ABSTRACT
An influential Tudor family's retrospective narrative of its own rise to public prominence was often a useful element in confirming its current social status. The Sidneys were no exception in that by the second half of the sixteenth century the courtly and military distinction of their forebears was well defined and systematically maintained. For the generation of Sir Philip Sidney and his siblings, two key elements of their family's historical identity mattered above all else: the ancient respectability of the paternal Sidneys and the aristocratic potency of the maternal Dudley line. ;I am by my father's side of ancient and always well esteemed and well matched gentry', insisted Philip's 'Defence of the Earl of Leicester' (c. 1584/5); but his 'chiefest honour' was that he was *a Dudley in blood', and he was determined to live up to the 'nobility of that blood whereof I am descended'.1 So proud were the Sidneys of this connection that when Philip's father Henry had married his mother, Mary Dudley, on 29 March 1551 he was granted permission to quarter his own family crest, the porcupine, with that of his wife, the bear and ragged staff (appropriated in 1547 by John Dudley from the fifteenth-century Beauchamp Earls of Warwick). This combination of heraldic devices was to define symbolically the fortunes of the Sidneys for the rest of the sixteenth century.
