Borne high in the low countries: Philip Sidney's cavalry banner

• Published in: Sidney journal (Guelph) 2014-07, Vol.32 (2), p.65
• Main Author: Kuin, Roger
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biography; Classical literature; English poets; Lactantius, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus (240?-320); Latin literature; Sidney, Philip; Sidney, Philip (1554-1586); Works
• ISSN: 1480-0926

In Thomas Lant's famous engravings of Sir Philip Sidney's funeral procession, winding from the Miñones (near the Tower of London) to old St Paul's on February 17, 1587, there is a considerable military presence.1 After the thirty-two poor men (one for each year of his age) and their conductors come those who "represent the officers of his foot [infantry] in the Low Countries": two "sergeants of the band" trailing halberds, then fifes and drums "playing softly," followed by the "Ensign tray led" and a "Lieutenant of Foot." The one earned "trayled"-at the trail, a sign of mourning -here is square, and bears as its image a fish lymg on the surface of the sea, the two eyes in the top of its head looking up at stars, with the motto PUL CHRUM PER SE. [...]Robert Stillman has been doing some remarkable work on the way in which Joachim Sr, the great Classical scholar and friend of Philip Melanchthon, mediated for Sidney not only Aristotle but Melanchthon hnnself, thus adding him and Ins sons to Sidney's Continental Philippist influences.5 There is a 1578 letter from Sidney to Joachim Jr and Philipp in which he thanks them for their hospitality and offers financial help for their publication of their father's work, notably his translations, with commentary, of Aristotle's pseudo -Economics, his Ethics, and his Politics. [...]Philipp later remembered with affection a dinner in 1577 where Sidney entertained the company with his table-talk on the elimination of wolves from England.6 Joachim Jr, a scholarly zoologist, was at that time working on a series of four emblem books concerning the animal world: [...]in what would become the fourth "century," he found, or was shown, emblem XVII with Üie title AD SIDERA VULTUS, which had as its illustration a splendid image of an ocean, a heaven with clouds and stars, and lying on die water an Uranoscopus, contemplating die constellations. [...]Galen10 laughs mockingly at those who consider that that is why man stands erect: in order to look up readily to heaven.