The myth of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) as a candidate to the Polish throne and the circumstances of his visit to Poland

Sir Philip Sidney was one of the most important gures in Elizabethan England. An outstanding poet, courtier, diplomat and knight, he has been a subject of research for many generations of scholars. Some authors state that Sidney received a proposal to become a candidate for the Polish elective throne but refused because the Queen did not agree. is story can be traced back to a short biography of him written by Robert Naunton in ca. 1630, but the ultimate source was the elegy on the death of Sidney written by Robert Dowe. Addressed to an anonymous “Polish friend”, it proposed Sidney could have become a great king, had he not been killed in battle. It was clearly a poetic metaphor rather than a statement of fact. Nevertheless, a number of scholars still believe that Sidney was approached with the proposal by Olbracht Łaski when he visited London and was received with unprecedented splendour by Elizabeth I. Even though the reasons for Łaski’s visit are still unclear, there are many arguments against such a hypothesis. Nevertheless, Sidney was greatly interested in the Polish political system (as can be gleaned from his correspondence) and eventually visited Cracow in 1574, at the invitation of Marcin Leśniowolski. e last part of the paper is an attempt at identifying the house in which Sidney stayed and it is argued that it must have been the same house in which John Dee later intended to stay (probably on Sidney’s advice), but changed his mind. e house belonged to one Pernus, whose rst name was not recorded by Dee. A detailed analysis of several members of that patrician family shows that it must have been Paweł Pernus, who studied at Heidelberg and later held high civic o ces in Cracow. He owned several houses, but it seems that the most probable identi cation of the one in which Sidney stayed is the house at Floriańska 11, which was also occasionally visited by Edward Kelley during his and John Dee’s later stay in Cracow