Poets, Patrons, and Professors

Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists

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VI The end of a period

As if Sidney's death alone had not been enough to terminate a fruitful development of Anglo-Leiden relations, the general débâcle of Leicester's Dutch policy occurred at almost the same time¹. The Earl's final departure was to be postponed for another year, but losing Sidney did not improve his position. This is how Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft, the Dutch seventeenth-century poet and historiographer, somewhat acidly recalls the events in his renowned Nederlandsche historien :

... they paid most dearly for that battle, because twenty-five days later Philip Sidney came to die from a wound in his thigh which he had there received: a gentleman of some thirty years, happy in wit, brave in action, genuine in erudition, polite in speech, sensible and engaging in his manners. He was the offspring of a sister of the Earl of Leicester; found himself notably favoured by the Queen; and was therefore firmly expectant of uncommon preferment.
And some never doubted but (had he lived) his wisdom and modesty (once time and experience had mollified his passions) would have obliged his uncle, whose intelligence could not compare with his, to discontinue his immature enterprises, which were a humiliation to the States. But others judged, that if he should have used his industry, valour, and ability in undermining liberty (which his insistence, from the very first, that Leicester's governorship should embrace unlimited authority, had given them reason to fear), that this would have disagreed with the country even more than the delusions of Leicester, the rash beginnings of whose enterprises caused him to halt half-way.²

Hooft's view was no different from other Dutch appreciations of the Leicester episode, whether they included Sidney or not, and the brief English interregnum has kept its doubtful reputation ever since. Within a general break-down of Anglo-Dutch relations, cultural relationships, too, could have survived only

1 See J. den Tex, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, I, Haarlem, 1960, ch. 15.

2 P.C. Hooft, Nederlandsche historien, ed. Amsterdam, 1677, pp. 1094-95. See Appendix II, no. 81.

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under the most difficult circumstances: especially in Leiden, where an incredibly naive and immediately frustrated attempt at a pro-English coup in 1587¹ hastened and decided Leicester's departure from the Low Countries. Throughout the late 1580s and early nineties, Leiden, where the number of English undergraduates was seen to drop considerably, became positively unfriendly. Witness Fynes Moryson's experiences when he first visited the University in 1592:

At the faire City of Leyden not wanting many faire Innes, I was refused lodging in sixe of them, and hardly got it in the seventh, which made me gather they did not willingly entertaine Englishmen.²

On the other hand, the Republic of Letters had endured greater trials than these, and some Anglo-Leiden friendships had already proved capable of maintaining their personal independence. Regardless of political strife a certain amount of literary traffic continued. But the old spirit seems to have vanished when the vision of an Anglo-Dutch alliance of the kind prophesied by the poets failed to materialize. The 1586 enterprise had proved unfortunate: an Anglo-Leiden literary activity as originally conceived had lost its purpose - and its subject-matter.

From the day when Rogers wrote the first foreign epigram ‘In Lugdunum novam Batavorum Academiam’ to the unhappy hour when Benedicti sent his Epitaphia in mortem Sidneji to the printer's, it would seem that there existed no small measure of understanding between England and Leiden. Beginning with incidental friendships, a complex pattern of personal relationships emerged by 1586, which resulted in large numbers of poetic and epistolary exercises. It was natural, considering the humanistic outlook of the participants, that the literary history of these years should have begun and ended in a political and academic setting; and equally natural that its principle milieus in England and Holland should have produced two literary ‘schools’, where themes of wit and beauty and virtue were expressed in the sonnets, odes, and epigrams which (with a newly acquired

1 See p. 92, note 2; and p. 127, note 1.

2 Moryson, Itinerary, ed. Glasgow Univ. Press, IV, p. 61.

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taste for vernacular composition) became the fashionable forms of literary expression. With them poesy served on the one hand the practical purpose of formulating an opinion, furthering a cause, and celebrating men and events, and on the other hand it gave requisite scope for self-expression. Considering this, these eleven years furnish a vivid illustration of a particular use of poetry. This use of the bonae literae was an essential feature of the ideal Academia of Leiden as conceived of by its founders; and Leiden must therefore have been particularly congenial to the English poet-scholars with their similar poetic aspirations.

Severed from their former diplomatic setting, Leiden's English interests were to become increasingly academic. It is true, some contacts remained; but no new pattern of exchange was to be established until the beginning of the next century,¹ and when it came it was different from former times. The optimism, energy, hero-worship, and inspired enthusiasm which belonged to that sixteenth-century generation of courtiers and scholars were to give way to a new set of values and a new mode of personalities.

It is therefore possible to regard the eleven years between the foundation of the first Dutch university and the death of Sir Philip Sidney as an identifiable ‘period’ of Anglo-Leiden relations, a period remarkable for its experiments towards a ‘national’ poetry in an international system of service to the state and literary performance. In the written remains of these crucial years the two countries have appeared united in letters, in the perhaps never again so intimate world of poets, patrons, and professors.

1 For this new ‘pattern’, see Bachrach, Huygens and Britain.