ABSTRACT
More than three decades ago i decided on Algernon Sidney (illustration 25) as a doctoral topic after reading a collection of his letters published in 1825. From Hamburg on 30 August 1660 he wrote to his father, Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester:
i knowe the titles that are given me of fierce, violent, seditious, mutinous, turbulent …. i know people will say, i straine at knats, and swallow camels; that it is a strange conscience, that lets a man runne violently on, till he is deepe in civill blood, and then stays at a few words and complements; that can earnestly endeavour to extirpate a long established monarchy, and then cannot be brought to see his error, and be persuaded to set one finger towards the setting together the broken pieces of it …. i cannot helpe it if i judge amisse; i did not make myself, nor can i correct the defects of my own creation. i walk in the light god hath given me; if it be dimme or uncertaine, i must beare the penalty of my errors: i hope to do it with patience, and that noe burden shall be very grievous to me, except sinne and shame. (Blencowe 194-8)
i was moved by the content and the powerful, classically educated prose. But i had no idea, and could not until recently have recognized, the extent to which most of Sidney’s life and writings are here encapsulated. now, after two books (Scott, Algernon/Republic and Algernon/Restoration) and important work by many others, a great deal has been explained, but relatively little added. Here is the republicanism, never abandoned, and the mutiny which brought him to the scaffold. Violence and blood knit the life and writings together in the service of a cause about the rightness of which he agonizes. Part of that morality was classical, both greek and Roman. But it has taken a long time for scholars to recognize, as they now have, how deeply it was anchored in religion. Sidney knew Plato and Livy by heart, but did not die for them. He died for “the people of god” (Apology, in Sidney, Works 30-32): “god direct us in that which is for our good, and prepare us well to defend our cause, or willingly to suffer for it, if he please to call us unto it” (east Sussex Record Office, Hampden Letter 5, 2-3).
