Despairing Radicals

Blair Worden

• Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet by Katherine Duncan-Jones
  Hamish Hamilton, 350 pp, £20.00, September 1991, ISBN 0 241 12650 9
• Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis by Jonathan Scott
  Cambridge, 406 pp, £40.00, October 1991, ISBN 0 521 35291 6
• Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage by Alan Craig Houston
  Princeton, 335 pp, £22.50, November 1991, ISBN 0 691 07860 2
• Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution by Nicholas von Maltzahn
  Oxford, 244 pp, £32.50, November 1991, ISBN 0 19 812897 5

In the gentle countryside to the west of Maidstone in Kent lies Penshurst House, the home of the Sidney family since the middle of the 16th century. The most famous of the Sidneys, Sir Philip, included an affectionate account of Penshurst in his Arcadia, where it is thinly disguised as the house of Kalendar. A generation later Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To Penshurst’ celebrated the house as a landmark of antique virtue and antique hospitality, and contrasted it with the new and vulgar ‘prodigy houses’, such as Hatfield and Audley End, that were ‘built to envious show’ amidst the riot of competitive expenditure in the reign of James I. The Sidneys never had the money to spoil their inheritance, which survives as a glorious muddle of a house, centred on an enchanting Medieval hall and sprawling out into its Renaissance and later additions.