Quarrel with the King (9 page)

Mary Tudor died in November 1558, and another of Aubrey's stories, hinged to that moment and certainly untrue, nevertheless reveals what Wiltshire thought of this Pembroke: coarse, vulgar, a shifter, an object of ridicule as much as terror, a man in some ways humiliated by his greed for wealth and power.

Elizabeth succeeded her half sister and Pembroke apparently seamlessly transferred his allegiance from the Catholic to the Protestant queen. He had been among those who had first acclaimed Elizabeth,
but the relationship between sovereign and magnate very quickly shifted. A strained correspondence between them survives from the very first weeks of her reign, thick with a sense of fearlessness on both sides, a prickly manoeuvring but no form of self-abasement. Both Edward and Mary had appointed Pembroke Lord President of the Council for Wales and the Marches, a powerful official in a part of the kingdom that anyway formed some of the Pembroke heartlands. But this queen was to be different. “I have received your letters,” he wrote to her from Wilton,

It was a fairly graceless withdrawal, and on August 5, his bastard nephew, also called William Herbert, was to feel the sting of royal power. A letter came from the queen at Richmond to the sheriff of Glamorgan:

This William Herbert was thrown in the Fleet prison next to the Thames in London, but all this was a sign of the world changing, of that warmongering Tudor magnate no longer casting any kind of shadow over the central authority of queen, Privy Council, or her sheriff in the wild lands of Wales. Sir Henry Sidney, a royal servant of no great wealth, too poor to be elevated to the peerage, was appointed in his place.

Never in Elizabeth's reign would the queen call on the powerful but dangerous capacity in her great noblemen to provide her with armies. Her avoidance of war was a means not only of saving money but also of preventing the dispersal of power into the hands of those mighty subjects. The subjects themselves were made less mighty, and the story of Elizabethan England is in part one of the emasculation of the nobility, the turning of real warriors into toy warriors, fighters into frustrated lovers, the condottieri of Tudor England into the wan and beautiful princes drifting through the fields of Arcadia, an aestheticization of nobility that buttressed rather than menaced the power of the state.

Elizabeth's was a new form of monarchy, appealing to a wider constituency than the nobles she might have gathered around her, using them but not relying on them. A sign of how this new world was to work had already appeared clearly enough in April 1559. She went one afternoon

This was the most elegant form of emasculation, diminishing the nobility by means of a supper party and some fireworks, the defeat of Tudor brutalism by glamour and politics. From now on, the great old magnates of medieval England—the Cliffords, Nevilles, Percys, and Talbots—were left to fester in their huge estates, remote from the levers and rewards of power. And Pembroke, too, was pushed to the margins.

In the late 1560s one last attempt was made by the old earl to influence the state in the way he had at the height of his career. He was keen for the Roman Catholic duke of Norfolk to marry the Queen of Scots, by then a captive in the north of England. Elizabeth heard rumors of this suggestion, Norfolk was sent to the Tower, and Pembroke was arrested. By then two of the old northern magnates, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, had raised armies from their affinities in order to release the Queen of Scots from captivity. Pembroke seemed to Elizabeth to have been involved in this reassertion of noble power. For their own purposes, that is what the two earls were claiming. A little pathetically, he wrote to the queen in December 1569:

There is the willow bent full double. Of course he had never changed sides; of course his only interest was in the validity of the true religion; of course he had never plotted with any other grandee about how they might steer the riches of England into the strong chests in the strong rooms and armories at Wilton. God forbid that anything so impure had ever passed though his mind!

John Aubrey, listening to the Wiltshire gossip about the 1st Earl of Pembroke seventy-five years later—this was a story from his great-uncles, the Brownes of Broad Chalke—heard that “in Queen Elizabeth's time some Bishop (I have forgot who)”—it was in fact the Bishop of Winchester—“was sent to him from the Queen and Council”—actually of his own accord—“to take Interrogatories of him,” to ask him some legal and technical details about his landholdings. The bishop, although Aubrey didn't hear this detail, wanted to get back the manor of Bishopstone in the valley of the Ebble, just to the east of Broad Chalke.

This wonderful story, as if folktales were being constructed even in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Wiltshire, has a deep moral and historical truth to it. This is nothing but the modern, literate, bureaucratic state trying to take back from the unlettered warrior, the ancient earl who depended for his standing on his physical presence, his leadership of men and his native cunning, the lands on which his existence relied. Here, in a few lines, modernity, legal and lettered, nibbles at the ancient conditions. The historical truth of the story is that the bishop attempted to have a private act of Parliament passed, but a covey of Pembroke-sponsored MPs in the House of Commons saw him and his bill off. But the emotional and metaphorical truth is not in that account. It is here in the Brownes' memory and in Aubrey's delighted retelling of it: the sense that the modern world was a clever cheat, the ancient earl a blind and muscled colossus.

The same anxiety fuels Aubrey's final remembered story of the earl, which shares the same dreamlike, emblematic quality. As he lay dying in early 1570, one desperate phrase, the end of all his dreams and nightmares, was on his lips, repeated again and again: “They would have Wilton, they would have Wilton.” Underneath that armored carapace, and never given voice in the official record, only remembered here in the gossip of the chalkstream valleys, was a desperate anxiety over the status and the lands for which he had lusted and fought for so long. It is a recognition that his noble power, his gathering of armies, his assembling of crowds of liveried and chain-bedecked followers, his country of lands and manors, was, in truth, as fragile as a vase.

On December 23, 1567, “remembering the uncertainty of man's life and to how many perils and casualties the same is subject”—something of which Pembroke would have been all too aware—he
had made his will. He left £400 each to the poor of the ward around Baynard's Castle, in Salisbury, and in Hendon, near London, where he had yet another house. Apart from a few legacies to his other children, he left everything to his son Henry.

But late on the evening of March 16, 1570, in his apartments in Hampton Court, feeling death coming near, he had his younger son Edward and the Earl of Leicester, son of his old friend Northumberland, whom he had betrayed, come to his bedside. Death had given him a conscience. His second wife was to keep her own clothes and jewels, which would otherwise have gone to Henry. He left his “newest fairest and richest bed” and his greatest jewel to the queen, to Leicester his best gold sword, and to his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, his second-best gold sword.

Leicester then left the bedside, and the dying earl was alone with his son Edward and the physicians. His dying thoughts are recorded. His second wife, Mary Talbot, whom he had married for her money and connections—she was the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury—was to be looked after, to be allowed to stay in Baynard's Castle; his daughter Anne was to be given £500; but more than that, anxiously and insistently, the ordinary men who had been with him and looked after him during his life, were to be cared for by Henry, Lord Herbert, his heir.

It was his last stated wish that his son should keep his affinity together. Philip Williams was William Herbert's secretary; Robert Vaughan, his treasurer; Thomas Scudamore, one of the gentlemen who carried his coffin. Herbert died the following morning, aged sixty-three, the climacteric, thought to be the most dangerous year of one's life, being the multiple of the two magic numbers, nine and seven.

His funeral, on April 18, 1570, was the greatest possible statement of the man he had become and of the dynasty he had created. The reverse of a beautiful portrait medal of the earl cast in 1562 showed a Welsh dragon, or wyvern, by a classical tempietto and carried the motto “Draco Hic Virtus Virtutem Custos”—This dragon the true guardian of the virtues. That is how William Herbert saw himself; the man of violence protecting the good: the humanist inheritance that Anne Parr had brought to this family, the radical Protestantism in which, for all the necessary trimming, William and Anne almost certainly shared a belief, and the people of his lands, whom he had in part abused but for whom he felt a deep affection.

Two yeoman conductors with black staves led the procession, followed by a hundred poor men, walking “ij and ij,” or two by two. Mr. William Morgan, one of the many Welshmen in London for the funeral, carried the earl's banner, ahead of “the Defunctes gentlemen ij and ij,” that is, the greatest of his gentry tenants from all those lands spread across England and Wales. Two secretaries followed, as befitted a man of business, then all the knights and squires who were beholden to him, then the chief officers of his household (his steward, his treasurer, and his comptroller). In all of this, it was a funeral indistinguishable from a king's. Another banner carried by his neighboring
Wiltshire knight, Sir George Penruddock, from Compton Chamberlayne, in the valley of the Nadder, who had been with Pembroke fighting the French for Queen Mary; then the York herald with Pembroke's coat of armor, carrying his helm and crest; the Chester herald carrying the shield on which Pembroke's arms were emblazoned; the Richmond herald carrying his sword; and finally the Garter king of arms carrying his coat of arms, accompanied by two “Gentleman Ushers” with white rods. One of these gentleman ushers, dressed up for the occasion, was in fact Roger Earth of Dinton, just across the valley of the Nadder from Compton Chamberlayne, who had been arrested in August 1553, described as “Servaunt to The'erle of Penbroke,” and thrown into the Fleet prison for fighting in the streets of London with one of the servants of Lord Stourton. Gentleman usher or brawling member of the affinity: in this life they were the same thing.