Quarrel with the King

1

The Long Road to Civil War

1540–1650

2

The Making of the Pembrokes

1527–1546

3

A Countrey of Lands and Mannours

The World the Pembrokes Acquired

4

The Exercise of Noble Authority

The First Earl as Power Broker, 1549–1570

5

I'll Be a Park and Thou Shalt Be My Deer

The Making of the Pembroke Arcadia, 1570–1586

6

Little Earths Kind of Paradise

Mary Pembroke's Court at Wilton, 1586–1601

7

Two Incomparable Brethren

The Careers of William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, 1601–1630

8

So Mutable Are Worldly Things

Ancient Communities and the Threat of Modernity

Photographic Insert

9

Elizian Fields and Ayery Paradises

The Perfecting of Wilton, 1630–1640

10

A Sad and Miserable Condition We Are Fallen Into

The Catastrophe of Civil War, 1640–1650

Afterword

Hear This, O Ye that Swallow Up the Needy

The Destruction of Downland Society, 1650–1830

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Adam Nicolson

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1540–1650

I
n this book a great family, one of the richest and most glamorous of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, pursues a long arc of ambition, success, failure, and collapse. It is not an exclusively private story, because the family—the earls of Pembroke, their wives, children, and dependents—was deeply involved, for over a hundred years, in the central concerns of England. They saw themselves, in many ways, as an alternative to royalty. In their great house at Wilton, near Salisbury, they could entertain the king and his court as though welcoming them to a different state. They controlled tens of thousands of England's most beautiful acres, and still more in Wales, and many thousands of tenants and followers. Land, money, politics, art, and patronage were their realms. They could summon armies and, through them, impose their wills. They could gather vote-changing clusters of politicians in both houses of Parliament. As England's greatest patrons, they could sponsor poetry, plays, paintings, houses, gardens, and landscapes, all of which proclaimed their virtues, their fortitude, their antiquity, and their worth. Another England belonged to the
Pembrokes, an older and premodern country set against almost everything the modern state hoped to impose upon it.

For a century, from about 1540 onward, this family maintained a long, simmering quarrel with the king, one that flickered across the decades, part opposition, part seduction, part manipulation, and part denial. Only, finally, in the 1640s did it erupt in civil war, a dreadful and destructive conflict that released into the towns, villages, and highways of England precisely the anarchy and violence the country had dreaded for so long. The basis of the quarrel was power, a struggle between a government that needed and wanted to concentrate ever more authority in itself and its agents, and the ancient nobility of England—or at least those such as the Pembrokes, who saw themselves in that light and who thought of their role as the guardians of an ancient and balanced community of which they were the head and whose integrity the newly assertive, power-grabbing crown was disrupting and breaking.

It is a premodern story but there are many modern echoes in it: Was government a question of agreement and respect? Or authority and compulsion? What status did traditional rights have in a changing world? Did an emergency mean those rights could be ignored or overturned? Or was an emergency precisely the time when rights should be respected? This is not the usual, modern tale of freedoms struggling to assert themselves against an ancient and intolerant authority. The Pembrokes' story is the opposite of that: a long rearguard action by provincial grandees who found their ancient power, and the ancient independence of the communities they governed, under threat. In that way, this story is about the end of an old world, not the making of a new one. Almost every aspect of the Pembrokes' view of themselves was retrospective: old family, old authority, old ways of being, old values. And nearly every aspect of what they hated was new: new
men, new money, new forms of authority, the new demands of the modern world.

The Pembrokes had no interest in individual freedom, only in the maintenance of their position as power brokers, with access to all the sources of money and authority they considered their due. But they were astute, and the need to survive and thrive in the modern world, combined with their energy and appetite, inevitably meant a complex engagement with that world. These “grandeez and gloriosoes” of Renaissance England were deeply embroiled in the court world from which they felt such distance. They were rebels, but they were also courtiers. For year after year, they sucked money from the crown they despised. Generation after generation carefully manoeuvred for influence and the ear of the king. Few families, in fact, managed so adroitly to surf the successive waves of royal power and favor. Each wave they caught brought another gush and surge of cash and influence. That, in fact, is their central paradox: nearly everything they had came from the king, but the more they had, the more they could afford to oppose him. The Pembrokes came to look like the ultimate cavaliers, but in the end they would be parliamentarian. At different times, they both threatened the crown and acted as its bruisingly efficient and violent agents. These were rebels not to be found plotting in a dimly lit garret but either dancing in the candlelit halls and delicious arbors of royal pleasure or actually commanding royal armies and sponsoring royal display. They were, in other words, highly ambivalent figures: flag carriers for an ancient England and time servers in some of the most corrupt courts England has ever known. The sense of distance between the Pembrokes and the crown, of the quarrel itself, was never quite absent but only rarely showed its fully naked face. It could be said that this book is a study in the ambiguity necessarily involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status.

 

A
simple act of curiosity lies behind my writing it. Many years ago, I was walking through the beautiful valley of the Nadder, in Wiltshire, in southern England, a cool and lovely clearwater stream that makes its way between the chalk downs on either side. The trout and grayling were flickering in the shallows, and bunches of meadowsweet were flowering on the banks. Just to the east of Salisbury, the river slides past the garden of Wilton House. I had been walking all day and, still in my heavy boots, I paid for my ticket, entered the house without quite knowing what to expect, and found myself in the greatest sequence of seventeenth-century rooms in England. It was a revelatory moment. I suddenly understood how wonderful a palace in the trees could be, the meaning of provincial, non-urban, exquisitely refined power.

Wilton's climax, one of the central moments of English culture, is the huge saloon known in the seventeenth century as the “great Dining-roome, or Roome of State,” now called the Double Cube. It is thirty feet wide, thirty high, and sixty long—Palladian proportions, created here, almost certainly by Inigo Jones, in the 1630s. But the decoration is so rich that the harmonics of the room nearly disappear beneath it. Carved swags, gilded encrustations, and suspended pompoms hang from the walls. There is a vast fruitiness to it all; apples, peaches, and pears drip from every surface. Nothing is held back. It is grand but it is friendly grand. A giant cove, painted with putti, pan masks, and still more bowls and swags of fruit, reaches up to the ceiling. Around the marble fireplace, mannerist motifs—broken pediments, swagged consoles—jostle with the gilded statues of Bacchus and Ceres, the god and goddess of country riches. The whole complex is a shrine to fertility, a space designed for enjoyment, an arrival.

I stood there excited, bowled over by the completeness of this
hidden, ancient world. But there was more: this climax of a glamour-thick room had its own climax within it. On the west wall is an enormous portrait of the family who owned and created it. Seventeen feet wide and ten deep, it is the largest painting ever made by Van Dyck, a joint portrait of the 4th Earl of Pembroke and his children. Each of the ten figures it portrays is just larger than lifesize and they dominate, as they were meant to, the gilded space in front of them. The portrait was painted in the late winter of 1634 or the spring of 1635, and it shows the Pembroke family at the sunniest and most optimistic moment of their existence. It is a wedding picture, the forerunner to and perfect model for tens of millions of paintings and photographs in the centuries to come. The oldest surviving son, fifteen-year-old Charles, Lord Herbert, in scarlet, was to marry a young heiress, the twelve-year-old Mary Villiers, who was to bring to the marriage a dowry of £25,000, roughly equivalent to two thousand years' wages of a Wiltshire shepherd.

Above them, the three dead children of the family, with garlands of roses in their hands, float on clouds as putti. The younger brothers to the left and the older sister with her husband to the right, the elegant bronzed cavalier Earl of Carnarvon, surround the Earl and Countess of Pembroke, who sit centrally, facing us, as if king and queen.

The painting is full of grace and aristocratic poise, of riches at ease with themselves, of what now would be called privilege and was then considered nobility. You can't help but stand back and gaze at its beauties as I did that afternoon. It exudes a distant and forgotten handsomeness, an abandoned world of elegance and power, neither stiff nor louche but regal and familial. But there is something not quite settled about the painting. As you look at it a little harder, that atmosphere becomes a bit uncertain. It is not blankly smug as an eighteenth-century depiction of a great family might be; nor assertive and singular as it might have been a century earlier. Inside this painting's grace are hints of anxiety and melancholy, of a world teetering on collapse, of love
thwarted and happiness denied, of ambivalence as the companion of glamour.

I looked at these people, so distant and so present, in the very rooms they would have known and loved, near the great series of south windows over the valley of the Nadder, where they would undoubtedly have ridden and played. As I stood there, I wanted, above all, to hear them speak. What did they believe in? What led this family to its prominence? What did the signals in the painting mean? Why was that woman holding a pearl between her fingers? Why did that man dabble his fingers with hers? What were the implications of the strange space they were in, half public, half private, half on display, half acting out a set of hidden relationships? And what would become of them in the cataclysm of civil war that would overtake England within seven years of the painting's being finished?

The room stewards had to usher me out of the house as closing time approached, but I knew I would return, and over the last two years I have been able to plunge myself knee-and elbow-deep into the world of the Pembrokes. I soon realized that this was a world hinged to inheritance, to what the past had given it. I knew that to understand the figures in the painting, I had to go back to their grandfather, a violent and bruisingly ruthless figure in Tudor England, the 1st Earl of Pembroke, who acquired Wilton in the 1540s. More than that, though, I had to explore the world surrounding their beautiful painting: the luxurious saloon, the perfect lawns, the sliding river, the woods, fields, and villages extending from here to the horizon, all of which they owned. The Wilton landscape and the social structures embedded in it were intimately connected to their most cherished beliefs. To understand the painting, I had to understand the world in which it was made.

The story of this family, their manoeuvrings and struggles, tracks the history of Renaissance England. Tudor Wilton was a place of brutalist display. Elizabethan Wilton was the home of Sir Philip Sidney
and his dazzling sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, who created here the dream of Arcadia, that perfect world where strife was over and turmoil done. Mary's sons William and Philip were very probably the lovers, respectively, of Shakespeare and James I, and the promoters, from the 1610s to the 1640s, of a vision of England that looked back to a more beautiful and happier time, before the corruptions, ambitions, and squalor of the Stuart court had destroyed it. Everything Shakespeare and Sidney wrote about the possibilities of a finer world found its embodiment here. Wilton became the headquarters for its own brand of Arcadian idealism, the early, aristocratic progenitor of communal and environmental ideas that set itself against the dirty, hungry power plays of city, crown, and court in Whitehall.

Few families can have had such a powerfully heritable culture. In a remarkable act of continuity, the Pembrokes transmitted their conservative, Arcadian idealism from generation to generation, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters each playing their part for more than a hundred years. Central to their idealism was the belief that the beautiful world over which they presided did not rely for its meanings on the state. They were not in the condition of servants to the king. Far from it: they represented virtues the crown and court knew little of. That was the most intriguing aspect of all: these beautiful people in their silks and their glimmering cavalier hair turned against the king in the 1640s. The great painting by Van Dyck was a picture not of conformity and settlement but of a family that had rebellion—and a longing for a better world—burning in their hearts.