A Tale of Two Knights: Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse: Guest Post by Peter Nieuwenhuizen

Peter Nieuwenhuizen, president of the Dutch Wodehouse Society, gave an original and delightful talk at the 17th US Wodehouse Society (October 19, 2013) convention of The Wodehouse Society in Chicago. Here is a reworked version of the same, reported first in Plum Lines. Fans of Plum will enjoy his scholarly study of the evolution of the heroic Sir Philip Sidney’s famous battlefield quotation in Plum’s works.

Portrait of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) c.1620 (oil on panel) by Decritz, John the Younger (1600-1657)

A longtime ago, in 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh sailed to the east coast of America to start a settlement in North Carolina. He did this for Queen Elizabeth I of England. The United States was not yet a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

In the same year in The Netherlands, my ancestors had to deal with the Spanish conquerors. During this strife, a noble British knight, Sir Philip Sidney, fought alongside the Dutch soldiers and died at the age of 31 from wounds suffered in a battle. Poet, husband, and nobleman, athletic and courageous, he dedicated his life abroad to his queen, country, and church.

Much later, another knight, Sir P.G. Wodehouse, was touched by this small piece of history and wrote about it in his novels—not once, not twice, but twenty times. So it must be important, but why? Let us explore this little historic jewel.

Philip Sidney was born in 1554, in the reign of Mary Tudor. He was named after Mary’s husband, the Spanish king Philip II.

Philip Sidney grew up at Penhurst Place, a magnificent estate in Kent. He was well-educated, becoming a pupil at the Shrewsbury School at the age of ten. As a boy of twelve, at the side of his uncle Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, he witnessed the festive procession of Queen Elizabeth in Oxford. At the age of fourteen he started studying at Oxford, and four years later he made a grand tour on the continent and visited Paris, where he met Lodewijk (Louis) of Nassau, the brother of the Dutch governor, and, later, William of Orange, the founder of The Netherlands. Philip Sidney went on to visit Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Antwerp before he returned to England. He had traveled for three years and returned wiser, a man of the world.

In England he stayed at the court of Elizabeth and studied music and poetry, wrote sonnets, learned to fight, took part in tournaments, and developed into a noble knight, a gentleman pur sang, as our French friends would say.

After those two years at court, though only 23 years old, he became a diplomat for England. He first served in Germany and later in The Netherlands, where he witnessed the baptism of Elizabeth, the eleventh child of William of Orange.

Back in England he went to live at his sister’s place near Salisbury, where he started to write his famous poetry. He wrote Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesy, and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

(Battle of Zutphen)

By now you’re probably wondering what was going on in The Netherlands and why Philip Sidney was involved. Well, the Dutch were overwhelmed by the Spanish in a war that would last for eighty years. William of Orange was shot dead by Balthasar Gerards in 1584 in Delft. Obviously, the Dutch needed help and appealed to England. Queen Elizabeth sent 5,000 soldiers under the command of Philip’s uncle, Robert Dudley. In return, Elizabeth got some Dutch cities as security, including Den Briel and Flushing (Vlissingen). Philip Sidney became the governor of Flushing and sailed to The Netherlands. In Flushing, he found his soldiers to be underpaid, ill-armed, hungry, and sick. It was not a good start for an ambitious 31-year-old governor.

Maurits of Orange, the son of the murdered William of Orange, welcomed Sidney and his uncle. They made a grand entrance in cities like Delft, The Hague, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.

The Duke of Parma, Alexander Farnese, launched an offensive in 1586 and conquered several cities. It was imperative that Maurits, Dudley, and Sidney take action. They conquered the city of Axel and went on to Zutphen, a strategic city on the river Ijssel that was occupied by the Spanish.

With five hundred soldiers and fifty noblemen (the latter of whom were anxious to witness a real battle – from a distance, of course), they started the Battle of Zutphen on October 2, 1586. At dawn they realized that the Spanish far outnumbered them, and they retreated.

But alas, near the hamlet of Warnsveld, a few miles away, Sir Philip Sidney was mortally wounded. He took a Spanish musketball to his thigh and tumbled to the ground in great pain. One of his servants present at the battlefield – a Jeeves avant la lettre – hurried toward him with a cup or chalice of water. But instead of drinking this water, this life elixir, he handed it to a dying soldier on a stretcher, saying: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” He didn’t recover, and three weeks later he died. His body was transported back to England, and he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

(Memorial at Warnsveld where Sidney was shot)

From this event the legend was born. Sir Philip Sidney became revered as a great warrior, although he had mostly fought at court tournaments. On the artistic side, his sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, had his sonnets and other work published, and he gained a successful posthumous literary career. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, statues were erected in his memory. One still stands in England at his old school in Shrewsbury, and another can be found in Zutphen in a park named after him.

Somewhere along the line, that other writer and later a knight, Sir P.G. Wodehouse, heard this beautiful story about Sir Philip Sidney. According to Norman Murphy’s Wodehouse Handbook, one of Plum’s cousins attended the Shrewsbury school where a statue of Sidney stood on the playground, and Shrewsbury was the model for Wrykyn in The White Feather.

Wodehouse was so impressed by this legend, this noble deed of Sir Philip Sidney, that he used variations of the famous phrase “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine” in various forms twenty times in his novels and stories.

The very first reference that we have found is a peculiar one. For the June 1915 Strand magazine, Wodehouse wrote the story “Black for Luck,” in which a black cat is a central character. Both James Renshaw Boyd and Elizabeth Herrold considered the stray cat as their own, and it was a good luck charm for both of them. Elizabeth finally gave up the cat for the sake of James, the playwright: “In any case, it would be like Sir Philip Sidney and the wounded soldier—’your need is greater than mine.’ Think of all the people who are dependent on your play being a success!”

A cat replaced the cup of water. Oddly, when this story was published in The Man with Two Left Feet in 1917, the sentence was altered to: “Never mind about me.” Alas, no reference to Sir Philip and his heroic deed.

In 1920, Wodehouse used the Sidney legend again in the novel Jill the Reckless (U.K.), aka The Little Warrior (U.S.). Freddie Rooke is going to meet his friend Algy Martyn in the Drones Club, but, not being a member, he can’t receive a snifter:

There he sat, surrounded by happy, laughing young men, each grasping a glass of the good old mixture-as-before, absolutely unable to connect. Some of them, casual acquaintances, had nodded to him, waved, and gone on lowering the juice – a spectacle which made Freddie feel much as the wounded soldier would have felt if Sir Philip Sidney, instead of offering him the cup of water, had placed it to his own lips and drained it with a careless “Cheerio!”

This is a wonderful reference but in fact the opposite of what happened on the battleground. Wodehouse used the reverse to emphasize the fierce desire for something and not getting it.

Later in the canon, the soldier of legend transforms into “a stretcher case,“ but the supply of a drink remains. In Ring for Jeeves, Jeeves comes to the rescue:

Jill collapsed into a chair…. Jeeves was a kindly man, and not only a kindly man but a man who could open a bottle of champagne as quick as a flash. It was in something of the Spirit of the Sir Philip Sidney who gave the water to the stretcher case that he now whisked the cork from the bottle he was carrying. Jill’s need, he felt, was greater than Bill’s.

“Permit me, miss.”

Jill drank gratefully.

A year later, Jeeves did it again. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, Aunt Dahlia is talking to her nephew Bertie. Dahlia longs for a cocktail and, of course, some advice from Jeeves. At the start of this excerpt, Bertie gives Dahlia hope:

“He should be with us at any moment now. He stepped out to get me a tankard of the old familiar juice.”

Her eyes gleamed with a strange light.

“Bags I first go at it!”

I patted her hand.

“Of course”, I said, “of course. You may take that as read. You don’t find Bertram Wooster hogging the drink supply when a suffering aunt is at his side with her tongue hanging out. Your need is greater than mine, as whoever-it-was said to the stretcher case. Ah!”

Jeeves had come in bearing the elixir, not a split second before we were ready for it. I took the beaker from him and offered it to the aged relative with a courteous gesture. With a brief “Mud in your eye” she drank deeply.

Over time, Wodehouse changed the water not just to other beverages but also to objects or actions. The third chronological reference to the legend was in 1921, and here the drink was transformed into a kiss. Wodehouse wrote in Indiscretions of Archie:

He kissed her fondly.

“By love!” he exclaimed. “You really are, you know! This is the biggest thing since jolly old Sir Philip What’s-his-name gave the drink of water to the poor blighter whose need was greater than his, if you recall the incident. I had to sweat it up at school, I remember. Sir Philip, poor old bean, had a most ghastly thirst on, and he was just going to have one on the house, so to speak, when… but it’s all in the history books. This is the sort of thing Boy Scouts do!”

And only two years later, the cup of water became an umbrella. In Leave It to Psmith, Psmith borrows Walderwick’s umbrella without permission for the rescue of Eve Halliday in the rain. Psmith then praises Walderwick for his sacrifice: “You are now entitled to rank with Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh!”

After a cat, cocktail, kiss, and umbrella, Wodehouse took the reference even further: the noble act becomes money. In 1925’s Sam the Sudden, Sam Shotter rents a cottage in Valley Fields and “borrows” the rent money, without permission, from his friend Braddock. He slips a note in Braddock’s wallet:

Dear Bradder: You will doubtless be surprised to learn that I have borrowed your money. I will return it in God’s good time. Meanwhile, as Sir Philip Sidney said to the wounded soldier, my need is greater than yours.

Trusting this finds you in the pink.

Yrs. Obedtly,

S. Shotter.

Wodehouse completely reverses the myth: it is the opposite of what Sir Philip Sidney said. This adds more comic effect for the readers who know the real legend.

(The statue of Sir Philip Sidney that stands on the lovely grounds of Sidney Park in Zutphen, The Netherlands)

After this joke, Wodehouse does not refer to the legend for seven years. In 1932, it surfaces again in Hot Water. Packy Franklyn tries to impress his fiancée Lady Beatrice Bracken by cutting the hair of Senator Opal: “To go and hack at this old buster’s thatch would be to perform a kindly and altruistic act, very much the same sort of thing for which Sir Philip Sidney and the Boy Scouts are so highly thought of.”

The smuggling of a pearl necklace by Reggie Tennyson is a relief for motion-picture magnate Ivor Llewellyn, in return for a movie contract. In 1935’s The Luck of the Bodkins, Mr. Llewellyn is grateful:

There was nothing in the look which Mr. Llewellyn was directing at Reggie now to awaken the critical spirit in the latter. It was entirely free from that pop-eyed dislike which the young man had found so offensive in the early stages of this conference. It was, indeed, very much the sort of look the wounded soldier must have directed at Sir Philip Sidney.

In 1936 in Laughing Gas, Joey Cooley, inhabited by the narrator’s spirit and personality, says:

“Prunes! … Hi! Give me a lick!” I cried, in a voice vibrant with emotion.

He passed it over without hesitation. If he had been Sir Philip Sidney with the wounded soldier, he couldn’t have been nippier.

The issue of morals is also seen through the lens of the Sidney legend. As we all know, Bertie Wooster is a fine lad, but sometimes morally unsound. In The Mating Season, Bertie remembers the lessons of his youth:

When I was a piefaced lad of some twelve summers, doing my stretch at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the private school conducted by the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, I remember hearing the Rev. Aubrey give the late Sir Philip Sidney a big build-up because, when wounded at the battle of somewhere and offered a quick one by a companion in arms, he told the chap who was setting them up to leave him out of that round and slip his spot to a nearby stretcher-case, whose need was greater than his. This spirit of selfless sacrifice, said the Rev. Aubrey, was what he would like to see in you boys—particularly you, Wooster, and how many times have I told you not to gape at me in that half-witted way? Close your mouth, boy, and sit up.

So, for objects and actions, drinks and water, and a moral compass, the Sir Philip legend is useful for almost everything.

When Gussie in Right Ho, Jeeves refuses to distribute prizes, he says that “the square, generous thing to do was to step aside and let you take it on, so I did so. I felt that your need was greater than mine.”

But now we stumble upon a problem. The reference to Sir Philip Sidney has disappeared, as have the cup of water and the wounded soldier aka the stretcher case. Wodehouse does this several times, as if to say that by now everybody is familiar with the legend in his works over the past years. Examples of this abridged version of the legend follow:

Laughing Gas: “The goldfish were looking up expectantly, obviously hoping for their cut, but my need [for a breakfast leftover] was greater than theirs.” (Another reversal of the legend.)

Uncle Fred in the Springtime: Lord Ickenham says to Pongo, in reference to money for Polly Pott for the onion soup bar, “All I can say by way of apology is that her need is greater than yours.”

Quick Service: Joss Weatherby, the artist, after having his money embezzled, says that “the lawyer who had charge of it [was] getting the feeling one day that his need was greater than mine.”

Barmy in Wonderland: referring to a frog in the hotel bathroom: “but that your need was greater than his. I thought it showed a nice spirit in the lad.”

Sir Philip is still remembered by the Dutch. A beautiful statue stands in Sidney Park in Zutphen and bears this inscription in Dutch: “Nobleman, Poet, Statesman, Fighter for our Freedom. Sir Philip gave his life for The Netherlands.” In Warnsveld, where Sidney was shot, there is a small marker with the famous words engraved: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” And at the Gunpowder Tower in Zutphen there is this plaque, installed by the Dutch P. G. Wodehouse Society:

This is our way to show respect for two great knights and literary heroes, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

Notes:

1. Permission of the author to post this article here is gratefully acknowledged. The original article in Plum Lines can be seen here: https://www.academia.edu/8938301/A_Tale_of_Two_Knights_Sir_Philip_Sidney_and_Sir_Pelham_Grenville_Wodehouse
2. An epitaph of Sir Philip Sidney: “England has his body, for she it fed; Netherlands his blood, in her defence shed; The Heavens have his soul, The Arts have his fame, The soldier his grief, The world his good name.”

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