She gathered around her at Wilton, as her own armory, a company of wits, poets, thinkers, and scientists. She and they made Wilton the center of Renaissance England. Almost the entire family was writing poems. Her other brother, Robert Sidney, who became governor of Flushing on Philip’s death, wrote a sequence of poems addressed to Mary. Her son William and her niece, also called Mary Sidney, both became poets. The only silent members of the household were the increasingly ill and curmudgeonly Henry, and Mary’s younger son, Philip, both of them devoted to their hawks and hounds. Mary had not been admitted to Philip Sidney’s funeral, and afterward she withdrew to Wilton in her grief for two years. Philip Sidney had made her his literary heir. She was in possession of the manuscripts of Arcadia, The Defence of Poesy, and the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. Over the coming years, from her base at Wilton, she would oversee the publication of all of them. But her role was far more than a keeper of the flame.
