Philip Sydney was the quintessential Renaissance courtier but his ambitions for military glory were constantly frustrated by Elizabeth's caution and distrust.

3:10watching spectators. Um the match report of the tournament then proceeded Master Philip Sydney in very sumptuous manner with armor part blue and the rest guilt and engraven with four spare horses having comparisons and furniture very rich and costly. So Tom Phillips Sydney he's a tremendous man isn't he? >> Yeah he's the embodiment I think of um everything that a Renaissance courtier dreams of being and that's why he's he's

3:38such a superstar. So, um, he is insanely well-connected. He's the nephew and the heir of the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, um, Elizabeth I's great favorite. And he is the brother-in-law of the Earl of Pembrook who builds this tremendous house outside Wilton in uh, Wiltshire and the Salsbury area. >> Lovely to have Wiltshire and Ssbury back on the show. It has these beautiful tuda gardens in Black Adder when Black Adder

4:07falls in love with Bob and they go uh walking to the tune of Green Sleeves. It's the gardens of Wilton House that you see. So that's very much um Sydney's kind of house in the country. He has a European reputation as well as an English one. Um he's famous across the continent for his intellect, for his eloquence, for his courtesy. He's kind of, you know, the model of spritzer,

4:31this kind of Italian ideal of nonulant style and he is one of the great geniuses of this golden age of English literature that flourishes in the reign of Elizabeth I. So that sonnet that you read is part of a sequence that in the opinion of most critics ranks second only to the set sequence written by Shakespeare himself. The set sequence is called Astril and Stellar. And Stella is

4:58a star and Astroil is star lover. But of course, Phil is a play on Philip Sydney's um own name. What can I say? The Elizabethans love these kind of puns and word plays. Um he's also the author of a very famous defense of poetry, which again has a kind of Europewide reputation. And he's written a poem called Arcadia, which is a pastoral romance. Uh he wrote it at Wilton House

5:22and he dedicated it to his sister, the Countess of Penrook. And the most famous line from that poem, um, they are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts. Very stirring and inspiring. And Sydney can get away with writing this kind of stuff because everyone takes for granted that this is exactly what he is about. He is, I think, for kind of tuda courtier fanboys. I mean,

5:47he's the embodiment of that. He is the the quintessence of uh Elizabethan nobility. And yet there is a sense of um ambitions [snorts] unfulfilled, isn't there? Because although he likes winning tournaments and he likes writing sonnetss and all of these kinds of things and cutting a dash, his ambitions go much further. What he actually wants to do is to make his imprint on history and indeed uh on the map of Europe

6:12because we started with that background um the sense of uh conflict on the continent and that's a really really important part of understanding what happens to Philip Sydney. Yes, he wants to go to a real war. He doesn't want to just kind of prance around in tournaments. Um, and I think that uh this is partly he has a great devotion to the old medieval ideals of chivalry.