An edition of The Correspondence of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester [1598-1659], ed. Michael Brennan, Margaret Hannay and Noel Kinnamon

1. This project, to complete a contracted and collaborative edition (with Ashgate Publishing) of The Correspondence of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester [1598-1659], draws upon the wealth of seventeenth-century manuscript material held in the Sidney family archive, one of the largest collections of early-modern family and state papers in private hands. With the support of its owner, Viscount De L'Isle, the three co-editors of this edition have been collaboratively working on materials from this archive for the last fifteen years, resulting, to date, in six published books, numerous articles and conference papers, and four further ongoing contracted book-length publications.
2. This edition will provide the first complete edition of the c.140 surviving letters from Dorothy Percy Sidney's correspondence and will illustrate her centrality to the Sidney family's personal and public lives from the 1630s onwards. Its scope and format will parallel our earlier collaborative edition of Sidney family letters for the same Ashgate series, Domestic Politics and Family Absence. The Correspondence (1588-1621) of Robert Sidney, first Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester (Ashgate, 2005) - i.e., the correspondence of Dorothy Percy Sidney's parents-in-law. It will also draw upon my own preliminary findings on her familial and political importance included in my monograph, The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 15001-1700 (Ashgate, 2006 - completed during a previous period of AHRC Research Leave in 2005).
3. Dorothy secretly married Robert Sidney (son of Queen Anne's Lord Chamberlain, Robert, 1st Earl of Leicester, and nephew of Sir Philip Sidney) in mid-1616 but was warmly welcomed into the Sidney's family life at Penshurst in Kent and at London, where they often resided at Baynard's Castle with their influential cousins, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and his younger brother, Philip Herbert, 1st Earl of Montgomery, a lasting favourite and close personal friend of King James.
4. Dorothy's own familial links were of immense value to the Sidneys. She was the daughter of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, and his wife, Dorothy Devereux, the sister of the executed Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex. As her letters demonstrate, she also brought useful political connections with the circle of her sister, Lucy Percy Hay, Countess of Carlisle and, thereby, developed a productive intimacy relationship with Queen Henrietta Maria herself.
5. During her husband's embassy to France (1636/41) and then his Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland (1641/4), Dorothy became an active and shrewd promoter of her family's interests at court and a staunch defender of her husband's administrative reputation and loyalty to the English royal family. Due to Robert Sidney's prolonged absences on international, official and court duties, Dorothy increasingly became the personal and political focus of the Sidney family during the 1630s and 1640s; and, following her husband's traumatic disassociation from Charles I in 1644, she became the central and pivotal figure for the Sidneys in court and political life.
6. In addition to her correspondence with a wide variety of influential court and political figures at this period, in her letters Dorothy also regularly writes about her responsibilities for the financial and domestic management of both her country estate, Penshurst Place in Kent, and her huge London mansion, Leicester House. She comments on the Sidneys' growing collection of pictures and furnishing imported from France and, after 1649, acquired from the English royal collections, and the domestic vicissitudes of childhood illnesses, outbreaks of the plague and schemes for the grand marital unions of her children. Her letters eloquently convey how complex, demanding and testing were the multifaceted roles expected during the mid-17th century of an aristocratic early-modern Englishwoman.