Quarrel with the King (15 page)

But he would not remain the wayward young man of the
Sonnets
for the rest of his life. As age gathered around him, as his waist thickened and time dug furrows in his brow, his careless, self-indulgent youth would come to seem like an interlude in the long story. In the heart of early-seventeenth-century England, and right up until 1630, when he died, Will Herbert would become one of the most admired men at court, the champion of everything his family had believed in and an upholder of the idea that dignity and significance did not in the end come only from the crown.

T
HE
C
AREERS OF
W
ILLIAM
, E
ARL OF
P
EMBROKE, AND
P
HILIP
, E
ARL OF
M
ONTGOMERY
1601–1630

A
long with hundreds of other peers and gentlemen, both William Pembroke and his younger brother Philip Herbert hurried to meet the new Scottish king as he made his way south through springtime England in May 1603. Philip was four years younger than his brother and as they settled into adulthood, each began to play the complementary pair to the other. William was the older and the richer, the more established, increasingly the more political. He championed anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic policies, as Sidney had done. He was driven by a growing awareness of his inheritance as the heir to the Sidneyan tradition, which looked back to more glorious days under Elizabeth. Then, they told themselves, the great men of England had stood for a heroic Protestant clarity against the Spanish, and for ancient communal practices of hospitality, for the custom of the country, the law of the land, and the Ancient Constitution, in a way that the modern world of James's court, disturbingly attracted to a foreign absolutism, seemed to be leaving behind. William was a poet, if not a very good one, and,
like his mother, the patron of an enormous range of writers, fostering the literary heirs of Sidney and Spenser. The inherited idea of another more perfect country was allied in both sons to a growing interest in the English colonies of the New World as a place where a vision of Arcadian perfection could perhaps be made real. Both Herbert brothers were among the most substantial investors in the Virginia Company.

Philip was the more glamorous, lighter on his feet, dedicated to the delight and charm of the king and his court, a passionate huntsman and gambler, needing to make his way in the world, hungrier than his brother, no litterateur, but agile and beautiful, and a champion in the tiltyard, at the staged fights known as “the barriers,” and in the elegantly performed allegorical dances of the masque.

In these two, known at the time as the “incomparable brethren,” the quarrel with the king takes its subtlest and most subterranean form. Both brothers, for their entire adult lives, were inhabitants of the court. Both received offices and riches at the hands of both James and Charles I. Both became deeply integrated with the workings of the court. But for all that, first in William and then, only later, in Philip, a clear sense of distance opened up between them and the roots of royal power. They were at court but not of the court; they were favorites but only for a while. They behaved gracefully as courtiers should, but not humiliatingly. They could not be part of the grossly self-indulgent culture that began to develop around them.

The Herberts were a complex amalgam. No family was so identified with life at Whitehall, its entertainments and extravagances, its glory and honor; and no family carried in its sense of itself so powerful an inheritance of noble, aestheticized, principled independence from the crown. The two tendencies were folded in with each other, in their own family history, in their political and social assumptions, in their pride in themselves as great magnates in Wales and Wiltshire, and in their recognition that the crown, like it or not, was the source
of virtually all modern wealth. They were, like the grandees in Shakespeare's
As You Like It
, lords dressed as foresters, Arcadianists of the real world, the incomparable brethren, the Earls of Paradise. These two currents in their lives ran at full bore for thirty years. To understand their Arcadianism, one must first understand the courtly world in which they lived, moved, and at times seemed utterly absorbed.

Philip Herbert's place as the second son seems to have liberated him from the burden of melancholy that affected his brother. When he first came to court, he charmed and shone, and when James arrived in England, the royal eyes alighted on him. As Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the Pembrokes' Wiltshire neighbor and later the historian of the Civil War, would recall, the beautiful young Philip Herbert had made an early impact, in a court suddenly liberated from the formalized antiquity of its predecessor:

Philip may have been the more robust, less troubled, and less complex of the two brothers, but there is no sense of William, Earl of Pembroke, living in his shadow. James made William a Knight of the Garter as soon
as he arrived in London. Pembroke had been in disgrace during the last years of Elizabeth, for the pregnancy of Mary Fitton. That shame was now lifted and there is no doubt of a real warmth and intimacy with the king. At the coronation in August 1604, delayed because of the Plague the year before, the Venetian secretary in England, Giovanni Scaramelli, after watching each of the earls kneel before the newly crowned king, had seen “il Conte di Pemruch, giovane gratioso,” a handsome youth

That moment provides a sudden bridge between William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, the serious man of court and state business, and the “Mr W.H.” who would not marry and who drove his poet to distraction.

William was already vastly rich from his Pembroke inheritance, but Philip had to play the favorite to gain his fortune. In the summer of 1603, James made him a Knight of the Bath (which meant what it said: each candidate was given a purifying bath the evening he was knighted), and in Whitehall, on December 27, 1604, he was married to a girl he had fallen in love with, Susan de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford and sister of the Bridget de Vere William had turned down in the 1590s. Susan was beautiful and entrancing.

The king loved nothing more than the wedding of one of his chosen young men. A riotous party followed, at which “many great ladies were made shorter by the skirts,” whatever that might have meant. Silver and gold plate worth £2,000 was given to the newlyweds. The king gave them £10,000 worth of land at Shurland in Sheppey, in Kent. The party rolled on deep into the night. Finally, Philip and Susan were put to bed in the Council Chamber, where “there was sewing into the sheet, casting of the bride's left hose, and twenty other petty sorceries.” First thing
the next morning, “the King gave them a
reveille matin
in his shirt and nightgown, and spent a good hour with them in the bed, or upon, choose which you will believe best.” The distance that Elizabeth had maintained from her court, her virginal horror at the marriage of any man or woman close to her, had disappeared with this regent. The king was now cuddling in public and in bed his favorite and his favorite's bride.

A river of money now came both the Herberts' way. William Pembroke was made Warden of the Stannaries in Cornwall, Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall, and Lord Lieutenant of the County of Cornwall, every one of those appointments bringing patronage and payments in its train. Philip was given a half share in a license to export thirty thousand undressed cloths duty-free every year. In 1605, the doting king made him Earl of Montgomery, the title named after a castle and county in the Herbert heartland in Wales.

William Pembroke had inherited the great estates garnered by his grandfather and had also married a hideous Talbot heiress with enormous riches, having, according to Clarendon, “paid much too dear for his wife's fortune by taking her person into the bargain.” It was Philip, the happy beneficiary of a love match, who was in need of financial support. To the horror of royal Treasury officials, the king granted him revenue from the crown in the amount of £2,000 a year for sixty years, plus a pourboire of “200l. a year as our free gift.” This was favoritism in action, a draining away of crown assets into the pockets of the minions who would so radically threaten the well-being of the crown in the years to come.

The king paid off £44,000 in debts incurred by the Earl of Montgomery and two other favorites, and asked Montgomery to collect £20,000 due to the crown from lands that had been confiscated from Roman Catholics, on which he was given a 50 percent commission. In the summer of 1612 a Roman Catholic, Sir Henry James, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the king because it conflicted with
his attachment to the Roman Church. Without a flicker, the Earl of Montgomery “begged Sir Henry's goods and lands, worth 1,600l or 1,700l per an,” and received them. The mechanism was different from the way in which the 1st Earl of Pembroke had collected his estate, but the effect was the same: a redistribution of money and power into the hands of those who got themselves close to the body of the king.

Nor was William Pembroke immune to such gold digging. In 1618, his mother-in-law, the ancient, widowed Countess of Shrewsbury, was said to be “almost out of her mind, with a dread of being poisoned.” No thought was given to the old woman's mental health. More important was that Pembroke and her other powerful son-in-law, the Earl of Arundel, “beg the protection of her estate”—meaning the control of her lands and money—“and will enjoy the fruits of it if she do not mind,” which in the seventeenth century meant “if she does not notice.” A third, less important son-in-law, Lord Ruthin, and his wife, Elizabeth Talbot, were cut out of the arrangement. It does not look, at this stage, as if either Herbert—William or Philip—was maintaining much independence from the crown.

No portrait survives of William, the third earl, as a young man, as he was when Shakespeare fell in love with him, but there is a portrait of his brother, with the same reddish-brown hair, the same “pritty sharpe-oval face” they inherited from the Sidneys, painted soon after Philip had become a Knight of the Garter, on April 23, St. George's Day, 1608. In the painting, probably by William Larkin, Philip wears the badges of his recent elevation: the pearl-embroidered garter below his left knee, matched by the wide satin sash under the other. He wears the garter collar around his shoulders, and hanging from it, the enamelled jewel of St. George wielding a sword studded with diamonds, the green dragon crouching at his feet. Philip's own sword swings from a hanger around his waist; his cuffs and ruff are of lace, halfway between the Elizabethan cartwheel and the loose lace collars of the cavaliers;
and a beautiful coral bracelet encircles his left wrist. His hand drops carelessly from the pommel of the sword behind him; the other hand is at his hip, holding a hat emblazoned with a cloud of ostrich feathers.

The broad scarlet ribband and the scarlet velvet mantle of the Order of the Bath are laid over his doublet and hose of a satin that has been embroidered with silver thread in damascene stripes. Lace pompoms decorate his high-heeled shoes, his hair is loose and unaffected, his chestnut reddish beard light, his lips feminine, his eyes intent and watching. There is no depth or complexity in his expression. There is even a kind of naïveté in his face, as there is in this portrayal of worldly glory. This is the sort of materialist, enriched, pleasure-loving, world-enjoying figure against whom the Puritans railed. He is the Jacobean court. Everything here is new, so new in fact that the creases are still visible in the velvet and on the satin lining of the outer mantle. He is a bride dressed for a wedding, but what he has married here is no husband, but status, the Garter, riches, glory, himself.

This is perhaps the greatest portrait painted in Jacobean England, and its beauty consists, at least in part, in its heightened worldliness, its frank enjoyment of the gifts the world has to offer. It is, perhaps, a portrait of luck. This is no ancient noble. His brother, not he, has inherited the ancient Pembroke title and the vast spread of lands in Wiltshire and Wales. But James has made Philip a peer, too, simply because James loved the verve with which Philip went about his hunting and gambling, his life. It is a portrait of success.

By the time William, the elder brother, first appears in a Daniel Mytens portrait of about 1616, he has left behind his wayward and passionate youth. He has become the noble politician, the patriot, the man who was maintaining the meaning of old England against the corruptions of court favorites. In the political and aesthetic ecology of the time, William, in his recessive patience, occupies the opposite niche to his brother's wonderful flamboyant display. In young Philip,
at the peak of his courtly success, one sees the Jacobean courtier like a peony in full bloom. He has done well by courting the sovereign. He can make no claim to independent power because he is the sovereign's creature. Without James, he would have been merely Mr. Philip Herbert, not this jewelled, pearl-decked, coral-braceleted, and gartered hero.

Against Philip's verve and risk taking, William acted the judicious statesman. A famous incident occurred at court on September 17, 1608. William had been playing cards with Sir George Wharton, a wild young courtier, who was to die the following year in Islington at a duel with a young Scot, who was also killed. On this occasion, Sir George, presumably losing at cards, also lost his temper, at which Pembroke told him,

That is the voice of this tradition, looking back to Sidneyan sweetness of temper, a balanced composure, and an opting for long-term love over passing diversion. Wharton did his best to maintain the argument, but Pembroke refused to be riled and tried to make peace. But Wharton was uncontrollable. Out hunting with the king in Surrey the next day,