“Intent, and Scope”:

Abstract

One Jacobean text capable of affiliating Sidney with Prince Henry has an appropriate date of composition (ca. 1610–12). If Greville wrote his biography of Sidney about a quarter of a century after its subject’s death, as generally accepted, he would have known of the huge hopes invested in Henry. Greville might even have been aware of how entirely those hopes had been frustrated, if most of his labor occurred during the final months of 1612. In the introduction to his edition of Greville’s biography, however, Nowell Smith proposes as a compositional terminus ad quem another death, occurring half-a-year prior—that of Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury.¹ Moreover, whereas Greville might not have been able to mention Henry’s end, he also neglects to mention his promise. On the other hand, no such uncertainty surrounds the publication of Greville’s biography (1652), as delayed as its composition, occurring about a quarter of a century after its own author’s death, and Annabel Patterson interprets this timing as evidence of the text’s “potential appeal to a Puritan and republican audience,” based on “the relevance of its message to the monarchy that had just been abolished.”² In their certain and possible responses to Gre-ville’s biography, however, both Pepys and John Collop shed doubt on the terms of its “appeal” during the Interregnum and post-Restoration period.