Sir Phillip Sidney was born in Penhurst, Kent and attended the Shrewsbury School and Christ Church College, Oxford. He was a courtly celebrity of his day, working for Elizabeth I as an ambassador and soldier, as well as being her most highly favoured poet. His works Astrophil and Stella, The Countess of Pemroke's Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy, are considered to be the greatest surviving examples of renaissance rhetoric and courtly love poetry.
 
In 1585 Sidney was made governor of Flushing in the Netherlands where he fought against the influx of Spanish Catholicism, receiving a mortal wound to the leg in a skirmish at Zutphen, in 1586. His body was returned to England the following year and interred at St. Paul's Cathedral.