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1. Fulke Greville and David Hume on the Death of Sir Philip Sidney1
It is well known to Sidney scholars that the heroic legend of Sir Philip's death in 1586 from wounds received at Zutphen and his reputed generosity in offering his water-bottle to a dying fellow soldier was first promulgated in Fulke Greville's "A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney," drafted between 1604 and 1614 but only first published in 1652 as The Life of the Renowned Sr Philip Sidney. Greville, however, had not been an eye-witness to Sidney's fatal wounding in the Low Countries since Queen Elizabeth had expressly forbidden him to leave England. While this memorable incident is not corroborated by any other contemporary source, its imaginative potency to both writers and artists proved remarkably long-lived. After receiving a musket-shot which broke his thigh-bone Sidney was forced unwillingly to withdraw from the field of battle and Greville reports:
In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army where his uncle-the general-was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought to him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words: "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."2
The poignancy of Greville's account of this moment possesses an inherent theatricality and dramatic power which was to prove of great inspiration to a broad range of painters, engravers and illustrators for over two hundred and fifty years. The first known example is now at Wilton House, the ancestral home of the Herbert family, Earls of Pembroke and, of course, of Sidney's sister, Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621), Countess of Pembroke. In this painting an anonymous late-sixteenth or seventeenth-century artist (attributed, variously, to the Dutch, Flemish or Spanish School) placed Sidney on the left-hand side of the composition, supported by three soldiers and wearing an armoured breast-plate and ruff but, pointedly, no leg armour. He gazes compassionately upon another dying soldier, placed to the right below him and supported by...