Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst,in Kent,on the 29th of November,1554.His father,Sir Henry Sidney,had married Mary,eldest daughter of John Dudley,Duke of Northumberland,and Philip was the eldest of their family of three sons and four daughters.
Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh were of like age with Philip Sidney,differing only by about a year,and when Elizabeth became queen,on the 17th of November,1558,they were children of four or five years old.
In the year 1560Sir Henry Sidney was made Lord President of Wales,representing the Queen in Wales and the four adjacent western counties,as a Lord Deputy represented her in Ireland.The official residence of the Lord President was at Ludlow Castle,to which Philip Sidney went with his family when a child of six.In the same year his father was installed as a Knight of the Garter.When in his tenth year Philip Sidney was sent from Ludlow to Shrewsbury Grammar School,where he studied for three or four years,and had among his schoolfellows Fulke Greville,afterwards Lord Brooke,who remained until the end of Sidney's life one of his closest friends.
When he himself was dying he directed that he should be described upon his tomb as "Fulke Greville,servant to Queen Elizabeth,counsellor to King James,and friend to Sir Philip Sidney."Even Dr.Thomas Thornton,Canon of Christ Church,Oxford,under whom Sidney was placed when he was entered to Christ Church in his fourteenth year,at Midsummer,in 1568,had it afterwards recorded on his tomb that he was "the tutor of Sir Philip Sidney."Sidney was in his eighteenth year in May,1572,when he left the University to continue his training for the service of the state,by travel on the Continent.Licensed to travel with horses for himself and three servants,Philip Sidney left London in the train of the Earl of Lincoln,who was going out as ambassador to Charles IX.,in Paris.He was in Paris on the 24th of August in that year,which was the day of the Massacre of St.Bartholomew.He was sheltered from the dangers of that day in the house of the English Ambassador,Sir Francis Walsingham,whose daughter Fanny Sidney married twelve years afterwards.