THE FIRST EARL AS POWER BROKER 1549–1570
The crisis in William Herbert’s life erupted in the spring of 1549, as the roads began to dry and people could begin to move. Henry VIII had died two years before and had left the throne to his son, Edward VI, still only a boy of nine. The boy’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had become Lord Protector, king in all but name. William Herbert had begun the new reign as Somerset’s ally, but their ways had soon parted. Somerset was cold, arrogant, and even priggish. Increasingly he monopolized the boy king and his instruments of power. The atmosphere at court had turned vicious. One of Herbert’s allies, Sir William Paget, wrote to Somerset: “Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster, before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy…. And that was to follow mine advise in all your proceedings more than any other man’s.”
No sense of communality here; only mutual distrust. The duke, as regent and Lord Protector while Edward VI was still a minor, had issued proclamations to the effect that landowners should return to the old ways of doing things, that they should consider themselves stewards and fathers of their little commonwealths. New men had behaved badly. Enclosures of what had been either open field or common land, either for private gain or for the pleasure a park could afford, ran against this communitarian ethic. In Somerset’s hands, the custom of the manor was making a renewed claim against the lordly Renaissance desire for spreading parkland.
In addition, the long history of English radicalism, founded on that element in the Bible that saw men as equal in the sight of God, fed the sense of outrage. If Isaiah could warn, “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place [left], that they [i.e., the landowners] may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!” it was inevitable that the rioters would demand, “Why should one man have all and another nothing?” What was there to stop the people of Washerne who had been evicted from their houses and had had the seven acres of Lampeland taken from them to reclaim what was theirs in the sight of God and apparently of the Lord Protector?
In April 1549, reports began to come in to the Privy Council in Westminster of peasants creating havoc in many parts of the country. There was nothing new in that: a long tradition of English violence had bubbled away for generations. But there was no doubt that the 1540s were a desperate time in southern England. Not only were there many estates in which the lax government of the abbeys had been replaced by hardheaded modern men, harder-headed than most. The underlying economic situation was desperate, too. The population of England, now at about 2.75 million, had increased by some 35 percent over the previous century. The cost of living had risen by 50 percent in the previous fifty years. In 1545, the harvest had been catastrophic and the economy was still reeling from the aftereffects. The rich, gathering up the pickings from the dissolution of the monasteries, were getting richer, and the poor, their numbers burgeoning against a static food supply, were getting poorer.
On May 25, 1549, the crisis hit home. A Norfolk gentleman, John Paston, wrote to his cousin the Earl of Rutland:
there is a great number of the commons up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir William Herbert’s park that is about his new house and divers other parks and commons that be inclosed in that country.
It was the people of Washerne taking their revenge. They threw down the new oak palings that Herbert had set up to enclose the deer and exclude the people, and slaughtered what deer they could catch. For three weeks they occupied the ground on the other side of the Nadder from Herbert’s new house. They may not have known quite what they were taking on, since in those weeks, as they attempted to rebuild their houses on the old sites—there was a mistaken belief widespread in England that any man who could build a house and light a fire in the course of a day had the right to remain in it—Herbert was away in Wales. There, from his Glamorgan estates, drawing on the “affinity”—the band of his tenants who could be relied on to fight for him when summoned—he marched them back into Wiltshire. Approaching Wilton, he attacked his invading Washerne tenants as if they were an enemy and “slew to death divers of the rebels.” News of Herbert’s fearsome response reached the young king, who recorded in his journal how the men of Washerne had created trouble and chaos and how “Sir William Herbert did put them down, overrun, and slay them.”
The park where Sir Philip Sidney would within thirty-five years wander with the dreams of Arcadia in his head was now restored to wholeness, and if you stand on the lawns outside Wilton House today, staring across the elegance of the park and its gentlemanly accoutrements, you are looking at one of the heartlands of Arcadia: a stretch of landscape in which the people who claimed some rights over it were murdered so that an aesthetic vision of otherworldly calm could be imposed in their place. It is an early, miniature, English version of the clearances on the great Highland estates in Scotland or even of the National Parks in the wilder parts of America: calm, beautiful, and empty landscapes, not because God made them like that but because the people who belonged there were driven off, killed, or otherwise dispensed with.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider exactly what was done here in the service of Arcadia. Remember the dog chains in the old armory, the bills and pikes, the halberds with which you could spike a man and then cut him. Almost certainly Herbert would have used a sword on his tenants. The favorite and usual strokes in the sixteenth century were not fencing-like thrusts—a slightly later, European development—but rather more woodmanlike slashing and severing: the cutting of the head from the shoulders, the cutting off of an arm or a leg, and the slicing stroke down through the head. This could be dramatic. There are records throughout the Middle Ages of sword cuts leaving the severed halves of the head hanging down to left and right on either shoulder. Sometimes the sword was smashed into the head with such violence that it cut down through a man’s torso to his hips, with his body folding apart like a carcass in an abattoir. Skeletons from medieval battles, unearthed and examined, often have multiple wounds: both legs cut off, sometimes apparently from a single sweeping blow with a sword; parts of the skull cut away in several pieces; occasionally many wounds of which any one would have been fatal; bodies left halved.
There is a disturbing echo in this story of the use of a park as a place for a hunt. The king’s phrase—“put them down, overrun, and slay them”—is curiously reminiscent of the account of a successful pursuit of a quarry. This was the manly excitement of the hunt taken to its ultimate, a point of view summarized by one Richard Blome, the author of the late-seventeenth-century Gentleman’s Recreation. Hunting, as Blome described the tradition,
is a commendable Recreation…a great preserver of Health, a Manly Exercise, and an increaser of Activity;…it recreates the Mind, strengthens the Limbs, and whets the Stomach;…no Musick is more charming to the Ears of Man, than a Pack of Hounds in full Cry is to him that delights in Hunting…
Hunting was universally seen as training for war, or rather, more than that, as a form of nostalgic and pretechnological war that reminded its noble participants of what war must have been like before an awkward, ugly modernity contaminated it. Sir Thomas Elyot, the Tudor theorist of government, had recommended that sixteenth-century Englishmen should use only the javelin in the hunt, because that is what Xenophon had recommended in ancient Greece, and it alone would preserve the nobility of the exercise. James I, a passionate huntsman, would have no gun come anywhere near the parks where he pursued deer, because the use of guns, as he told his son Prince Henry, was a “theevish forme of hunting.” Grandeur was antique.
When in the following decade William Herbert paraded through London (the old dowager queen of Scots, Mary of Guise, was visiting), he had with him “a hundred great horses, mounted by a hundred horsemen,” their coats lined with velvet, gold chains around their necks, white feathers in their hats, wearing the Pembroke badge of the wyvern, the winged dragon, “and every [man] havyng a new gayffelyns in ther hands.” That is a word to raise the hackles on one’s neck. Was it javelins the men and women of Washerne were hunted with, as Elyot recommended, that summer afternoon in 1549? Was it a kind of pig-sticking? The elision was commonplace in the sixteenth century of any difference between a working man and a brutish beast. Shakespeare’s Venus uses a “javelin’s point a churlish swine to gore”—and one is left in no doubt that her churlish swine, with his brawny sides, his hairy bristles, and short, thick neck, living in his “loathsome cabin,” is a kind of animal Caliban, a dirty commoner, to be gored by the lovely, javelin-wielding elegant men, with feathers in their hats, chains around their necks, and beauty in their faces.
William Herbert’s pursuit and slaying of the tenants who had presumed to enter his park represents the most disturbing compaction of the binary worlds of Arcadia and violence: a dreamlike killing of people in a consciously aestheticized place, the reality of human death for once taking over from the playacting of deer death, the heart-pumping chase, the satisfactory conclusion, the restoration of calm.
Having used his Welsh tenants to kill his Wiltshire tenants, William Herbert then took the former to war. He was certainly—and from the point of view of his own interests, rightly—excited by it. The summer of 1549 would turn him from a successful adventurer into one of the central power brokers of the Tudor state. He brutally suppressed a Catholic rebellion in the West Country, and emerged from it at the head of an army with which, ominously, he then turned for London.
The crisis rippled on into the autumn. The cold, brusque, rigid, and aloof idealism of the Duke of Somerset, still in London with the king, had alienated most of his supporters in the council: landlords such as Herbert, who had suffered invasions of their parks or enclosed fields; the old nobility who felt themselves supplanted by the new men such as Paget and Herbert; anyone who felt bruised by Somerset’s short temper, arrogance, and obstinacy. It was a grouping fatal for Somerset. Herbert’s friend John Dudley, now the Earl of Warwick, was in Norfolk with another army. Somerset felt caught between the two of them and retreated with the king to the safety of Windsor Castle. Again and again, he and the boy king wrote to Herbert, telling him that the other nobles on the council had tuned against them and imploring him to come to their aid.
Slowly Herbert approached from the west, arriving at Andover, a mere forty miles from Windsor, on October 8. From there, Herbert wrote to Somerset a cold, disdainful, and threatening letter, perfectly aware of the central place he and his army had acquired in the future of England:
We have received your letter and lament your dissension with the nobility. You required us to repair to Windsor Castle. As long as we thought he nobility now assembled had conspired against the king, we proceeded with our company. But today we heard from the lords that they are loyal, which we believe, and that this great extremity proceeds only from private causes between you and them. We have therefore decided to levy as great a force as we may for the safety of the king and realm. Let bloodshed be prevented by any means. We much dislike your proclamations and bills put about for raising the commons. Evil men will stir as well as loyal subjects.
It is a hard, cold letter, reliant on the naked power of an armed force, Italian arquebusiers among them, which had already destroyed the rebels in the West Country. It is a statement of threat, the violence in it scarcely an inch below the surface.
Herbert withdrew with his army to Wilton and from there wrote to the Earl of Warwick and the other lords of the Privy Council in London. “We have stayed all these parts, this part of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wales and the West, so that [the Lord Protector] can draw on nothing to do any hurt. Let is know what you would have us do, and with what numbers.”
This is the foundation level of dominance, the exercise of authority that will later allow the expression of grace. It is about the gathering of power. That casual, proconsular listing of the parts of England and Wales over which they have established their authority is thrown away with the nonchalance of a victor. This is the moment when Herbert became one of the rulers of England. The silverback growls and glares, and the world submits.
Somerset, horrified by the thought of civil war between the nobility and the shedding of still more blood, surrendered to the new power grouping around Warwick and Herbert. He was imprisoned in the Tower. He returned to the Council for a while, but within eighteen months had been executed. His lands, in the most primitive accumulation of spoils, were distributed among the victors, Herbert among them. The Privy Council allowed Herbert to mint two thousand pounds of silver into coin, keeping the difference between the value of the metal and the value of the currency, making him a profit of £6,709, 19s. And rewards continued to flood toward him. During Edward’s reign, Herbert received lands worth £32,165 in capital value, including fifty-three manors in Wales, nine in Wiltshire, five in Gloucestershire, two in Sussex, and one each in Middlesex, Devon, and Hertfordshire. And on October 10, 1551, the second son of the illegitimate gentleman from the Vale of Ewyas was created Baron Herbert of Cardiff. The following day he became the Earl of Pembroke.
He had won. He had become what his grandfather had been. He had threatened the throne, defeated the regent, absorbed some of his riches, garnered still more, and had established himself in the position he may always have thought he deserved to hold: not the 1st Earl of Pembroke, as history knows him, but the twentieth, the inheritor of all that medieval dignity. To do so, he had acted not as his son, grandsons, and great-grandsons would do, in defense of the ancient constitution or the ancient social structures on which the well-being of his estates would rely. Rather, he had behaved as the freelance he was, the hired gun, asserting authority through brutish and coldheaded masculinity. Without this exercise of ignoble power, it is perfectly likely that his dynasty would have ended with him. And so when you look at the beautiful boys in their beautiful silks in the Van Dyck painting, or out across the coiffed perfection of the lawns at Wilton, or at any sign of aristocratic elegance, these moments in 1549 are what need to be remembered. Behind the grace and the nonchalance of riches hangs the mask, with the hatchet mouth and hooded eyes, of the man-killing condottiere founder of the dynasty. This particular quarrel with the king had produced money, land, and the prospect of a well-funded future. No idealism here.
At the end of February 1552, William Herbert’s wife, Anne Parr, Countess of Pembroke, died at Baynard’s Castle in London. She was thirty-six, the mother of two sons and a daughter. She was buried with huge pomp in old St. Paul’s, next to the tomb of John of Gaunt, where her memorial described her as “a most faithful wife, a woman of the greatest piety and discretion” and “her banners were set up over her arms set on divers pillars.” The earl undoubtedly loved her. When he came to write his own will, despite having married again, he said he wanted to be buried “nere the place where Anne my late wife doth lie buried” in St. Paul’s. In a perfectly literal sense Anne had brought legitimacy to the Herberts. If William had vigor and ruthlessness, Anne gave the family grace and courage. When Edward VI regranted the manors to the Pembrokes, it was explicitly “to the aforenamed earl, by the name of Sir William Herbert, knight, and the Lady Anne his wife and the heirs male of their bodies between them lawfully begotten.” She was the joint creator of this extraordinary enterprise. A stained-glass window in a Wilton church shows her kneeling before an open prayer book or Bible—no signs of religious imagery in evidence—in a long armorial mantle on which are embroidered the many quartered arms of her distinguished ancestry. It was that Parr-derived inheritance that gave the Pembroke family any legitimate claim to ancient nobility. And she knew it. On her tomb in St. Paul’s, the epitaph reads that she had been “very jealous of the fame of a long line of ancestors.”
William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, had become one of the rulers of England, a man without whom no power settlement could be made. He was precisely the sort of figure—independent, dangerous, and unforgiving—whose standing the governments of Elizabeth and the Stuarts would need to erode. His power had been derived from royal patronage, but he had so managed the gift that it had now outgrown its source. Astute buying of lands, the exercise or threat of violence, and the subtle, flickering understanding not only of the best alliance to make but of the moment to desert an ally: all of this had placed him at least partly in control. The Earl of Worcester, the Parrs, his Wiltshire neighbor the Duke of Somerset: all had provided another step up, and at each turn the earl had learned to combine toughness with flexibility, to be the willow not the oak. He knew, in other words, how to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. The Machiavellian truth of Tudor England was that unless men of Pembroke’s substance plotted to remain in power, others would plot to remove them. It was a business principle: either growth in the enterprise or collapse.
The young Edward VI spent time down at Wilton, hunting, getting lost, and being entertained by Pembroke as though he were visiting the palace of an eastern potentate. “The King was served in vessels of pure gold,” the imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfvre wrote to the queen dowager of Spain, “his Council and Privy Chamber in silver gilt, and all the members of his household, down to the very least, in silver. All this plate belongs to the earl, who presented the King on his departure, with a very rich camp-bed, decorated with pearls and precious stones.”
Pembroke habitually carried the sword of state before the sovereign. The untrammeled roughness of his Welsh ancestry (he spoke fluent Welsh himself and was educating his son Henry in the language and its poetry) proved an asset at that brutal court. The imperial ambassadors spread the gossip through Europe: Pembroke could speak no other language than English (untrue), could neither read nor write (probably untrue), and stood at meetings of the Privy Council “shouting at the top of his voice,” in which mood no one dared contradict him (almost certainly true). The memory of 1549 and his assertion of military power were never far from the surface.
As Edward VI sickened, Pembroke and his ally John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and now Duke of Northumberland, plotted for a Protestant succession to the throne that would deprive the Catholic princess Mary of the crown. Their candidate, Lady Jane Grey, was Henry VIII’s great-niece, and according to the old king’s will was to be the next heir after his own children. She had been a girl in the Parr household and had become a passionate Protestant and a Greek scholar there, reading Plato’s Dialogues in the original for pleasure and denouncing the Roman Church as the home of Satan. According to her parents’ wishes but against her own will, she was quickly married to Northumberland’s son, submitting only “by the urgency of her mother and the violence of her father, who compelled her to accede to his commands by blows.” Her sister, Lady Catherine Grey, was married at the same time to Pembroke’s eldest son, Henry.
Once again, Pembroke held the fate of England in his hands. Edward died on July 6, 1553. Three days later, Lady Jane was told she was queen. Pembroke knelt to kiss her hand, at which the sixteen-year-old fell weeping to the floor, speaking of her inadequacy. On July 13, Northumberland left London to capture Mary, who was in Norfolk with an army and with support gathering around her. Once again, Pembroke bent like the willow, sniffed the wind, heard that the people were gathering to Mary’s banner in Norfolk, and at this critical juncture abandoned both Lady Jane Grey and Northumberland, his friend and ally. Pembroke got his son Henry to repudiate Catherine Grey. All connections to her were to be severed. On July 19, Pembroke gathered a group of like-minded lords in the great rooms overlooking the Thames at Baynard’s Castle and asked them to join him in supporting the Catholic princess even then making her way with her army to London. It was another occasion for shouting. Holding his battle sword in front of him, Pembroke bellowed to the assembled lords, “This blade shall make Mary queen, or I will lose my life.” There was no denying him, and the party went out into the streets of London, where they had Mary proclaimed sovereign of England. Pembroke threw his jewelled cap into the air and tossed his gold-filled purse into the crowd.
Mary was crowned queen in October, and Pembroke was there, carrying the sword of state before her. Lady Jane Grey, Northumberland, and his son Guildford Dudley were all eventually executed. Henry Herbert, Pembroke’s son and heir, rejected Catherine, Lady Jane Grey’s sister, in a series of vicious letters in which he called her a whore.
Once again, Pembroke became the leathered brawn for the new regime, facing down a Protestant rebellion in London in 1554, fighting a series of largely ineffectual wars against the French on Mary’s behalf, bringing the spoils back to Wilton, and entrenching his power base ever more in Wiltshire and Wales. Wilton served as a perfect tool in his display of significance. He spent more time there than in London, entertained foreign ambassadors in his exquisite landscape, took them out hunting and hare coursing on the downs, and displayed the vast assemblages of men and money that were the undeniable evidence of his standing.
“The handsomeness and commodities of Wilton, with the good appointment and the good furniture thereof, in all things whereof the better has not been seen,” were as impressive as anything England could offer. The most sophisticated Europeans were not entirely taken in. The Venetian ambassador wrote a witty and skeptical account of the strange manners of the English to his masters in the Venetian Senate in August 1554. “The nobility, save as such are employed at court, do not habitually reside in the cities,” the Venetian began, his eyebrows raised,
but in their own country mansions where they keep up very grand establishments, both with regard to great abundance of eatables consumed by them [the ambassador had witnessed the groaningly vast supper and breakfast offered at Wilton to a Spanish marquis and his men] as also by reason of their numerous attendants, in which they exceed all other nations, so that the earl of Pembroke has upwards of a thousand clad in his own livery. In these their country residences they occupy themselves with hunting of every description and with whatever else can amuse or divert them; so that they seem wholly intent on leading a joyous existence, the women being no less sociable than the men, it being customary for them and allowable to go without any regard either alone or accompanied by their husbands to the taverns, and to dine and sup where they please.
This reads more like the description by an Englishman of the pleasures of Renaissance Italy: its slight air of loucheness, the sunshine in their lives, the apparent ease and equality of men and women in the aristocratic milieu. The English by the 1550s had absorbed much of that campagna culture. But here it is clamped to what is also late-medieval behavior, the great gang of the affinity, the display of power, the premodern guarantee of luxury through overt threat and strength. When the king of Spain himself arrived at Southampton to marry Queen Mary, the earl went down to meet him with two hundred mounted gentlemen in black velvet wearing heavy gold chains, accompanied by a body of English archers, their yellow tunics striped with bands of red velvet, the livery of the house of Aragon. This is the social and multiple equivalent of the way the earl himself appeared. Here is the fighting body dripping in pearls, velvet, and gold. It is the essence of Tudor England: luxury as the medium of power; power as the underpinnings of beauty; beauty as the companion of threat.
To a great extent Pembroke came to believe his own propaganda. Where the descent of the crown itself was full of uncertainties and illegitimacies, where the claim on power was not a matter of genetic formality but an exercise in politics and force, then the legitimacy of the Pembrokes as magnates who could raise formidable armies of their own was not in question. They had as much right to be sources of power in their own countries as the sovereign did in the nation as a whole. Magna Carta did not mean nothing. Noble power, in an atmosphere where there was so much harking back to the myths of the Middle Ages, to the Arthurian romance, must have felt like a reality. In a 1562 survey of his estates, Pembroke’s surveyor, after discussing the “free” tenants (those who owed the manor no duties) and the “customary” tenants (those whose lives were ruled by the custom of the manor), asked “which of them could be tallaged [taxed] as serfs ratione sanguinis nativi” by reason of their native blood. It was still legitimate in 1560s England to ask whether the ownership of a manor and a piece of land involved the ownership of human beings who came attached to that land as soil-bound slaves.
Pembroke’s name in England and Wales was surrounded by a halo of violence and power. In 1556, one Thomas White, arrested and interrogated by the Council, reported a conversation he’d heard secretly one evening in an inn with a man called Ashton. Ashton had said
he had a noble gentleman able to bring a great part of Wales at his tail. I asked him if it was lord Pembroke. He said, “Tush for him, for he is more feared than loved.” I said, Two of the best in England are not able to drive him out of there, being the Queen’s friend as you say he is, and she having the trust in him you say she has. He said, all his trust was in his great horses, but with 5,000 or 6,000 footmen, he would wait with stakes sharpened at both ends.
This muttered, half-obscure, secretive talk feels like the last words of the Middle Ages, of great armed power barons stalking the land and holding the central authorities for ransom. That January, Pembroke received a special commission to levy troops for Mary’s defense of Calais, a thousand from Wiltshire, a thousand from North Wales, and a thousand from South Wales, by far the largest commission given to any nobleman in the country. He was a figure unthinkable in the modern world, a man too powerful for the state not to use. He had been part of a cabal that had rewritten Henry VIII’s will in its own interest. He had helped destroy Edward VI’s trusted councillor and protector. He had elevated Lady Jane Grey to the throne and had then destroyed her. Due largely to his support, the English political class had accepted the Catholic queen Mary as she entered London. And he had saved her, by commanding the streets of the city, from the highly dangerous rebellion of Thomas Wyatt and his Protestant bands. Four English sovereigns in a row had, in their different ways, been reliant on Pembroke’s goodwill and ability to summon threat. He had inserted himself like a virus into the body politic of England. This was not so much a quarrel with the crown as a commandeering of it.
Still, for all this potency, the old Wiltshire nobility knew exactly who he was. They treated him as a parvenu. His servants and those of the old lord Stourton, part of the ancient nobility of Wiltshire, brawled in the villages and in the streets of both Salisbury and London over the meaning of nobility. The stories were still current in the seventeenth century when Aubrey heard them. Whenever Lord Stourton was returning home from the assizes in Salisbury, his way ran straight past the gates of Wilton. The old man would never lose the opportunity to “sound his Trumpetts and give reproachfull challenging words: ’twas a relique of Knighthood Errantry.”
Mary Tudor died in November 1558, and another of Aubrey’s stories, hinged to that moment and certainly untrue, nevertheless reveals what Wiltshire thought of this Pembroke: coarse, vulgar, a shifter, an object of ridicule as much as terror, a man in some ways humiliated by his greed for wealth and power.
In Queen Mary’s time, upon the returne of the Catholique Religion, the Nunnes came again to Wilton abbey, and this William earle of Pembroke came to the gate with his Cappe in hand and fell upon his knee to the Lady Abbesse and the Nunnes crying peccavi [I have sinned]. Upon Queen Mary’s death, the Earle came to Wilton (like a Tygre) and turnd them out, crying, “Out ye Whores, to Worke, to Worke ye Whores, goe Spinne.”
Elizabeth succeeded her half sister and Pembroke apparently seamlessly transferred his allegiance from the Catholic to the Protestant queen. He had been among those who had first acclaimed Elizabeth, but the relationship between sovereign and magnate very quickly shifted. A strained correspondence between them survives from the very first weeks of her reign, thick with a sense of fearlessness on both sides, a prickly manoeuvring but no form of self-abasement. Both Edward and Mary had appointed Pembroke Lord President of the Council for Wales and the Marches, a powerful official in a part of the kingdom that anyway formed some of the Pembroke heartlands. But this queen was to be different. “I have received your letters,” he wrote to her from Wilton,
perceiving your grace has been informed that the counties and marches of Wales (for want of a president and others of ability and reputation resident there) are grown to much disorder and like to fall into greater inconveniences if speedy remedy is not provided. As you are minded to take the presidency from me (which I never sought) I am ready to yield. Where it liked you to have my advice of one or two for that office, pardon me, for the world is such nowadays as if I should meddle I might be thought of some (that have not yet learned to speak well) very partial, having presently both friends and kin there in trouble.
It was a fairly graceless withdrawal, and on August 5, his bastard nephew, also called William Herbert, was to feel the sting of royal power. A letter came from the queen at Richmond to the sheriff of Glamorgan:
We are informed that William Herbert of Cogan Pill, Glamorgan, has disobeyed several letters from our privy council. Immediately apprehend him and send him hither to the council under safe custody at his own charge.
This William Herbert was thrown in the Fleet prison next to the Thames in London, but all this was a sign of the world changing, of that warmongering Tudor magnate no longer casting any kind of shadow over the central authority of queen, Privy Council, or her sheriff in the wild lands of Wales. Sir Henry Sidney, a royal servant of no great wealth, too poor to be elevated to the peerage, was appointed in his place.
Never in Elizabeth’s reign would the queen call on the powerful but dangerous capacity in her great noblemen to provide her with armies. Her avoidance of war was a means not only of saving money but also of preventing the dispersal of power into the hands of those mighty subjects. The subjects themselves were made less mighty, and the story of Elizabethan England is in part one of the emasculation of the nobility, the turning of real warriors into toy warriors, fighters into frustrated lovers, the condottieri of Tudor England into the wan and beautiful princes drifting through the fields of Arcadia, an aestheticization of nobility that buttressed rather than menaced the power of the state.
Elizabeth’s was a new form of monarchy, appealing to a wider constituency than the nobles she might have gathered around her, using them but not relying on them. A sign of how this new world was to work had already appeared clearly enough in April 1559. She went one afternoon
to Baynard’s Castle, the Earl of Pembroke’s Place, and supped with him, and after supper she took a boat and was rowed up and down the river Thames, hundreds of boats and barges rowing about her, and thousands of people thronging at the waterside to look upon her Majesty, rejoicing to see her and partaking of the music and sights in the Thames, for the trumpets blew, drums beat, flutes played, guns were discharged, squibs hurled up into the air, as the Queen moved from place to place. And this continued till ten o’clock of the night, when the Queen departed home.
This was the most elegant form of emasculation, diminishing the nobility by means of a supper party and some fireworks, the defeat of Tudor brutalism by glamour and politics. From now on, the great old magnates of medieval England—the Cliffords, Nevilles, Percys, and Talbots—were left to fester in their huge estates, remote from the levers and rewards of power. And Pembroke, too, was pushed to the margins.
In the late 1560s one last attempt was made by the old earl to influence the state in the way he had at the height of his career. He was keen for the Roman Catholic duke of Norfolk to marry the Queen of Scots, by then a captive in the north of England. Elizabeth heard rumors of this suggestion, Norfolk was sent to the Tower, and Pembroke was arrested. By then two of the old northern magnates, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, had raised armies from their affinities in order to release the Queen of Scots from captivity. Pembroke seemed to Elizabeth to have been involved in this reassertion of noble power. For their own purposes, that is what the two earls were claiming. A little pathetically, he wrote to the queen in December 1569:
From my poore Howse at Wilton
My name is moast falselye and wickedly abused by the wicked Protestation of those two traitorous Erles.
I do reverently before God, and humbly before your Majestie, protest that in all my Lief I was never privey to so muche as a Mocion of any Attempte either of these bankcrupte Erles, or of any Mans ells, against either Religion (in defence whereof onelye I am redie to spill my blood) or yet your Majesties Estate or person; and that I am redie against them, and all Traitors to make good with my Bodie when and howsoever it shall please your Majestie to commande: For God forbid that I should lieve the Houre, now in mine olde Age, to staine my former Lief with a spot of Disloyaltie.
There is the willow bent full double. Of course he had never changed sides; of course his only interest was in the validity of the true religion; of course he had never plotted with any other grandee about how they might steer the riches of England into the strong chests in the strong rooms and armories at Wilton. God forbid that anything so impure had ever passed though his mind!
John Aubrey, listening to the Wiltshire gossip about the 1st Earl of Pembroke seventy-five years later—this was a story from his great-uncles, the Brownes of Broad Chalke—heard that “in Queen Elizabeth’s time some Bishop (I have forgot who)”—it was in fact the Bishop of Winchester—“was sent to him from the Queen and Council”—actually of his own accord—“to take Interrogatories of him,” to ask him some legal and technical details about his landholdings. The bishop, although Aubrey didn’t hear this detail, wanted to get back the manor of Bishopstone in the valley of the Ebble, just to the east of Broad Chalke.
So [the bishop] takes out his pen and inke, examines and writes. When he had writt a good deale sayd the Earle, “Now lett me see it.”
“Why,” quoth the Bishop, “your Lordship cannot read it?”
“That’s all one, I’le see it,” quoth he, and takes it and teares it to pieces. “Zounds, you rascall,” quoth the Earle, “d’ee thinke I will have my throate cutt with a pen-knife?”
It seems they had a mind to have pick’t a hole in his Coate, and to have gott his Estate.
This wonderful story, as if folktales were being constructed even in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Wiltshire, has a deep moral and historical truth to it. This is nothing but the modern, literate, bureaucratic state trying to take back from the unlettered warrior, the ancient earl who depended for his standing on his physical presence, his leadership of men and his native cunning, the lands on which his existence relied. Here, in a few lines, modernity, legal and lettered, nibbles at the ancient conditions. The historical truth of the story is that the bishop attempted to have a private act of Parliament passed, but a covey of Pembroke-sponsored MPs in the House of Commons saw him and his bill off. But the emotional and metaphorical truth is not in that account. It is here in the Brownes’ memory and in Aubrey’s delighted retelling of it: the sense that the modern world was a clever cheat, the ancient earl a blind and muscled colossus.
The same anxiety fuels Aubrey’s final remembered story of the earl, which shares the same dreamlike, emblematic quality. As he lay dying in early 1570, one desperate phrase, the end of all his dreams and nightmares, was on his lips, repeated again and again: “They would have Wilton, they would have Wilton.” Underneath that armored carapace, and never given voice in the official record, only remembered here in the gossip of the chalkstream valleys, was a desperate anxiety over the status and the lands for which he had lusted and fought for so long. It is a recognition that his noble power, his gathering of armies, his assembling of crowds of liveried and chain-bedecked followers, his country of lands and manors, was, in truth, as fragile as a vase.
On December 23, 1567, “remembering the uncertainty of man’s life and to how many perils and casualties the same is subject”—something of which Pembroke would have been all too aware—he had made his will. He left £400 each to the poor of the ward around Baynard’s Castle, in Salisbury, and in Hendon, near London, where he had yet another house. Apart from a few legacies to his other children, he left everything to his son Henry.
But late on the evening of March 16, 1570, in his apartments in Hampton Court, feeling death coming near, he had his younger son Edward and the Earl of Leicester, son of his old friend Northumberland, whom he had betrayed, come to his bedside. Death had given him a conscience. His second wife was to keep her own clothes and jewels, which would otherwise have gone to Henry. He left his “newest fairest and richest bed” and his greatest jewel to the queen, to Leicester his best gold sword, and to his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, his second-best gold sword.
Leicester then left the bedside, and the dying earl was alone with his son Edward and the physicians. His dying thoughts are recorded. His second wife, Mary Talbot, whom he had married for her money and connections—she was the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury—was to be looked after, to be allowed to stay in Baynard’s Castle; his daughter Anne was to be given £500; but more than that, anxiously and insistently, the ordinary men who had been with him and looked after him during his life, were to be cared for by Henry, Lord Herbert, his heir.
That my lorde Herbert do consider Thomas Gregorie and Tidie with money for their travaile and paines beside that he hath bequeathed to them in annuity that he speciallie do appointe to Francis Zouche and Charles Arundell fit and good annuities for them. That he have special care of Henrie Morgan George Morgan Phillipp Williams Robert Vaughan and Thomas Scudamore and either entertaigne them into his service payinge them their wages beforehand or else appoint them sufficient annuities That he do entertaigne his household and keep them together.
It was his last stated wish that his son should keep his affinity together. Philip Williams was William Herbert’s secretary; Robert Vaughan, his treasurer; Thomas Scudamore, one of the gentlemen who carried his coffin. Herbert died the following morning, aged sixty-three, the climacteric, thought to be the most dangerous year of one’s life, being the multiple of the two magic numbers, nine and seven.
His funeral, on April 18, 1570, was the greatest possible statement of the man he had become and of the dynasty he had created. The reverse of a beautiful portrait medal of the earl cast in 1562 showed a Welsh dragon, or wyvern, by a classical tempietto and carried the motto “Draco Hic Virtus Virtutem Custos”—This dragon the true guardian of the virtues. That is how William Herbert saw himself; the man of violence protecting the good: the humanist inheritance that Anne Parr had brought to this family, the radical Protestantism in which, for all the necessary trimming, William and Anne almost certainly shared a belief, and the people of his lands, whom he had in part abused but for whom he felt a deep affection.
Two yeoman conductors with black staves led the procession, followed by a hundred poor men, walking “ij and ij,” or two by two. Mr. William Morgan, one of the many Welshmen in London for the funeral, carried the earl’s banner, ahead of “the Defunctes gentlemen ij and ij,” that is, the greatest of his gentry tenants from all those lands spread across England and Wales. Two secretaries followed, as befitted a man of business, then all the knights and squires who were beholden to him, then the chief officers of his household (his steward, his treasurer, and his comptroller). In all of this, it was a funeral indistinguishable from a king’s. Another banner carried by his neighboring Wiltshire knight, Sir George Penruddock, from Compton Chamberlayne, in the valley of the Nadder, who had been with Pembroke fighting the French for Queen Mary; then the York herald with Pembroke’s coat of armor, carrying his helm and crest; the Chester herald carrying the shield on which Pembroke’s arms were emblazoned; the Richmond herald carrying his sword; and finally the Garter king of arms carrying his coat of arms, accompanied by two “Gentleman Ushers” with white rods. One of these gentleman ushers, dressed up for the occasion, was in fact Roger Earth of Dinton, just across the valley of the Nadder from Compton Chamberlayne, who had been arrested in August 1553, described as “Servaunt to The’erle of Penbroke,” and thrown into the Fleet prison for fighting in the streets of London with one of the servants of Lord Stourton. Gentleman usher or brawling member of the affinity: in this life they were the same thing.
The coffin itself was carried by eight gentlemen, some from Herbert’s Welsh lands, some from Wiltshire, and eight yeoman assistants, including a ranger of his forests and men from Wyley and Broad Chalke. Further knights and gentlemen, all hooded, processed into St. Paul’s, followed by the young Henry, the new Earl of Pembroke, followed by the great of Elizabethan England: the Lord Chancellor, Sir Nicholas Bacon; the Earl of Leicester; Sir William Cecil; Lord Howard of Effingham; and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. Finally came the long, long line of the dead earl’s yeomen, the copyholders of his estates across the breadth of the realm, and the servants of other noblemen and gentlemen mourners, all of them in black, “ij and ij,” for minute after minute through the great west door of St. Paul’s.
As a formality, this accumulation of people was the definition of nobility. It was the household in full performance, the affinity in commemoration of death. Everything about this funeral procession enacted the realities of sixteenth-century power: the spread of lands and of people on them; the conspicuous expense of such elaborate obsequies; the intimacy with the great of the court and the royal administration; the sense that if this was not, in actuality, a fighting band, it was not long since it had been. There were men here who had been with the earl on the bridge in Bristol in 1528; who had helped him destroy the papist images in the 1530s; who had stood with him against the rebels in 1549; again in the streets of London at the accession of Queen Mary; again when Thomas Wyatt had threatened the Catholic queen in 1554; again on the battlefields of France, when the great suits of armor were brought home to Wilton; and who had, of course, chased with him, day in and day out, across the Arcadian hunting grounds of Wiltshire.
At the end of it, after “a certain collect” had been read and the chief mourners had departed, the officers of William Herbert’s household were left alone to see the body buried. “Which officers did put the defunctes staff into the graue and brake each of their own staves and cast them into the graue with him.” The founder of the dynasty was dead and his authority over.
It had been an extraordinary career, utterly without principle and single-mindedly violent. William Herbert had favored himself above all others, except perhaps his first wife, Anne Parr. He had not, until the very last, attended to the well-being of his people. He had killed them when they had offended him. He never knew the meaning of loyalty, either to man or to religion. And his brutality did not conceal deep inner springs of philosophy or understanding, but rather anxiety and dread. He had not defended the virtues. He had often opposed the crown, but only out of self-interest. It may well be that underlying everything that would happen to the Pembrokes in the next eighty years was the example of this brute, a man who consistently, and without care, got his own way. They would have been nothing without him.