2nd Earl of Pembroke

• Sources yet to be consulted:
  • Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Frances Berkeley Young, 1912.
  • Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies, 1992.
  • bibliography for Mary Sidney

mar 2ndly, 17th Feb 1563 [him age 29, her age est c.15] to Catherine Talbot [born est c.1548],
succ 1570, entertained Elizabeth I at Wilton 1574,
Catherine bur 15th May 1576, age est c.28 yrs,

mar 3rdly, 21st Apr 1577 [him age 43, her age 15, but marriage seems to have been happy]
to Lady Mary Sidney [born 27th Oct 1561, descendant of Edward I] and had issue:

1. William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, K.G., born 8th Apr 1580, poet, gave his name to Pembroke College, Oxford.

2. Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, born 16th Oct 1584.

Lady Mary was a poet and translator, and a great patron of learning at Wilton,
the (late-17th cent) diarist and folklorist John Aubrey says in her entry in his "Brief Lives": "In her time, Wilton House was like a College, there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. She was the greatest Patronesse of witt and learning of any Lady in her time.",
Wilton has been called "the nursery of the English Renaissance",
The countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 1579-81 refers to her, her brother Sir Philip Sidney wrote it at Wilton, after his death 1586 she ensured the publication of his works,

Aubrey also says of Lady Mary Sidney: "She was very salacious, and she had a Contrivance that in the Spring of the yeare, when the Stallions were to leape the Mares, they were to be brought before such a part of the house, where she had a vidette (a hole to peepe out at) to looke on them and please herselfe with their Sport; and then she would act the like sport herselfe with her stallions. One of her great Gallants was Crooke-back't Cecill, Earl of Salisbury." [1st Earl of Salisbury, her son would marry his niece],

2nd Earl was named as supporting the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots 1587,
The Ruines of Time by Edmund Spenser (friend of her brother Sir Philip Sidney) was dedicated to Lady Mary, 1592,
2nd Earl died 19th Jan 1601, age 66 yrs.

Lady Mary died London, 25th Sept 1621, of smallpox, age 59 yrs, see print epitaph,
bur in the choir [or "Quire"] of Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire,
there is no gravestone, but there is apparently a plaque to "several members of the Pembroke family buried here with no mark" or similar wording, beside S door of Quire.
See resources.
See Connections to Shakespeare.

Lady Mary Sidney, c.1618.
From Tudor Place.

Salisbury Cathedral.
Published 1798. From here.

Salisbury Cathedral.
Photo by Andrew Dunn, 2005. See terms of use.
See more images.

Lady Mary Sidney's epitaph

- Epitaph [in print, NOT on grave] to Lady Mary Sidney,
ascribed to the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson,
but apparently was written by the poet William Browne [Jewitt and Hall, 1881].

• The John Dee Society
  • John Dee Studied as an English Neoplatonist, I.R.F. Calder, PhD thesis, 1952.
    • Chapter VII (spanning 1564-83) covers Wilton in the time of Lady Mary Sidney.
    • Notes to Chapter VII

• Female Dramatists of the English Seventeenth Century
• Herbert family in Biographical Index to the Elizabethan Theatre

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