Benedicti's laudatory contributions were yet to remain somewhat impersonal.

Not so with Baudius, who, in his autobiography, was subsequently to recall that ‘towards the end of that month [i.e. June 1585] he accompanied the splendid legation which the States then sent to Queen Elizabeth, there made the acquaintance of many men of renowned fame and dignity, but was of all most dear to Philip Sidney’.1 It will soon become evident that there was some truth in this assertion by a man who would later affirm ‘to have in his studies imitated three men above all, the three Philips’, Duplessis, Sidney, and Marnix.2

A central position must be reserved for Dousa, whose leading part in the Dutch embassy had been anticipated by his unofficial mission of the preceding year, 1584, when, apart from his formal duties, he will gladly have fulfilled the customary request which Lipsius had sent him: ‘please greet the gentlemen Philip Sidney and Dyer on my behalf.’3 Nor did he forget his concern for mixing the utile and dulce when travelling in an official capacity. In his Album one can see the steady widening of his English circle: Richard Mulcaster, the renowned educationalist, Richard Thomson, ‘Dutch Thomson’, the biblical scholar, Andrew Melville, the great Scottish theologian and divine poet, and three others on a single day (26 August), viz. Sidney's adventurous friend Archibald Douglas, the Italian Scipio Gentili, and William Camden, whose verse read:

Dousa could therefore claim to have friends in more than one quarter when, soon after his appointment as historiographer of Holland and University Librarian, he returned to England

in 1585 - an event which his cliens Benedicti was not slow to record in a ‘Gratulatio’1.

Nothing would have been more unlike a true humanist than to visit foreign parts empty-handed. Thus one finds Dousa bringing his recently printed Petronius Arbiter, and offering it to Sir Philip Sidney, the greatest ‘arbiter’ of all, with an appropriate Ode2. Dousa had actually dedicated a commentary on this book to Sidney's intermediary, Rogers, only two years before. The London meeting had been prepared by many an earlier contact.

Although it is easy enough to imagine that an exchange of thought would take place under these circumstances, it remains difficult to prove or even indicate what this literary traffic in fact comprised. The problem does not become any the less if one moves from an academic world and its well-preserved correspondence to informal incidents in courtly surroundings. The more fortunate, therefore, that one or two such incidents have left enough traces to allow an attempt at their reconstruction.

One is the Latin translation which Janus Dousa the Younger is known3 to have made of a sonnet by Henry Constable4:

Dousa's translation first appeared in print in 1591, as the twelfth carmen of his ‘Ἐρωτοπαίγνιον’. Since Constable's Diana was not published until 1592 (and no copy is recorded in Dousa's library1), Dousa the Younger must have translated from a manuscript. This need not have been given to him by the author himself, who, incidentally, has recently been recognized as a Protestant politician2. There is no evidence

that either the poet or his father, Sir Robert Constable, followed Leicester to the Low Countries in 1585/61, although at the time of Dousa's London visit Henry Constable may well have been in England to receive Walsingham's instructions for his next continental journey2: his familiarity with the background to Leicester's campaign as revealed in A short view of Cardinall Allen (1588?)3 supports this supposition. But the fact that Constable is never mentioned in the letters and poems of the Dousa circle makes it unlikely that any degree of intimacy existed, so that the manuscript may have reached the younger Dousa through other channels. The translation - which, incidentally, testifies to Dousa's knowledge of the English language - thus presents some interesting problems. Why should he have selected this truly ‘conceited’ love-poem by a writer who had no direct links with the Dutch, and why a sonnet addressed to the legendary Penelope Rich, Sidney's Stella? And who could have shown it to him?

The key to this curious Stella-Constable-Dousa connexion appears to be a Frenchman, Jean Hotman.4 Hotman, whose father François - a good friend of Dousa the Elder's - had been offered a Leiden Chair in 15785, was a former tutor to the children of Sir Amias Poulet, English ambassador at Paris in the late seventies. Through his connexions at Oxford he had entered the English Court, where his familiarity with the Sidney-Leicester circle6 brought him to the post of secretary to Leicester. In this capacity he was to spend the years of Leicester's Governorship in Holland, where the Hotmans already had numerous influential friends. Orange's widow, Louise de Coligny, was not the least important of

these: François Hotman had commemorated her father in his De Furoribus Gallicis.1

Not only does the name of this intimus of Sidney frequently occur in the verses of both Dousas, but it was equally familiar to both Penelope Rich and her ‘other admirer’, Henry Constable, who had also written verses to Louise de Coligny on her father's death. Various references to Constable, for instance in connexion with some controversial treatise of the poet2, survive in Hotman's correspondence. Lady Rich continues to appear until the early seventeenth century when we find Hotman hoping to use her influence to receive from King James I the promised reward for his French translation of the Βασιλιχὸν Δῶρον.3

One published and five unpublished letters of Penelope Rich to the Hotmans, in one of which she apologizes for her ‘mauvase escriture’ because she has lost her ‘fidele guide [Mrs. Hotman?] en la lange françois’4, show, in spite of the somewhat general terms of the short notes, that they were close friends. One of them contains the following lines:

J'ay envoié une letre à ma clarté, et un autre à hilliard lequel je desire monsieur hoteman de doner à luy, et de prandre de luy mon pourtrait, et de la doner à monssieur l'ambassadeur ...5

It may be worth noting that only two references to the lost Hilliard miniature of her are known6, one of which is the sonnet ‘To Mr. Hilliard upon occasion of a picture he made of my Ladie Riche’ by Constable himself. The other letter (also preserved at Haarlem) is more eloquent still. In it Lady Rich makes a mischievous display of her London friends and

admirers: Paul Choart, Seigneur de Buzanval, Henry of Navarre's ambassador in London; Horatio Palavicino, the diplomat-financier; Philip Sidney's brother Robert; Henry Constable; and Hotman himself, whom she admonishes ‘to love his wife and be constant, with all the others’, until the return of ‘la plus constante de ceux qui sont nommez en ce papier, hors mis une, Penelope Riche’.1

No date is given in this epistolary gem - which Hotman rightly preserved among his more serious letters - but 15892 is probably correct. It is useful to remember, however, that as early as 1585/6 or possibly earlier these same men worked closely together on behalf of Navarre when the combined English, French, German, and Dutch summer campaigns for 1586 and 1587 were being prepared in London.3 Whether Lady Rich played an active or merely decorative part at such an early date is uncertain, but she may have been on the scene. It seems justified, at any rate, to surmise that the setting of the 1589 letter had existed for some years, thus providing a fitting background to the translation of Constable's sonnet, which was probably made through Hotman's mediation in the younger Dousa's ‘period of English interest’. This period was limited, as we shall see, to the years 1585-6 only; but in it we find young Dousa expressing such sentiments as:

This rude song, my Muse, you must carry to our Hotman. ... It will take you two days before you reach Arnhem ... where you will find him busy writing or studying, or relaxing has mind by reading or walking. And if he receives you well and kindly, then, if Hotman should send you to him as well, you will venture with less fear and trepidation to submit yourself to the judgement of the learned Sidney. Beware of hastily importuning the polite ears of Sidney, and make sure that you do not obstruct his business

and occupations. But if he will somehow have leisure, free from all cares and worries, then o Muse, then remember to approach him - but reverently and with modesty ...1

Concerning the small group of poems in which the Constable ‘adumbratio’ is found, Dousa in his ‘Ad lectorem’ of 1590/1 writes that he will not apologize for their lack of refinement because many of them ‘slipped out three years ago’ when their author was only ‘sixteen or even fifteen years old’.2 Considering, therefore, firstly Dousa the Younger's brief though active interest in English letters and his literary contact with Sidney's milieu through Jean Hotman at the time of Leicester's Dutch campaign, secondly the French Huguenot background to Lady Rich's courtly clique in which Constable's poems originated (perhaps well before 15883), and, finally, his own allusions ‘To the Reader’, there is reason to believe that Dousa's rendering was made in about 1586, and that it went back to a copy - necessarily in MS. - which he will have obtained at the time of his youthful visit to the Protestant Court of England in 1585. As regards Dousa the Younger's acquisition of this material, Hotman's close friendship with Sidney's Stella4 (or Constable's Diana) and his familiarity with these French-minded poet-politicians leave

little need to wonder how and why some of the Diana poems came to the notice of his best friends in Holland - including the son and companion of ambassador Dousa, who translated one of them in admiration of the poetry, if not of that incomparable Lady herself.

This was not the only English poem which the young Dousa translated. His ‘book of love-play’, the ‘Ἐρωτοπαίγνιον’, consisted of twenty carmina, followed by one ‘Triumphus’ and five Dutch ‘Epigrammata’. The first two carmina had no special title, nos. 3-7 were headed ‘Ex Graeco’, and 8-11 ‘Ex Graeco Meleagri’. No. 12 (the Constable translation) was not subtitled but headed by the words ‘Adumbratum de Anglico Henrici Conestabilis’, with ‘Carmen XII’ underneath. The later editor of his Complete Poems1 therefore regarded not only ‘Carmen XII’ as an imitation of Constable, but also the following numbers 13-21, and typographically gave all ten the appearance of belonging together for that reason.

In the absence of further demonstrable parallels - no extant Constable poems match the numbers 13-21 - one would be inclined to regard the editor's attribution as a mistake. But then one discovers that the first (Dutch) sonnet of the five ‘Epigrammata quaedam Belgico idiomate’ which follow immediately after is a literal translation of another sonnet by Constable2:

Although the other four Dutch sonnets again have no obvious parallel in any extant Constable sonnet, it might be argued that Dousa's ‘Epigramma III’ also looks like an adumbratio:

The most logical conclusion, therefore, is that the whole series of carmina XII - XX, ‘Triumphus’ (XXI), and the following five Dutch sonnets were translated or at least derived from Constable's love poetry. This need not be contradicted by the absence of the majority of their originals. We know that Dousa the Younger used a mansucript which was circulated privately before a number of poems were printed. Constable's original set of Diana-poems may therefore have included many others which now only survive in the Leiden adumbrationes. In conclusion, this printed collection of Dutch love sonnets and other poems was one result probably of the pre-Leicestrian embassy of 1585, and perhaps entirely a translation from the English.

Hotman acted as a link between Dousa the Younger and Constable. It would not be difficult to find, through Hotman, other names which would widen the London circle considerably. These names will, of course, help to define the original Sidney-Leiden group to which Hotman, for one, truly belonged. ‘How much laughter have we shared in jest and wine,’ Dousa was to write to Groslot, ‘I, Hotman, and you, together with Melissus’; and, he added, the fifth member who used to enlarge their carefree ‘quadrumvirate’ was Rogers, or ‘ipse Sidneius pater elegantiarum’.1

Again through Hotman, the ‘quadrumvir’, one may associate Scipio Gentili with the Leiden visitors a little more closely than an inscription in Dousa's Album need imply. Both his Leiden sojourn in the winter of 1582/32 and his printed paraphrases of the Psalms3 and Tasso translations (some dedicated to ‘the outstanding poet’ Sidney4) may have brought the Italian refugee into contact with Dousa's circle; and perhaps through his brother and Jean Hotman he became acquainted with Sidney - on the birth of whose

daughter Elizabeth he wrote and published in 1584 the poem Nereus. Some seven years later, in a letter addressed to ‘my Scipio’, Hotman still had occasion to recall ‘the carmina which so pleased our Sidney’.1 Indeed, it is evident that Scipio, the poet ‘whom all England admired’2, was a familiar name in 1586 both as a talented writer and as a legal scholar3. His brother Alberico was the great pioneer of international law, who, with a letter of recommendation from Leicester, had been registered at Oxford University in 1581 on the same day as Jean Hotman.4 This Gentili's early publications, a few years before his Oxford appointment as Regius Professor of Law, had included books dedicated to Leicester, Dyer, and Palavicino.5 On 21 July 1585, coinciding with the Dutch and French negotiations with the Queen, he dedicated his De Legationibus libri tres to Sidney whom he describes, while defending Leicester6, as the ideal ambassador. The history of Alberico's book re-introduces Hotman, for De Legationibus was based on the legal advice which those two Protestant refugees had given to the Privy Council concerning the disputed criminal immunity of the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, in 1584.7 Thus Scipio Gentili's name in Dousa's Album emphasizes the fact that contacts between Sidney's circle and the gentlemen from Leiden were no longer exclusively dependent on one or two earlier friendships.

In this way new names continue to appear. For example,

Dousa's Ode on the Queen's birthday1 to Alexander Neville, future editor of the Cambridge poems on Sidney's death, enumerates ten scholars, some previously mentioned, some ‘new’, yet every one of them in some way connected in England with Sidney and Rogers, or in Holland with Lipsius and Dousa. They are Abraham Hartwell, the antiquary, Andrew Melville, Alexander Dickson from Cambridge2, Scipio Gentili, Richard Mulcaster, Abraham Ortelius, the future ‘Arminian’ professor Peter Baro3, Georgius Benedicti, William Whitaker the Calvinist theologian4, and William Camden. It seems to follow that the number of ‘secondary participants’ in the Anglo-Leiden meetings of 1585 is not strictly limited.

The poetic traces of their English visit, as far as the Leiden group is concerned, are too numerous for discussion. If Dousa wrote Latin verses on the Queen's birthday, so did his son5. Dousa wrote a poem to Sidney when offering a copy of Petronius Arbiter, and his son used Sidney's appointment as Governor of the isle of Walcheren as the occasion to make a similar poetic effort. Dousa the Younger addresses Sir Philip Sidney - like others had done at the time of the 1577 embassy to Germany - as ‘princeps Philippus Sidnaeius, Henrici Hiberniae proregis filius’, and writes:

O Sidney, to whom Pallas has given her own arts, Hermes eloquence, Mars valour, Cynthius the art of poetry, whom Suada has granted her very essence1, Plutus richess, Cypris beauty, the Graces wit; where should I begin to sing your praises and the eminence of your wit (your skill in Latin and Greek will surely be honoured in greater poetry than this) ...?2

This is not very fortunate verse, supporting the conclusion that poems in praise of Sidney tend to become more stereotyped with the growth of Sidney's own reputation. It is, for instance, almost impossible to see anything personal in the elaborate Sidney-Ulysses comparison with which the young Dousa continues. Of course, there is a convention behind it, and the social distance between ‘Princeps Sidnaeius’ and the eldest son of ‘Jonkheer’ Jan van der Does must be taken into account. Or was his extreme formality, one might almost say reverence, an artificial means towards establishing a relationship of the same nature as client and patron with ‘the common Rendevous of Worth in his time’3?

Let us turn to his friend Baudius first. Any Maecenas was welcome to this brilliant lawyer-theologian-historian whose inclination towards the bohemian life necessitated his having rich patrons. Dousa, on some occasions, was one of them. Though probably a most unreliable character, his ready wit, drinking habits, and pleasant conversation made Baudius good company, an opinion held by even so retiring a scholar as the great J.J. Scaliger4. In any case, apart from writing

the customary poems on the Queen1, he used his time successfully enough to provide the financial basis for a life of leisure. In September he pointed out to Lipsius that lack of occupation had now led to habitual inertia.2 A little later he sent Sir Philip Sidney a poem begging his patronage in no uncertain terms.3 In November Sidney sailed for Zeeland and arrived at Flushing on the twenty-first of that month. From there Baudius sent this other letter to Lipsius, a remarkable document not only illustrating the working of Baudius' mind but also throwing some curious light on the conditions in the familia of a ‘Maecenas’:

They say that friends mean wealth. That this is true I daily experience. Because, either through some happy fate of mine - as I persuade myself to believe - or on account of my own merits - which, however, I do not wish to arrogate to myself - I may freely rejoice in having met with numerous special friends whose works and courtesy have always been most honourable and useful to me. I leave out all the others, but this one man I must speak about, Dousa, I say, and Mr. Rogers, through whose kind offices it has been achieved (nothing more desirable could have fallen to my lot) that I am received into the familia of the illustrious knight Sir Philip Sidney. Should I, to you, bring to mind his wisdom, kindness, and his other gifts?
Our wit is incapable of describing the bounds of such praises,
Nor can it celebrate such men in proper verse.
And yet, I do not know why, here I am a mere nobody, as they say; not indeed because I like it, nor, I believe, through any fault of mine, except perhaps because of some slight rustic bashfulness. And so, in order to content my mind where I can, I earnestly request you, my Lipsius, that you will relieve the shyness of my nature, by including, when you send him a letter, some indications of your love for me: indications of those things which you, too, can say about me without an infringement of the truth: I trust that I shall honestly answer for your affirmations. I tell you, there is nobody more accessible to you than he is, for he burns with admiration for you. And so, if you will do this, you will not make me love you still more warmly (for my love for you has nowhere to increase), but you will achieve that I owe you more, and at the same time can do more to repay you this debt. Farewell.
[P.S.] Again I beg you, my Lipsius, what I have already im-

plored you concerning the sending of this letter to this place. I am here at Flushing in the house of Van der Beke, the Pensionary. I should really prefer you to send various letters of the same kind at different times. I shall only bring him one, and if more of them should arrive I shall keep the others. My regards to Donellus, and also to the Van Hout family. Farewell, my precious friend.1

The revealing parts of this remarkable letter are the references to Dousa, Rogers, and Lipsius and their actual relationship to Sidney. Whatever one may think of Baudius' pathetic request, this was an instance of a Leiden man whose literary friendship with Dousa and Rogers gave him access to Sidney, the Heros as he called him, and whose personal introduction to the Englishman's familia was a demonstrable result of the long Rogers-Dousa-Sidney friendship of many preceding years. His literary intimacy with Lipsius, which was real enough in spite of that unfortunate letter, could make Baudius a somebody in the eyes of one whom ‘the Universities abroad ... accompted ... a generall Maecenas of Learning’2. Here was a future Leiden professor, whom various generations were to allow no small merit as a neo-Latin poet, finding a patron in Sir Philip Sidney, and consequently travelling in his company for the few remaining months of the latter's life.

One is somewhat doubtful about Baudius' later statement3 that his verse ‘Oratio Sub Persona Belgarum’4 was instrumental in persuading the Queen to support the cause of the Dutch embassy of 1585. Nor is it certain that Sidney's munificence satisfied Baudius' demands. He wrote another poem, probably on new year's day 1586, praising his patron for a love of poetry, but concluding with the inevitable request that ‘you, o good Maecenas, will deign to lift up your insignificant pupil, and lead him away from a slothful life’.5

Sidney would no longer have to be content with minor verses as a reward:

promises Baudius as he enters the beginning of 1586, ready to draft the Sidney epic.

It seems possible that Dousa the Younger - though in his case not for financial motives - also followed the first English contingent and sailed with the new Governor of Flushing, for his presence in London at any later date cannot be proved with certainty.

His father, on the other hand, stayed behind with a small group of diplomats long after the other ambassadors' return to The Hague. Their concern, no doubt, was to hasten the speedy execution of her Majesty's promises, and to advise the English campaigners. During the month which elapsed between Sidney's departure and Leicester's sailing, the ‘quadrumvirate’ of Dousa, Hotman, Groslot and Melissus, with Rogers as an additional member, was in its most active state.

Melissus, it will be remembered, had travelled to England that year to offer his poems to the Queen. ‘His poems’ must have been a shorter manuscript copy of the Schediasmata poetica, printed in 1586 but dedicated to the Queen ‘at Paris, August 1585’1. This was by no means his first poetic presentation to Elizabeth. Three years earlier he had, from Augsburg, written her an Ode pindarica, and the very dedication of that Ode had included a reminder that ‘you have before this received my Schediasmata [of 1574-5]’.2 Of the Ode pindarica two copies had been sent to George Gilpin ‘the Queen's ambassador to Rudolph II’, one with a poem written on the first fly-leaf in which Melissus requested his friend to present the book to Elizabeth and then

to let me know with a felicitous sign what she orders me to execute. You will dedicate me - for what I am worth - to the celebration of her fame, I am all ready to serve England.3

Encouraged perhaps by some ‘felicitous sign’, Melissus had now come to England with two volumes of poetry addressed either to living persons or to his courtly mistress ‘Rosina’. The volumes were divided into ‘books’, and each book was preceded by a poem to Elizabeth. In perfect agreement with the subtle fashions of Eliza's court his mistress of perfection, Rosina, was the mirror of those ideals of courtly love exemplified by the Virgin Queen. Rosina was, so to speak, Melissus' Tudor Rose:

Aurora, hail. Each day when my eyes beheld your beauty I felt happy, for thus I thought clearly to see Elisa, that learned, cultured Queen of England, and in her living image my Rosina, whose fame lies enwrapped in many shining books of songs, long celebrated by a thousand poets' verses.1

Whether it was by his ability to address the right people in the proper fashion, or by his familiarity with numerous English writer-politicians, Melissus appears to have found the English Court hospitable. No doubt his long-established friendship with the Sidneys, Philip and his brother Robert, to whom he devoted another poem in the 1586 Schediasmata, increased the delights of his London sojourn. This poem, an elaborate plea for simplicity to be fashioned after the unpainted naturalness of sweet Diona and Diana, was at least a more personal tribute than the formal verses of his colleagues.2

Close friends already,3 Dousa and Melissus, like Rogers and Sidney, shared a literary Parisian background and thence a particular interest in modern literature. Neither of them hesitated to recognize their spiritual kinship, while praising the happy Fate that had brought them together under so favourable circumstances.

writes Melissus in the autumn of 1585. To share the delights of our conversations, he continues, ‘your son is with you, a boy of lively wit, whom Melpomene has deemed worthy her loving care by teaching him the fine arts of the Muses, whom she has made a Latin poet of great merit’. You, the ambassador, find the Queen divinely agreeable to yourself and your cause of liberty. ‘The virgins of The Hague prepare with tender hands the golden gifts for Dudley their leader ..., Leiden expects you, too, and meditates an eternal epic in honour of you as much as of Leicester. But do not go so soon, Lord of Noordwijk.’1 This poem of Melissus was to be included in an anthology entirely devoted to Dousa2 - no slight honour for a living poet - and Dousa writes to Melissus in much the same manner3.

Meanwhile arrangements for Leicester's departure were under way and Dousa was ready to precede the Lord Governor, in order to assist perhaps in the preparations of his festive welcome. Towards the end of November both Melissus and Groslotius wrote in Dousa's Album.4 Soon afterwards, probably early in December, Dousa was notified that

I and Groslotius will see you before you go, as we promised yesterday. Therefore, my dear Dousa, let us know what hour would suit you and not be inconvenient to you and your time-schedule. If you expect to be asked for a repast we shall wait for you afterwards, and then we shall come to attend the ship with mutual good wishes. A poem may follow you and your son.5

The poem followed indeed, recalling how

your faithful friends stood on the riverbank when the tide went out, myself, Rogers, and Groslotius, following the Poet with sincerest wishes.6

After Dousa's safe arrival1 Melissus tarried in England a little longer. Few letters survive, but they imply a continuous correspondence between Melissus, Hotman, Dousa, and Sidney. When Dousa sailed - for Flushing, it would seem - Melissus asked him to give his ‘kindest regards to Philip Sidney, whom I have known so well for many years’.2 Early in the new year he sent his old friend via Hotman a ‘munus’, which was in all likelihood his printed Schediasmata:

I was glad to learn from your letter, my Hotman, that Sidney liked my present. I wish I had the good fortune to see him here; my negotiations at Court would be concluded very much more quickly and conveniently if he were present ... Greetings again to Lipsius and Dousa and the other friends.3

Nevertheless he could write to Walsingham a week later that

my reason for writing is to inform you of my departure to France ... Nothing keeps me here any longer, except waiting for a passport which I shall need at the harbour: I hope that Mr. Secretary Nicasius4 has already made it to be written out and signed by the Queen's hand.
If any letters from my old friend Sir Philip Sidney should be sent to me, I should like to have them forwarded.5

Though the ‘quadrumvirate’ was thus broken up, some events, as we shall see, would again unite them. The first immediately presented itself in the death of the inspiring leader to whom they all had reason to feel indebted: ‘as I am writing this,’ said Groslotius in a somewhat belated letter to Dousa, ‘I receive the news that Pierre de Ronsard has recently died, our principal vates, inferior only to Du Bartas’6. The literary world was deprived of one of its foremost leaders. And every one of the London circle of the preceding months, English or Dutch, French or German, could claim to have lost a great teacher, and, in some cases, also an old friend. Many

years separated Ronsard's death from their days of literary apprenticeship in Paris, from the time which Rogers had recalled in a poem to De Baïf:

when I visited your house, Baïf, and you would read me the graceful delights of your Muse,

with Ronsard, whom

I see before me singing your poems with his refined voice.1

The ode which Melissus now wrote on Ronsard, to be included in the Tombeau recuelli de plusieurs excellens personnages, was composed in London in February 1586, soon after Rogers had reported the news of Ronsard's death; and it was his last poem devoted to French matters. It has been observed that in his ‘Ode de obitu Ronsardi’ Melissus weeps ‘avec plus de sincérité que certains compatriotes du maître. Le génie de Ronsard et les principes dont la Pléiade avait vécu étaient déjà fort démodés dans cette jeune poésie, qui se ralliait autour de Desportes; ils n'avaient rien perdu de leur prestige pour l'imagination toujours fraîche de Melissus.’2 Certainly, Ronsard's undiminished prestige to Melissus may account for some of the tears, and it is curious that the two poets whom he introduced in this same ode in order to share the grief were Rogers and Dousa.3 The German, the Englishman, and the Dutchman, who had been equally inspired by a poetic example which was then a quarter of a century old, must have looked slightly old-fashioned in the company of the other ‘excellens personnages’. The French eulogized a man who had been ‘a pioneer in his day’. Melissus' poem, on the other hand, serves to remind us of how far Dutch, English, and German poetry still lagged behind.

It may not be inappropriate to consider at this point a few questions connected with the development of vernacular poetry in England and Holland. When confronted with such quantities of Latin verse a modern reader will find himself

prejudiced in favour of vernacular writing.1 This is curious because the authors themselves seemed hardly conscious of any such problem of preference. Sidney himself never apologizes for English poetry as opposed to Latin writing, nor does he reveal an impulse to defend the English language against a tyrannical insistence by scholars on Latin. His very examples of great contemporary authors are almost exclusively Latin poets, and he omits the ‘obvious’ point in favour of a vernacular, even in a Defense which was so clearly written for an English public. ‘Latin or English’ was not one of his problems, and his assertion is simply that English was no less suitable a medium for poetry than any other language.

To understand the Dutch interest in English writers it is worth considering for a moment how much they knew of the language and literature of Britain. The prestige of English and Dutch as literary languages was only just being established, although by 1585 some men in both countries had begun to indicate or prove the merits of their mother tongue in comparison with other ‘vulgar speeches’. Though it should be noted that a philological interest for its own sake was developing at the time, the motive for learning a modern language other than French would often have been, in the case of scholarly poets, that of wanting to read other literatures. We know that Sidney had some acquaintance with German, but the absence of a literary reason for mastering the tongue Languet had advised him to learn may have accounted for his abandoning these exercises2. One is of course rarely told about proficiency or motive, but when Dousa the Younger translated Constable's sonnets into Dutch as well as Latin, and did so with more than average skill, this can only be evidence of a good knowledge of the languages. We may assume, perhaps, that all the Leiden visitors of that year learnt ‘literary English’ to varying degrees of fluency. One poem by the same Dousa3 suggests that he knew Sidney's Arcadia, and he was not necessarily an exception. Sometimes

writers attribute proficiency in foreign languages to their contemporaries, but one cannot be too careful. Melissus, we are told, ‘apart from his own language, which is high German, and those which are taught at school and in the Universities, was very fond of Italian, French, Spanish, and also Dutch and English.’1 Melissus himself, however, allows us to see this tribute in the right proportions in a letter to Dousa while both were in London: ‘if I stay here any longer, I shall make an effort to learn English’.2 And that was only two months before he left England.

Conversely, in 1586 there is the problem of whether any of the English knew Dutch - i.e. Low Dutch. But before that time such questions never seem to occur in an Anglo-Dutch context - at least we never hear of them. Nor, in some cases, is there any need to create the problem.

It has never been thought strange that foreign writers should have unanimously praised Philip Sidney in his capacity as a poet,3 not only in 1585/6 but even at the time of his German embassy much earlier4. Had they all read his English works, his Astrophel and Stella, his Psalms, and also his greatest piece of poesy, the Arcadia? Perhaps at one time, but certainly not in 1577, before these works were written. It is obvious that his admirers had more than these English books in mind. Rogers has given the answer at a very early date when, declaring his poetic inability to do justice to the wonders of Eliza's Court and calling them a subject befitting ‘the voice of Phoebus, or of Sidney, or Dyer’, he said of Sidney:

Whether you wish to speak out in Latin, or prefer the accents of Gallia, or rather express your feelings in Italian speech, nobody could do it more gracefully or better than you.5

Much later Groslotius was to make the same point and even add another item, Greek, to his specified account of Sidney's multilingual Muse:

Second to none he was in the arts of the Camoenae; witness his English, Italian, Latin, French, and Greek poetry: such laurels deck

so great an image, to me they are as many burning torches of life; because of them, for ever he shall live.1

Groslotius - though a Frenchman - gives pride of place to Sidney's English poetry, as does Rogers when he emphasizes the particular abundance of the poet's wit ‘when your passion takes possession of our [i.e. English] arts’. But almost equal tribute is paid to his (now lost) achievements in Latin and Greek, French and Italian. Perhaps Thomas Moffet thought of these same literary compositions when he discussed Sidney's oeuvre under the heading ‘adolescentia’.2

This completes our picture of a renaissance poet who without these other accomplishments would have looked strangely disloyal to his own ideal of a complete courtier. As a practising amateur-polyglot he was as true to the model as any other respectable member of the Republic of Letters. This also helps to explain why he was recognized as a confrère by many a foreign poet whose skill in the English language or interest in ‘Areopagitican’ experiments is easy to doubt. We must therefore assume that Sidney's concern with English poesy and the authority with which he compared its merits had their foundation in his practice in non-English verse. This he had probably written with greater ease since he was able to draw from the established tradition of the ‘literary languages’. Some Dutch writers were to pursue the same course, which the Pléiade poets themselves had indicated (after the example of Du Bellay) by using Latin and Greek for literary composition as much as the vernacular. And even Ronsard, the French renovator, began ambitiously as a Latin poet and never deserted the humanists' world3.

It follows that language barriers did not arise. Nor can the half-truth be maintained that ‘Sidney est le seul écrivain anglais de son temps qui ait joui d'une réputation européenne; toutefois, celle-ci était fondée non sur ses ouvrages qui, de son vivant, ne furent pas connus sur le Continent, mais sur sa personnalité de gentilhomme ami des lettres.’4

In approaching their underestimated vernaculars, Sidney's

circle and the Leiden poets ran almost completely parallel. In this only did they differ: that in a non-academic setting of Ladies and Courtiers, the English works of Sir Philip Sidney had a better chance of survival, while the classical spirit of the University of Leiden would take better care of nonvernacular manuscripts. In fact, the survival of manuscripts was determined more by the above practice than by relative merit.

Towards the end of the crucial year 1585, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, at long last sailed for Holland to join his nephew and lead the Queen's forces in the foreign field.

They were both preceded by the formal adulation of the four Leiden poets, who were seconded by one Arnoldus Eick(ius) from Utrecht. This peculiar versifier - perhaps another unofficial member of the Dutch legation - wrote and printed two ‘Elogia’1, one to Leicester, and one to Sidney which he subtitled De vera nobilitate. The Sidney eulogy, a set of ‘Odes Horatianae’, was dedicated to the author's son Justus; although the tract was really addressed to the sitter for the portrait ‘of true nobility’, since Eickius signed his pages of exalted clichés with:

Tuus cliens Utrix dabat
Hoc Eickius
Tuam aucupans clarissime
vir gratiam.2

His odes, unfortunately, deserve no further inspection in respect of either contents or merit. The end of a bombastic ‘To the Reader’ includes the line: ‘may Dousa, the Attican Muse, support me in this with greater force’. A reader of the

copy which is now preserved in the British Museum1 was provoked to add in manuscript a distich ‘to the critic’:

Dousa, who will to reprove this vates and accuse him of a wart, hiding the while the large tumours of his monstrosity?2

So acid a contemporary comment relieves us from the task of discussing the Utrecht pamphlet. Its subjects, however, Leicester and Sidney, deserve more attention. For in the opening weeks of 1586 Holland was to witness an uncommon yet at the same time truly ‘renaissance’ spectacle, the triumphant entry of the chivalry of England headed by two noblemen who were known to be, the one a principal patron of letters, the other a renowned poet.