ABSTRACT
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is closely associated with her famous brother, Sir Philip Sidney. 1 Indeed, some of his posthumous fame comes from her efforts to commemorate him by patronizing writers who praised him, by supervising the publication of his work, by writing poems to commemorate him, and by completing the metrical Psalms that he had begun. In these ways she was celebrated by her contemporaries as Philip Sidney’s Phoenix. They became so closely associated in the public mind that most poems praising her mention Philip and an eighteenth-century manuscript of Philip Sidney’s epitaph identifies him simply as ‘brother to the Countesse of Pembroke.’ 2 But Mary Sidney had two younger brothers, Robert and Thomas, both of whom had served with Philip in the Netherlands and were present when he died there. Robert was the chief mourner who walked immediately behind ‘The Corpes’ at Philip Sidney’s splendid funeral; young Thomas was one of the other principal mourners who followed Robert. As a woman, Mary Sidney could not participate in the funeral, but she was represented by her husband, who rode with the ‘Earles and Barons of his kindred and frendes,’ including the Sidneys’ uncles, the earls of Leicester, Huntingdon, and Warwick. 3
