1568] As Clerk in Holy Orders.

25

Philip Sidney was collated to the said church of Whitford.*

This comical arrangement can be easily explained. Master Hugh Whitford, hitherto rector of Whitford, was evidently one of the thousands of Papists, who, loyal to Queen Mary, refused to adopt the Protestant ritual prescribed by Queen Elizabeth. More than five years had elapsed before his heresy was discovered, or before it was convenient to displace him. At length, Sir Henry Sidney-being Lord President of Wales, and anxious to make some provision for his son-followed a plan which looks strange and scarcely honest in the nineteenth century, but which was common enough in the sixteenth, and took advantage of Master Whitford's contumacy. From the time when Philip Sidney was nine and a half years old, he was lay-rector of Whitford. It appears from a proposed marriage settlement drawn up for him in 1569, when he was not yet fifteen, that his title to the living had then still sixty years to run, and, after all dues and all charges for performance of the work by deputy were deducted, yielded him an income of £60 a year.t

Philip having been made a clerk in holy orders, it was time for him to be sent to school. Under date of the 16th of November, 1564, his name is entered, along with that of Fulke Greville, in the register of Shrewsbury school. Shrewsbury, which Sir Henry often visited on public business, was within easy

These four documents are among the MS. treasures at Penshurst. †This document, dated 6 August, 1569, is among the Hatfield MSS., No. 1316.

and Mary her junior by a year or so. They were not now forgotten. The royal grace shown to Lady Sidney was to consist chiefly in requiring her to give frequent and often irksome attendance on her old companion at Whitehall, Hampton Court, and elsewhere; but the brothers were to have more substantial rewards. Lord Robert Dudley, having special talent for self-advancement, used his influence over Elizabeth so well that on the 11th of January, 1559, he was appointed Master of the Horse, and on the 23d of April following was made a Knight of the Garter, and sworn into the Privy Council. Other honours ensued in quick succession, until the highest was reached by his elevation to the peerage as Baron Denbigh on the 28th of September, 1564, and as Earl of Leicester on the next day. Throughout the five years before and the five years after this date, nearly every year bringing a fresh grant of land and rich pension, he was openly talked of as the Queen's lover, only prevented by State reasons or her own whims from becoming her husband. Lord Ambrose Dudley was not so highly favoured; but he was made Master of the Ordnance in 1560, created Baron de L'Isle, and allowed to assume his brother John's lapsed title as Earl of Warwick in 1561, and invested with the Order of the Garter in 1563.

Sir Henry Sidney, being busy in Ireland, can have seen nothing with his own eyes of the boisterous gaiety with which all Englishmen-except those who were Catholics by conviction, and many even of them-welcomed the change from Queen Mary's