Born at Penshurst, Kent, England, about 1622: beheaded at London, Dec. 7, 1683. An English politician and patriot, younger son of the second Earl of Leicester. He served in the Parliamentary army, being wounded at Marston in 1644; was in 1645 elected to Parliament, where he took rank as one of the leaders of the Independents; became governor of Dublin and lieutenant-general of horse in Ireland 1646; became councilor of state in 1659; was peace commissioner between Denmark and Sweden 1659–60; lived on the Continent after the Restoration until 1677; and, being known to be a supporter of Monmouth, was arrested on the discovery of the Rye House Plot (with which he had no connection) in June, 1683, and condemned to death for high treason. He wrote “Discourses Concerning Government” (1698), etc.
Personal
All who come from Paris commend Algernon for a huge deal of wit and much sweetness of nature.
When he came on the scaffold, instead of a speech, he told them onely that he had made his peace with God, that he came not thither to talk, but to die; put a paper into the sheriff’s hand, and another into a friend’s, sayd one prayer as short as a grace, laid down his neck, and bid the executioner do his office.
A man of the most extraordinary courage—a steady man even to obstinacy—sincere, but of a rough and boisterous temper that could not bear contradiction. He seemed to be a Christian, but in a peculiar form of his own; he thought it was to be like a divine philosophy in the mind; but he was against all public worship and everything that looked like a church. He was stiff to all republican principles, and such an enemy to everything that looked like monarchy, that he set himself in a high opposition against Cromwell when he was made protector. He had studied the history of government in all its branches beyond any man I ever knew…. Sidney had a particular way of insinuating himself into people that would hearken to his notions, and not contradict him.
The production of papers, containing speculative opinions upon government and liberty, written long before, and perhaps never even intended to be published, together with the use made of those papers, in considering them as a substitute for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be paralleled in the history of juridical tyranny. But the validity of pretences was little attended to at that time, in the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruction, and upon evidence such as has been stated was this great and excellent man condemned to die.
The manifest iniquity of this sentence upon Algernon Sidney, as well as the high courage he displayed throughout these last scenes of his life, have inspired a sort of enthusiasm for his name, which neither what we know of his story, nor the opinion of his contemporaries, seems altogether to warrant. The crown of martyrdom should be suffered perhaps to exalt every virtue, and efface every defect, in patriots, as it has often done in saints. In the faithful mirror of history Sidney may lose something of this lustre. He possessed no doubt a powerful, active, and undaunted mind, stored with extensive reading on the topics in which he delighted. But having proposed one only object for his political conduct, the establishment of a republic in England, his pride and inflexibility, though they gave a dignity to his character, rendered his views narrower and his temper unaccommodating.
Errors may well be passed over in silence and his faults forgotten, where so much remains to be admired and venerated. One of the noblest martyrs of that liberty which the progress of civilization and the developments of time seem to point out as the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race. His were virtues which deserve immortality, and his a name which will go down with honor to remote generations of men. The man dies, the principles he cherished are immortal. That cause for which Sidney suffered, proscribed in his day, has been gloriously vindicated in ours. The doctrines of resistance to oppression—of popular sovereignty—of the inalienable right of mankind to intellectual and moral, to civil and religious freedom—of which he was the champion in life, and in death the martyr, have become the foundation and corner stone of those democratic institutions which since his day have sprung up in the New World. No nobler cenotaph than the free institutions of America can be reared to the memory of the dust which sleeps in its ancestral vault at Penshurst. No more glorious epitaph can be written for the patriot martyr than that which so eloquently speaks in the silent workings of those institutions. Surely while they endure, and while the doctrines which Sidney taught shall continue to be regarded as the elementary truths of our political creed, it may with truth be said that the noble blood shed in their defence on Tower Hill, has not been spilled in vain.
He lived through most critical times. He was an actor in events which affected the whole of Europe. He was a keen and shrewd observer of men and characters. He was a student and an author. He had a remarkable individuality. His friends and his enemies—he had most of the latter—alike bear witness to the power he exercised over the minds of all with whom he was brought into contact. There is, however, always something strange in the way they speak of him. The affection of his friends is but loving admiration; the opposition of his enemies is always admiring fear. He is a noble-minded, hard-working patriot, and a pure-souled and thoroughly honourable man of the world. He died under an unjust sentence, at perhaps the darkest period of our English history; but what gives him a claim on our interest and sympathy to a far greater extent is the fact of his suffering injustice throughout an almost blameless life.
General
They [“Discourses”] are admirably written, and contain great historical knowledge and a remarkable propriety of diction; so that his name, in my opinion, ought to be much higher established in the temple of literature than I have hitherto found it placed.
Algernon Sidney created the language of politics; his “Discourses upon Government” have grown obsolete…. The revolution of 1688 arose from the scaffold of Sidney, with the steam of the blood of the holocaust! This bloody dew is now falling, and the England of 1688 is disappearing.
In all the discourse of Algernon Sidney upon Government we see constant indications of a rooted dislike to monarchy and ardent love of Democracy; but not a sentence can we find that shows the illustrious author to have regarded the manner in which the people were represented as of any importance.
Both in his diplomatic mission, and in his labours on the legislative council, he soon became enrolled among the intellectual minority who lead instead of follow, and organize instead of assent. When he placed pen to paper and logically thought out his speculations, his style, though somewhat heavy, was clear, solid, and vigorous—all he wrote bore the impress of a well-read mind, a mind that was as much accustomed to profound reflection as to practical action.
More than any other among the distinguished historical personages of the seventeenth century, Algernon Sidney, in point of character and conduct, will continue to have his detractors and admirers. The published letters in the different editions of the Sidney papers serve only to confirm his partisans in their admiration of his consistency of principle as an enemy of monarchical government—even to the extent of deprecating the personal rule of Cromwell—and his enemies in their reprehension of the factious leader who could waste his splendid energies in caballing with France and Holland for the establishment of a republic in England. The most able and eminent of the knot of revolutionary patriots to which he belonged, he was also the most uncompromising and most provokingly obstinate.
His writings are “Discourses concerning Government,” written at Frascati in 1663, but first published in 1698, and letters and memoirs respectively printed in 1742 and 1751. In 1884 a treatise on “Love” was first published from Algernon Sydney’s manuscript. Sydney is very diffuse; but the alteration which had come over prose may well be noted by comparing his republican discourses with the totally unreadable reams on the same subject which Harrington had produced in the preceding generation.
The style precisely corresponds to the author’s character, haughty, fiery, and arrogant; but thrilling with conviction, and meriting the highest praise as a specimen of masculine, nervous, and at the same time polished English. Much additional zest is imparted to the author’s argument by his continual strokes at the political abuses and the unworthy characters of his own day, from Charles II. downwards. He had the advantage of writing under the stimulus of fiery indignation kindled and maintained by the actual existence of a tyranny. He is thus never tame, and depicts himself as one of that remarkable class of men of whom Alfieri is perhaps the most characteristic type—aristocrats by temperament, champions of democracy by intellectual conviction. Although the controversy in which he engaged now belongs entirely to the past, he is often modern in sentiment as well as in style; sometimes we are reminded of Shelley, at other times, and more frequently, of Landon.
Sidney’s chief work, the “Discourses concerning Government,” was first printed by Toland or Littlebury in 1698. This is an answer to Filmer’s “Patriarcha,” which was first published in 1680; and the few allusions to contemporary politics in Sidney’s book show that a great part of it was written about that year. Though tedious from its extreme length and from following too closely in Filmer’s footsteps, it contains much vigorous writing, and shows wide reading.
