ABSTRACT
The Sidney family had good cause to regard their long and distinguished history of royal service to successive Tudor monarchs as a double-edged privilege. None more so than Lady Mary Sidney (the mother of Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; and Robert Sidney, first Earl of Leicester), who bore upon her face disfiguring scars as a remembrance of her once close intimacy with Queen Elizabeth. In October 1562 smallpox had brought the queen close to death; and she had insisted to the Council that, in the event of her demise, her increasingly powerful favourite, Robert Dudley, should be appointed as Protector of the Realm. While nursing Elizabeth, Lady Sidney (who was Robert Dudley’s sister) caught an especially virulent dose of the illness which necessitated her withdrawal from court to recuperate at Penshurst Place, the family home in Kent. Even though she was fortunate to survive this life-threatening illness, her looks and later health were permanently ravaged and she withdrew from court. Her eldest son, Philip, then almost eight years old, caught the disease and also bore its facial scars for the rest of his life; and her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, was still haunted by the trauma of these events over two decades later. He recalled in a letter of 1 March 1583 to Sir Francis Walsingham: ‘When I went to Newhaven I left her a full fair Lady in mine eye at least the fairest, and when I returned I found her as foul a lady as the small-pox could make her.’1
