Quarrel with the King (10 page)

The coffin itself was carried by eight gentlemen, some from Herbert's Welsh lands, some from Wiltshire, and eight yeoman assistants, including a ranger of his forests and men from Wyley and Broad Chalke. Further knights and gentlemen, all hooded, processed into St. Paul's, followed by the young Henry, the new Earl of Pembroke, followed by the great of Elizabethan England: the Lord Chancellor, Sir Nicholas Bacon; the Earl of Leicester; Sir William Cecil; Lord Howard of Effingham; and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. Finally came the long, long line of the dead earl's yeomen, the copyholders of his estates across the breadth of the realm, and the servants of other noblemen and gentlemen mourners, all of them in black, “ij and ij,” for minute after minute through the great west door of St. Paul's.

As a formality, this accumulation of people was the definition of nobility. It was the household in full performance, the affinity in commemoration of death. Everything about this funeral procession enacted the realities of sixteenth-century power: the spread of lands and of people on them; the conspicuous expense of such elaborate obse
quies; the intimacy with the great of the court and the royal administration; the sense that if this was not, in actuality, a fighting band, it was not long since it had been. There were men here who had been with the earl on the bridge in Bristol in 1528; who had helped him destroy the papist images in the 1530s; who had stood with him against the rebels in 1549; again in the streets of London at the accession of Queen Mary; again when Thomas Wyatt had threatened the Catholic queen in 1554; again on the battlefields of France, when the great suits of armor were brought home to Wilton; and who had, of course, chased with him, day in and day out, across the Arcadian hunting grounds of Wiltshire.

At the end of it, after “a certain collect” had been read and the chief mourners had departed, the officers of William Herbert's household were left alone to see the body buried. “Which officers did put the defunctes staff into the graue and brake each of their own staves and cast them into the graue with him.” The founder of the dynasty was dead and his authority over.

It had been an extraordinary career, utterly without principle and single-mindedly violent. William Herbert had favored himself above all others, except perhaps his first wife, Anne Parr. He had not, until the very last, attended to the well-being of his people. He had killed them when they had offended him. He never knew the meaning of loyalty, either to man or to religion. And his brutality did not conceal deep inner springs of philosophy or understanding, but rather anxiety and dread. He had not defended the virtues. He had often opposed the crown, but only out of self-interest. It may well be that underlying everything that would happen to the Pembrokes in the next eighty years was the example of this brute, a man who consistently, and without care, got his own way. They would have been nothing without him.

T
HE
M
AKING OF THE
P
EMBROKE
A
RCADIA
1570–1586

N
o earl of Pembroke would ever again enjoy the untrammeled authority wielded by the great founder of the dynasty. On his death in 1570, the long rearguard action began. How would the Pembrokes maintain their standing as powers in the land when the currents of authority were running so consistently against them? How would the Pembrokes survive the Tudor state? From the beginning it seemed clear that the first earl's successor, his son Henry, the second earl, was too weak for the task. He was by inheritance the richest man in England, but his qualities as a man scarcely matched the role his genes had given him.

He had been used by his father as a tool in the advancement of the family. First, in 1553, as part of the great plot to disinherit Mary Tudor and to install Lady Jane Grey on the throne. He had been married to Lady Jane's sister, Catherine, and then, just as rapidly unmarried from her, on the grounds that the marriage had never been consum
mated. Henry, as an unattractively loyal son, had written cruelly to the poor girl, telling her without any kindness that she had no claim on him. Next, he had been married to the Earl of Shrewsbury's daughter, Katherine Talbot, for her money. Quite smoothly, the willow principle at work, the old man had steered his son around the labyrinth of aristocratic lands and royal influence.

Katherine Talbot died young, and for his third wife, Henry Herbert married the most brilliant woman of her generation. Mary Sidney was so sparkling a catch that according to Aubrey's salacious and voyeuristic gossip, Henry's father, the old trimmer himself, thought she was bound to cheat on him. “The subtile old Earle did see that his faire and witty daughter-in-lawe would horne his sonne, and told him so, and advised him to keepe her in the Countrey and not to let her frequent the Court.” As often with Aubrey's tales, this one is impossible. The old earl had been dead seven years by the time Henry married Mary Sidney, but there is a poetic and emotional truth to the tale that goes beyond the simple facts. Henry's personality disappears under his wife's intense glamour. It is she, in alliance with her brilliant and difficult brother, Sir Philip Sidney, who takes up the long quarrel with the crown. Henry shrinks and shrivels in their shadow.

Under the new regime, Wilton turns from being the creation of a canny and potent dynasty maker to the setting and frame for the sparklingly jewel-like presence of Elizabethan England's greatest woman patron and poet. Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, drew around her a dazzlingly literate court. She became the dedicatee, sponsor, completer, and publisher of the greatest prose romance of the age, a distinguished translator of the Psalms, the author of political tragedies, the champion of Spenser, the friend of Shakespeare, and the sustainer of a newly empowered Arcadian vision.

Her father, Sir Henry Sidney, had been an impoverished but distinguished servant of the state. Brought up as a classmate of Edward
VI, he had held the boy king in his arms as he died. Henry Sidney had been unable to accept a peerage because he did not have the income to support the condition, but he was a member of that rising upper-middle band of intelligent, vividly Protestant Englishmen who became the vertebrae of the Tudor state. On her mother's side, Mary Sidney was connected, dangerously, to greatness. Her mother's father was John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland who had attempted with Pembroke to make Lady Jane Grey queen of England, whom the 1st Earl of Pembroke had deserted at the crucial moment, and who, together with his son Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey, had been executed by Mary Tudor. Mary Sidney's uncles, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and their sister, Katherine, Countess of Huntingdon, had been disgraced, imprisoned, and impoverished, but had survived to flower again in the sunshine of Elizabeth's reign. This Dudley inheritance—attuned to power, close to the throne, increasingly attached to the fervent cause of active and aggressive Protestantism both in England and in Europe, thinking of themselves as the core of that interest in England—was Mary Sidney's inheritance. Using the enormous wealth of the Pembrokes, she would make Wilton the heart of that other England, a place dedicated to preserving the country against the erosions of an increasingly powerful court and crown. It was under Mary Sidney's influence that Wilton became the heartland of the English Arcadia.

Her co-champion and co-promoter of the cause was the man who gave this enterprise its name, her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, the author of
Arcadia
, the greatest prose romance of Elizabethan England, which was written largely at Wilton and dedicated to his sister, the woman who was in effect its queen, or as the poet Gabriel Harvey would call her,

Over two generations in this family, the women whom the bluff, difficult, and choleric Herbert men married were the ones who brought the civilization of Renaissance England into the rooms and garden walks at Wilton. Anne Parr had brought humanist grace to William Herbert's drive. Mary Sidney brought Renaissance glitter to Henry's conformity. She had been educated to the highest level: fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, with a smattering of Greek and Hebrew. The medieval discipline of rhetoric—figures of speech, the understanding of decorum, the different forms of language suitable to different purposes and different occasions—complemented theology and a reading of the classics. She could sing and play the lute and was famous for the lace she wove.

She was more than twenty years younger than her husband, and it was no love match. Mary had been at court two years, since 1575, a handmaiden to the queen, when her uncle Leicester had arranged her marriage to the thirty-nine-year-old Henry in 1577. The dowry the Pembrokes required was an enormous £3,000—Mary's father had to borrow a large chunk of it from Leicester himself.

As for Henry Pembroke, he seems, if anything, a little overawed by the massive, remembered presence of his father. As a young man, he had behaved as required, welcoming as a thirteen-year-old the Spanish envoys to Wilton with an elegance that was noticed at court, acting with the propriety his bullying father would have insisted on, but doing little more in the end than maintaining the role he inherited. No very distinguished image of him survives; nothing compared with his father's, mother's, wife's, sons', or grandsons' portraits. In the
one picture that survives at Wilton, the man himself seems slightly shrunken inside his clothes. He wears the ribbon of the Garter; he has a little sword; his sleeves are fashionably puffed. Nothing is larger in the landscape than that huge inherited coat of arms. Neither handsome nor authoritative, he looks like a man acting a role with which he does not quite identify. It is inconceivable that this figure could ever have held the future of England in his hands.

Instead, Henry found a role as the agent of royal power in the western provinces where the Pembroke lands lay and where his father had raised armies and decided fates. He became Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, Shropshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and twelve Welsh counties. He was Lord President of the Council for Wales, responsible, with the sheriffs, for the performance of justice, the preparation of the muster rolls by which the militias were called out, the summoning of those trained bands, and supervision of the military stores. He was, in other words, the local agent of central power, accepting the diminution of the nobility against which his father had railed. The difference between the first and second earls of Pembroke is the difference between a very late medieval warlord and a very early modern official. “My dogs wear my collars,” Elizabeth had said. Henry Pembroke was one of those dogs.

The state papers are peppered with complaints about Henry's hopelessness and with his own slightly querulous notes in reply. Local Wiltshire gentlemen badger him to become his deputy. “All men cannot be deputy lieutenants,” Henry writes back. “Some must govern, some must obey.” The Privy Council in Westminster intervenes. Henry needs more than one deputy lieutenant because he is “for the most part resident in Wales.” The Privy Council took to appointing captains of the trained bands in Wiltshire without consulting him. Henry complained, removed the Westminster appointees, and put his own in their place. Without hesitation, the Council told him to reinstate the origi
nals. He was ticked off for the inadequacy of the Wiltshire militia, hopeless in both men and equipment. Henry said that the Wiltshire gentlemen didn't want to contribute money or men. He was told to “be more earnest with them.” He was carrying a great name and title, but was he up to the task? England was now at war with Spain; some vigor was required.

Henry, as his father had done, organized the representation of Wiltshire in Parliament, trying to ensure that he always had a body of MPs who would act as his pressure group at Westminster. But even this he allowed to slip out of control. Sir John Thynne, an ambitious north Wiltshire gentleman, cheated and bribed his way into one seat against Henry's wishes and against the candidature of Henry's steward George Penruddock of Compton Chamberlayne, the son of the first earl's great standard-bearer. Henry wrote Thynne a sad and spineless letter:

This is good behavior, concerned with the balance and regularity of the political community, even treating the gentlemen of Wiltshire as if they were his sons to be educated in the ways of the world, but it is scarcely the correct response to having been outmanoeuvred by a man on the make.

Instead, Henry, when back from his summer expeditions to Wales,
plunged into heraldry and bloodsports, the long-standing consolations over many centuries for grandees not quite up to making their way in the political world. “Henry Earle of Pembroke was a great lover of heraldrie,” Aubrey remembered,

A slightly pedantic nostalgia marked an ebbing of the fire.

Henry had one of the richest hunting establishments in England, an enormous enterprise: Arab stallions and mares, racehorses, horses for “stagge-hunting, fox-hunting, brooke-hawking, and land-hawking.” For hounds, the earl had the biggest, the “harbourers,” whose morning task was to find “a runnable stag” in its “harbour” in the wood. There were bulldogs, which were put in “to break the bayes of the stagge” at the end of the chase, when the animal had run itself into its final corner; there were also bloodhounds, to find the wounded deer; foxhounds; smaller harriers, “that kind of dog whom nature hath endued with the virtue of smelling, and draweth into his nostrils the air of the scent of the beast pursued and followed,” who would put up the hares; and “tumblers,” small greyhound-like lurchers, which could be set off to hunt alone and would fall or tumble in catching the rabbits or hares. “His Lordship had the choicest tumblers that were in England, and the same tumblers that rode behind him he made use of to retrieve the partridges.” There were setting dogs, or setters—“a certain lusty land spaniel”—which would put up the partridges “for supper-flights for his hawkes.” Greyhounds were kept to run in the hare warren, “as good as any were in England.”

Henry set up a famous horse race on the downs above Wilton, four miles long from the start, at the Aubrey farm in Broad Chalke, to the finish, by his father's hare warren outside the park at Wilton. He presented a golden bell to the winner worth fifty pounds. The first to win it in 1585 was one of the great glamour men of Elizabethan England, George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, adventurer, tournament champion, passionate Protestant, enemy of Spain, and practiced robber captain on the high seas. One of Queen Elizabeth's state-sponsored pirates, he once, after a trip to the Azores, arrived back at Falmouth and “unladed and discharged about five millions of silver all in pieces of eight or ten pound great, so that the whole quay lay covered with plates and chests of silver, besides pearls, gold, and other stones which were not registered, elephants' teeth, porcelain, vessels of china, coconuts, hides, ebon wood as black as jet, cloth of the rinds of trees very strange for the matter and artificial in workmanship.”

That is the kind of figure with which to fill the rooms of Elizabethan Wilton, a place in which Henry, Earl of Pembroke, is present but not quite dominant. He was too much his father's son and had not absorbed the central place that beauty and glamour had taken in the exercise of power.

It happens again and again in the history of cultures. A generation of severe, rigorous, demanding, and ambitious parents, who establish a form of order and riches, gives way, in the next generation, to a more evolved world, one more intent on fineness than propriety, happy to spend what the parents had earned, indifferent to debt, more interested in display than restraint, more attuned to brilliance and intricacy than mere obstinacy and assertion. The difference between mid-and late-nineteenth-century Britain and between mid-and late-seventeenth-century Holland appeared in the change that occurred between mid-and late-sixteenth-century England. The Wilton that
in the 1580s became the dream landscape of Elizabethan England, the heart of a full-blown Arcadia, came out of the armored toughness of an earlier age. Everything William Herbert had done to his tenants and his rivals, his enemies and friends, laid the foundation for a place of the highest and most lightly conceived civilization and literary art. Under Mary Sidney's tutelage, the Arcadian butterfly emerged at Wilton.