Sir Henry Sidney cradled the dying King Edward in his arms. Two years earlier Henry had married Mary Dudley, daughter of the famous hero of Flodden, and in the same year Penshurst Place in Kent was granted to the Sidney family. The marriage linked the up-and-coming Sidneys to the influential Dudleys, fostering a host of connections that would prove vital (and occasionally problematic) to both families. The offspring of Henry and Mary each made a mark: there was the extravagantly popular Philip, poet, patron of the arts, and youthful martyr killed at Zutphen in the struggle against Catholicism; then Mary, writer, translator, and wife of Henry Herbert, earl of Pembroke; and finally Robert, the steady diplomat and minor poet who was the first earl of Leicester (and whose family was living at Penshurst Place when Ben Jonson wrote his great country-house poem to the estate). Later generations were equally prominent, from the brilliant and controversial Mary Wroth to Algernon Sidney, the republican sympathizer executed in 1683. Indeed, as Michael Brennan records in his dense and narrowly focused study, for two defining centuries in British history the Sidneys remained close to the center of the action and, despite significant setbacks, managed to prosper.

Brennan narrates a good story. Using the Sidney family archive, as well as state records, historical chronicles, and literary texts, he traces the ups and downs of the Sidneys with more than merely a recitation of factual data. Chapters divide the narrative chronologically, and, within each chapter, Brennan treats individual family members against the backdrop of the Sidney-Dudley-Herbert-Wroth network. Philip Sidney's fortunes drive the early part of the tale, and Brennan unearths some interesting facts amid the familiar material of Philip's life, such as that he was a poor correspondent and had little aptitude for bureaucratic tasks. But Brennan is careful not to allow Philip's fame to obscure less well-known Sidneys, such as Robert, the second earl of Leicester, who spent half his career as an active servant of Charles I and half, after a personal disagreement with the king, in studious retirement. It may be that the Sidney name retains its prominence largely because we continue to read, teach, and anthologize Astrophil and Stella and the Arcadia, but Brennan does his best to achieve parity of emphasis for the family's widespread accomplishments in other areas, especially diplomatic and military service (e.g., his useful chapter on “The Sidneys and Royal Service, 1621–1644”). Brennan's project is twofold: to explore both the political and personal ramifications of a family that stayed close to the English crown for two centuries and to use this renowned family's standing at court as a means of characterizing different Tudor and Stuart regimes. If this is history with a bias, then it is the deliberate sort of bias that illustrates rather than distorts the historian's argument. In examples too numerous to cite, Brennan demonstrates how the Sidneys typified the kind of courtly ambition and exceptional perseverance required to succeed in the wild competition swirling around the monarchy. Brennan also does exceptional spade work in sorting out the shifting loyalties and enmities of successive generations of aristocrats. Percys, Dudleys, Herberts, Cecils, Howards, and Throckmortons abound, along with dizzying changes in rank and title within families and during the same generation. The sheer bulk of competing interests is daunting, and, considering the difficulty of keeping all the scores straight (both then and now), Brennan manages admirably to isolate salient events that affected the Sidneys’ fortunes.

If there is a difficulty with The Sidneys of Penshurst, it is not that Brennan views English courtly history through a Sidneian lens—this seems as valuable a glass as any to train on the aristocracy of the period. But, particularly when events overshadow the Sidneys’ part in them, Brennan's single-family approach can create a sense of disproportion. This is most pronounced in Brennan's discussion of Charles I and the Civil War, when the Sidneys were not as influential as they had been under Elizabeth and James. Brennan's observations can also be too obvious, as when he informs us that Thomas Elyot's Book Named the Governor strongly influenced the Sidneys (he at the same time neglects to mention Castiglione's Cortegiano, a book at least as influential among English courtiers). Moreover, despite the density of his study, Brennan sometimes makes provocative remarks without substantial support, such as when he asserts that Elizabeth might have doubted Sir Henry Sidney's loyalty and therefore refused to grant him certain privileges. Or when he suggests that the dowager countess of Pembroke might have been having an affair with her young doctor Matthew Lister, that neither Robert Sidney nor his wife Barbara Gamage seemed to know about the affair, but that Mary Wroth's pastoral drama Love's Victory “may well shadow this relationship” (127).

But these are small objections. Michael Brennan has widened the dimensions of Sidney scholarship. The Sidneys of Penshurst is a book for specialists, and its erudition reenforces the importance of understanding the Sidney family and the milieu they helped to forge.