Quarrel with the King (2 page)

1527–1546

T
he man who would become the 1st Earl of Pembroke was as tough, powerful, and cynical, and his wife as serious and high-minded, as anyone in sixteenth-century England. Together, they embodied the two streams of Tudor life: the untrammeled brokering of power through violence, threat, and political flexibility, and the cleansing of the mind through education and integrity. William Herbert and his wife Anne were the rootstock of the Wilton Arcadia: its necessary power; its longing for goodness.

William Herbert was a Welsh hardman. He may not have been able to read and could scarcely write his own name—those signatures of his that survive, in an age of sometimes exquisite handwriting, waver and wobble from one letter to the next, unable to distinguish lower from upper case, not even pursuing a straight line across the page, but intent on a flourish here and there, the writing of a bear—a bear with pretensions—into whose paw someone has thrust a pen. According to John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century gossip, Herbert was “strong
sett, but bony, reddish favoured, of a sharpe eie, sterne looke” and his portraits confirm that stark, bullish quality, depicting his feet planted four square beneath him, his eyes cold, his impatient face scarcely connected to the finery in which he has been dressed, one hand holding gloves but ready for the sword, the other clasping the staff of office as if it were a stick he might hit someone with. Everything is fixed, obdurate, immovable; the man is as substantial as the material world to which his life and passions are directed. Herbert was the acquirer of riches and the founder of a dynasty. The Elizabethan historian William Camden called him “an excellent man, who was in a manner, the Raiser of his own Fortunes,” and Aubrey, “of good naturall parts, but very colorique.” He was an English condottiere whose hatchet mouth and unforgiving eye founded a dynasty. Spirit barely flickered inside him. He was no Arcadian, but without him Arcadia could not have flowered.

Neither William Herbert nor his descendants wanted to see themselves as arrivistes. They wanted to look as if they had always been at the heart of significance, and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Pembrokes did their best to cover up some slightly flaky origins. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had been entirely Welsh. Not until the late fifteenth century were they even called Herbert. (No one knows where the name came from.) Instead, out of the mists of Wales and time emerged Jenkyn ap Adam, who begat Gwylym ap Jenkyn, who begat Thomas ap Gwylym, who married Gladwys, the Star of Abergavenny (her dowry was a park full of deer), and together they begat William ap Thomas, who took a large body of Welsh archers to Agincourt in 1415. His son, Gwilym Ddu, “Black Will,” marauded and burned his way across England in support of the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and as his reward was made Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV. This slashingly successful warrior, the first Welshman to become an English peer, who for years
ran the whole of Wales as his fiefdom, had several illegitimate children, one of whom, Richard, had as his lordship the poor, steep Vale of Ewyas in the Black Mountains, a place that is still full of small, edge-of-subsistence farms, houses pushed into the hillside, heart-stopping beauty, and unrelenting rain.

No one could ever imagine that Ewyas was the threshold of power, but it is the place from which the young William Herbert, Richard's second son, emerged to conquer his world. From a modern perspective, it is not surprising as a background to a tough, violent, imposing, and driven life—a grandfather of heroic proportions, a near-fatal lack of social standing, the stain of illegitimacy, and the fate of the second son: disinheritance even from his father's small patrimony.

That essentially meritocratic view was not how it was seen at the time. When William Herbert was finally made Earl of Pembroke in 1551, he did not boast his climb to power, nor call himself the “1st Earl.” There was no honor in that. As far as he was concerned, he was the 20th Earl of Pembroke, heir in line direct to the previous nineteen, of nine different creations, who had battled their way across the Middle Ages. It was the grandest of inheritances. The pretentious George Owen, Elizabethan antiquarian and remote relation of the Herberts, whom Owen adulated, was still relishing the ancient power of the earls of Pembroke in the late sixteenth century. The earldom of Pembroke, Owen wrote, “was in auncient tyme a County Palatine,” not subject to any king's power. The earl “had the commanding and leading of all the people of his country to make warres at his pleasure. He had within his Country nine castles of his owne and twelve seigniories or manors which were parcell of his Countye…”

In an era of increasing bureaucratization of government, and an emasculation of the old magnates of medieval England, there was a frisson to this manly independence, which a mere created earl or baron could scarcely rival. It is not surprising that any memory of the ille
gitimacy of William Herbert's father was quietly soothed away. Here was a man conducting his life as a power-broking baron in the mold of his ancestors.

What Owen does not mention in his catalogue of honor is that the first time this William Herbert made his mark on the world, it was as a murderer. His father had died in 1510 when William was three, and the boy went to live in the household of his relation by marriage, the Earl of Worcester. Worcester was a warrior, administrator, diplomat, and the great producer and showman of Henry VIII's court. He was responsible for the tournament ground and pasteboard palaces set up for the meeting of Henry VIII and François I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the summer of 1520. It was Worcester who arranged for five thousand people to be shipped across the Channel to France to organize this event. Vast quantities of timber and glass were brought to the site. Three hundred knights took part in the tournament, over which Worcester himself presided as one of the judges. William Herbert, aged thirteen, was at his side, as his page, learning the intimacy of power and glory.

Worcester died on April 25, 1526, and that year William Herbert appears as a “gentleman pensioner” at the court of Henry VIII. It was the lowest rung of court life. One could be a gentleman pensioner and still be thrown into jail for debt or be arrested on suspicion of treason, but it was the necessary first step on the road to significance. But then Herbert's career came adrift. On midsummer's eve 1527, a time for drinking and feasting, bonfires, high spirits, sex, and violence, there was an incident in Bristol, the great seaport already spreading its networks to the New World, that might have destroyed him.

The mayor of Bristol, a man known as Thomas or “Davy” Broke and later described by the hostile protestant preacher George Wishart as “a knave and gorbely [fat] knave,” together with his “brethren”—perhaps “that droncken Gervys, that lubber Antony Payne, &
slovyn William Yong, and that dobyll knave William Chester,” all leading Bristol merchants and all identified by Wishart as Broke's associates—were coming back into the city after some duck shooting. Unexplained, William Herbert, already with the reputation of “a mad fighting young fellow,” was there with a gang of Welshmen to meet them on the bridge. They began to talk and “for want of some respect in compliment” fell into an argument and then a rage. A fight broke out, and Herbert killed one of the merchants, a man called Richard Vaughan, from an old and distinguished Bristol family.

The incident fits. Herbert's origins in South Wales were just across the Severn. The Bristol men would have known he was an illegitimate son. Herbert had by now spent most of his life in the heady atmosphere of court, wearing the badge first of his kinsman the Earl of Worcester, then of the king himself, acquiring the sheen and courteousness of that world. His own honor would have been both high and tender in his mind, and now he found himself insulted by a party of drunk, duck-hunting Bristol merchants. Of course he turned to his knife.

Herbert and the Welshmen who were with him “fled through a gate into the Marsh and escaped in a boat with the tide.” After that, wanted for murder, named in a Bristol's coroner's report as the man who did it, Herbert disappeared. Nothing is known of him for the next seven or eight years. John Aubrey thought he had gone to France, to the Valois court, but as Herbert in later life was unable to speak French, that is unlikely. Maybe he went to ground in Wales, surrounded by the protective world of his Herbert connections, sheltered by the common understanding that Welsh fighters had long since been killing fat Bristol merchants. Either he, or someone else called William Herbert, killed “one honest man” in Newport in South Wales in 1533, and his servant was convicted of killing yet another Welshman the following year. Brutality lay at the center of his life.

In 1534 Herbert was still being described as a “late gentleman of
the household,” but soon after that he returned to court, was readmitted to the glowing circle near the king, and in 1535 was promoted to become “an esquire of the body,” an honorific but one that implied a further penetration of the layers surrounding the sovereign. The story of this family over a period of more than one hundred years is hinged, at least in part, to that bodily geometry; closeness to the king, to his actual body, his breathing presence, is the one variable that governs their fortunes. Thuggery and exile among the ancestral comforts of South Wales was one thing; sharing the same physical space as the fount of all honor and the source of all lands was quite another.

On returning to court, Herbert met Anne Parr, the woman he would marry. She and Herbert may have fallen in love. Neither had any fortune to bring to the marriage. Both were orphans. Both were making their way in the world of the court. And Henry VIII's court in the 1530s was one where love affairs were frequent and courtly love admired and practiced as necessary and civilizing elements of the Italianate courtier's life. The most beautiful lines written in Tudor England are by Thomas Wyatt, in his poem bemoaning the un-Arcadian, treacherous world of calculation and disloyalty at court (“They fle from me that sometyme did me seke”), which describes just such a moment of unadorned and immediate love:

Love itself might also be seen as a form of Arcadia, a private place in which the fever and anguish of being is soothed away.

William Herbert was about eight years older than Anne Parr. A
drawing by Holbein, probably made when Anne was about twenty, in 1535, shows her as she was when William fell in love with her. As an image, it is a universe apart from Herbert's tense and wary assertion: calm, pure, and controlled, with a clarity and directness about her eyes and a firmness but no meanness in her mouth, she seems all spirit. It was a marriage of opposites. It is a strikingly Protestant image, nearly shadowless, a form of portraiture motivated by truth and clarity, a product of the Reformation with the removal of the dark and its substitution with the clear-eyed, clear-skinned vision of Englishwomen such as Anne Parr.

In 1531, as an orphaned sixteen-year-old after her mother died, Anne had come to court to serve as a maid-in-waiting to Henry VIII's sequence of wives. She was the daughter of a gentry family of no great wealth or standing but one that since 1483, over four generations, had served England's queens. Her mother, Dame Maud Parr, had been both confidante and lady-in-waiting to Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and now both Anne Parr and her elder sister, Katherine, were serving in the household of Catherine of Aragon's daughter, Princess Mary. Sir Thomas Parr had died in 1517, and both girls had been brought up, along with their brother, William, by the formidable Dame Maud, who was fluent in French and maybe also in Latin, a manager of lands and contracts, an educational theorist, and friend of the humanist scholars Thomas More and Roger Ascham. Dame Maud had provided her daughters with the richest possible humanist education, setting up a small school in their house in Leicestershire. Its methods had been modeled on the program Thomas More had ordained for his own family, teaching the children philosophy, mathematics, Latin, French, Italian, chess, the study of coins, art theory, medicine, and rigorous training in the Scriptures. Anne had emerged a scholar. In later life she would become patron of Fellows at St. John's College,
Cambridge. She sent two of her sons to Peterhouse. Roger Ascham, who became Elizabeth I's tutor, borrowed Anne's copy of Cicero and quoted Ovid in the letters he wrote her. The fineness and purity that glows from the face of Anne drawn by Holbein was no illusion.

Both Anne and her sister would become champions of the reformed religion that swept through England in the 1530s. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that their education in the highest and most sophisticated form of Renaissance humanism prepared the ground for a skeptical attitude toward the inherited ways of the Church. Anne Parr, in other words, looks like a Protestant in the making. She also looks like William Herbert's better half. They were probably married late in 1537, when she was twenty-two and he thirty-one.

No one could have predicted that they would be the foundation of one of the great families of England. Anne had remained no more than a maid-in-waiting, a body servant, to the evolving sequence of queens; William was still an Esquire of the King's Body. They were without any prospect of inheritance, landless, and disconnected from that great engine of power but playing their hands in the life of the court, the only place where that condition could be altered. “Upon the bare stock of their wits, they began to traffic for themselves.” Over the next twenty years, the two of them played that game more successfully than anyone else in England.

William's attitude toward religion would remain equivocal for the rest of his life. He changed as circumstances required him to change. He was the heir to a great name but to nothing else. Treading carefully was an aspect of survival. He believed in the religion that the king or queen of the day required him to believe in, no more and no less. Such changes of religious allegiance were no rarity in sixteenth-century England—many justified it openly on state grounds—but his voltes-faces were among the slickest and the sweetest. In the 1590s, the old, slippery smooth courtier the Marquess of Winchester was