Quarrel with the King (17 page)

At the very center of national life, this kind of scandal did lasting damage to the prestige of the crown and court. It was everything Arcadia—not to speak of the enormous puritan constituency and the knights of the shires—most deeply despised. The divorce and remarriage was scandal enough, but the two Carrs then plotted the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, who had been a close friend of Robert's but who had advised him not to marry Frances Howard. Overbury was a reproach and an annoyance, and James sent a reluctant William Pembroke to persuade him to go abroad as an ambassador. Overbury refused and instead was sent to the Tower. There, Frances Howard arranged with the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Gervas Elwes, to send Overbury poisoned tarts and jellies. He ate them and died an agonizing death. Philip Montgomery, who had been accused a few years earlier of trying to seduce Frances Howard himself, was sent to her by James and she confessed all to him. Or so it is said: no written version of the confession was ever produced. Both Carr and his wife were sentenced
to death, but were pardoned by James and lived the rest of their lives in ruin, first in the Tower and later in the country, uncommunicating, in separate wings of the same Northamptonshire house.

In recognition of the moral crisis at the court, Pembroke, unstained by this scandal, was in December 1615 made Lord Chamberlain in Somerset's place. Ben Jonson dedicated his book of
Epigrams
to Pembroke, as “THE GREAT EXAMPLE OF HONOUR AND VIRTUE” in a court that was as degenerate as the Roman court on which Martial's Latin epigrams, Jonson's model, had poured their “wormwood and sulphur.” Among Jonson's barbs was Epigram XV, “On a Court-Worm”:

The collapse of Carr's gilded wings was the moment for Pembroke to enter what he might have considered his inheritance. He had already hatched a plot to insert a pliant and amenable favorite in the king's heart as a way of exerting even greater control over the fount of all patronage. A “great but private entertainment at supper” had been held the year before at the Pembroke house of Baynard's Castle, in London, attended by several Herberts and their friends and allies, including the brutally severe Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott. As their candidate for royal love, the Pembroke dinner party had settled on an impoverished but exceptionally beautiful twenty-two-year-old Northamptonshire man, who had traveled in Italy and was cultured charm itself, a master of the dance and the hunting field: George Villiers. In August 1614, he was a guest, not by chance, at a house party in Northamptonshire where the king's eye fell on him. By April 1615,
Villiers had arrived: he was appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber, knighted by James, and given an annual pension of £1,000. By August, the plan had succeeded beyond all possible dreams: Villiers and the king slept in the same bed at Farnham Castle, then in Hampshire, where the king was on his annual summer journey through the shires. This, in itself, did not necessarily mean that their relationship was sexual, but Buckingham's later description—of “the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed's head could not be found between the master and his dog”—can leave little doubt.

The prizes for Villiers came rolling in: the Order of the Garter, a barony and a viscountcy, an earldom, a marquisate, and eventually a dukedom—all of Buckingham—a title that, it was suggested at the time, even by the king, carried some sexual implication. Lands, manors, and appointments all followed, not only for Villiers but for almost everyone he knew. His mother became Countess of Buckingham; his lunatic elder brother, John, Viscount Purbeck; his younger brother, Christopher, earl of Anglesey; his brother-in-law Earl of Denbigh; and his half brother, Edward, a knight and the vastly profitable position of Comptroller of the Court of Wards. “He loved Buckingham,” James told his Privy Council, gravely sitting around their table in Whitehall, with Buckingham himself on his chair among them, “more than any other man.” James liked to call his favorite Steenie, short for Stephen, as it was said of St. Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles that “all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.” This love was only appropriate for a king, James insisted. “Jesus Christ had done the same as he was doing…for Christ had his John and he had his George.” The Herberts were left in the wake of this Villiers coup. Philip Montgomery kept up a friendship with Villiers, based on their joint enjoyment of courtly pleasures. They danced together in the masques
(performing in January 1617 to an audience that included Pocahontas, the Indian queen) and hunted with the king. In 1618, Buckingham became godfather to Montgomery's son. But a growing distance developed between Pembroke and Buckingham.

Although part of a single court, they represented two sides of the great cultural divide opening up in early-seventeenth-century England: the old aristocracy against the new; a Protestant inheritance against Spanish-loving modernity; propriety against glamour; integrity against corruption; chivalric medievalism against self-promoting, money-gathering absolutism. To some extent, Buckingham simply made Pembroke look old-fashioned. Pembroke's attachment to his tradition, to the Elizabethan-revivalist “patriot party,” as it was called, the party in effect of the country, which saw England not as a crown and a people but as a patchwork of manorial estates, with a deep suspicion of courts and their favorites—all of that seemed out of date in the context of Buckingham's high-glamour, internationalist, ineffably charming appeal. For Buckingham, the old aristocracy, with its fantasies of goodness rooted in the old social structures, was an irrelevance. But to that ancient aristocracy, of which Pembroke was the leader, Villiers himself, the archangel of beauty and power, the smooth facilitator in the market for titles, monopolies, and office, was the embodiment of wickedness. Philip Montgomery hung uncertainly between the two of them.

The coming of Villiers polarized the Arcadian inheritance. Around Pembroke clustered a group of writers, poets, and playwrights who maintained a steady and constant stream of nostalgic, Arcadian, anti-court literature, dreaming of a better time when England was whole. In those fantasies, lords were always kind to their people, and friendship, unlike the bitter rivalries of court, described the relationship between men. “Friendship on earth we may as easily find,” Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, a Pembroke client, wrote,

The world was in decline, and only in Arcadia, the place not of cheap copper but of real silver, not of show but of truth, not of whoring but of love, did any virtue remain. Eclogues, pastorals, and Arcadias poured from the pens of these poets.
The Shepheards Pipe
,
The Faithful Shepherdess
, the
Queen's Arcadia
,
The Shepherds Hunting
, the
Shepheards Sirena
: one after another they emerged to imply or state the wickedness of modernity. English pastoral Protestant comedy, Italianate pastoral tragicomedy, ancient British pastoral tragedy, Italianate English romantic pastoral comedy, Virgilian Georgian civic pastoral romance, native pastoral satire—Arcadianism surged out of England in response to the modern wickedness of the courts.

William Browne, in residence at Wilton and the author in 1616 of
Britannia's Pastorals
, wrote bitterly and angrily of the differences between the reality of Buckingham's Britain and the dream of pastoral. There had been enclosure riots, poverty, famine. The lords, for their own pleasure, were destroying the ancient landscape of custom. Copyholders who had been in their houses and lands for years were being dispossessed.

This was in a poem dedicated, with permission, to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The upstart alien Stuarts were irrelevant compared with the profoundly British Welshness of Browne's patron:

Next to that rooted heroism, the court, which should have been the source of such life and goodness, was nothing but a sink of iniquity and the home of sterility and desolation.

In the mind of this school of poets gathered around the Pembroke interest, England was a wasteland of wrongness, and to that wrongness one name could be attached: Buckingham.

The tensions between Pembroke and Buckingham were those that would break into civil war in the 1640s. Was the crown to show respect for the ancient habits and practices of England, for its deep structure of manors and lords, whose relationship was one of head and limbs, equivalent to the relationship of king and Parliament? Or was it to abandon that organic structure and set up instead an effective, authoritarian government, much as was happening all over Europe, which treated the country as a whole as landlord would be treating a manor if
he abandoned the copyhold system and turned it all over to leases and commercial rents? Was the crown to consult the nobility and gentry in Parliament? Or was it to ignore them? Was it to collude with the wicked Catholics of southern Europe? Or help the beleaguered Protestants, England's natural allies, of the north?

Pembroke's relationship with Buckingham for many years drifted toward a crisis. It was not merely a matter of two court grandees manoeuvring for advantage. They had squabbled over the appointment of minor functionaries at court, with Pembroke asserting his right as Lord Chamberlain, and Buckingham using his influence as the king's favorite. But large-scale ideological differences came between them, too. Buckingham had no inheritance; he was the ultimate creature of the court and of the moment; the glamour of Spanish prestige, sophistication, and style attracted him; his interest was in monopolizing and extending royal power in England. Pembroke was his opposite: acutely aware of his place at the head of a powerful, half-nostalgic, half-subversive movement in England that needed to protect the “pattern of manors” against the depredations of a hungry court and state. His task was to defend that world against greed and corruption. He was the heir to the Sidney inheritance: the independence of a self-respecting nobility; the location of that nobility's meaning and source of significance in the land over which it held sway; the sense that in that connection there was an authenticity and value that the world of the court would erode; fixedly Protestant and anti-Spanish, always looking for the ways in which the royal administration was either drifting toward Rome and Catholicism or simply failing to defend the Protestant interest in Europe; highly literate and with a high-minded view of its destiny; a patriotic position that could contemplate the possibility of civil war. There was nothing contradictory in its close service to the crown over several generations and the possibility that one day, if the crown failed to uphold the custom of the manor, the way in which
England had always regulated itself as a form of balance, it might desert the crown in favor of the health of the country.

Pembroke had long cultivated a position in Parliament, which he could use to fight his battles at court. At least twenty MPs, and on occasion half as many again, including Benjamin Rudyerd and the young Edward Hyde, later to be Earl of Clarendon, depended on his patronage and could be expected to speak out in favor of this agenda. He also controlled the proxy votes of several peers. On one occasion, under the great new Palladian coffered ceiling of Inigo Jones's redesigned chamber for the House of Lords, Pembroke was reported by the letter writer John Chamberlain as having cast four votes on one side of a question and four on the other, an act of supreme, patriotic balance. Unfortunately, this marvellous story cannot be true because Pembroke only ever controlled five proxies in the House of Lords, but it is a signal of the role he played in England's political imagination in the 1620s: a man of power because he was a man of balance.

Pembroke's program always insisted on unity, on making the king responsive to Parliament and vice versa. The well-being of the body required the head and limbs to be in active equilibrium. The surging ambition and power control of the Duke of Buckingham was like a hectic in the blood. Unfortunately, the power struggle on the mainland of Europe between the Catholic Habsburg empire and the new Protestant states could not provide an environment of calm and ease. Throughout the 1620s, English domestic politics were riven by the insolubly difficult questions of alliance and aggression within that shifting European political-military-religious storm.

In the 1620s English foreign policy became embroiled in marriage proposals first with Spain and then with France; in war first with Spain and then with France. All four of those policies were more or less catastrophically handled. The prestige and financial position of the crown and of Buckingham in particular crashed under the impact
of expensive failure and national humiliation. This was not how it had been in the great days of Elizabeth, when England, the Protestant hero country, had defeated the great Spanish Armada.