Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hello everybody. Before we get started with the show today, we are coming up quickly on our live streaming event that is happening on March two at looped live dot com. That is where you can go to buy tickets to get a v I p add on that includes a meat and greet with Holly and me. We also have the link directly to the ticket page pend up at the top of our Facebook and our Twitter. We are so excited about this. We hope we will see you all there on our virtual screens once more. That is that looped live dot com, or you can find the ticket on all our social media. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today we are going to talk about someone who's been on my list for a while, but I kind of finally sidled up next to it, and that is Mary Sydney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. She was a patron of the arts. She was the first woman to publish an English language play, which was a translation, and the first woman to publish pastoral poetry in English. Which is something that she got away with because she was writing for the Queen. Um. Mary is really interesting because she was an incredibly wily woman in her life. She definitely understood her position as a woman in the Elizabethan world and what its limitations and possibilities were, and she was able to carefully step around the obstacles of that society, finding ways that she could do the things she wanted without stirring up criticism of her behavior. And she also was smart enough to leverage her husband's wealth and her family connections to support artists, and she became truly influential in the literary world of her time. Just as a quick aside on her name, sometimes we'll just call her Mary, sometimes Mary Sydney, sometimes Mary Sidney Herbert, and that's just because you'll see her in all those ways if you look up any biography of her um as well as the Countess of Pembroke. So that is the scoop, and we're going to talk about her her influence on so much of the things we read today. Yeah. So Mary Sydney was born on October fifteen, sixty one at tick and Hill Palace in Worcestershire, near Bewdley. Her father was Sir Henry Sydney and her mother was Mary Dudley. At the time, Sir Henry, who had been really close to King Edward the Sixth before his death, was serving as Governor of the Marches of Wales. This is the region of England that's right up against the Welsh border. Mary Dudley also had deep ties to the crown. Her father was the Earl of Northumberland and had been very influential during Edward the Sixth Rain. When Mary was a child, the family spent time in Dublin, where her father was Lord Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland, and in pan shirt Kent, where the Sydney family home was located, and this very Protestant family was very close to Queen Elizabeth the First. Her brother, Robert Dudley, is that Robert Dudley that had been the Queen's favorite for a long time. Um Mary Dudley, her mother, was a lady in waiting to the Queen and she had actually nursed Elizabeth through smallpox, contracting it herself in the process and becoming, at least by her husband's account, disfigured. As a result. Mary Sydney and her sister Ambrosia were unique for girls of their time because they got a really well rounded and extensive education. They learned the things that were fairly typical for girls, a bit of music through singing in lute lessons, tutoring, and activities like needlework, but they were also taught literature and multiple languages, including French, Italian, and Latin. Mary had three brothers, Robert Thomas and her older brother, Sir Philip Sidney, who became the most well known of the siblings. You will often see rite ups about Mary that subtitle her as the sister of Philip Sidney, but he is not referred to with the same sibling definer usually. Philip was seven years older than marying he was a scholar and a poet. He served the country in the military, and Philip was very important in Mary's life. The two were close and they would collaborate on writing projects at times, and the events of Philip's life deeply impacted the course of Mary's life, as we're going to discuss in just a moment. Philip was well known and well liked in his time, but he made the mistake of criticizing Queen Elizabeth the first for negotiating the possibility of a marriage to a French suitor that would have meant she was marrying a Catholic, which he thought was a terrible idea, and for being critical of the Queen, he was soon banished from court. When Mary was fourteen, she was invited to the court of Queen Elizabeth the First with the promise that the Queen would take quote a special care of the teenager. This invitation was catalyzed by the death of Mary's sister Ambrosia. The Queen couched it as an invitation to get away from Wales. It seems likely she just wanted to give Mary a chance to just get out of a grieving home. Mary was married not that long thereafter, less than two years later, at the age of fifteen, to Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, who was in his thirties. Herbert was a friend of Mary's father, Sir Henry Sydney, and this match made her one of the wealthiest women in England. It also offered her new husband's family a lot of influence. The new role as a wife was initially a little bit overwhelming for her, but Mary pretty quickly hit her stride and she realized just what she could accomplish with her husband's influence and wealth. The couple lived primarily in their residence of Wilton House in Salisbury. Wilton House had been built on the land of the Wilton Abbey by William Herbert, the first Earl of Pembroke. It still exists today. It's open to the public, although the current structure has been changed a good bit due to a fire in the seventeenth century. They also spent time at Baynard's Castle in London that had been built in the fourteen twenties, and that structure was destroyed in the Fire of London in sixteen sixty six. It is believed that Mary's brother Philip may have visited Wilton House in fifteen eighty and spent some time there, during which time he wrote the book The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, which is dedicated to Mary. This sort of residency in exile from court may have also planted the seeds of Wilton House being a haven for other literary minds of the day. It eventually had the nickname the Wilton Circle that was cultivated by Mary, although not until several years later Mary had her first child in fifteen eighty. This was a daughter named Catherine, who sadly didn't live to adulthood, and she had another daughter named Anne, who did live to be an adult, but still died very young. She was in her twenties. She also had two sons, William and Philip. Catherine actually died on the same day that Philip was born, when she was just three. Mary's family has enjoyed a good bit of fame throughout the centuries, aside from her brother, in part because Mary and Henry Soon's were the beneficiaries of the dedication of Shakespeare's first folio in sixty three. The famed writer refers to them as end quote incomparable pair of brethren. But William and Philip were not the only members even of that immediate family to receive notice from writers of the day. Edmund Spencer, Nicholas Bretton, and Thomas Morley, among others, dedicated their works to Marry and that is because she was a dedicated patron of poetry and the arts in general. But her in depth work in the arts did not start right away. So we just mentioned the death of Mary's toddler, Catherine, that happened in fifteen eighty four, and this was the first of several deaths in Mary's life. In fifteen six, she lost both her father and her mother within just a few months of each other, and that was at a time when all of her brothers were away at war. England was trying to regain Holland, which was Protestant, from Spain, which was Catholic. Mary was the sole member of her family at her mother's funeral, and then this was followed by the death of her dear brother Philip in October of that same year. That happened because the wound that he had received in battle had become infected. The death of Philip, to whom she was so close, on top of these other losses, was just devastating for Mary. She took two full years to grieve, and when she emerged from this period, during which she stayed exclusively in the country, she returned to London in a literal parade, and she was ready to really invest in the literary world. And this time it was with the idea that she was going to honor her brother, who had been deeply mourned by the public as well. She commissioned elegies of Philip, of which there had already been many, but patronage for those had waned, so she kind of took up that effort, and Abraham France, Edmund Spencer, and Thomas Moffatt all wrote of Sir Philip Sidney under this desire of Mary's. This is really when she established Wilton House as a nexus point of the arts, something that was described as being like a college where learning and writing were encouraged and supported by the Duchess of Pembroke, who presided over some of the most prolific writers of the day. And she worked consistently to elevate the literary reputation of her brother Philip, who she felt should be seen as one of the greatest writers of their time, like she wanted him to be the chaucer of their era, and this included publishing a number of his works posthumously. Coming up, we'll talk about how Mary was not just a supporter of writers, but also did a great deal of her own writing. We will dig into that after we pause for a sponsor break. Mary Sidney was an incredibly smart person. She was, in addition to being a fan of the arts and particularly of literature, a contributor to the works of the day herself and a significant one. Her translation work in particular has been incredibly important. Her first published original work was the Doleful Lay of Clarinda that was published in in a Book of Elegies. She likely wrote other pieces before this, but if so, we don't have any evidence of them or any record. We do know that she wrote this elegy well before it was published, as she mentioned it in correspondence In is something she had written long ago, presumably not long after her brother Philip's death. The language of the poem is very clearly about her coping with the loss of her brother. One Stanza speaks of how the world has been robbed of its joy in the a of a person quote death, The devourer of all the world's delight hath robbed you and reft from me my joy, both you and me and all the world he quite hath robbed of joyance and left sad annoy joy of the world. And shepherd's pride was he shepherd's hope, never like again to see. And this poem concludes with imagery of the deceased having gone to heaven and existing in a state of bliss, while the people who remain behind on earth are left with their grief at their loss quote, but live thou, They're still happy, happy spirit, and give us leave thee here thus to lament, not thee that dosed thy Heaven's joy inherit, but our own selves that here in dolor drent. Thus do we weep and wail and wear our eyes morning and others are own miseries. Even before she started publishing her own original works, Mary Sidney Herbert was translating the work of others. In she pish a translation of Philippe Duplessi mourns Discorde la vilam That's Discourse on life and Death. She dated this in May off. This was a project that her brother Philip had actually started, but he couldn't complete it before his death. She also translated Petrarch's trionfo de la Morte the Triumph of Death. She translated it into terts arima. That's the verse form that uses three line stanzas, in which the first and third line of each stands a rhyme, and then the second line rhymes with the first and third line of the stanza that follows. Dante's divine comedy is written in tertsarema. This project was another that offered Mary a meditation on death, something that had touched her life so very deeply. And one of the interesting things that shifts in Mary's Sidney's translation from Petrarch's is that she chose to give the female character of Laura more focused than other scholars of the day. The character was always there, she wasn't adding to it, but a lot of English speaking scholars had simply not paid much attention to that portion of the work. They had focused on the earlier section of it. She also translated Robert Garnier's mark Antoine. That translation of mark Antoine was more than just a way to bring French historical drama to an English language audience. It also brought the commentary on contemporary politics through the use of historical storytelling over from France. The Garnier play is based on life of Antonius, and it's one of the larger group of biographies that Plutarch wrote that are grouped under the umbrella title of Plutarch's Lives or parallel Lives. So for context of why this translation was important in the fifteen nineties in England, Elizabeth the First was four decades into her reign. She was in her sixties she was embroiled in a financial conundrum because England was deeply in debt from war and the economy was struggling. There had also been some issues with crops, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants was ongoing, and Elizabeth was seen in a far less favorable light than she had enjoyed earlier in her reign. People were starting to wonder what is going to happen when Elizabeth dies because there is some discord and strife, and one of the greatest fears that there was going on at the time was that England would plunge into a civil war. So the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, whose relationship was connected to the civil War of Actium, probably felt like a cautionary tale in late sixteenth century England. And in addition to translating works of this nature, Mary Sidney Henry began to encourage writer she patronized to create similar works. One of the translations that Mary Sidney is most well known for is another project that her brother Philip had been working on before his death. It was the translation and poetic adaptation of Psalm's forty four through a hundred and fifty, with the intent that they would be appealing for personal devotional use. It's believed that Mary was probably working on this alongside her brother from the very beginning. To develop this work, Mary studied numerous editions of the Bible and existing translations in Hebrew, Latin, and English, and worked to create verse versions of the songs that were both true to the original text and esthetically appealing, and how they formed versus. This was to be clear a massive project. Psalm one nineteen, for example, contains one hundred seventy six verses. Those verses are grouped into twenty two sections, and each begins with a different letter representing the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For example, the section beginning with oh starts oh what a lantern? What a lamp of light? Is thy pure word to me? To clear my paths and guide my goings? Right? I swear and swear again I of the statutes, will observer be thou justly dosed? Ordain? There are more than a hundred and twenty different verse forms the work, which have come to be known as the Sydney Psalms. They weren't published in Mary's lifetime, but circulated only in manuscript Some modern scholars have viewed these psalms as a sacred parody, meaning that they used the poetry style more associated with secular romantic verse as a means of popularizing religious poetry. There are in the original manuscript also two additional poems. One is written in honor of Mary's brother Philip, and there is a dedication poem to Queen Elizabeth. Though this is considered an important work and was recognized for its achievement in its time, Mary refers to this whole project as quote half maimed, because she was piecing together and editing, and reworking the efforts of her brother, who she felt was absolutely matchless in skill. In her poem about him, to the Angel Spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney, she writes, behold, oh that thou were now to behold this finished, long, perfect actions, part begun the rest, but peaced as left by the undone pardon, blessed soul, presumption overbold if love and zeal hath to this error, run to zealous love, love that hath never done, nor can enough, though justly here controlled. There was a dedication to Queen Elizabeth, which is titled to the thrice sacred Queen Elizabeth, but you'll often see it referred to you by the opening words, which are even now that care and this Mary maintained humility, recognizing that the Queen is a woman whose time is filled with responsibilities and who acts as an agent whose power had been bestowed by God. Mary also makes it clear, though, that her brother died for the Protestant cause in service to the Queen. The second stanza of this poem conveys the hope that the Queen, who Mary did seem to genuinely care for for her entire life, will accept this dedication, writing quote, yet I dare so as humbleness may dare perish, some hope they shall acceptance. Find not weighing less thy state, lighter thy care, but knowing more thy grace, abler thy mind, what heavenly powers the highest thrown assigned assigned the goodness suiting that degree, And by thy strength thy burden so defined to others, toil is exercised to the This was not the only poem that Mary wrote for Elizabeth. She penned another and anticipation of the Queen's visit to the Pembroke Estates in This was titled a dialogue between two shepherds they not and Peers and praise of Austraia, and this poem Australia clearly represents the Queen and the two shepherds debating the best way to praise Austraia or sitting as proxy for the poets, sort of working out within herself how best to compliment someone like Elizabeth. In the end, words are deemed not worthy, as the poem concludes with Piers saying, words from conceit do only eyes above conceit? Her honor flies, but silence not can praise her. So there were a couple of reasons that Mary Sidney Herbert would want to ensure Elizabeth's favored during this time uh and why she might have been writing such very, very crazy things to her, And she pursued this favor in letters to the Queen as well as in her poetry. For one, her husband, the Earl of Pembroke, was nearing the end of his life, and for another, her son William was almost an adult and she was hoping that the Queen would grant him a place at court. The ill health of Henry Herbert was making things especially tricky, because if he died before William came of age, which would happen in April of sixt one. Mary worried that she and the family and the estates would be at the mercy of the Court of Wards, and indeed Mary's husband died in January, several months before William's twenty first birthday. What happened next is a true mess, and we will explain after we hear from the sponsor that keeps stuffy meth in history class going. So, this precarious position that Mary felt her family's future was in got a lot worse in a hurry in early sixteen o one, having little to do with the fact that Henry Herbert had died. Mary's son, William, had a sexual relationship with one of the Queen's maids of honor, that was a young woman named Mary Fitton. Mary got pregnant and William did not behave honorably per the mores of the day, although he did acknowledge that the child was his, but he abandoned Mary Fitton, and as a consequence, he was arrested and incarcerated at Fleet Prison. Queen Elizabeth was understandably furious, and this tank to any hope that Mary Sydney had of using her connection to the throne to secure a place at court for her son. William and his mother became estranged. The Sydneys were not welcome at court. Mary Fitton's child was born but did not live, and William spent his time in prison writing. He was eventually released due to ill health, but he was banished from court. That was until King James took the throne of England in sixteen o three. That whole ordeal represented a turning point in Mary Sydney's life. She had lost her influence with the Queen, and then once King James was in place, she just became irrelevant. She became busy with managing issues of family property, and she seems to have stopped writing. We should mention that some of those property issues involved stopping uprisings by the residents who didn't like the way the land had been parceled out to them. She also was not the least bit shy about being litigious, and she was very quick to bring suits against anyone she thought had wronged her. Yeah, we're speaking very very praisingly of her in many ways, but I don't want to be clear that she was at this point a rich count who was putting down peasant uprisings, who were just trying to get a fair shake, maybe suing her tenants. It sounds like right. It was like I think you stole from me. It was a lot of petty power moves um. In the early six hundreds, post Elizabeth and in the reign of King James, Mary Sidney saw her sons married once the scandal of his involvement with Mary Fitton had faded in the memory of the court. William got married to Mary Talbot. There are so many Mary's. Mary Talbot's father was the Earl of Shrewsbury. Philip got married to Susan Daver. Mary's daughter Anne was betrothed, something Mary had arranged, but after several postponements to the wedding due to illness and died, most likely in the early winter of sixteen o six. Documentation of Mary Sydney's life after Anne's death is a little sparse for several years, but by the mid sixteen teens it seems like her life settled a bit. Her sons had achieved good positions at court. They had taken up her mantle as patrons of the arts. So Mary, who had reconciled by this point with William seems to have taken advantage of her later years to mostly focus on enjoying herself. Yeah. There are lots of fun stories about her during this time, where she's reported as smoking and dancing and shooting pistols for fun. Uh. She is also rumored to have possibly had a romance with Sir Matthew Lister, who was her doctor and was younger than her. The King, even though she wasn't influential at court but her kids were, had granted her land in Bedfordshire, and she had a home built there called Hotton House, which she adorned with her own crest, which she designed. It incorporated the letters M and H for Mary Herbert and featured a bear, the symbol of the deadly side of the family, and a porcupine, the symbol used by the Sydneys. The King visited Hotton House in sixteen o one, giving recognition to Mary as the mother of two imports men of the Court. The ruins of Hotten House still exists today and that site is open to the public. I think you can only go during daylight hours. Mary also spent time in London, where she retained a second residence. Mary died of smallpox on September one in London, that was a month away from her sixtieth birthday. She died in her London home and was buried at Salzbury Cathedral under the choir steps, alongside her husband. Eventually, William and Philip were also laid to rest there. Unfortunately, as well documented as Mary's life is in many ways, there are still huge gaps in her record. For example, we don't have any of her writing work from after the fifteen nineties, although she lived for more than two decades after that, and she is believed to have continued to exchange manuscripts with other writers, even though she probably wasn't writing at the rate she had been before. We don't have many of her personal letters, just some business correspondents, and this is probably because, as we mentioned earlier, Wilton House burned in the seventeenth century, so any of her personal effects that had been stored there were likely destroyed at that time, and her secondary residence, Baynard's Castle, also had a fire in the seventeenth century. We mentioned it burned during the Great Fire, so we can assume the same thing happened to any of her writing. That may have been on hand. There one aspect of her life's work that remains a little underdocumented. It's difficult to actually proves their interest in science, particularly chemistry and alchemy. She's said to have had a lab at Wilton House and to have devised a recipe for disappearing inc using bismuth and salt. This is mostly sourced from a seventeen fifty five book that was published in Germany, allegedly translated from a writing in English by somebody who claimed to know Mary and Philip Sydney. This includes a secret procedure which creates ink that disappears. The author says that he has two documents create did by Mary Sydney Herbert using this inc. One depicting the Tower of London and the other that's a fortress floor plan. And to see the ink, the reader had to hold the paper near a heat source. It would appear, according to this writing, in a greenish color, and then it would fade away after a few hours. And that recipe for disappearing ink, which is in that book, it works. It's a real recipe for disappearing inc. But we we don't know for sure if it was Mary's doing or not. That same book also claims that Mary had developed something quite charming, which was a musical code assigning certain bars to letters so that she could play a tune on the violin that was actually a musical representation of a piece of writing. There is also an account from Mary's time in Salisbury that indicates that she tried to hire a very skilled chemist named Mr Boston, who was believed to be looking for the elusive Philosopher's Stone, to work exclusively at Wilton House, but he declined. She did, however, manage to employ Sir Walter Raleigh's half brother Adrian Gilbert, to work in her chemistry lab. Mary Sidney Herbert, Duchess of Pembroke had garnered some esteem during her life, but that seemed to diminish for a while after her death. Before the twentieth century, it was common to see most mentions of her claim she had a rivalry with Shakespeare that's not really supported by any actual record, and a lot of what she wrote herself was rumored to have really been the work of men. There's an irony here, and that she had taken a personal tragedy, which was the death of her beloved brother, to seize a rare opportunity for a woman to achieve a literary career in the pursuit of honoring the memory of a man. In the twentieth century, however, scholars have looked more closely at Mary Sidney's life, and they've been able to reveal that she was formidable. She was a woman who was able to take charge when needed and work in the interest of her family, and she also has emerged as one of the most important literally or figures of the Elizabethan era. There are scholars in recent history that make the case that she may have actually been the author of shakespeare Sonnets, pointing out that the narrative plot of the Sonnets, the poet being romantically involved with a younger man who has feared to be in love with someone else, a married woman, actually parallel the events of Mary's life after her husband died, when she was close with and rumored to be involved with, Sir Matthew Lister. The very fascinating little side tale we can talk a little bit about in our behind the scenes. Um. Yeah, she's an interesting one. Interesting interesting Mary Sydney. Do you have some listener mail for us? I do, and it features one of my favorite things which is pets uh uh. This is from our listener Brandy, who writes, Ladies, I have finally done it. Today I can proudly say I have finished the archive of stuff you missed in history class. I started listening over two and a half years ago. I listen anytime I'm in my car myself. I started with Josh and Candice when Josh pretended to know nothing about history, and remember when he finally had enough of himself that he could no longer stand lying to us. I hail from a place I personally love, home in Louisiana, and was so pleased when you talked about the Rugaroo Festival that I sent the podcast to the organizers of the festival, only to realize they probably had already heard about it since I was listening a year after it was published. I look forward to attending the festival this year, whom you two fingers crossed. It was canceled last year due to Hurricane Ida, but I was impressed with the organizers. They canceled the festival and immediately started helping our community to recover from the storm. I hear the question why do you still live there after every storm? There are so many answers to this question, but the main one for me is this is our home. A large part of the Cajun culture is the importance of family. We stay here because our family is here and this is our home. Anyway, I'm off my soapbox. Thank you both for the amazing podcast and keep up the good work. And she has included pup be pictures. These these puppies are in portraits where they look like historical figures and it is one of the best, she says. The matriarch is Luna, and the three boys are her offspring, Taft, Rutherford, and Fillmore named after presidents per my niece's request. Sincerely, Brandy, these pictures are so stinking cute. I can't deal with it. I love it, um and I'm I'm just delighted. I you know, I grew up on the Gulf Coast, so I understand that question of why do people live there, and it's just it's a beautiful place, and if it's your home, it's your home. That's that's what's up. Almost anywhere has some weird thing that comes with it, whether that be earthquakes or fires or terrible cold or whatever. Everybody's got a different thing um, Brandy, thank you for writing us this email. Congratulations on your PhD and Stuff you Missed in History Class, um, and thank you for sitting us those pictures because they delight. If you would like to write to us, you could do so at History podcast i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us as Missed in History on social media, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the I heart radio app or wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.