Chapter 10
A SAD AND MISERABLE CONDITION WE ARE FALLEN INTO
THE CATASTROPHE OF CIVIL WAR 1640–1650
By the beginning of the 1640s, all over England, the old arrangements began to break up. In May of that year, Pembroke’s son-in-law, Robert Dormer, the Earl of Carnarvon, was trying to raise a militia in Buckinghamshire for the war against the Scottish Presbyterians. He was meeting with little but reluctance from a gentry who had been subjected to forced loans and “new unheard-of taxes” and who were not now interested in paying for the king’s desire to spread a richly Episcopal church to Scotland.
Concerning our soldiers, I make no question they will be forewith very well clothed, but I do not see a possibility of procuring the draught horses, the country is so averse to paying ready money. I have sent out my warrants twice, and met the country twice, but they will part with no money.
In Wiltshire it was worse. Pembroke and his sons accompanied the king to the north, but other Wiltshire gentry only sent money, at best. Some refused to do that. In the summer of 1640, soldiers were pressed from all across the county. John Nicholas, successor to Sir Thomas Morgan as steward of the Pembroke estates, wrote to his son Edward, clerk to the Privy Council in Whitehall. John was in the family house at Winterbourne Earls, in the beautiful valley of the Bourne, just north of Salisbury. “It begins to be bad enough here,” he wrote on June 1, 1640.
Yesterday, being Sunday, a company of soldiers which were pressed [for the war against the Scots], about Martin and Damerham, in Wilts., [on the southern slope of the downs south of Broad Chalke] passing through our parish towards Marlborough, where the rendezvous is appointed, took all they could catch in their way, and being resisted by the owners of such poultry and other provisions as they took, they beat many very sorely and at Idminston [a couple of miles up the valley from Winterbourne Earls] cut off the hand of one Nott, and hurt another very dangerously…. There were but five soldiers, they came by my house as I was at dinner, and asked for victuals, and your mother sent them a piece of beef and beer enough, wherewith they were well pleased; yet after this they did the mischief. It is an ill beginning…. I wish you would take more time to stay with us than you have done heretofore.
That image of the hand of the poor chalkland farmer Robert Nott—he died in 1660—being sliced off by a small platoon of passing soldiers introduces the 1640s, as if the gentleness and expressiveness of the hands in the Pembroke family portrait, the linking gestures between them, had turned to this.
The world had darkened. The king’s use of his prerogative powers in the 1630s had thrown the entire basis of the state into question. “We must not only sweep the house clean below,” John Pym, the leader of the radical party in the House of Commons, told Edward Hyde, one of the old Pembroke adherents, that summer. “We must pull down all the cobwebs which hang in the top and corners, that they might not breed dust, and so make a foul house hereafter; we now have the opportunity to make our country happy, by removing all grievances, and pulling up the causes of them by the roots.”
This was the deepest possible change. The cluttered ancient arrangements that were the essence of custom no longer seemed adequate. The great jurist Sir Edward Coke had repeatedly quoted an old saw: “out of the old fields, as men saith, cometh new corne fro yere to yere.” To Pym and his allies, that frame a mind no longer seemed valid. It had been betrayed by a crown that had ruled without a parliament for a decade, had imposed illegal taxes, had imprisoned people wrongfully, had suborned the judiciary, and was steering the church away from the purity of its Protestant Reformation and toward the sinks of Roman Catholic iniquity.
If the lord had betrayed the copyholders of the manor, the copyholders no longer owed him any allegiance. The mutuality had gone. Instead, for Pym and his followers, a kind of brutal clarity was needed, a sweeping away of the unreliable superstructure of monopolies, forced loans, income from the sale of wards, and all the other baggage of inheritance. The ancient constitution had failed. The king and his ministers had failed England, and England needed to move on to a more enlightened and clarified future. The king saw all this clearly enough. The idea of Pym’s party in Parliament, he said, was “to erect a universal over-swaying power to themselves.”
The deep disenchantment of England soon focused on the most powerful and uncompromising minister of the crown, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. He was not only guilty, Pym thought, “of vanity and amours,” but as president of the Council both in Ireland and in the north of England, he had tried to “subvert the ancient fundamental laws of these realms of England and Ireland and to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government, against law.”
That spring, as the bill for the condemnation of Strafford was being debated in Parliament and in the Council Chamber, mobs gathered at Westminster and even within the precincts of Whitehall Palace:
As any lord passed by [they] called Justice, justice! And with great rudeness and insolence, pressing upon and thrusting those lords whom they suspected not to favour that bill; professing aloud “that they would be governed and disposed by the honourable House of Commons and would defend their privileges.” This unheard of act of insolence and sedition continued so many days, till so many lords grew so really apprehensive of having their brains beaten out, that they absented themselves from the house.
Eighty or so lords had heard the arguments for Strafford and against, but in the end only forty-six dared attend on the crucial day. Thirty-five of them voted for his death. Pembroke was among them. Only eleven lords dared to defend Strafford. Pembroke was acting according to the tradition he had inherited: a support for the ancient constitution against the inroads of royal government and its arrogant officers. On May 3, 1641, he moved still further against the king, telling the angry anti-Strafford crowd jostling outside Westminster Hall that “His Majesty had promised they should have speedy execution of justice to their desires,” a set of words that reached the ears of Charles and his queen and condemned Pembroke in their minds. It was a moment when the old amalgam was falling apart and choices had to be made. Pembroke was on the side of the country, a position that was in effect Arcadia turned political.
On May 12, 1641, after the king had reluctantly given his authority for the act, Strafford was executed on Tower Hill for treachery against the English nation; a crowd of two hundred thousand exulted in his death. The king would never recover from what he thought of as his betrayal of a loyal servant. He was clear in his mind: Pembroke, even if acting in defense of the ancient constitution, had himself betrayed his sovereign and his duty. It was the conflict of idealisms that would lead to war.
The tension at Westminster in that hot and close summer would finally burst and destroy Pembroke’s career in July. The trigger for the crisis was trivial but symptomatic of this complex, involuted world. As part of his wife’s dowry, Philip, Lord Herbert, now the earl’s eldest surviving son and heir, had come into possession of some lands in Sutton Marsh, in the south Lincolnshire fens. It was one of the most contested pieces of land in England. The rights of commoners, who had been accustomed to living off the wildfowl and fuel from the marshes, had been extinguished by a set of aristocratic landlords who had drained, improved, and privatized their property. Along with other drained fens, it had become the scene of regular riot and destruction
On top of that, Herbert’s title to these fenlands was in dispute with, among others, the king’s cousin the Duke of Lennox, now the husband of the very Mary Villiers with whom Philip, Lord Herbert, had once been in love and on whom Pembroke had once been relying for her dowry. As yet another ingredient in this tangle, Lennox’s sister, Elizabeth Stuart, was married to Henry Howard, Lord Mowbray and Maltravers, the heir to the Earl of Arundel, part of the Howard family that had been long-standing rivals and enemies of the Herberts. Maltravers, of enormous wealth himself and one of the major investors in fen drainage, had in 1626 married this girl against the king’s wishes. William Pembroke and Philip Montgomery, as Privy Councillors, had both been part of the decision to commit him to the Tower.
Now in the fiercely heightened atmosphere of the summer of 1641, polarized by the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford in May, amid whispers of an army plot to take over Parliament in the king’s name, and in the presence of the bellowing crowds outside the Parliament House, this angry nest of aristocratic enmities and rivalries came to a head. Lennox, Pembroke, and Maltravers, as well as Lord Seymour, an old rival of Pembroke for local influence in Wiltshire, were all members of a small committee of the House of Lords whose task it was to consider the petitions of the people. The young Philip Herbert was also in attendance himself, acting as a messenger between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Pembroke had voted for the execution of Strafford; Maltravers had made himself conveniently absent for the day; Lennox was one of the eleven who had voted to save Strafford. The summer was hot and overpowering. Smallpox and the plague were spreading in the City. One puritan MP had proposed a bill “for the gelding of Jesuits.” According to a document in the papers of the House of Lords, taken down from witnesses the following day, the tension burst at a meeting of the committee on July 19, 1641.
It began with a pedantic discussion about an ancient statute from the time of Henry IV that had been dragged up by one of the lawyers in one of the Sutton Marsh cases. The Duke of Lennox arrived late to the committee, heard the phrase “Sutton Marsh,” and asked what they had been discussing. Pembroke, looking across the table and pointing toward Maltravers, said, “No man named Sutton Marsh till you named it.”
To which my Lord Maltravers replyed I never named it till you named it first, and I appeale to the Committee. To which my Lord Chamberlayne sayd—But you did. The other answered—I did not; and so twise or thrise to and fro. Then said my Lord Chamberlayne—My Yea is as good as your No, to which my Lord Matravers—And my No as your Yea, and further sayd that he would maintayne that he had named it 20 tymes this day. To which my Lord Chamberlayne sayd that he durst not maintayne it out of that place. Then my Lord Matravers sayd, That he would maintayne it in any place, for it was true; To which my Lord Chamberlayne replyed that it was false. My Lord Matravers sayd, You lye. Whereupon my Lord Chamberlayne reached out his white staff and over the table strok him on the head. Then my Lord Matravers took up the Standesh [a stand for pen and ink] that was on the table before him, and my lord Chamberlayne goinge farther from him, he threw it after him but misst him. Then my Lord Chamberlayne came towards him agayne and over the table gave him a second blow with his white staffe.
It was a catastrophe. Pembroke had lost his temper often enough before and had even hit people with the staff of office, which Van Dyck had shown resting so elegantly in his fingers. But he was not to get away with it this time. His hurried, draft apology, written the same day as the incident, survives among the papers of the House of Lords, scratchy and no more than half legible:
at the committee for
am fallen into the dishonour of
this House
for my offence I am greatly sorry for that offence
of your Lopps
of that House
to be most iust. So I in all humility
submit my selfe thereunto
Both he and Maltravers were sent to the Tower. On July 21, Pembroke made his apology to the House of Lords for his “miscarriage towards your lordships.” The opportunity was too good for the king to miss. He had long been exasperated by Pembroke’s rough and uncourtly behavior and took the chance to “send to him by a gentleman usher for his staff.” The symbol of authority was removed from him and his career at court ended in humiliation. Efforts by Parliament to have him appointed Lord Steward of the Household were rebuffed by the king. Pembroke, as the inheritance from his grandfather the first earl, from Philip Sidney, and from his brother might all have suggested, was being pushed into the arms of those who were opposed to the king.
It was utterly humiliating. Pembroke could not “choose but think 44 years’ service ill requited to be thus disgracefully dismissed.” The atmosphere at Westminster was filled with anxiety and threat. At the end of October an anonymous gentleman on horseback gave a porter a letter for Pym, with twelvepence to deliver it. When Pym opened it in the chamber of the House of Commons, a filthy and bloody rag that had been drawn through a plague sore fell from his hands. The letter said: “Do not think a guard of men can protect you if you persist in your traitorous courses and wicked designs…If this do not touch your heart, a dagger shall.”
Early in January 1642, after word had reached the king that Parliament would try to impeach his Catholic queen, Charles went with a party of one hundred troopers to the House of Commons to arrest the leaders of the anti-Stuart faction. They had escaped before he arrived, but the military intervention was an irrevocable and disastrous step. Charles had become a king who was prepared to threaten the nation gathered in Parliament with military force. On January 10, he left London and gradually made his way north, attempting to persuade the country that his task was to defend the liberties of England against the prospect of an increasingly tyrannical parliamentary government. The body of England was pulling apart into head and limbs, each claiming they were the true heirs of the integrated whole. After Parliament decided to raise its own army in March 1642, war was inevitable. By May the king was in York, and from there, on May 30, 1642, he wrote to Pembroke. That letter, a folded foolscap sheet, has survived. It is the fulcrum of this story, the point at which this family’s long double commitment to king and country splits apart.
To our rt trusty & right wellbeloved Cosin & Councillor Philip Earle of Pembroke & Montgomery
Wee greet you well. Whereas Wee have some occasions of importance highly concerning our person, honor, & Service, wherein Wee are very desirous to recieve your advise and assistance, having had experience of your Affection, Wisdome and Integrity, Our express Pleasure therefore is, And Wee doe hereby will and command you all delayes and excuses sett apart, to make your immediate repaire hither to vs, When you shall understand the particular & urgent causes of this our sending for you: Of wch you may in no wise faile, as you value the good of Vs & our Service. And for so doing this our letter shall be your sufficient Warr[ant]. Given at Our Court at York the 30th day of May 1642.
“Charles R.”: the king had signed this letter, with its ominous mixture of command and entreaty, by putting his large feathery signature, the pen scarcely touching the paper, at the head of the secretary’s text. But Pembroke ignored it, and the letter remains today in the House of Lords where it arrived that spring day. England was en route to civil war. The two sides were gathering their troops all over the country. In August, after the harvest had been taken in and men could turn their thoughts to war, Charles raised his standard at Nottingham and began to collect his army around him. Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, was with him. The Earl of Pembroke, Dormer’s father-in-law, was not.
The discontent had surfaced, and in Clarendon’s words, “every man [became] troubled and perplexed.” Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, the long-standing Pembroke client, who with William Pembroke had written private Arcadian love poems thirty years before, had said to the House of Commons in July 1642 that “If blood once again begins to touch blood, we shall presently fall into a certain misery and must attain an uncertain success.” The sense of the community of England, of a single organism connecting crown and people through the ancient constitution, had broken down, and for the next decade, as they repeatedly expressed it, the body of the country was at war with itself. It was “an intestinal war,” “the troubles,” the “unnaturall war,” “the late unhappie difference.” For Philip Skippon, the roundhead commander at Marlborough in December 1642, the royalists were “a race of vipers, that would eat the passage to their ambitions through the entrails of their mother, the Commonwealth.” The favorite term used by parliamentarians for royalists was malignant, as if they were a disease of the body. If they had possessed anything like the frame of mind that could produce this expression, they would have recognized the Civil War as a form of autoimmune disease, the tissues of the body filled with its own hostile antibodies, a war in which not only liberty but the entire constitution of the body—a word that in its political and physical senses still preserves this ancient analogy—was endangered.
The war was brutal, not only in its battles, where the proportion of dead in infantry units could at times reach 75 percent, usually under the swords of the cavalry, or in the aftermath of sieges, whether of towns or fortified manor houses, where rage and revenge exacted a terrifying price from the defenders. A man emerged from one of these sieges with his mind so destroyed that he spent the rest of his life crawling around on all fours, hoping to be mistaken for a dog. Nor only in the dreadful weather, the cold and rain, which beat almost ceaselessly, winter and summer, in the early 1640s. Nor in the disastrous harvests, particularly in the middle of the decade, which left swathes of England hungry and weakened. Nor in the attacks of the plague that ravaged the hungry villages. Wilton, Bemerton, and Fugglestone were all devastated by the disease, which killed some of the people and kept others shut up so that they could not work but “during wch tyme they were inforced to waste and consume that small porcion of estate wch they formerly had gotten by their hard labour to ye utter impoverishinge of them and theire families,” so that “as they have died in the plauge so now will they dye with famen also.” Village after village made “a miserable cry to the magistrates,” imploring the authorities for aid.
More than that, the Civil War was a brutal eruption of anarchy, rape, theft, and violence, of gang dominance and gang attack, of pervasive lawlessness, which spread across the country, terrified ordinary people, gave free rein to thugs and thieves, and turned the roads through the Arcadian valleys of Wiltshire into places no ordinary man or woman would dare travel. Everything that sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England had feared, against which the idea of Arcadia had been set, became a reality in the 1640s: a breakdown of order and even of meaning, a sense that no one knew anymore what mattered or what they believed in. The only constant, becoming ever more urgent as the years of war and turmoil rolled on, was a desire for a better time, a time in the past, an increasingly golden age of peace and happiness.
Wiltshire was turned over time and again. Already by March 1643 “the ways are now very dangerous to travel in by reason of the interruption of soldiers.” Pembroke abandoned Wilton for his London houses and sent his estranged wife, Lady Anne Clifford, to live in Baynard’s Castle, where she could look after his paintings and treasures. Detachments from both sides camped from time to time in the great rooms at Wilton and at Ramsbury, with the troopers quartered in the stables, the household servants providing meals for the officers. Pembroke’s son-in-law, the Earl of Carnarvon, on the enemy side, spent a night in the house with other cavalier commanders in late May 1643. The king himself spent a few nights at Ramsbury, and at the very end of the war the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, held court with one or two of the Wiltshire cavaliers for a few days at Wilton. Around these passing wartime ironies, the county became a battle zone, controlled by Parliament to begin with, then taken by the royalists making raids from Oxford; its many country houses became armored hardpoints in the war, besieged and stormed, first by one side then the other, often sacked with astonishing and terrible ferocity, the women raped, the children abused, while armies marched across the ravaged lands between them.
The men and women of the county found themselves in a labyrinth of contradiction, not sure how or why the country had come to this, nor what their part in it all should be. Where before they had known what their rights and restrictions had been, now they were to answer to strange masters on strange grounds. Arguments they were only faintly familiar with had erupted into their lives. “Do you not thinke the condition of the poor Countryeman hath not suffered a sad alteration,” one anonymous Wiltshireman asked at the end of 1642, “from a state wherein he knew what was his owne, and was not capable of any violence for which he was not sure of a remedy and reparation, to this, where he receives commands under the penalty of plundering and hanging from persons of whom he never heard, for horses, for money, for personall attendance, for which he can find no ground?”
Few sights are more pathetic than the marks of illiterate Wiltshiremen from these villages, perhaps related to the symbols with which they identified their sheep in the common flocks, put at the end of the hundreds of petitions and complaints to the justices that detail the damage and destruction done to their lives in these years:
A selection of marks made by Wiltshiremen on Civil War presentments and petitions.
“’Tis indeed a sad and miserable condition we are fallen into,” the anonymous Wiltshireman wrote. He was addressing his friend, an MP at Westminster. Why, he asked, had the war even begun? They were “weltering in one anothers bloud before we know why we are angry, and to see our houses and towns fired and our Neighbours and Friends taken prisoners, by men who do not onely speake the same language with us, but are of our owne families and of the same (or seeme to be of the same) Religion.” Violence and viciousness had erupted in precisely the way the whole culture had been designed to prevent.
There was “a strange dejection in the spirits of the people,” this Marlborough man continued, “& if I am not cozened, an inquisitivenesse, by questions they did not use to aske. Who raised armies first? Why they did it? What the Commonwealth wanted? Whether the king hath denyed anything was not in his lawful power to deny?” And was the prize worth the grief that would inevitably come?
That so many widowes must be made, so many children fatherlesse, and such a desolation brought upon the whole kingdome? With the like questions which in a little time may raise such a storm as the cunning and power of both houses cannot allay.
All certainty had gone, all trust and assurance. On Monday, December 19, 1642, when the country was deep into the first bloody phase of civil war, when the forces of king and Parliament had already shed each other’s blood, Pembroke made a speech in the House of Lords. On the instigation of the queen, he had been shut out of the king’s councils, and the anarchy he sensed around him, both social and political, had made him defensive. He did not feel that his allies in the House of Commons would remain allies for long. This was, as he said, the speech of an honest man, and all he was looking for was “an accommodation” between the warring sides. In its straightforwardness, its lack of guile, its deeply conservative conception of him as a grandee, and in its fearful, honest pleading with his peers, the speech might stand as his credo, his apology for himself and the decisions of his life. It was the statement of a man whose only intention was “to scape undoing.”
The earl clearly liked what he said, as he had the speech printed and distributed. The words of his enemy and rival the fearsomely godly Lord Brooke were then also printed in response. In their two speeches, one can see, in fierce confrontation, the revolutionary opposed to the man for whom revolution is a greater disaster than the ills it aims to cure. It is the meeting of radicalism and gradualism, between the ferocity of first principles and the beliefs of someone such as the Earl of Pembroke, for whom continuity between past and future was more important than anything that might be put in its place.
THE EARL OF PEMBROKE’S SPEECH FOR AN ACCOMMODATION SUNDAY 19 DEC. 1642
My Lords,
I have not used to trouble you with long Speeches, I know I am an ill Speaker, but though I am no Scholler, I am an honest man, and have a good heart to my King and Country.
I have more to loose then many of those who so hotly oppose an Accommodation. I will not forfeit mine estate to satisfie their humour or ambitions. My Lords, ’tis time to look about us, and not suffer ourselves to be fooled out of our Lives, our Honours and our fortunes, to help those men, who when their turns are served, will dispise us; and begin to laugh at us already.
A fellow here of the Town, an ordinary scurvy fellow, told me the other day to my face, that he cared not if I left them to morrow; nay if all the Lords went to the King, they should do their businesse the better: yet my Lords, I think we have helped them. Now nothing will content them, but no Bishop, no Book of Common Prayer, and shortly it will be no Lords, no Gentlemen, and no Books at all.
My Lords, I wonder what we shall get by this war. We venture more then other men, I am sure I venture more then five hundred of them, and the most I can look for is, to scape undoing; we have but a narrow way to walk in: we hear every base fellow say in the street as we passe by in our Coaches, that they hope to see us a-foot shortly, and to be as good men as the Lords themselves; and I think they will be as good as their words.
My Lords, I am no Scholler, but I understand men. I have served the Kings Father, and Himself, and though I have been so unhappy to fall into His displeasure, no body shall perswade me to turn Traytor, I have too much to loose.
Lord Brooke then replied with a speech like a sword, a denial of every Arcadian principle of accommodation, gentleness, hierarchy, love, and custom:
My Lords,
His Lordship tells you much of what he has to lose, and into what great contempt the Nobility will grow, if there be not a speedy accommodation; and I fear some of these vile Considerations have hung Plummets [small lead weights] on some of our wings, which by this time would have mounted far higher; but these are the baits the enemy of godlinesse and true holinesse flings in the way, to discourage worldly mindes from fighting the good Fight of the Lord.
They who are transported with naturall affection to their Fathers and Brothers, kindred, friends, will not keep us Companie; yet this troubles me the lesse, whilst I see those Noble Lords in my eye (upon whom I can never look enough) who, banishing those womanish and effeminate fancies, cheerfully undertook to serve against that Armie, wherein they knew their own fathers were; and on my conscience (I speak it to their honour) had they met alone, would piously have sacrificed them to the commands of both Houses.
The Laws of the Land (being but mans invention) must not check Gods children in doing the work of their heavenlie Father. Let us proceed to shed the blood of the ungodlie.
All the ingredients were here of the destruction that unrolled across the United Kingdom for the next eleven years, founded on the idea that any damage—the killing of fathers by sons, the destruction of estates—was good and strong if done in the service of the word of God. Any doubts were effeminate fancies, any law a tissue of worldly invention. The custom of the manor had lost all authority.
The result of such sweeping certainty on both sides was that for the next few years a harrow would be dragged across the body of England. No part of the country suffered more than Wiltshire and its surrounding counties, the borderlands of royalist influence both around Oxford and to the west, with parliamentary control in the country around London.
There was a pervasive feeling that wickedness was loose in the land. And in its wake came an unprecedented level of hatred: Parliamentary prisoners taken in the first months of the war were forced by their royalists guards in Oxford to drink the water in which the guards had previously washed. Nothing was safe from the thieving of the armies. The wonderful Quarter Sessions Rolls, on which much of this book relies for its evidence, were preserved only because in January 1643 the Wiltshire justices, wondering how the “sessions records may be preserved in this time of danger,” ordered “a strong chest with two locks and keys for that purpose be provided and kept in the vestry house of Warminster church.”
Rough gangs of pressed soldiers roamed the valleys. “When service happens,” one recruiting sergeant boasted, “we disburden the prisons of thieves, we rob the taverns and alehouses of tosspots and ruffians, we scour both town and country of rogues and vagabonds.” War legitimized violence and theft. Soldiers staying in Salisbury in the spring of 1643 set fire to the beds they had slept on. Others raided a butcher’s shop and threw the pig carcasses into the Avon. In the small chalkland village of West Lavington, about eighteen miles north of Wilton, on Sailsbury Plain, one of these savage gangs broke into the house where the young Henry Penruddock of Compton Chamberlayne, whose father was famous as a Catholic and royalist sympathizer, was staying, exhausted after days in the saddle. He was asleep in a chair in the house and woke to find the troopers in the parlor, armed, the women shrieking and fluttering around them. One of the men pulled him up by the hair, knocked him down, and “broke two pistols over his head, without so much as tendering him quarter.” Another, said to have been “a collier,” perhaps a charcoal maker, famously independent men of the woods, “swore that he should die for his father’s sake, and putting a pistol to his belly shot him dead.”
A steady stream of casual death, theft, and violence was done to ordinary people. Abraham Hale of the House of Correction at Devizes was forced “to entertayne the Prest souldiers & to make pvision for them wch came to Seven pounds fifteene shillings & Seaven pence,” never paid. On March 25, 1644, in Warminster, a young mother at home alone with her child was surprised to hear a man called George Long knock on her door,
and two soldiers in Armes with him and the said Long and one of the souldiers required the peticoner to open her dore who answered she would not unless he was an officer. Then the said Long said he was as good as any officer whatsoever and ymediately by force broke downe a windowe leafe wch fell into the house upon a paile of water whereby both window leafe and paile of water fell on yor peticoner and her child wch dod so bruise the child that it fell sick and shortly after dyed. Yet not being contented they also brake up the dore and enterd the house by force and then the said Long fel to byting pinching and scratching of yor peticoner saying & swearing in most execrable and ignominious manner shee was a witch and therefore hee would have her blood wch he drawed from her in great abundance.
There is no explanation in the records of why Long and his armed friends attacked her and killed her child. At the same time, George Reynolds was asked to be high constable of the hundred but declared himself incapable “haveing byn by souldiers soe heavily abused & beaten yt he is not able to ride nor travel.”
Carriers had “corne and malt taken from them by a turbulent multitude by reason whereof they cannot travel with the said comodities and therefore many poore people in those parts are in great distresse for want of the same.” Widows were robbed, villages burned, and attacks made on hedges and other enclosures. The chance was taken to carry out revenge killings under the cover of ideological difference. After the war, the courts were full of cases trying to decide whether individual deaths were murders or were done in the cause of duty.
All over Wiltshire, parks were broken into and deer chased with greyhounds and shot. Incidents of sheep stealing peaked, and anyone who attempted to retrieve the stolen sheep ran the risk of gangs of men coming to find them. Thomas Astill of Peasemore recovered sixteen of his sheep and was driving them home when he “was overtook by a man on horse back with dogges & other men wth Clubbes who took the sheep away from him.” The gang then threatened to take Astill and his neighbors to Devizes “& have them tyed neck to heels together & afterwards hanged for demanding and medling with the sheepe.”
The people of Horningsham, Maiden Bradley, and Kingston Deverill, three villages at the far western end of the Wiltshire chalk, applied to the justices for permission to take the law into their own hands. The war had left them plagued by thieves:
the number of Felons have greatly multiplied in and about our parishe by whom we are dayly robbed of our cattell (especially our sheepe) wth much bouldnesse not spareinge sometimes our very howses to our great discouragement in the buildinge and keepinge of sheepe the over throwe of tillage and soe to the generall damage of the whole Comonwealth
They wanted a warrant from the court that would allow them to attack and arrest their enemies. But the court, which had worked only intermittently during the war, did not trust this vigilante law. The petition of the three villages is signed by the justices: “Noe order.”
If that is a signal that some fragment of the system of law was still operating, many other places suffered from the ebb and flow of armies to which the whole county was subject, attacked in turn, plundered in turn, taxed in turn, and then, for many, “barbarously burned.” Gentry like the Penruddocks would receive the familiar imploring-cum-threatening letters demanding “£100 for our necessary support and maintenance of our army”—this was from the king’s camp—“And of this service we cannot doubt since if you should refuse to give us this testimony of your affection you will give us too great a cause to suspect your duty and inclination both to our person and the peace.” Lesser folk were simply bullied into the provision of goods and services. Thomas White of Potterne, near Devizes, had taken from him
as much Beare, Stronge water and Sack as came to the Sume of xii li or neare thereabouts and carried the same to a place called Rundwayehill [Roundway hill] with promise to pay
which of course he never was. The armies took food and carriage on tick, but by the time payment was due, had moved on. A mason from Meere, for the want of building work, took to buying and selling cheeses. He was told to take two hundred Wiltshire cheeses to Oxford “for his Majesty’s provision there,” half of the payment on credit. But he was never paid the sixteen shillings he was owed for the cheeses, nor the shilling a day for himself and his three horses for eight days.
Worse still was when an army detachment took up residence where you were living. There was no avoiding what was called “free quartering”; the landowners simply had to provide. In Easter week 1645, Thomas Randoll of Fisherton Anger, between Bemerton and Salisbury, had quartered on him
of Sir William Walers Army six men for eleven dayes viz until the twentieth of April aforesaid whereof three were Ensigns, one Chirugion a quartermaster and a Marshall 3li 6s
In the previous November, the mayor and aldermen of Salisbury had been ordered to provide “upon sight” twenty bushels of wheat, twenty quarters of oats, twenty dozen candles, twenty bushels of salt, twenty flitches of bacon, and twenty quarters of meat “whereof we shall exact a punctuall account off yow as yow will answer to the Contrary.” The Pembrokes’ old steward John Nicholas, of Winterbourne Earls, was “never free from billeting of soldiers of both sides, some times thirty, forty or fifty men and as many horses three or four days and nights together.” He took to hiding in his pigeon loft when army detachments were seen coming down the road.
No side was better than the other. When Lord Percy’s soldiers were quartered in the village of Odstock, on the Ebble, in 1644, they defaced the parish register, drawing wild, looping, carefree scrawls all over one page and an irreverent rhyme, now partly blodged out, on another:
God mad[e] man and man mad[e] [money]
God mad[e] bees and bees mad[e] hone[y]
When Cromwell’s troopers entered Winchester in 1645, they used the priceless medieval documents in the cathedral’s muniment room to make kites.
The royalists who landed in Salisbury in December 1644 were particularly destructive. On a series of ninety-eight little torn notes and scraps of paper the citizens of Salisbury recorded their losses to the troopers of Sir Marmaduke Langdale’s famously aggressive cavaliers: shops broken up and plundered; widows robbed; a man deprived of his doublet, hose, and shoes; blankets and a carpet taken; gloves, stockings, and hats stolen. One man, John Russell, a cobbler, had everything stolen and then found he had “a poore sick soldier lieth uppon my hands and I am not able to release him.” William Philipps had a hat taken off his head, all his clothes stolen, both wool and linen, and “they kame a kene aftere word & had a plondeare a kene.” Richard Durnford had his wife’s petticoat taken; Bennet Eastman, four pounds “taken out of his pockets in money”; Hugh Smith, his Bible.
The other side was no better. An old man made a pitiable list of the goods in his house, all of which had been taken by parliamentarian soldiers:
7 pairs of sheets, 3 brass kettles, 2 brass pots, 5 pewter dishes, 4 shirts, 4 smocks, 2 coats, 1 cloak, 1 waistcoat, 7 dozen candles, 1 frying pan, 1 spit, 2 pairs of pot hooks, 1 peck of wheat, 4 bags, some oatmeal, some salt, a basketful of eggs, bowls, dishes, spoons, ladles, drinking pots, and whatsoever else they could lay their hands on.
The violence left the country littered with victims: men who had been pressed for service with one or other of the armies, who had deserted, been imprisoned, and driven into penury; men falling sick “with a disease called the Mesells” after being exposed to the unprecedented wartime movement of people; and many men claiming pensions for the injuries they had received in the war. Richard Rickette was “a poor lame mayned man a carpenter at worke at Ridge”—a Pembroke possession to the west of Chilmark—who had been “dangerously wounded crippled & disabled for all future service or labour whereby both himself and a small child is left wholly to the Charitie of his neighbours for their releefe & sustenance.” The justices decided that the parish itself was “to releeve him according to the necessity of the party.” There were men who had been shot in the back and were unable to work; a man blinded, “having lost the sight of both eyes by a cut across his face and left for dead” in Salisbury. Hundreds were left homeless and destitute in the towns that had been stormed and burned, filled with “heaps of rubbish [and] consumed houses, a multitude of which are raked in their own ashes. Here a poor forsaken chimney and there a little fragment of a wall that have escaped to tell what barbarous and monstrous wretches there have been.”
Under the strain of such levels of violence and invasive theft, the social fabric stretched and broke. Men in the villages refused to play their part as tithingmen, the essential keepers of order. Those who had been chosen tithingman before the war found no one willing to take the duty on from them. Parishioners in Lacock were presented to the justices in July 1641 for failing to do their communal work, the essential mechanism for the workings of the village:
John Pountney, Martin Gass, for not doing his six hours service
Ambros Browne came not in with his plow to do his six
days worke (same John Rumsey and Nicolas Barett)
John Banks for doing but 3 dayes service (same Richard
Ashly, William Frie)
John Bush for not scowring his ditch along Nash way
John Davis for not clensing his ditch along Nash way
Others would not or could not contribute their share of the taxes and rates levied by both sides. Village by village, Wiltshiremen complained that they were being forced to carry the burdens of war alone. Many individuals refused “to pay their rates with their neighbors towards the charge of the prest souldiers.”
Robert Locke the Tythingman at Wylye and Anthony Ballard the Constable, had
disbursed and layd out of their owne purses divers sums of money for the setting out of soldiers for his Majesties service this last summer out of the Tythinge of Wily aforesaid
Whereupon a rate hath bin there made by the said Tything for the collecting of such summes of money as were to be paid out of the said Tythinge
Roberte Greene, Henry Patient and John David doe refuse to pay the severall rates imposed upon them by the said Tything whereby your said peticioners are likely to pay the said monyes out of their owne purses beside all their great travaile and chardges already in the premises by them expended.
The rest of the village needed “to beare their burthen with their neighbours.” It may be significant that both Locke and Ballard were members of long-standing Wylye families, who had maintained the workings of the village over several generations. (The Ballards had the inn the Green Dragon.) None of the three men named—Greene, Patient, and David—appear in the survey of the village made in June 1631. They were newcomers, perhaps parliamentarians, not prepared to contribute to the general fund or to the royalist cause.
Communal payment for communal goods was the customary expectation of the manor, but war meant that neighborliness itself was under threat. Villages became even less tolerant of difference than they had been before. Vicars such Thomas Lawrence at Bemerton had clearly drifted into unpuritan churchmanship and it was reported by his neighbors “That he do & did usually ducke and make obaysance to the communion table at the entering in to the church and at the goinge for the and did always bowe at the name of Jesus.” Anyone who stepped outside the norm, who was said “to have conveyed armour into Scotland, who had spoken treason or done felonie,” was reported to the authorities. Edward Williams of Marborough was presented in 1641 for saying “there was base rogery in that book,” when talking about the Book of Common Prayer. Increasingly confident puritan ministers campaigned against dancing, music, games, and drink. John Newman, minister of Upavon, on the north side of the plain, addressed the justices as though he were their moral physician, giving them a sermon on the good and healthy life:
There is a greate complaint of bastardies, sheep-stealers, hedgbreakers, quarrellers and ye like. Would you be eased of these diseases? Believe it, they gather into Alehouses as humers doe into ye stomach. Doe you but drive them thence with som strong Physick, and you hele our towne and villages of infinite distempers.
People were beginning to pursue their private ends and neglect the needs of the community. The inhabitants of Tippett found their sheep dying of foot rot after “Henry White gent” neglected the water channels on his own land and allowed their common meadow to remain flooded. The royalist Lord Seymour was presented “for flotting his meadowe called long Meadowe for destrowing the Kings high way.” Susan Long of Warminster “delivered to one Henry Garratt, blacksmith, a fire pan to have the same mended, but the said Garratt deteyneth it and telleth yor peticoner she shall come by her pan as she can for (saith hee) there is noe law.” There is noe law: that might have been the motto inscribed over 1640s Wiltshire. War had dissolved the bonds of custom.
The ground was slipping under old meanings and structures. An intriguing petition came in to the justices in 1646 from the villagers of West Knoyle, on the very edge of the chalk, about sixteen miles west of Wilton. It was against “William Willoughby Esq, Lord of the said Mannour of Westknoyle concerning Rates and payments for the service of the king & Parliament.” Willoughby was a royalist who would be implicated in a futile royalist Wiltshire rebellion in 1655 led by the Penruddocks against the Commonwealth, and this petition is a moment of revolution against him. In a small Wiltshire village, the ordinary copyholders make a requirement that the future should be fair, that the lord of manor should not ride in on the deference of his tenants but that he, too, should pay his way and should be no burden on the common man. Before the war, Willoughby had paid only a third of the parish rates or taxes, although his demesne lands represented far more than a third of the productive land in the parish. Previously, the parishioners had submitted to this unfairness, “hee being their landlord, and these payments then but small in respect of the tymes now.” But times had changed; the amount that the villages had to contribute to war expenses on both sides, “daiely and weekly,” was so great that the men and women of West Knoyle felt this was no longer fair.
Therefore we most humbly do peticion you to soe order this busynes that hee may now beare and pay equall share with us according to his and our estates, which he refuseth to doe, although his demains be worth 300 li per annum besides the parsonage there, worth 60 li per annum which wee heare to fore never questioned in making our rates.
Willoughby refused to budge: “hee will pay but according to his former rate, which comes but to 26 shillings 7 pence a weeke and some of his said Tennaunts doe pay 9 shillings 10 pence halfpenny which is verie unreasonable and unconscionable that hee should soe free himself and lay the burthen upon his country who pay more payments as fines [on entering a copyhold], heriots [on the death of a copyholder] and yearly rents.”
There is even a suggestion that, at the most internalized of levels, the power of authority had evaporated. In 1647, Grace Stokes, the wife of Henry Stokes, a glazier from Fisherton Anger, just on the edge of Salisbury, came to the justices to complain about a girl called Susanna Candby who was the daughter-in-law of William Locke, the husbandman from Wylye. Grace had taken Susanna on as her apprentice for three years. Susanna had, at least in the past, suffered from scrofula, a disease of the lymph nodes in the neck, which was severely debilitating and erupted in rough, raw pustules. Since the early Middle Ages, it had been known as the king’s evil and was thought to be curable by the touch of the monarch. When Susanna first came into Grace’s employment, she was
extreamely troubled with a disease called the Evill Which when yor peticoner perceived asked her how long she had bin troubled with it, as also whither she was cured of it. she answered that she had bin with the King and was cured and did amend.
Grace took her on, but in the circumstances of the war the magic no longer worked. Grace found herself with a girl so sick she was useless as an apprentice and she wanted to be rid of her. Susanna, it turned out,
hath bin and nowe is soe vehemently troubled with ye said disease that she is not able to helpe herselfe and is almost redy to perish for want of Cure, to ye greate griefe and damadge of yor poor petr.
As usual, the records have nothing to say about the outcome of the case, nor whether it was thought reasonable that a sick girl could be dispensed with in this way, nor any reason why the king’s cure no longer worked.
Alongside this erosion of old meanings was a longing for peace and for a return to the conditions before the war. As early as October 1642, the leading Wiltshire gentry petitioned the king for peace, as did the burgers of Salisbury. For the first time in the world of seventeenth-century politics, women began to make their voices heard in these petitions for peace, but as the damage, taxation, violence, and—increasingly—disease and hunger took its toll, a fiercer and more directed reaction emerged from these villages. Each side was taking more than £700 a week out of Wiltshire at the height of the war. From the spring of 1645 onward, the men of Wiltshire, combining with their counterparts from Somerset and Gloucestershire, gathered themselves into the bands known as the Clubmen, opposed to all armies, all incursions, and all taxations, whether for the king or for the Parliament. The Clubmen were attempting, in fact, to restore locally the peace that national politics had denied them.
In July 1645, the parliamentarian general Sir Thomas Fairfax told his masters in London what he had heard about the Clubmen. “They pretended only the Defence of themselves from Plunderers, but not to side either with the king’s Forces or the Parliament’s, but to give Free Quarter to both: They list themselves under several Officers daily, and meet in great Bodies at their Rendezvous, and boast they can have Twenty Thousand Men at Four and Twenty Hours Warning for assembling them together.” It was Wiltshire gathering its own power. The Clubmen were, at least apparently, well organized, sending messages throughout the valleys and summoning the men from the fields by ringing the church bells.
For Distinction of themselves from other Men, they wear White Ribbons, to shew, as they say, their Desires of Peace. They meet with Drums, flying Colours, and for Arms they have Muskets, Fowling-pieces, Pikes, Halberts, great Clubs, and such like. They take upon them to interpose betwixt the Garrisons of either Side.
Salisbury itself provided seven hundred clubmen, “some with Pikes and Muskets, and others with Carbines and Pistols,” and in mid-July they and others from all over the Pembroke estates and from farther afield—four thousand in all—gathered at a rendezvous in the great Saxon forest of Grovely, on the ridge above Wilton where Philip Sidney had loved to ride. There they heard “certain Articles read and proposed to them, which they all assented to by giving a Shout.”
It must have been a moment of self-reassurance, the reassertion of self-defense against the inroads of anarchy and alien ideas. The leaders of the Wiltshire Clubmen included two Pembroke tenants: Thomas Bennett of Broad Chalke and William Gould of Alvediston. Both of them signed petitions sent by the Clubmen to both king and Parliament, “for procuring a Peace,” telling both of their woes.
More deeply than many other Parts of this Kingdom [they had] tasted the Miseries of this unnatural intestine War, which have been the more extremely embittered unto them by the Pressures of many Garrisons both here and in the neighbour Counties, and the opposite Armies continually drawn upon them by the reason thereof.
They had given up hope of a negotiated peace and had been forced to take the future into their own hands. All they wanted was “the true Reformed Protestant Religion; and next, as free-born English, not degenerating from the Virtues of their Fathers, by all possible and lawful Means to preserve and uphold the native Inheritance of their Laws, their Liberties, and Properties, which they equally hold in Esteem even with Life itself.” They were asking for a restoration of the custom of the manor. The very instinct that had led Englishmen to war in 1642—a defense of the ancient—now led them in their desire for peace. “Immesurable Taxes, continual Free Quarter, and uncessant Plunderings,” they told the king, “have scarcely left Your poor Suppliants sufficient for the Support of Life. Our purses have bin exhausted, corn eaten up, cattell plundered, persons frighted from our habitacons and by reason of the violence of the soldiers our lives are not safe.”
The simple desire for certainty, for structures by which they could pay their rents, have their debts honored, make their living, and maintain their wives and families “from utter ruin and decay,” was all that drove them. They wanted “peaceably [to] return to their wonted habitations and to the obedience of the established laws.”
But it was a fantasy. The reality of the Clubmen’s impotence and posturing was made apparent on August 4, 1645, when Cromwell, at the head of the New Model Army, brushed them aside. The brief engagement was at the Iron Age fort on Hambledon Hill, just over the county border in Dorset, where the Clubmen had gathered, shouting taunts at Cromwell’s disciplined ironsides. “I believe we killed not twelve of them,” Cromwell wrote to Fairfax that evening, “but cut very many and put them all to flight. We have taken about three hundred; many of which are poor silly creatures, whom if you please to let send home, they promise to be very dutiful for time to come, and will be hanged before they come out again.”
It was a 1640s version of the long story this book has described: the meeting of a retrospective idealism with the overwhelming facts of power.
This is the background to Philip Pembroke’s own involvement in the war. He behaved in a way that was little different from the thousands of Wiltshiremen who were first uncertain which way to turn, felt perplexed at the catastrophic outcome of events, wavered one way and then another, and felt deeply attached both to the ancient constitution and to the king who had betrayed it. But the 1640s was not a time for understanding, and Pembroke was ridiculed and despised for his flickering and uncertain behavior. Clarendon claimed that Pembroke became a parliamentarian because he wanted to protect Wilton and thought Parliament the stronger side. Others thought his rivalry with the Seymours, the great family from the north of the county with whom the Herberts had sparred since the 1540s and who had become ardent royalists, explained what Pembroke had done. Neither was right; the explanation is simpler. The tradition of which Pembroke was a part, and which this book has described, could only have led him toward Parliament. The “life of loyalty,” which one satire attributed to him, was loyalty to what? Perhaps to himself, to Wilton, to his family’s culture, to a true reformed church, to the Covenanting Scots, to the hunting he had loved since he was a boy, and to a world that was lost, destroyed from both ends, by an increasingly authoritarian crown and an increasingly radical Parliament and army.
He became something of a joke to his contemporaries. The royalist Earl of Dorset, in a letter to his son-in-law, a parliamentarian, wrote sarcastically that “You cannott suffer, while you have soe sure and constant a man amongst you as the earl of Pembroke…Paraselsus himselfe [the great sixteenth-century alchemist and pharmacologist] cowld never have fixed the mercuriall spirit thatt predominates in his breast: if hee weere alive to practise on him.”
The brilliant satirist Samuel Butler published the definitive verdict:
Pembroke’s a Covenanting Lord
That ne’er with God or men kept word
One day he swore he’d serve the King
The next was quite another thing
Still changing with the Wind or Tide
That he might keep the Stronger Side
His Hawks and Hounds were all his Gaze
For them he made his daily Prayers
And scarce would lose a hunting Season
E’en for the sake of darling Treason.
Parliament sent him out to gather the militia on their behalf. In 1642 he was appointed “Generall for the Western part of the Kingdom” and Lord Lieutenant in Wiltshire, Somerset, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, and the Isle of Wight. If it looked for a moment as if his grandfather’s Tudor fiefdom had somehow reappeared a century later, that was mere illusion. Pembroke had no military expertise and, at nearly sixty, was too old to be an active soldier. He soon withdrew to the comfort of his rooms in the Cockpit at Whitehall, taking part in the increasingly unreal debates in the House of Lords, where at times in the 1640s Pembroke and two or three other peers were the only figures on the empty benches under Inigo Jones’s vaulted ceiling.
Repeatedly, Parliament sent him as one of their commissioners to negotiate with the king. But that, too, came with its humiliations, as Parliament would not allow the commissioners freedom to negotiate without reference back to Westminster. Late one night, in the very cold January of 1645, at the negotiations between the two sides at Uxbridge, Pembroke came to pour his heart out to his old friend and client Edward Hyde, later to be Lord Clarendon, who was one of the king’s commissioners at the negotiations. Pembroke sat with Hyde for many hours, trying to persuade him that the king should consent to Parliament’s demands. Hyde was adamant that the crown could not submit, as the only outcome of that submission would be tyranny in England. Pembroke then confessed that he, too, thought “there was never such a pack of knaves and villains as they who now governed in the parliament.” Pembroke was “of the moderate party,” and they needed this treaty to work. Otherwise there would be a coup and England would become a republic. Hyde “told him if he believed that, it was high time for the Lords to look about them, who would be then no less concerned than the King. [Pembroke] confessed it, and that they were now sensible that they had brought this mischieve upon themselves, and did heartily repent it, though too late, and when they were in no degree able to prevent the general destruction which they foresaw.” Only if the king agreed to their demands would they be able “to recover all for him that he now parted with, and to drive those wicked men who would destroy monarchy out of the kingdom, and then his majesty would be greater than ever.”
Hyde thought Pembroke and his fellow parliamentary commissioners both contemptible and ridiculous, “so broken were they in their spirits, and so corrupted in their understanding, even when they had their own ruin in view.” Pembroke left him late in the evening, a pitiable sight, scarcely the same man who had posed for William Larkin with his ostrich fathers and his coral bracelet so long before.
The family had fallen apart. Pembroke’s sons had stayed with him. Two of them, Philip and James, became members of Parliament. But his glamorous son-in-law, Robert, Earl of Carnarvon, had become a leading and courageous cavalry commander on the other side and had been killed, casually, in the evening of the first battle of Newbury in 1643, when a parliamentary trooper recognized him after the battle was over and ran him through with his sword. Carnarvon’s wife, Anna Sophia, had very nearly died of smallpox the same year. Their son, Charles, the young boy born in 1632 and represented by the pearl between Anna Sophia’s fingers in the great Van Dyck portrait, was painted by his successor the young Lely perhaps in that year. The young boy’s pose looks as if it deliberately reflects his father’s in the family portrait, one foot raised on a step, his head turned to look, the color and manner of his clothes also a form of inheritance from his father. In the background, the Arcadian trees were painted by Lely withered and broken under the blast of war. It is just possible that this painting was made for Pembroke, the boy’s grandfather, a sign that his love for his daughter’s son spread across any ideological divide. Among the executors’ accounts preserved at Hatfield is an item: “Paid to Mr Lilly painter for severall pictures made for the late earle of Pembroke the sume of £85.”
After the defeat of the king and the fall of his headquarters at Oxford, in July 1646, Pembroke was sent to Newcastle with Parliament’s propositions. Charles had been given a copy privately sometime before. He asked Pembroke and the other commissioners
whether they had powers to treat with him on the Propositions or in any way discuss them. On their answering that they had no such powers, and had only to request his Majesty’s Ay or No as they stood, “Then, but for the honour of the business,” said the King testily, “an honest trumpeter might have done as much.”
It was a good remark, symptomatic of the collapse of any authority Pembroke might have had. Pembroke stayed with the king as Charles was moved under house arrest to the giant Elizabethan palace of Holdenby, in Northamptonshire, walking with him on “the Long Gravel-Walk” of the garden there, maintaining a fond and “mirthful” relationship with a man who had known him all his life, “and not without some difficulty held pace with him, his Majesty being quick and lively in his Motion.” When on June 3, 1647, the king was kidnapped by the army officer George Joyce, on Cromwell’s orders, arriving at Holdenby at dawn, with five hundred armed troopers behind him and “a cockt pistol in his hand,” Pembroke went with the king in the coach to Cambridge, Newmarket, and eventually to Hampton Court.
In these years of disaster and dissolution, Pembroke’s affection for the king grew and flowered. The king was not allowed his old Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to attend him, and Pembroke arranged for his cousin Thomas Herbert to play that role. Herbert watched the two of them carefully. “The earl of Pembroke (let others say what they will) loved the King in his Heart, and had certainly never separated from him, had he not (by the Procurement of some ill-willers) been committed to the Tower, and his White Staff taken from him, only by reason of a sudden and unhappy falling out.”
Thomas Herbert also recorded the most poignant of all tales to do with Pembroke at the very end of Charles’s life, a prisoner in the unhappy, Orwellian world of Westminster in 1648, with its whisperings and deceits, its sense of unbridled power lurking an inch or two beneath the surface of life, the air of mutual treachery. Thomas Herbert had at times been failing to wake up in the morning and the king had tried through the offices of the Earl of Pembroke to get him a repeating watch with an alarm. Herbert, in the third person, described a visit to Pembroke’s rooms in the Cockpit at Whitehall. Pembroke
then as at sundry other times enquired how his Majesty did, and gave him his humble Duty to him, and withal ask’d [Herbert], if his majesty had the Gold Watch he sent for, and how he liked it. Mr Herbert assured his Lordship, the King had not yet received it. The earl fell presently into a Passion, marvelling thereat; being the more troubled, lest his Majesty should think him careless in observing his Command; and told Mr Herbert, at the King’s coming to St James’s, as he was sitting under the great Elm-Tree, near Sir Benjamin Ruddier’s Lodge in the Park, seeing a considerable Military-Officer of the Army pass towards St James’s, he went to meet him, and demanding of him if he knew his cousin Tom Herbert, that waited on the King? The Officer said, he did, and was going to St James’s. The Earl then delivered to him the Gold Watch that had the Alarm, desiring him to give it Mr Herbert, to present it to the King. The Officer promised the earl he would immediately do it.
But neither king nor Herbert had seen anything of the watch.
My lord, (said Mr Herbert) I have sundry times seen and pass’d by that Officer since, and do assure your Lordship he hath not delivered it me according to you Order and his Promise, nor said anything to me concerning it, nor has the King it I am certain.
What were they to do? Could they accuse this military high-up of theft from the king? Not then.
But such was the Severity of the times, that it was then judged dangerous to reflect upon such a person, being a Favourite of the time so as no notice was taken of it.
Herbert did of course tell the king this story. “Ah,” he said. “Had he not told the Officer it was for me, it would probably have been delivered; he will know how short a time I could enjoy it.”
In January 1649 Pembroke was appointed by parliamentary ordinance to the court that was to try the king. But Pembroke could not bring himself to attend and remained in his beautiful rooms in the Cockpit, from where he “swore he loved not to meddle with businesses of life and death and (for his part) hee would neither speake against the ordinance nor consent to it.” He had not signed the king’s death warrant but he had done nothing to save him.
The king was executed on January 30, 1649. One of his last acts before he stepped out from the Banqueting House window and on to the wintery scaffold was to give Thomas Herbert his gold watch. Pembroke, with his old friend the Earl of Salisbury, watched the execution, quite dispassionately, from his lodgings in the Cockpit. On the scaffold, Charles I prayed to God: “Look upon my misery with Thine eye of mercy and let Thine infinite power vouchsafe to limit out some proportion of deliverance unto me.” John Milton would reveal in Eikonoklastes that this prayer was not the king’s own but was a quotation from Arcadia. By using it, Milton maintained, the king had polluted “prayer itself, by borrowing to a Christian use prayers offered to a heathen god, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen fiction praying to a heathen God; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.” For Milton, it was symptom of everything that was wrong with royalism: no access to the divinely revealed truth, no belief in liberty, no pride in what a freeborn God-fearing Englishman should take pride in. And Milton had no trouble binding together the two Arcadias.
Anyone who still longed for this crown-dominated Arcadian world, Milton wrote, showed
themselves to be by nature slaves and arrant beasts—not fit for that liberty which they cried out and bellowed for, but fitter to be led back again into their old servitude like a sort of clamoring and fighting brutes, broke loose from their copyholds, that know not how to use or possess the liberty which they fought for, but with the fair words and promises of an old exasperated foe are ready to be stroked and tamed again into the wonted and well-pleasing state of their true Norman villeinage, to them best agreeable.
This was probably true. The English could not bear too much liberty, nor the fear of tyranny, which came in liberty’s wake. Eikon basilike, the king’s own (ghosted) justification of his life and kingship, went through thirty-six editions in 1649 alone. Hunger for a Restoration had surged on the execution of the king.
Pembroke himself would be dead within a year, a year during which the new regime would continue to humiliate him. The Council of State discussed whether they should demolish his castle in Cardiff; whether his art treasures should be sold along with the king’s for the good of the country; whether soldiers should or should not be quartered in Durham House, the earl’s London residence since 1640; whether he should be allowed to keep the keys to the doors and gates into St. James’s Park, or if they would be better off in the hands of Colonel Pride. On March 19, 1649, the House of Lords was abolished by an act of Parliament that declared that “The Commons of England [consider] by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England.” Although there had been talk the year before of making Pembroke a duke, he now became a member of the House of Commons, sitting alongside his sons, as member for Berkshire, a move ridiculed in the London broadsheets as “an ascent downwards.”
Pembroke was not well. He was seriously ill in May, again in June, and again in July, running up apothecaries’ bills for £122 over the summer. His digestion was failing him, and the painful affliction returned in the autumn. Mr. Metcalfe, the apothecary, was paid ten shillings a day for attendance, making large quantities of “alterative ale, issue powder and deobstructive electuary” to get the bowels working. The most expensive was sweet powders containing musk and amber, which were thought to aid the digestion and “intestinal elimination.” Everything known to seventeenth-century medicine was thrown at Pembroke:
Sweet fenall seeds, liquorice and coriander seeds, acqua cardiata, acqua cinnamon, syrup of roses, Syrup of citrons with Rhubarb, Syrupe of dryed roses, Syrupe of Limons, Syrupe of the Juice of Citrons, Syrupe of raspberries, Syrupe of Corrall, Two Ivory Clyster pipes prepared, Maiestry of pearle, Maiestry of Corrall, Crabbs eyes, Salt of Wormwood, Salt of scurvie grass, Confectio de Hyacinth, Conserve of Red Roses, Conserve of Rosemarie flowers, Chymicall oyle of wormwood, White sugar candy, Sweetes with musk and amber, purging potion with rhubarb and on Christmas day, a cordiall julipp with with syrupe of pomegrannutts
On Christmas day he had a “syrupe of marsh mallows with liquorice and maydenhaire” followed by conserve of bugloss and borage, a mysterious “Box of tabletts” along with “Syrupe of jujubes.” On and on the treatments went until January 28, 1650, when he had a possett, a gargarisme with syrup, a cataplasm, and finally “a cooling Julipp,” which would cost his estate 2s 8d and after which he died. The sum total for all of this was another £177 17 10, the price of good house. The executors were having none of that and reduced the bill by £65.
On Pembroke’s death, bitter, spoof accounts by secret royalists of his last hours were quickly printed and published on the streets of London, the ranting visions of a man guilty of killing his king, of pursuing nothing but his own appetites. “Dam’ me,” Pembroke is meant to have muttered on his deathbed,
there ’tis againe, a man without a Head, beckoning me with his Hand, and bending his fist at me; what a pox art thou? Speake, if thou art a man, speake; speake, speake; zblood, canst thou not speake without a Head?
Then, after his guilt, his desires:
O mistress May. Come to bed Sweet-heart, come, my Duck, my Birds-nye; Zblood I must go to Salisbury tomorrow, bring me my Boots quickly; Zounds will not the Rogues bring me more Money; zblood that Cock’s worth a Kings Ransome, a runs, a runs, a thousand pound to a Hobby Horse; Rub, Rub, Rub, a pox. Rub a whole hundred Tubs. Tell them I’ll restore those Pictures and Modells I had from S. Iamses; the seiling of the banquety-House at White-Hall, tell them is as fit for my parlor in Ramesbury mannor as can be. I come, I come, good Devill lead the way. When Rebellls dye Hell makes a Holly-day.
The long arc the Pembrokes had traced from the 1520s had now returned to earth. Their status had gone, and the family was deep in debt; the fourth earl’s horribly convoluted estate took five years to sort out. The executors’ accounts survive at Hatfield. Friends, neighbors, and relations all came crawling out of the woodwork with promissory notes and obligations at dice or cards. The bills came in. Most of the earl’s London pictures were sold to pay off the creditors. Connoisseurs toured the rooms to inspect them. Lands were mortgaged and jewels pawned. Valuers picked their way through the great rooms in Durham House, the Cockpit at Whitehall, Baynard’s Castle, Wilton, and Ramsbury.
But this was more than a personal catastrophe. The world had changed, and the central place in the workings of England that the Pembrokes had occupied for so long was no longer available to them. The England they had known was now broken. Their conservative revolt against the crown had in turn released huge revolutionary energies in the country, which had swept away their old dreams of a renewed and potent nobility. England, infused with these dreams of radical and universal freedom, was now for ten years to be subjected to a brutal military dictatorship that the threat of freedom had summoned from the republican authorities.
In this fierce and polarized world, the balance and organic integrity of Arcadia could be little but a forgotten memory. Only the ex-royalists, savagely fined by the new regime and creeping back to their damaged and neglected estates in the depths of the country, could turn to the consolations of poetry and the beautiful, quiet life, a wan and defeated ghost of what the Arcadian dream of a good country had once been. The quarrel with the king was over because the king was dead. But as Clarendon had predicted, the status of the earls who had indulged in this quarrel for so long collapsed with the king they had finally and so catastrophically opposed. The old world had gone, and England would never be the same again.