Biography of Dorothy Sidney Countess Sunderland 1617-1683

Letters of Horace Walpole. 7th August 1572. This morning we have been to Penshurst [Map] - but, oh! how fallen!³⁴¹ The park seems to have never answered its character: at present it is forlorn; and instead of Sacharissa's³⁴² cipher carved on the beeches, I should sooner have expected to have found the milkwoman's score. Over the gate is an inscription, purporting the manor to have been a boon from Edward VI to Sir William Sydney. The apartments are the grandest I have seen in any of these old palaces, but furnished in tawdry modern taste. There are loads of portraits; but most of them seem christened by chance, like children at a foundling hospital. There is a portrait of Languet³⁴³, the friend of Sir Philip Sydney (age 17); and divers of himself and all his great kindred; particularly his [her aunt] sister-in-law, with a vast lute, and Sacharissa, charmingly handsome, But there are really four very great curiosities, I believe as old portraits as any extant in England: they are, Fitzallen, Archbishop of Canterbury, Humphry Stafford, the first Duke of Buckingham; T. Wentworth, and John Foxle; all four with the dates of their commissions as constables of Queenborough Castle, from whence I suppose they were brought. The last is actually receiving his investiture from Edward the Third, and Wentworth is in the dress of Richard the Third's time. They are really not very ill done.³⁴⁴ There are six more, only heads; and we have found since we came home that Penshurst belonged for a time to that Duke of Buckingham. There are some good tombs in the church, and a very Vandal one. called Sir Stephen of Penchester. When we had seen Penshurst, we borrowed saddles, and, bestriding the horses of our postchaise, set out for Hever [Map]³⁴⁵, to visit a tomb of Sir Thomas Bullen, Earl of Wiltshire, partly with a view to talk of it in Anna Bullen's walk at Strawberry Hill. But the measure of our woes was not full, we could not find our way and were forced to return; and again lost ourselves in coming from Penshurst, having been directed to what they call a better road than the execrable one we had gone.

Note 341. Evelyn, who visited Penshurst exactly a century before Walpole, gives the Following brief notice of the place:-"July 9, 1652. We went to see Penshurst, the Earl of Leicester's, famous once for its gardens and excellent fruit, and for the noble conversation which Was wont to meet there, celebrated by that illustrious person Sir Philip Sidney, who there composed divers of his pieces. It stands in a park, is finely watered, and was now full of company, on the marriage of my old fellow-collegiate, Mr. Robert Smith, who marries Lady Dorothy Sidney, widow of the Earl of Sunderland."-E.

Note 342. Lady Dorothy Sidney, daughter of [her father] Philip, Earl of Leicester [Note. Mistake? She was sister of [her brother] Philip Earl of Leicester]; of whom Waller was the unsuccessful suitor, and to whom he addressed those elegant effusions of poetical gallantry, in which she is celebrated under the name of Sacharissa. Walpole here alludes to the lines written at Penshurst-

"Go, boy, and carve this passion on the bark

Of yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark

Of noble Sydney's birth; when such benign,

Such more than mortal-making stars did shine,

That there they cannot but for ever prove

The monument and pledge of humble love;

His humble love, whose hope shall ne'er rise higher,

Than for a pardon that he dares admire."-E.

Note 343. Hubert Tanguet, who quitted the service of the Elector of Saxony on account of his religion, and attached himself to the Prince of Orange. He died in 1581.-E.

Note 344. In Harris's History of Kent, he gives from Philpot a list of the constables of Queenborough Castle, p. 376; the last but one of whom, Sir Edward Hobby, is said to have collected all their portraits, of which number most probably were these ten.

Note 345. Hever Castle was built in the reign of Edward III, by William de Hevre, and subsequently became the property of the Boleyn family. In this castle Henry VIII passed the time of his courtship to the unfortunate Anne Boleyn; whose father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was Created Earl of wiltshire and Ormond, 1529 and 1538.-E.

On 20th July 1639, some sources say 11th July 1639, Henry Spencer 1st Earl of Sunderland (age 18) and Dorothy Sidney Countess Sunderland (age 21) were married at Penhurst Rother. She by marriage Baroness Spencer Wormleighton. Her long-term suitor, she was the 'Sacharissa' of his poems, Edmund Waller (age 33) wrote a letter to the bride's sister (age 12) on the occasion of the wedding. She the daughter of Robert Sidney 2nd Earl of Leicester (age 43) and Dorothy Percy Countess Leicester (age 41). They were fifth cousins.

Madam,

In this common joy at Penshurst, I know none to whom complaints may come less unseasonably than to your ladyship, the loss of a bedfellow being almost equal to that of a mistress; and therefore you ought at least to pardon, if you consent not to the imprecations of, the deserted, which just Heaven no doubt will hear. May my lady Dorothy, if we may yet call her so, suffer as much, and have the like passion for this young lord, whom she has preferred to the rest of mankind, as others have had for her; and may his love, before the year go about, make her taste of the first curse imposed upon womankind, the pains of becoming a mother. May her first born be none of her own sex, nor so like her but that he may resemble her lord as much as herself. May she that always affected silence and retirement have the house filled with the noise and number of her children, and hereafter of her grandchildren; and then may she arrive at that great curse, so much declined by fair ladies, old age; may she live to be very old and yet seem young; be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth; and when she shall appear to be mortal, may her lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, that being there divorced we may all have an equal interest in her again! My revenge being immortal, I wish all this may befall her posterity to the world's end and afterwards! To you, madam, I wish all good things, and that this loss may in good time be happily supplied with a more constant bedfellow of the other sex. Madam, I humbly kiss your hands, and beg pardon for this trouble, from

Your ladyship's

most humble servant,

E. Waller.