The foundress of Sydney Sussex College was the Lady Frances Sidney, one of the learned ladies of the court of Elizabeth. She was the aunt both of Sir Philip Sidney and of the Earl of Leicester; the wife of Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, known at least to all readers of "Kenilworth" as the rival of Leicester. To-day the noble families of Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Sidney all claim her as a common ancestress. A few years ago, in conjunction with the authorities of the college, they restored her tomb, which occupies the place of the altar in the chapel of S. Paul in Westminster Abbey. It was the Dean of Westminster, her friend Dr. Goodman, who gave to the college that portrait of the foundress which hangs above the high table in the college hall. It is a characteristic of the period which may be worth noting here--of the middle, that is, of the sixteenth century--when the destinies of Europe were woven by the hands of three extraordinary queens, who ruled the fortunes of England, France, and Scotland--that, as the fruits of the Renaissance and of the outgrowth of the New Learning, and perhaps also of the independent spirit of the coming Puritanism, learned women should in some degree be leading the van of English civilisation. How long the Lady Frances had had the intention of founding a college, and what was the prompting motive, we do not know. In her will, however, which is dated December 6, 1588, the intention is clearly stated. After giving instructions as to her burial and making certain bequests, she proceeds to state "that since the decease of her late lord"--he had died five years previously--"she had yearly gathered out of her revenues so much as she conveniently could, purposing to erect some goodly and godly monument for the maintenance of good learning." In performance of the same, her charitable pretence, she directs her executors to employ the sum of £5000 (made up from her ready-money yearly reserved, a certain portion of plate, and other things which she had purposely left) together with all her unbequeathed goods, for the erection of a new college in the University of Cambridge, to be called the "Lady Frances Sidney Sussex College, and for the purchasing some competent lands for the maintaining of a Master, ten Fellows, and twenty Scholars, if the said £5000 and unbequeathed goods would thereunto extend." On her death in the following year her executors, the Earl of Kent and Sir John Harrington, at once attempted to carry out her wishes. Of them and their endeavour, Fuller, himself a Sidney man, has thus, as always, quaintly written:--