Quarrel with the King (4 page)

In the last two weeks of July, Bishop Gardiner attempted to close the trap on the Parrs. According to John Foxe, the protestant martyrologist, Gardiner whispered in the king's ear that Katherine and her ladies were holding, discussing, and propagating views that even by the king's own laws were heretical. More than that, “he, with others of his faithful councillors, could within short time, disclose such reasons cloaked with this cloak of heresy, that his majesty could easily perceive how perilous a matter it is, to cherish a serpent within his own bosom…”

“They rejoice and be glad of my fall,” the queen had written two years earlier in a set of private prayers.

The Protestant condition had martyrdom at its heart. Its self-conceived purity was isolated in a world of sinners. A court was a nest of enemies, and only in the sacredness of the soul's relationship to God was there any refuge. At some level, there was a connection here—one that will run throughout the story of this family—between a Protestant desire for safety away from the failings of the world and the ideal of Arcadian bliss, a place devoted to the demands of love and purity of motive. Protestantism and Arcadianism in that way sat hand in hand, bridging the secular and religious cultures of early modern England. Both were driven by the demand for retreat and for a stilling of the clamor. Each represented an equal and opposite reaction to the disturbance and trauma of modernity, the speeding up of the flywheel, the sense that the world was getting old and corrupt, with beggars on every street and every corner, where inflation and debasement of the currency was rife, simplification was good, the ancient was a refuge, rents did not produce what they had in the past, order was under threat, bread was too expensive, old systems of authority looked creaky and irrelevant, and there was no calm in the world.

One seventeenth-century Puritan preacher, Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman, saw the grave itself as a gazebo, or a place like the standing in the park at Wilton, as somewhere drenched in peace.
“Your Wives, your Husbandes, your Sonnes and Daughters, whose departing you so much lament,” he told a funeral congregation, “are but stept aside into their retiring rooms, their cool Summer-parlours, the shady cool Grove of the Grave to take a little rest by sleep….” Rest, the end of the drama, and silence: Renaissance England wanted nothing more. It is the subject that Hamlet dwelt on again and again: searching for somewhere in which the agony was over, where the flesh that he described either as too solid, too sullied, or too sallied—all three readings are relevant—would at last melt and resolve itself into a dew. Hamlet was a Protestant prince but he was also an Arcadian, at home not in the world of strife to which his ancestors had all belonged, but in the place of reflection and quiet. His soliloquy is itself an Arcadian form.

The natural end of Gardiner's plot against Katherine Parr and her circle was the arrest, interrogation, and execution of the queen and those about her. It reached its climax in the first week of August. Gardiner's men had been into the queen's apartments. Anne Parr's closet, as well as those of the other gentlewomen of the chamber, had been searched, but nothing had been found. The books were well away. Nevertheless, Gardiner felt he had enough evidence against her to persuade the king to issue a warrant for her arrest and committal to trial. Katherine guessed nothing, but by chance the warrant, at least according to John Foxe, fell out of the pocket of her enemy the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley. It was found on the paving stones by one of the queen's pages, or perhaps by her doctor, and immediately brought to her.

Her courage left her and she fell into a fit of hysterics, taking to her bed. When the king came to see her, she spoke to him without guile, asking what it might be that she had done wrong. The next day she had recovered, went to him in his chamber, told him she was “a silly poor woman”—meaning not that she was stupid but that she was
innocent—and the king was her “only anchor, supreme head and governor here in earth, next unto God, to lean unto.”

But there was no certainty in this court, and Gardiner continued with his plot to destroy Katherine Parr. She and the king had moved to Hampton Court, and it was there in the first week of August 1546 that the final act was played. Henry, Katherine Parr, Anne Parr, and the other gentlewomen of Katherine's court were in the Privy Gardens when suddenly, without warning, Wriothesley himself appeared among the gravel walks and box-lined beds. He had forty armed guards with him, and together they approached the royal party. Katherine watched for the king's reaction. By this stage in Henry's life, no one could be certain which way he would turn, or which set of loyalties he would respond to. The needle, quite arbitrarily, could flick either way. Would this, as it had been for other queens, be the moment of denial? Or had her confession of weakness and dependence been enough? Her life and future hung in the balance as Wriothesley approached down the gravel paths. But for Henry, there was no hesitation. The king, in an apoplectic rage, took Wriothesley roughly aside and shouted at him. “Knave! Arrant knave! Beast and fool!” Wriothesley was ordered from the palace with his men, and Gardiner's plot collapsed. The radical Protestant party, of which the Parrs were a central element, would be safe for the rest of the reign, and what the Herberts had, they would keep.

The first stage was over. William Herbert had wheedled his way into the confidences of the king. His wife, Anne Parr, had with her sister, Queen Katherine, outfaced the Roman Catholic conservatives intent on destroying her. The Herberts were in possession of Wilton but not yet secure enough to pose any threat to the crown. The stain and poverty of William's illegitimacy had been eased away. The foundations were being laid for future glory, and Wilton was to be its theater.

T
HE
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ORLD THE
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EMBROKES
A
CQUIRED

E
ngland in the sixteenth century was less a single state than a gathering of separate countries, each full of intense local loyalties and habits of being. Deep communality and tight local networks lay at the heart of the country. Each landscape was a world in itself, and the fifty thousand acres or so of Wiltshire lands and manors the Herberts acquired from the crown in the 1540s were then, and remain today, among the most desirable in the kingdom. The Herberts had landed in the best that England could offer. Even though the Herbert paradox was in play—they only possessed their estate because the crown had granted it to them—this was to become their country, the place where their most rooted loyalties lay. The story of their relationship to the crown cannot be understood without the picture behind it of the world they had now acquired. Their lands and manors were the counterpoint to the cynical realties of the struggle at court. The realities of an owned estate can explain conservative rebellion. The lands themselves are the vision behind the great Van Dyck painting.

Early on a summer morning—and you should make it a Sunday, when England stays in bed for hours after the sun has risen—the chalk downland to the west of Wilton slowly reveals itself in the growing light as an open and free-flowing stretch of country, long wide ridges with ripples and hollows within them, separated by river valleys, with an air of Tuscany transported to the north, perhaps even an improved Tuscany. Seventeenth-century scientists thought the smoothness of the chalk hills meant they were part of the sea floor that had appeared after Noah's flood had at last receded. It was old, God-smoothed country and pure because of it.

This morning, you will have it to yourself. At first light, the larks are up and singing, but everything else is drenched in a golden quiet. Shadows hang in the woods, and the sun casts low bars across the backs of the hills. You will see the deer, ever on the increase in southern England, moving silently and hesitantly in the half-distance. It is a place of slightness and subtlety, wide and long-limbed, drawn with a steady pencil. Above the deeper combes, on the slopes that the Wiltshiremen call “cliffs,” the grass is dotted with cowslips and early purple orchids. Gentians and meadow saxifrage can still be found on the open downland. Chalkhill Blue butterflies dance over the turf. Fritillaries and white admirals are in the woods. The whole place, as Edward Thomas once described the shape of chalkland, is full of those “long straight lines in which a curve is always latent…”

This feeling of length—slow changes, a sense of distance—is at the heart of the Wiltshire chalk. It is not a plain, because everywhere the ground surface shifts and modulates, but it is nowhere sharp. It is full of continuity and connectedness, a sense that if you set off in any direction you would have two or three days' journey before anything interrupted you. This, in other words, is a place that feels like its own middle, the deepest and richest of arrivals.

John Aubrey, the great seventeenth-century gossip and antiquar
ian, whose family rented a farm in one of these valleys, called his treasured country “a lovely
campania
,” a perfect Champagne country. There is no marginality; instead, settlement, rootedness, stability, removal from strife and trouble. “The turfe is of a short sweet grasse,” Aubrey wrote of the place he loved, “good for the sheep, and delight-full to the eye, for its smoothnesse like a bowling green.” The most delicious things here were the rabbits, “the best, sweetest, and fattest of any in England; a short, thick coney, and exceeding fatt. The grasse is very short, and burnt up in the hot weather. 'Tis a saying, that conies doe love rost-meat.” The rabbits' tastiness was a sign of the country's beneficence.

These wonderful lands—the chalk downs and the lush watered valleys of the rivers that run between them—spread over eighty square miles, were the core of the Herbert estate. Every element of the perfect life is here. High on the chalk ridge just to the west of Wilton is the great royal hunting ground of Grovely Wood, set up as a forest by the Saxon kings, so old that it formed no part of the system of parishes that were created around it before the Norman conquest. It is one of the twenty-five hunting forests mentioned in the Domesday Book, the precious reserves in which the king alone had the right to kill game. Grovely—its name perhaps a memory of the patches of rough woodland growing here when the Saxons first arrived—is still thick with bluebells and wood anemones in the early summer.

From the top of the downs, long droves descend into the valleys of the rivers that cut through the chalk tableland. Honeysuckle and wild clematis drape themselves across the hedges. The sun breaks into the droves past the thorns that are thick with mayflower. Cow parsley is just sprouting in the verges, the wheat and barley still a dense green in the fields beside you. It doesn't matter which river valley you choose: the Ebble, or the Nadder, or the Wylye. Each of them will still greet you like a vision of perfection, the perfect interfolding of the human
and the natural that is at the heart of the Arcadian idea. The chalk streams (all three of them still have the Celtic names they had in pre-Roman Britain) emerge in bubbling springs all along the valley sides. The water that has percolated down through the chalk hits a layer of clay and comes to the surface. Along that springline, below the arable fields but above the floodable valley bottoms, are the villages. Their emergences are beautiful, soft, weed-rimmed places where the water erupts in shallow mushrooms and riffles. It is as if the water is simmering in the pools before making its easy way down to the main rivers that slope off to the east.

So mudless is this spring water that the rivers remain entirely clear as they move over their pale beds. The banks are spotted with kingcups, and there are islands of white-flowered watercrowsfoot in midstream. The hairy leaves of water mint grow on the gravel banks, coots and moorhens scoot between them, and if you wade out barefoot into the shockingly cold water of the river, the small, wild brown trout flicker away in front of you, running from your Gulliver-in-Lilliput intrusion. Among the trout are the pale bodies of the graylings, called
Thymalus thymalus
because their flesh smells of the wild thyme that grows on the downland turf, and which in the seventeenth century were known here as “umbers,” shadow-fish, their silvery grayness scarcely to be distinguished from the most beautiful river water in England.

This was ancient country, drenched in continuities. In common with the rest of southern England, it looked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much as it had for at least a thousand and maybe two or three thousand years. There would have been differences in details: woods had grown up where fields had been before; fields had been cleared where trees had once clothed the landscape. There were more people and more houses. But the villages, as ever, were made of the materials the land could provide. Wheat straw–thatched the roofs, cut
not with a scythe but more carefully and more slowly with a sickle—a smaller, neater tool but justifiable in economic terms because it would guarantee a good length in the roofing material: longer straw made dryer roofs. In the walls, the oak frames were infilled with hazel panels, made with exactly the same technique as the hurdles used to enclose the sheep in the folds, the young pliant wands woven between the uprights or “sails” (the wattle), smeared with mud and straw (the daub), and then painted with limewash. Occasionally, for the walls, a mixture of chalk, or “clunch,” blocks would be used, quarried from the hill and then mixed with brick from the valley clays. All of this one can still see in the houses of these valleys. Nothing would have come from more than a mile or two away. This was an immutable pattern, the intimate folding of men, their farming, and their habits of life on to the opportunities and constraints the landscape offered them.

The high chalkland would have been nothing without the river valleys. Settlement needs water, and the dew ponds on the downs—in fact, enormous clay-lined dishes to catch the rain—provided water good enough for sheep but desiccating to human taste. Each sip seems to leave a residue of chalk in your mouth. The spring-fed valley water is different, as bubblingly restorative as any in England, marvellous to lie in on a hot summer afternoon, your back on the pebbles, the water dancing around your head and shoulders. The Arcadian world of the Pembrokes' Wiltshire valleys relied for its existence on the constant and mutually supportive relationship of these two environments, the high chalkland and the damp wet valleys, each providing what the other lacked.

The same system of land management, and the virtually immobile social structure it created, had persisted across the centuries. It was, apart for some alterations at the margins, a profoundly conservative and unchanging world. Farming patterns and social relationships had lasted here essentially unchanged from before the ninth century. This
extraordinary continuity, even as the world was revolutionized around them, became the dominant fact of the Pembroke estates. This was the old world. Its ancient methods looked like a version of Arcadia. And it was a world the Pembrokes were intent on protecting.

Its roots stretched back into the Dark Ages, perhaps to the moment when the Viking armies were threatening the well-being of much of the Midlands, East Anglia and Wessex, perhaps before then, when violence was still endemic among the Saxon chieftains and their war bands. The documents are thin on the ground, but it seems certain that the system of the manor emerged from a world of violence and the need for protection within it. A warlord offered land and defense, a villein—a man of the village—supplied in return labor and loyalty.

This was certainly how the landowning class of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the history of what they owned. John Norden, the preeminent surveyor of the early seventheenth century, a professional and a devout Christian, conservative in his ideals, first published his
Surveiors Dialogue
in 1607. It was a popular book that went through three large editions, and was the leading text on the meaning of land, its duties and rewards, in early modern England. With it, Norden was voicing the accepted nostrums of the society he was addressing.

After the departure of the Romans, Norden told his audience of gentlemen, the country was left as

In that wild time, when life was lawless, there was mutual benefit to be had in community. The arrangement was originally voluntary on both sides.

But time passed and what had begun as a voluntary arrangement stiffened into the “custom of the manor.” Both service to the Lord and the rights of the tenants had become obligatory “and either, in right of the custome due to the other, constraineth each other to do that which in the beginning was of either part voluntary.”

Central to the system was the idea of balance and mutuality in community. In Norden's pages you can hear the discussions of the English ruling class before the Civil War, the vision of what they still saw as the organic integrity of the manors they owned and controlled. Norden derived the word
manor
itself from the French verb
mainer
—to keep a place in hand, or in check. Control was the essence of good management, but in harness with control and discipline was the idea that the landlord's own life, that of his family, his “posterity,” the lands they held, the lives of those who lived on their lands, were all part of a single, organic whole.

It is, in this ideal and moralized world, a picture of a profoundly hierarchical community, deriving its security and well-being from the natural relationship of parts. “And is not euery Mannor a little common wealth,” Norden asked, tapping big political issues in the use of that phrase, “whereof the Tenants are the members, the Land the body, and the Lord the head?” That organic analogy worked in detail. Above all, the land's bodily nature needed to be attended to:

This idea of organic health, and of balance as the source of that health, runs unbroken from the farming of the fields to the management of the country. It is an undivided conceptual ecology that can take in the workings of the physical body, the court at Whitehall, the family, the village, the land itself, the growing of crops, the transmission of well-being to the future, the inheritance of understanding from the past, and above all the interlocking roles of nobility, gentry, and commonalty. It is the ideology of an establishment concerned with keeping itself in the position of wealth and power. There is not a hint of democracy, let alone radicalism, but it is a frame of mind that also sets itself against any form of authoritarianism. The workings of the medieval and post-medieval community depend at their heart on a balance of interests, contributions, and rewards. It is what, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was called, quite consciously, a “common wealth”: well-being derived from a life lived and considered in common. The custom of the manor was not to do with the regulations of the state, or with individual freedom. It was a deeply conservative premodern and pre-market system that recognized no overriding rights of the individual or of national interest. It believed, to an extent the modern world can scarcely grasp, in the rights of the community as a living organism.