English courtier, soldier and poet Philip Sidney was BOTD in 1554. Born in Kent to an aristocratic family, he was educated at Shrewsbury School, where he met his life-long friend, biographer and possible lover Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke. After studying at Oxford University, he became a member of Parliament aged 18, and travelled to France to (unsuccessfully) negotiate Queen Elizabeth I’s marriage to the duc d’Anjou. In 1576, Sidney succeeded his father as cup-bearer to the Queen, and travelled through Europe for many years on diplomatic missions. A star of literary and courtly life, he was considered the ideal gentleman of his day. Denied a serious overseas post by Elizabeth, who was unconvinced of his suitability for diplomatic work, he became a renowned scholar, producing work on divinity, ancient and modern history, geography, military affairs, law, logic and medicine. He is best known for his poetry, notably his love sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella and his prose romance Arcadia, now considered among the finest achievements in Elizabethan poetry. After his lover Penelope Devereux was married to a rival, Sidney married 16 year-old Francis Walsingham, with whom he had a daughter. Sidney had a number of passionate, possibly sexual relationships with men, notably French diplomat Hubert Languet, 30 years his senior, with whom he lived in Frankfurt and Vienna. “My affection for you has somehow come to bewitch my soul,” Languet wrote to Sidney, though Sidney’s replies were intermittent and aloof. Sidney also wrote love verses to Greville and fellow courtier Edward Dyer. In 1586, he died after sustaining injuries at Battle of Zutphen, aged 31.