MARY PEMBROKE’S COURT AT WILTON 1586–1601
Mary Sidney, the glamour queen of a pugnacious Arcadia, took up the cudgels. She gathered around her at Wilton, as her own armory, a company of wits, poets, thinkers, and scientists. She and they made Wilton the center of Renaissance England. Almost the entire family was writing poems. Her other brother, Robert Sidney, who became governor of Flushing on Philip’s death, wrote a sequence of poems addressed to Mary. Her son William and her niece, also called Mary Sidney, both became poets. The only silent members of the household were the increasingly ill and curmudgeonly Henry, and Mary’s younger son, Philip, both of them devoted to their hawks and hounds.
Mary had not been admitted to Philip Sidney’s funeral, and afterward she withdrew to Wilton in her grief for two years. Philip Sidney had made her his literary heir. She was in possession of the manuscripts of Arcadia, The Defence of Poesy, and the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. Over the coming years, from her base at Wilton, she would oversee the publication of all of them. But her role was far more than a keeper of the flame. Before his death, Sidney had been translating the Psalms into sophisticated English lyrics. He had reached Psalm 43, and Mary set herself the task of completing the remaining 107. In doing so, she helped shape the religious lyric of the seventeenth century, steering the atmosphere at Wilton away from the rather flat-footed hunting and hawking to which Henry, her husband, was devoted, and toward a higher, more spiritualized condition. But that heightened world at Wilton was not inert or passive. Its elevated tone was intended to be a model for what a court might be.
“Religion,” John Donne, a friend and admirer of both Sidneys, would say in a sermon, “is a serious thing but not a sullen,” and the translations of the Psalms that Mary Pembroke would make over the next few years were acknowledged by Donne and others as the most ingenious and richly poetic of any done in English. Donne certainly drew from them, as would George Herbert for the great religious poems he would write here in the early 1630s when vicar of Bemerton.
In the part courtly, part Protestant world of Wilton, the translation of the Psalms was a fusing of those universes. The task of the poet, as Ben Jonson said of translation, was “to draw forth out of the best and choicest flowers, and turn all to honey,” and that is what, at least in part, Mary Sidney did with the Psalms, applying the sweetness of Arcadia, its courtly concern for graceful precision and sophisticated invention, to the great poetry of the Hebrew Bronze Age. Religious verse, in her hands, as it would be in George Herbert’s, did not exist in a compartment separate from urbanity and courtesy; it was an extension of those qualities, not a denial of them.
The Psalms were thought to be the work of King David, royal poems, and that high religious and kingly standing played its part in the Wilton Psalms. “Hee,” Mary wrote later, meaning her brother Philip,
did warpe, I weav’d this webb to end;
the stuffe not ours, our worke no curious thing.
She was binding her life in with her dead brother’s, both of them in service at a court at which no Tudor monarch held sway, the highest court of which man could conceive. Here, in the Arcadian-Protestant amalgam, is another subtle form of subversion, a demotion, at least by implication, of all the pretensions to greatness that a worldly court might make.
Mary Sidney would have had before her the Psalms as translated by Miles Coverdale in 1535 and distributed throughout the country in the Great Bibles that Henry VIII and Archbishop Cranmer required each parish to hold. Here is the language of Coverdale’s Psalm 139, addressing the power of God:
Yf I saye: peraduenture the darcknesse shal couer me, then shal my night be turned to daye.
Yee the darcknesse is no darcknesse with thee, but the night is as cleare as the daye, the darcknesse & light are both alike.
Mary Sidney took that plain and workmanlike statement and gave it a kind of dancing elegance, at the same time elevating and refining its tone, making it courtly, maintaining its seriousness but banishing its sullenness, eliding Calvin with Castiglione:
Do thou best, O secret night,
In sable veil to cover me:
Thy sable veil
Shall vainly fail:
With day unmasked my night shall be,
For night is day and darkness light,
O father of all lights, to thee.
“In dancing,” Castiglione had written in The Courtier,
a single step, a single movement of the body that is graceful and not forced, reveals at once the skill of the dancer. A singer who utters a single word ending in a group of four notes with a sweet cadence, and with such facility that he appears to do it quite by chance, shows with that touch alone that he can do much more than he is doing.
This is the heartland of sprezzatura, the nonchalance that stems from discipline and rigor. The apparently effortless movement of the dancer is just the effect Mary Sidney was aiming for here, not as a form of worldly refinement but as an aspect of prayer and worship.
The Sidneyan Psalms are far more than a mere sweetening of the sacred note. They put on a bravura display of different voices and tonalities, different verse forms and rhyme schemes, a compendium of inventiveness that veers from coyness to savagery, from the most stylish of dance tunes to the most unforgiving of homilies. Psalm 52, as translated by the Geneva Bible of 1587, was a traditional puritan exercise in straight talking to the great of the worldly world:
Why boastest thou thy selfe in thy wickednesse, O man of power? the louing kindenesse of God indureth dayly.
Thy tongue imagineth mischiefe, and is like a sharpe rasor, that cutteth deceitfully. Thou doest loue euill more then good, and lies more then to speake the trueth.
Mary Pembroke had no difficulty in outstripping the Presbyterian divines in the uncompromising attack of her translation:
Tyrant whie swel’st thou thus,
Of mischief vanting?
Since helpe from god to us,
Is never wanting?
Lewd lies thy tongue contrives,
Lowd lies it soundeth:
Sharper then sharpest knives
with lies it woundeth.
Falshood thy witt approves,
All truth rejected:
Thy will all vices loves,
Vertue neglected.
This is the counterpoint of that earlier dancing lightness: the hammering, puritan contempt for the corruption and vanity of power, spoken with the authority of a countess, her own court around her, and the moral strength of her dead martyred brother allowing her no compromise in language or grammar. Truth telling of this kind can largely dispense with verbs and adjectives. The psalm in Mary’s hands has become a naked, noun-based charge sheet of worldly failing.
The poets Samuel Daniel, Abraham Fraunce, Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton and Thomas Nashe all became part of the Wilton orbit. They lauded Sidney’s sister as the “Arabian Phenix, wonder of sexe,” “the inheritor of his wit and genius,” the miraculous reappearance of his genius in another guise, “the happie and iudiciall Patronesse of the Muses,” of whose patronage, needless to say, these poets were the grateful recipients. The slightly desperate and wayward minor poet and anthologist Nicholas Breton, whose career wavered from one patron to the next, left an account of life at Wilton under Mary Pembroke that at least hints at its combination of courtliness, literariness, and piety. It was the nearest England had ever come to the gatherings of genius around Elizabetta Gonzaga, the Duchess of Urbino, celebrated in Castiglione’s The Courtier. “Who hath redde of the Duchesse of Vrbina,” Breton wrote to his patroness,
may saie, the Italians wrote wel: but who knows the Countesse of Penbrooke, I think hath cause to write better: and if she had many followers? Haue not you mo seruants? And if they were so mindfull of their fauors? Shall we be forgetfull of our dueties? No, I am assured, that some are not ignorant of your worth, which will not be idle in your seruice.
Breton, for whom life did not always run smooth, had been “a poore Gentleman in the ruine of his fortune,” but when Mary Pembroke took him in, he found Wilton to be a “little Earths kind of Paradise.” It was everything of which an Elizabethan literary man might dream:
Her house being in a maner a kind of little Court, her Lord in place of no meane commaund, her person no less then worthily and honourablie attended, as well with Gentlewomen of excellent spirits, as diuers Gentlemen of fine carriage.
Everything was as it should be, “God daily serued, religion trulie preached, a table fully furnished, a house richly garnished, honor kindly entertained, vertue highly esteemed, seruice well rewarded, and the poor blessed relieued.” Despite this lavish larding of praise, Breton, for some reason or other that remains obscure, fell out of favor. Such gatherings of dependents in large and highly emotionalized households, as Wilton clearly was, will drift into argument and rivalry. There are suggestions that Breton may have been something of a drinker. His own account blamed “the faction of the malicious, the deceitful working of the enuious, and the desart of his owne unworthinesse.” The fateful moment came on a winter’s day when, as he described in the third person, he had decided to leave the pressurized Wilton household and go wandering on the downs:
Taking leaue for a time, to trauaile about a little idle business, in a cold snowy day passing ouer an vnknowne plaine, not looking well to his way, or beeing ordained to the misery of such misfortune [the Calvinist note], fell so deepe down into a Saw-pitte, that he shall repent the fall while he liues.
That’s all he says. Had he been drunk? Or sunk into a kind of ridiculous melancholy, not looking where he was going, bringing dishonor on the household? It was certainly the most Sidneyan of mistakes, a wandering man, out on the wide snowy plains of Wiltshire, dreaming of a better world than this. Whatever his misdemeanor, only after a few years of apology and crawling was Breton readmitted to the charmed circle.
Others, more confident in this challenging world, survived more easily. Sir Walter Raleigh’s brother, the slightly sinister inventor and “chymist” Adrian Gilbert, joined the household, as did Dr. Thomas Muffet (or Moffet or Mouffet), physician and entomologist, a school friend of Edmund Spenser’s, graduate of Basle, a follower of the Earl of Essex, the first man to write authoritatively about the migratory habits of English wild birds, and the editor and compiler of the first English study of insects. His heavily worked Latin manuscript is now in the British Library—one real moth that was flying around the park at Wilton in the 1590s survives squashed between its pages—decorated in the margins with Muffet’s beautifully observed drawings of bees, worms, flies, beetles, butterflies, gnats, mosquitoes, the long-legged flies called “shepherds” in Wiltshire, and many, many spiders. These were later reproduced as woodcuts in the 1634 edition of his book the Theatrum Insectorum, or Theatre of Insects.
Muffet wrote a charming verse tale for his beloved countess about his passion for bugs (“I sing of little Wormes and tender Flies”), but he also turned his hand to some elaborate Latin verses in memory of Philip Sidney. They were written in 1593, on Mary Pembroke’s instructions, as a homily to young Will Herbert, the thirteen-year-old heir to this huge cultural inheritance. It was the year he went up to Oxford. The weight of expectation imposed on the boy’s shoulders was immense. He would carry the burden of his family’s expectations. If the family was to continue to maintain its principled independence of the crown, the duty would fall to him. It is clear that Will Herbert was not entirely happy with the burden being placed on him. Again and again, Muffet tells Will that his uncle, the famous Philip Sidney, when he was a boy, preferred his books to his games. At school “his bedroom was plastered with elegant epistles of choice Latin which he had stuck up on the walls.” Twice he became ill through studying too much—a habit of Mary’s, too—and when he was at university and then at court, Sidney kept his passions under control. Sloth, greed, self-seeking, and sensuality: all of them this paragon avoided. He was not without lust, but he controlled it.
Muffet did admit that the young Sidney spent far too much on “Christmas festivities and joustings, at which he was magnificently appointed, and then, with ceaseless liberality, on learned visitors.” But he was both modest and regal, and rose by his seriousness as well as by “wit, grace, elegance, learning and influence.” Other courtiers—more sidelong glances at Will—“chose to live in clover at home, to hunt wild animals, to follow a hawk, to wallow in every sensual pleasure.” Only our hero, it seemed, gave up “love, poetry, sport, trappings, lackeys, pages and carriages inlaid with ivory” for the sake of helping a neighbor country “where without fear he ran into fire as soon as he reached the foreign shore.” It doesn’t take much to imagine the thirteen-year-old groaning under the propriety of the model being held out to him. Will was the “growing shoot.” He was “the flower of the Sidneys.” He was given, as his own impresa, the motto Stat messis in herba—the harvest is in the green stalk. He was the second Sidney, their perfect man in embryo. “Therefore,” Muffet, with his eye of course more on the mother than the child, told the boy, “do you embrace and cherish him, your second self.”
This sense of urgency in Mary, needing to steer her son and heir toward the otherworldly perfection of her dead brother, was driven, it seems clear, by Will’s inclination to the very opposite. He was wandering toward the usual appetites of young men. Even eighty years later, Clarendon, writing his history of the Civil War, thought Will had been “immoderately given up to women.” What becomes particularly intriguing, though, is that precisely this set of circumstances, and the very same set of images that Muffet relied on, would repeat themselves within three or four years at another and more significant level.
There have been many candidates for the beautiful, aristocratic, reluctant-to-marry, sexy young man addressed with such overwhelming passion in the first 126 of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but none fits the circumstances as closely as Will Herbert: from a family of immense standing, which was of famous beauty in both men and women; with the initials W.H., those given by the publisher’s dedication of the Sonnets in 1609 to “The Onlie Begetter of These Insuing Sonnets”; of exactly the right age (born in April 1580) for an early middle-aged Shakespeare (born in April 1564) to fall in love with in the late 1590s; with a history behind him of his parents commissioning poets, whom they had known professionally, to urge him on to virtuous paths; seen as the “green shoot” of the family, with the next generation’s harvest latent in him, imagery on which Shakespeare memorably drew; and, as it turns out, with a wild and amorous nature but a deep reluctance to marry, exactly the subject of the first seventeen sonnets.
The Pembrokes had almost certainly come to know Shakespeare in the early 1590s, when he was writing for a touring company, of no great success, subsidized by Henry and known as Pembroke’s Men. Shakespeare had also written Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece for another aristocratic patron, the Earl of Southampton. It would be entirely appropriate, and even resourceful, for Mary Pembroke to turn to this brilliant, youngish court poet to address her increasingly wayward son. The first seventeen sonnets—more conventional than the rest, “sugared,” as they were described at the time, in a Sidneyan way—clearly form a group. Repeatedly playing on the same themes, they urge the young man to marry, to extend his line through children, not to let age destroy his beauty but to further it in children, an extension of the gifts his famous family has given him. The imagery plays around Will’s impresa, “Stat messis in herba.” Just as the harvest lies latent in the bud, the passage of the year erodes the beauty of the spring.
When I doe count the clock that tels the time,
And see the braue day sunck in hidious night,
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls or siluer’d ore with white:
When lofty trees I see barren of leaues,
Which erst from heat did canopie the herd
And Sommers greene all girded up in sheaues
Borne on the beare with white and bristly beard:
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must goe,
Since sweets and beauties do them-selues forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing gainst Times sieth can make defence
Saue breed to braue him, when he takes thee hence.
The setting is polite Arcadia: it is courtly and contained; the herds mill around the house; the woods are shady and the fields produce their harvest. The world turns on its Virgilian axis. This is Wilton, if beautifully animated by that vision of the barley sheaves on their funeral bier, white and bristly in the paleness of high summer, and suddenly shocked by the fruitless summoning of the “wastes of time” amid all this fecundity.
It is also a celebration of the defiance of Time’s scythe, the victory of marriage and progeniture over the shadow of age and death. Shakespeare’s sonnet, for all its local beauties, is driven by a need to defy time because the family corporation required it. This sonnet, which, along with the other first sixteen, is patronage poetry, involving no disturbance to any social or sexual hierarchy, was perhaps delivered, it can be conjectured, to Will Herbert, perhaps at Wilton, perhaps with the indulgent overseeing of his mother and father, on April 8, 1597—there is a great deal of spring imagery in these first sonnets—which was the heir’s seventeenth birthday. Shakespeare had taken up where Thomas Muffet had left off, playing a decorous role as prompter of virtue. The poems feel like what they were: a commission, a birthday present, a paid-for imploring, dedicated to the understanding that only by the complex of marriage and negotiation, of getting and begetting, can a person defeat his own mortality. That in effect is the voice of worldliness, of a good deal well done. The poems are driven by the understanding that this family could maintain its dignity and potency, its wealth and significance, only by the individuals within it submitting to the corporate ideal. If these assumptions are true, Shakespeare was co-opted for a moment as a bit player in the long Pembroke struggle to win.
Still, Will Herbert would not conform. In 1595, marriage had been proposed between the young Will and Elizabeth Carey. On September 25 of that year, the Carey parents were to visit Wilton, where “great preparacon was made for them,” but they never came. Will had by then met Elizabeth, and the match was broken off “by [William’s] not liking.” Henry was in no position to force his son into a marriage he did not like and cancelled the engagement. Sir George Carey was enraged “that lord Pembroke broke off the match between Lord Harbert and his daughter.”
Next, Bridget de Vere, the daughter of the Earl of Oxford and the granddaughter of Lord Burghley, was suggested. The families manoeuvred toward each other. Burghley sent Mary some special medicine from London, and she wrote to him in her increasingly convoluted style:
Yowr Lordships fine token is to mee of Infinight esteem, and no less in regard of the sender than the vertu in it selfe. It is indeed a cordiall and presious present. Not unlike to prooue a spesiall remedy of a sadd spleen, for of lyke effect do I alredy find what so euer is of likely success proceeding from the cawse whence this proseeded.
That might have been the way to address someone fifteen or twenty years earlier, but the late Elizabethan world had moved on to a quicker and more impatient rhythm. Mary wrote another letter of almost equal inflatedness to Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Bughley’s son. “To bee silent now finding so iust cawse to be thankfull were a wrong to yow and an Injury to my selfe whose disposition hath euer held yow in very worthy regard…” In her Wilton outpost, it looked as if Mary Pembroke, still only thirty-six, had begun to lose touch with the ways of the world. The whole Pembroke enterprise was starting to look shaky.
Burghley was also worried. His granddaughter Bridget was only thirteen, but there would be no consummation of the marriage until Will had come back from his travels. Would Bridget stay with the Pembrokes then or with her parents? The money was to be discussed by their agents, but the principles were clear. He would give a jointure equal to the dowry, plus a good allowance every year. Oxford himself was keen “for the ionge gentelman as I vnderstand he hathe been well brought vp, fayre conditioned, and hathe many good partes in hym.” Again, though, the match came to nothing. Henry Pembroke, increasingly ill and short-tempered, had, it seems, insulted Robert Cecil, perhaps suggesting that the rather recent descendant of impoverished Welsh farmers, as the Cecils were, should not have the pretension to become Viscount Cranborne. The fact of the Herberts’ own bastardy was by now well buried.
Mary Pembroke had to try to make good the damage and wrote to Robert Cecil in her high Elizabethan style.
Sir I vnderstand report hath bin made vnto yow of sum speech that should pass my Lord (not in the best part to be taken) tuching Cramborne. My desire is yow should be trewly satisfied therein, and that in regard of truth and the respect I beare yow, for otherwise I woold be silent. I protest unto yow the report was most vntrue; and upon myne owne knowlidg, word, and honor, do assure yow ther was not any word spoken at any time to which yowr selfe bin present yow coold have taken any exception.
Yowr frend as wellwisshing as any M. Pembroke
It was no good. The wickedness of court, its life juice of malice and gossip, had broken her designs.
Lewd lies thy tongue contrives,
Lowd lies it soundeth:
Sharper then sharpest knives
with lies it woundeth.
Henry, now chronically ill, was desperate to see his elder son married before he succeeded to the earldom. If he were unmarried and under twenty-one at Henry’s death, the Pembroke estates would fall into the Court of Wards (then in the hands of the Cecils), and his wardship would be sold off to the highest bidder, who would in turn suck from the Pembroke fortunes as much as he could in the few years that remained before Will turned twenty-one in 1601. Still another marriage, to a niece of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, was suggested, half arranged, and then failed to materialize, in the summer of 1599.
Meanwhile, in Herbert’s life, another eruptive passion broke loose. From those first seventeen sonnets, Shakespeare’s sequence suddenly comes alive with the reality of his love for this beautiful and feckless young man. Shakespeare, feeling aged himself, is rendered powerless in his presence: “Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonesse,” he pleaded, pitiably subject to Will’s grandeur and carelessness. “How many gazers mightst thou lead away, / If thou wouldst vse the strength of all thy state? / But doe not so, I loue thee in such sort,/ As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.” The poetry leaves behind the formal, dancelike qualities of the Petrarchan world with all its reliance on the inaccessible girl of unimpeachable beauty, and replaces her with some of the great truth-telling, homosexual, often brutally misogynistic, willfully complex, and psychologically agonized love poems in the language. It is as if the lid had been lifted on the Elizabethan world, the formality taken away, and the reality exposed to air. The fuel for that poetry was not only love, lust, sex, and desire but also the pains that came in the wake of that desire, a longing for Arcadian peace, a place of resolution beyond the torments of daily existence, beyond all conflict, but also a recognition that time, death, and mortality had their place in Arcadia. Et in Arcadia ego. Far from urging the boy to a life of heightened virtue, Shakespeare fell in love with him as he was, as both the embodiment of delicious and beautiful sexual delight and the object of a love that went far beyond the worldly manoeuvrings on which the directors of the family business were intent.
Everything in the Sonnets drifts into the metaphors of hierarchy, land, inheritance, the law, the court, the embroiled nature of life, as if life itself, in the modernity that swept from one negotiation to the next, was at the same time the great webmaker and the great eroder. Time digs furrows in our brows. Life and time remove from us the happiness we thought we had. Even the things that seemed for a moment unapproachably ours are rubbed down and worn away. “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end.”
The great and life-affirming paradox for Shakespeare is that only in the place made by the poem itself, in the actual written poem, can love and beauty remain impervious to time. Only there, in what the poet can do, can things of value be safe. Love itself can hurt, but there is a pervasive sense throughout the long sequence of the Sonnets that the poem, in its jewel-like existence, is itself the Arcadian space, the place in which hurt cannot occur and where perfection is removed from the erosions of weakness and time. The three words that appear more often than any other in Shakespeare’s Sonnets are “fair, kind, and true.” As a fugue on these themes, the sequence is a longing for goodness in a treacherous world. It is a realm in which grace has a chance, where truth can be spoken and love remain true. The poem itself is a park.
That itself is a Sidneyan idea. In the most famous paragraph of the Defense of Poetry, written by Sidney at Wilton, he makes precisely this Platonic claim: only in art can perfection be found, and Nature must regard the perfection of art’s forms with envy:
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich Tapestry as diverse Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden.
The poets alone can deliver a golden world. It is perhaps impossible now to read some of these poems as they might have appeared when their first manuscript copies were read by the beautiful boy of distinguished lineage to whom they were first addressed. But if they do not illuminate the life of William Herbert, which they might, they at least illuminate for sure the world in which he lived, thought, and felt.
This may be an unexpected turn for this story but it is perfectly integral to it. The Pembrokes’ quarrel with authority begins in military strength; transmutes into the literary complaint of the Arcadia; takes a high-minded and religious turn in the hands of Mary Sidney; and in the putative love affair with Will Herbert described in Shakepeare’s Sonnets becomes even more otherworldly, a challenge to the ordinary world not by confronting it but by removing oneself from it, looking for victory in unbridled retreat. That love affair is in many ways a teenage phenomenon. In the 1590s, even after his father’s death in 1601 and right up until Elizabeth’s death two years later, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, continued to behave badly and willfully. He quarrelled with his father and mother. He had an affair with Mary Fitton, one of the queen’s maids of honor, made her pregnant, acknowledged he was the father, but refused to marry her. He was thrown into prison and then banished to Wilton, where he bewailed his rustic fate. Even by the time the queen died in March, Pembroke was still only twenty-three years old.
But he would not remain the wayward young man of the Sonnets for the rest of his life. As age gathered around him, as his waist thickened and time dug furrows in his brow, his careless, self-indulgent youth would come to seem like an interlude in the long story. In the heart of early-seventeenth-century England, and right up until 1630, when he died, Will Herbert would become one of the most admired men at court, the champion of everything his family had believed in and an upholder of the idea that dignity and significance did not in the end come only from the crown.