Abstract: This study reinterprets young Philip Sidney's betrothal to Anne Cecil in 1569–1571, shedding new light on interrelated personal and political motives for both fathers. Modern biographies of Philip Sidney and of Sir William Cecil (Lord Burghley) have claimed consistently that this betrothal faltered in 1569–1570 due to a shortage of the Sidney family's finances and that in 1571 Burghley's dynastic ambition motivated the betrothal's replacement with Anne's marriage to Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Yet neither direct textual evidence in the documentary record nor relevant context substantiates clearly those emphases on motives of social rank and money. Cecil (Burghley) did not choose Anne's match with Oxford. He maintained personal love and admiration for Philip Sidney and, with Sir Henry Sidney, aimed to forge a dynasty of Cecils, Dudleys, and Sidneys at the heart of the Elizabethan inner regime.
Timothy D. Crowley (Thu,) studied this question.
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