Quarrel with the King (7 page)

The Pembrokes' cousin, the poet George Herbert, who in the
1630s was the vicar of Bemerton, in the valley of the Nadder between Wilton and Salisbury, gave many overlapping reasons for beating the bounds in May: it was a blessing of God for the fruits of the field; it established “Justice in the preservation of the bounds”; it was a moment for “Mercie, in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution of largess which at that time is or ought be made”; and it was an act of charity and neighborliness, “in living, walking and neighbourlily accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if they be any.” For Herbert, these were the four dimensions of a village's existence: metaphysical, legislative, personal, and social. The melding of communal action with communal need and communal belief that beating the bounds represented is the clearest of all demonstrations of the depth and multiplicity of meanings in which these places were steeped. Seen from an era of individual rights, the manor system may look like a nightmare of restriction and denial; from its own perspective, however, it was a deliberate and effective mechanism for a multidimensional life in which land was not a commodity but the matrix for existence.

The year rolled inexorably onward: Midsummer Night was celebrated on June 24, six months from Christmas, and holding up a mirror to it. Huge bonfires were lit, boys picked flowers, which they gave to girls, and the girls threw them into the flames to keep themselves free all year of agues and afflictions. The following day was the Feast of St. John the Baptist, the figure who represented not the redemption of the world but the heralding of a new version of it. August 1 was Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day, when the first wheat harvest of the year, baked into a loaf, was brought into church and tenants were bound to present a sheaf of the new harvest to their landlords. By August 24, Bartlemas, or St. Bartholomew's Day (Bartholomew had been flayed alive and was the patron saint of butchers), all pigs' noses were to be ringed; by Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, on September
29, all animals were to leave the common fields; at St. Luke's Day, October 18, all lambs are to be counted as sheep; and by Martinmas, the Feast of St. Martin, on November 11, the commons were to be cleared of grazing beasts.

This adds up to an extraordinarily complex map of life lived on the Herbert estates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These arrangements and patterns represent people's relationship to the land, to history, to the passing of the year, to their neighbors, to livestock, to the growing and getting of food, and even to the universe of which nowadays we have no conception at all. These are the lineaments of the world we have lost. They also describe precisely the world that the aristocracy of England would consistently seek to defend, not only as their property but as the foundation of their existence, as their moral universe.

William Herbert's relationship to this system was deeply ambivalent. He was a new man, who had made his own way in the world and had established himself and his family in a position of enormous wealth. At the same time, as he saw it, he was also heir to the great inheritance of his forebears, the medieval earls of Pembroke. This was the contradiction deep within him, one that would play itself out again and again in the story of this family. Was he a member of the ancient nobility, committed, like Norden's ideal landlord, to the welfare of the people dependent on him? Or was he a ruthless self-seeker, dependent for his standing on his relationship to the crown? Was he a new-made man or the defender of old England against a rapacious modernity? Was he a part of the system or a disruption to it? And how, if these two positions came into conflict, would he behave?

T
HE
F
IRST
E
ARL AS
P
OWER
B
ROKER
1549–1570

T
he crisis in William Herbert's life erupted in the spring of 1549, as the roads began to dry and people could begin to move. Henry VIII had died two years before and had left the throne to his son, Edward VI, still only a boy of nine. The boy's uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had become Lord Protector, king in all but name. William Herbert had begun the new reign as Somerset's ally, but their ways had soon parted. Somerset was cold, arrogant, and even priggish. Increasingly he monopolized the boy king and his instruments of power. The atmosphere at court had turned vicious. One of Herbert's allies, Sir William Paget, wrote to Somerset: “Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster, before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy…. And that was to follow mine advise in all your proceedings more than any other man's.”

No sense of communality here; only mutual distrust. The duke, as regent and Lord Protector while Edward VI was still a minor, had issued proclamations to the effect that landowners should return to the old ways of doing things, that they should consider themselves stewards and fathers of their little commonwealths. New men had behaved badly. Enclosures of what had been either open field or common land, either for private gain or for the pleasure a park could afford, ran against this communitarian ethic. In Somerset's hands, the custom of the manor was making a renewed claim against the lordly Renaissance desire for spreading parkland.

In addition, the long history of English radicalism, founded on that element in the Bible that saw men as equal in the sight of God, fed the sense of outrage. If Isaiah could warn, “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place [left], that they [i.e., the landowners] may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!” it was inevitable that the rioters would demand, “Why should one man have all and another nothing?” What was there to stop the people of Washerne who had been evicted from their houses and had had the seven acres of Lampeland taken from them to reclaim what was theirs in the sight of God and apparently of the Lord Protector?

In April 1549, reports began to come in to the Privy Council in Westminster of peasants creating havoc in many parts of the country. There was nothing new in that: a long tradition of English violence had bubbled away for generations. But there was no doubt that the 1540s were a desperate time in southern England. Not only were there many estates in which the lax government of the abbeys had been replaced by hardheaded modern men, harder-headed than most. The underlying economic situation was desperate, too. The population of England, now at about 2.75 million, had increased by some 35 percent over the previous century. The cost of living had risen by 50 percent in the previous fifty years. In 1545, the harvest had been catastrophic
and the economy was still reeling from the aftereffects. The rich, gathering up the pickings from the dissolution of the monasteries, were getting richer, and the poor, their numbers burgeoning against a static food supply, were getting poorer.

On May 25, 1549, the crisis hit home. A Norfolk gentleman, John Paston, wrote to his cousin the Earl of Rutland:

It was the people of Washerne taking their revenge. They threw down the new oak palings that Herbert had set up to enclose the deer and exclude the people, and slaughtered what deer they could catch. For three weeks they occupied the ground on the other side of the Nadder from Herbert's new house. They may not have known quite what they were taking on, since in those weeks, as they attempted to rebuild their houses on the old sites—there was a mistaken belief widespread in England that any man who could build a house and light a fire in the course of a day had the right to remain in it—Herbert was away in Wales. There, from his Glamorgan estates, drawing on the “affinity”—the band of his tenants who could be relied on to fight for him when summoned—he marched them back into Wiltshire. Approaching Wilton, he attacked his invading Washerne tenants as if they were an enemy and “slew to death divers of the rebels.” News of Herbert's fearsome response reached the young king, who recorded in his journal how the men of Washerne had created trouble and chaos and how “Sir William Herbert did put them down, overrun, and slay them.”

The park where Sir Philip Sidney would within thirty-five years
wander with the dreams of Arcadia in his head was now restored to wholeness, and if you stand on the lawns outside Wilton House today, staring across the elegance of the park and its gentlemanly accoutrements, you are looking at one of the heartlands of Arcadia: a stretch of landscape in which the people who claimed some rights over it were murdered so that an aesthetic vision of otherworldly calm could be imposed in their place. It is an early, miniature, English version of the clearances on the great Highland estates in Scotland or even of the National Parks in the wilder parts of America: calm, beautiful, and empty landscapes, not because God made them like that but because the people who belonged there were driven off, killed, or otherwise dispensed with.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider exactly what was done here in the service of Arcadia. Remember the dog chains in the old armory, the bills and pikes, the halberds with which you could spike a man and then cut him. Almost certainly Herbert would have used a sword on his tenants. The favorite and usual strokes in the sixteenth century were not fencing-like thrusts—a slightly later, European development—but rather more woodmanlike slashing and severing: the cutting of the head from the shoulders, the cutting off of an arm or a leg, and the slicing stroke down through the head. This could be dramatic. There are records throughout the Middle Ages of sword cuts leaving the severed halves of the head hanging down to left and right on either shoulder. Sometimes the sword was smashed into the head with such violence that it cut down through a man's torso to his hips, with his body folding apart like a carcass in an abattoir. Skeletons from medieval battles, unearthed and examined, often have multiple wounds: both legs cut off, sometimes apparently from a single sweeping blow with a sword; parts of the skull cut away in several pieces; occasionally many wounds of which any one would have been fatal; bodies left halved.

There is a disturbing echo in this story of the use of a park as a place for a hunt. The king's phrase—“put them down, overrun, and slay them”—is curiously reminiscent of the account of a successful pursuit of a quarry. This was the manly excitement of the hunt taken to its ultimate, a point of view summarized by one Richard Blome, the author of the late-seventeenth-century
Gentleman's Recreation
. Hunting, as Blome described the tradition,

Hunting was universally seen as training for war, or rather, more than that, as a form of nostalgic and pretechnological war that reminded its noble participants of what war must have been like before an awkward, ugly modernity contaminated it. Sir Thomas Elyot, the Tudor theorist of government, had recommended that sixteenth-century Englishmen should use only the javelin in the hunt, because that is what Xenophon had recommended in ancient Greece, and it alone would preserve the nobility of the exercise. James I, a passionate huntsman, would have no gun come anywhere near the parks where he pursued deer, because the use of guns, as he told his son Prince Henry, was a “theevish forme of hunting.” Grandeur was antique.

When in the following decade William Herbert paraded through London (the old dowager queen of Scots, Mary of Guise, was visiting), he had with him “a hundred great horses, mounted by a hundred horsemen,” their coats lined with velvet, gold chains around their necks, white feathers in their hats, wearing the Pembroke badge of the
wyvern, the winged dragon, “and every [man] havyng a new gayffelyns in ther hands.” That is a word to raise the hackles on one's neck. Was it javelins the men and women of Washerne were hunted with, as Elyot recommended, that summer afternoon in 1549? Was it a kind of pig-sticking? The elision was commonplace in the sixteenth century of any difference between a working man and a brutish beast. Shakespeare's Venus uses a “javelin's point a churlish swine to gore”—and one is left in no doubt that her churlish swine, with his brawny sides, his hairy bristles, and short, thick neck, living in his “loathsome cabin,” is a kind of animal Caliban, a dirty commoner, to be gored by the lovely, javelin-wielding elegant men, with feathers in their hats, chains around their necks, and beauty in their faces.

William Herbert's pursuit and slaying of the tenants who had presumed to enter his park represents the most disturbing compaction of the binary worlds of Arcadia and violence: a dreamlike killing of people in a consciously aestheticized place, the reality of human death for once taking over from the playacting of deer death, the heart-pumping chase, the satisfactory conclusion, the restoration of calm.

Having used his Welsh tenants to kill his Wiltshire tenants, William Herbert then took the former to war. He was certainly—and from the point of view of his own interests, rightly—excited by it. The summer of 1549 would turn him from a successful adventurer into one of the central power brokers of the Tudor state. He brutally suppressed a Catholic rebellion in the West Country, and emerged from it at the head of an army with which, ominously, he then turned for London.

The crisis rippled on into the autumn. The cold, brusque, rigid, and aloof idealism of the Duke of Somerset, still in London with the king, had alienated most of his supporters in the council: landlords such as Herbert, who had suffered invasions of their parks or enclosed fields; the old nobility who felt themselves supplanted by the new men such as Paget and Herbert; anyone who felt bruised by Somerset's short
temper, arrogance, and obstinacy. It was a grouping fatal for Somerset. Herbert's friend John Dudley, now the Earl of Warwick, was in Norfolk with another army. Somerset felt caught between the two of them and retreated with the king to the safety of Windsor Castle. Again and again, he and the boy king wrote to Herbert, telling him that the other nobles on the council had tuned against them and imploring him to come to their aid.

Slowly Herbert approached from the west, arriving at Andover, a mere forty miles from Windsor, on October 8. From there, Herbert wrote to Somerset a cold, disdainful, and threatening letter, perfectly aware of the central place he and his army had acquired in the future of England:

It is a hard, cold letter, reliant on the naked power of an armed force, Italian arquebusiers among them, which had already destroyed the rebels in the West Country. It is a statement of threat, the violence in it scarcely an inch below the surface.

Herbert withdrew with his army to Wilton and from there wrote
to the Earl of Warwick and the other lords of the Privy Council in London. “We have stayed all these parts, this part of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wales and the West, so that [the Lord Protector] can draw on nothing to do any hurt. Let is know what you would have us do, and with what numbers.”

This is the foundation level of dominance, the exercise of authority that will later allow the expression of grace. It is about the gathering of power. That casual, proconsular listing of the parts of England and Wales over which they have established their authority is thrown away with the nonchalance of a victor. This is the moment when Herbert became one of the rulers of England. The silverback growls and glares, and the world submits.

Somerset, horrified by the thought of civil war between the nobility and the shedding of still more blood, surrendered to the new power grouping around Warwick and Herbert. He was imprisoned in the Tower. He returned to the Council for a while, but within eighteen months had been executed. His lands, in the most primitive accumulation of spoils, were distributed among the victors, Herbert among them. The Privy Council allowed Herbert to mint two thousand pounds of silver into coin, keeping the difference between the value of the metal and the value of the currency, making him a profit of £6,709, 19s. And rewards continued to flood toward him. During Edward's reign, Herbert received lands worth £32,165 in capital value, including fifty-three manors in Wales, nine in Wiltshire, five in Gloucestershire, two in Sussex, and one each in Middlesex, Devon, and Hertfordshire. And on October 10, 1551, the second son of the illegitimate gentleman from the Vale of Ewyas was created Baron Herbert of Cardiff. The following day he became the Earl of Pembroke.