enser dedicated in 1579 his
"Shepheardes Calender" to "the most noble and vertuous gentleman, most
worthy of all titles, both of learning and chevalrie, M. Philip
Sidney"[179]; and William the Silent, Prince of Orange, once said to
Fulke Greville that "Her Majesty had one of the ripest and greatest
counsellors of estate in Sir Philip Sidney that at this day lived in
Europe." The remaining years of his short life were well filled; he had
been ambassador to the German Emperor in 1577; he had taken part at
home, though unasked, in the negotiations concerning the Queen's
marriage, and he lost favour for a while on account of the extraordinary
freedom with which he had written to Elizabeth against the French match.
He retired from court at that moment and went to live in the country;
while staying with his sister at Wilton in the midst of congenial
surroundings, he wrote most of his "Arcadia" (1580). He was a member of
Parliament in 1581 and 1584, and married in 1583 the daughter of Sir
Francis Walsingham. He all but accompanied Drake to America, where he
had received from the Queen a large grant of lands; he became at last
Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands. He died in that country at
thirty-one years of age, in 1586, of a wound received at Zutphen; a
premature death that gave the finishing touch to men's sympathy and love
for him; all England wept for him.[180] Even now, it is difficult to
think unmoved of his well-filled career ending on the eve of the great
triumphs of his country, to call to our memory this brave man who died
with his face to the enemy without knowing that victory would be
declared for his side, without having known Shakespeare, without having
seen the defeat of the Armada.

As for his Stella she survived him only too long. A few years after
Sidney's death she deserted her husband by whom she had had seven
children, and became the mistress of Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy,
afterwards Earl of Devonshire, to whom she gave three sons and two
daughters. Lord Rich, a man full of prudence it seems, waited for the
death of the Earl of Essex, his wife's brother, to divorce her. She then
married her lover in 1605. But till her death, which happened in 1608
she was mostly remembered as having been Sidney's friend, and books were
dedicated to her because she had been Astrophel's "Stella." Thus Yong's
translation of the "Diana" of Montemayor, a pastoral from which Sidney
had taken many hints, is dedicated to h