Quarrel with the King (18 page)

Pembroke played around the edges of these disasters, never dictating policy but working consistently to maintain a position that was anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and anti-Buckingham. His freedom of manoeuvre was severely restricted by the deep affection that both James I and, in his turn, Charles I had for a man who, uniquely in English history, became a favorite of two kings in succession. If Pembroke was to maintain his own position at court, he could not attack Buckingham openly. When a Privy Council vote was taken in the summer of 1623 to approve Charles's proposed marriage to a Spanish princess, Pembroke was unaccountably ill with kidney stones in Wilton. His brother Montgomery stood in for him. But Pembroke had not been that ill. Three weeks later, the king was down at Wilton for some hunting.

When James died in March 1625, Buckingham was so distraught that he took to his bed. The new young king took Montgomery and Pembroke along with him to Buckingham's sickbed, and the four of them spent three hours talking together. But the underlying differences among them were too powerful for such palliatives to work. Pembroke told the Venetian ambassador, who had begged him to be reconciled to Buckingham for the sake of European Protestantism, that internal enemies must be dealt with before external ones and that the cause they both had at heart would be better served without Buckingham than with him.

Buckingham was the enemy within, and by the spring of 1626, Pembroke was ready to attack the favorite. Through his network of patronage spread across the whole of the West Country, Pembroke, in alliance with the fiercely Calvinist George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, had assembled his team of MPs. As Parliament gathered that
year, the Pembroke party had Buckingham in its sights. A disastrous attack on Cadiz, of which Buckingham had been in charge as the Lord Admiral, a recent revelation of his sympathy for Roman Catholics in his own family and beyond, a growing disgust at his self-enrichment and his singular intimacy with the late king—all were weapons in Pembroke's hands. His squad of MPs were not slow to attack. “Affairs are not guided by the public counsel,” it was said in Parliament. “Was it good for the state that all things should be guided by the Duke's single counsel?” No money, they said, would be granted to the king by the Parliament before these worries had been addressed.

Leading the charge, Dr. Turnour, the member for Shaftesbury, Pembroke's nominee in one of the constituencies his grandfather the first earl had acquired and where most of the people voting would have been Pembroke's tenants, asked whether,

It was a bruising list, perhaps drawn up by Pembroke himself in the form of attacking questions that he often used, and it was undoubtedly designed to destroy the duke. The crown was desperate for money
from Parliament with which to wage war on the French. But the young king Charles would not surrender his beloved Steenie and instead dissolved Parliament. Moneyless, divided from the kingdom, and with a war to fight, but with his favorite at his side, Charles now turned to the solution that, perhaps more than any other single act, pushed England on the road to civil war.

He decided to demand directly from the people the money that their representatives in Parliament had refused to grant. In July, letters went out to all the justices of the peace requiring the men of property “lovingly, freely, and voluntarily” to subsidize the war. The request was greeted with silence, and that summer almost no one in England paid up. In September, the king decided to levy a “Forced Loan.” This was a euphemism for a compulsory tax, for which there were rare and extraordinary precedents but never on the scale now required nor in such bubblingly dangerous political circumstances. Under threat of being summoned to the Privy Council, the gentry of the country paid £250,000 into the royal coffers. Some refused and “very many gentlemen of prime quality,” in Clarendon's words, were imprisoned for that refusal to pay, one of them Sir William Coryton, a Cornish MP who was one of Pembroke's key clients. In a famous case, Coryton and four other knights challenged the legality of what the crown had done to them. To the shock and surprise of the ancient constitutionalists in England, they lost the case and were returned to prison. The gap between the two tendencies in English life represented by Buckingham and Pembroke, between an authoritarian government and a government based on balance and consent, had grown wider than it had ever been. “Could it be imagined,” Clarendon wrote, “that these men would meet again in a free convention of parliament, without a sharp and severe expostulation and inquisition into their own right, and the power that had imposed upon that right?” Writing in the 1650s, on the far side of a terrible civil war, Clarendon thought that this forced loan
and the imprisoning of the gentlemen was the source “from whence these waters of bitterness we now taste have flowed.”

In June 1626, perhaps at the prompting of the king and perhaps drawing on some earlier approaches, Buckingham and Pembroke started to achieve some kind of reconciliation. Pembroke would not have wanted a rupture in the state. The entire foundation of his life was a belief in organic unity, in a binding of king and country, and he began to make arrangements with Buckingham that would restore that unity. Pembroke was to become Lord Steward of the Household, a post he had long desired, the lynchpin of any administration, controlling and auditing the king's finances. His brother Montgomery would replace him as Lord Chamberlain, the officer who organized the running of the household. In an era of personal monarchy, these positions were at the center of the political nation. As a balancing gesture for Buckingham, his own allies, the earls of Carlisle and Holland, became Gentlemen of the King's Bedchamber, and the earls of Salisbury, Dorset, and Bridgewater became privy councillors. It was an attempt to reintegrate the fissure that was opening in the court and that the events in Parliament that year had been widening.

Both sides benefited, with the Pembrokes establishing themselves at the heart of the administration and Buckingham drawing legitimacy from his connection with the leader of the patriot party. The Venetian ambassador put it succinctly: Buckingham had gone in for the arrangement “to gain the Lord Chamberlain's faction.” The seal was to be put on it with money and marriage between the two families, with Buckingham's daughter Mary to marry Montgomery's son Charles.

The deal was done and the legal documents settled and signed on August 3, 1626. The two children, who were seven and four, “played together before the King, calling one another Husband and Wife. My lord Montgomery is promised great things to raise his House and Fortunes.” The same day, Pembroke became Lord Steward, and Mont
gomery, Lord Chamberlain. And on the same day the queen's French attendants were suddenly commanded to depart, Samuel Pepys's future father-in-law among them. This no doubt was also part of the deal to reduce the influence of Catholicism on the court. In less than ten days, Pembroke was moving to assert real physical control. On August 12, 1626, he wrote to William Boneman, the king's locksmith:

In the next session of Parliament in 1628, Pembroke called off the attack on Buckingham, but affairs went no better for the duke. The disastrous campaign at La Rochelle and the Isle de Rhé had blackened his name still further. The commons then called on the king to consider “whether, in respect the said Duke hath so abused his power, it be safe for your majesty and your kingdom to continue him either in his great offices or in his place of nearness and counsel about your sacred person.” But Charles would not abandon him, and again the session of Parliament was brought to a close. Buckingham equipped himself with a bodyguard. His personal astrologer was torn to pieces in a London street. Finally, in August 1628, in Portsmouth, an enraged ex-soldier called John Felton murdered him, stabbing him from behind. Buckingham was able to shout “Villain!” and pull the knife from the wound before staggering back dead. Felton said later, when asked for a motive, that he thought by “killing the Duke he should do his country great service.” It was one conclusion of the long debate between court and country, custom and corruption, Pembroke and Buckingham, which had held England in its grip for so long.

For all the elaborate alliances, Pembroke had remained hostile to his old enemy. After the assassination, he wrote to the elegant self-indulgent old courtier and diplomat the Earl of Carlisle (a man who had spent “over £400,000 in a very jovial life”) that “the king our master begins to shine already. And I hope this next session to see a happy agreement between him and his people.” Every element of Pembroke's statement—a dawnlike glowing of light, happiness, agreement, an Edenic togetherness in the nation—reflects a kind of Arcadian optimism, the conclusion of the sort of plot on which masque after masque had relied for decades.

But it was hope without foundation. England, in the words of Izaak Walton, had changed from what they thought it used to be, “that garden of piety, of pleasure, of peace, and a sweet conversation,” into “the thorny wilderness of a busy world.” Demons had been loosed at every level, fuelling widespread distrust of royal government at every level. The joint enterprise of England was under threat, and trust in the ancient constitution had been eroded.

The parliamentary opposition that Pembroke had fostered was not radical; it was defensive, set up to oppose the power-acquiring, independence-enjoying instincts of the new crown and its new counsels. England would have loathed Buckingham whether Pembroke had encouraged the country in that or not. But his orchestrating of the campaign against him and his championing of the anti-Buckingham cause had done nothing to diminish the hatred. Felton's downward strike with the knife at Portsmouth was in that sense an intimate part of this long story, a blow for the country.

William Pembroke did not long survive his great rival. He “departed this mortall life at Baynard's Castle, the 10th of Aprill 1630.” He was fifty years old, the victim of apoplexy “after a full and cheerful supper,” and £80,000 in debt, much of it to his own household officers. One of them, his steward, Sir Thomas Morgan, the seventh son
of a Welsh squire, who had been knighted at Wilton in 1623, built for himself what remains William Pembroke's most poignant memorial: a great Jacobean house, posing as a toy castle and bearing the Pembroke arms, at Ruperra, in Glamorgan, the center of the ancient Herbert estates. Morgan, as steward and controller of the Herbert household, had acted for Pembroke in the function Pembroke had acted for the king. What Wilton had been to Whitehall, Ruperra was to Wilton. Now burned and in collapse, Ruperra's toy towers and toy battlements are some of the last remaining vestiges of that honorable and chivalric ideal to which William Pembroke had devoted his life, an image of late-medieval perfection brought into a modern world that would neglect and ruin it. Clarendon called William Pembroke “the most universally loved and esteemed of any man of that age.” He was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, where, in 1644, a royalist trooper, Richard Symonds, quartered in the town that “wett, cold, and wyndy” October, saw his memorial:

That sword and those golden gauntlets, perhaps from the tournaments and barriers in which he had fought as a young man forty years before, were relics from a previous age.

A
NCIENT
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OMMUNITIES AND THE
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HREAT OF
M
ODERNITY

W
hat was happening beyond the gilded viciousness of court? As Pembroke and Buckingham battled for the soul of England, what was the reality in the Pembrokes' Wiltshire chalkstream valleys? And to what extent did this sophisticated dispute—between the Pembroke vision of an ancient organic community and the Buckingham ideal of a modern, efficient, centralizing state—reflect a conflict and tension within the body of England?

It so happens that a great deal can be known about the Pembrokes' world, the world that surrounded the family in the great Van Dyck portrait, because in the early 1630s Philip Herbert, who in 1630 succeeded his brother as the fourth earl, had his estates meticulously surveyed. No map survives, even if one had been made, but a set of enormous written documents were preserved from those surveys, recounting the names, family relationships, and tenancies of hundreds of people in the chalkland valleys. An extraordinarily detailed picture emerges from them: the shopkeepers, millers, clothiers, smiths,
“husbandmen,” cheats, and laggards who were the earl's tenants and dependents; the houses, yards, and barns these people occupied; the earl's “Lands, Woods, Meddowes and pastures,” the marshes, orchards, warrens, “lawns,” bottoms, bowers, breaches, hedges, coppices, crofts, furzes, lanes, moors, and ditches that made up the estate; the farm animals that were such intimate co-occupants of these places; and the extent to which the great estate, with its own manorial courts, its own police system, its own punishments, and its own deeply embedded hierarchies, was its own, self-reflective world. It is, in other words, the foundation of the whole Pembroke enterprise, the “country of lands and mannours,” as John Aubrey described it, for which, over the generations, the Pembrokes had been striving against the centralizing power.

In Broad Chalke, for example, the village arranged on either side of the Ebble, where John Aubrey would later delight in its tunable bells, there were thirty-six copyhold tenants in September 1631. The first to be named were Thomas Randoll, fifty-seven, and Avice, who was two years younger and was probably Randoll's sister. They lived together, in a single-storey house of four rooms, with storage lofts over the rooms, but it was not an isolated dwelling. The house was surrounded by a “4-room” barn, a stable, a cow-house and “other houses fit for husbandry.” It was, in other words, a small farmyard, just off North Street on the north side of the village, above the line of clay where the springs bubble up and run down through the meadows to the river. The Randolls had kept everything in good repair, as they were required to, and next to the buildings they had a backyard, called “a backside,” a small orchard, and a vegetable garden. Below them, on the wet ground by the river, they had a half-acre “close of meadow or pasture” called the East Close—a small hedged field that they would either have kept closed for hay, to be cut and made in July, or, if they had calves or a thin “rother,” a cow due to go out to grass, they would
have grazed them here in the spring. “It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,” Shakespeare's Timon says, “the want that makes him lean.” Above the house and yard stretched the open fields in which the Randolls had their arable strips: fourteen acres in the East Field, ten acres in the Middle Field, and eleven acres in the West Field. On these fields, after the barley and wheat harvest had been taken, and on the fallow fields, the Randolls had the right to pasture three horses, four cows, and a calf. Above that, on the chalk, they could keep eighty sheep with the village's communal flock.

Everything was fixed. There was no idea that the enterprise should grow or change. This was how it was, an ingeniously interlocked system that had been like this for a long time, and no one could see why it should not continue like this forever, just as it seemed to have come out of a distant past “time before mind.” Their father, John Randoll, had entered into this agreement with the Pembrokes in 1596 and had named Thomas and Avice as the two other “lives” in the copy. The Randolls were entirely secure here for as long as they lived. In 1596, John Randoll had given the earl twenty pounds as entry money to the property, quite a high “fine” as it was called, the equivalent of the annual stipend for a vicar, and had agreed a rent of eighteen shillings a year, about the annual wage of a servant girl, or the price of about ten turkeys. In effect, the copyholder bought a lease on which the rent was both low and fixed as long as the three named people remained alive. It is a measure of life expectancy in early modern England that three lives were thought to be the equivalent of twenty-one years. The Randolls had done well: in 1631 they were thirty-six years into their copyhold and still going strong.

The rest of the village repeated much of this pattern: the copyholders occupied neat small farmsteads lined out between the arable fields and the wetland by the river. The house of the old lady Goody Dewe was here, from whom Aubrey would later hear about Edward
VI getting lost while hunting. She lived on the south side of the river with her husband, Bartholomew (sixty-six years old in 1631), and their two sons, Thomas and John, their house one room smaller than the Randolls', but otherwise similar in all its arrangements and appurtenances.

There were signs of optimism. A fifteen-year-old boy, William Lawes, and a ten-year-old, John Penn, were both named as lives on copyholds. There can have been no expectation there of an early death. And there was no sense that women were excluded from the system. Widows continued to have unassailable rights in their properties after their husbands died; and a pair of sisters, Anna and Mary Fish, occupyied one ten-acre farm on the north side, off High Lane. Anna was married, but her husband had no part in the tenancy, and it was Anna herself who would become a member of the “homage,” or jury, of the manor court.

It isn't difficult to imagine how beautiful a place Broad Chalke must have been on a summer day in the 1630s. Its interlocking of private property and common interest, the sheer neatness of the relationship of downland fields, meadow, river, and village, laid like a tapestry sampler across the dip of the valley, the presence of the animals as an extra layer of life in the village. “A farme without stocke,” John Norden had said, “is like a piece without Powder, or a Steeple without bells”: all of that exudes a sense of health and coherence. “About Wilton and Chalke,” Aubrey mused in his memory, “the downes are intermixt with boscages that nothing can be more pleasant, and in the summer time do excell Arcadia in verdant and rich turfe and moderate aire…. The innocent lives here of the shepherds doe give us a resemblance of the golden age.” There was a real financial basis for this sunny view of life in the downland villages. Between 1540 and 1640 inflation affected all goods—the price of timber tripled, building materials went up two and a half times, metals doubled in price, and
textiles went up by 150 percent. But at the same period, prices for farm produce in southern England rose by a factor of four or five. It was a good time to be in farming.

The Pembroke estate made sure that through an increase in entry fines it relieved the tenants of some of that profit, but the three-lives copyhold meant that the fixed annual rents were very soon out of date. In 1631 one old widow, Anne Witt, was living in a four-room house in Broad Chalke, with the usual barn, cowhouse, orchard, and garden, and thirteen and a half acres of arable strips, according to an agreement made by her now-dead husband seventy-one years before, in 1560. Anne Witt was paying a very low, uninflated eleven shillings, sixpence rent a year. The village as a whole in the 1630s was undoubtedly experiencing a wave of well-being on which tenants and landlords both rose.

From the list of possessions made upon householders' deaths, one can begin to visualize the way in which these copyholders lived. In the Pembrokes' village of Wylye, on the north side of the Grovely ridge, one of the copyholders, William Locke, died in February 1661. At the time of his death he was eighty-two. As with the other copyholders, his house, with three rooms and lofts above them, was on the street side of his backyard, which was surrounded on the other sides by a barn, a cowhouse, and stable, and a separate kitchen. Much later buildings are now on the same site, opposite the Bell Inn, but are arranged exactly as those in the seventeenth century.

The bay size of the Lockes' timber buildings, constructed probably using small oak trees roughly adzed to shape, would have been about fourteen feet square. Both house and barn would have been single-storey thatched buildings about forty-two feet long and fourteen feet wide. Less room was devoted to human habitation than to buildings designed to keep the farm enterprise going. But the Lockes were clearly living in comfortable conditions, even with some pretension to them. The house
had a room called the “hall,” with a dining table and a side table, three chairs, three joiner-made stools, and a pair of cushions. William had six tablecloths and two dozen napkins with which to make the room elegant; as well as six pewter dishes; two candlesticks, also in pewter, which can take a high polish; two saltcellars; and sixteen silver spoons. In the smallest possible way, there is a dignity of self-possession here, of a man and his family conceiving of themselves as living an honorable life. Upstairs were two bedrooms, plenty of sheets and pillowcases, blankets, pillows, bolsters and hangings for the beds, and a rug, a good set of towels, and two chamber pots.

Alongside these best rooms were the harder-working parts of the farmstead. It was a crowded and busy place. In the cowshed was a cow and a bullock. Three pigs lived in the stable and five shillings' worth of poultry pecked their way about the yard. There was a haystack here—the winter food of the stalled cow and bullock—with some peas stored with it, two woodpiles—one very large, worth ten pounds, and one small—and a stack of timber, maturing, which had been cut into planks and posts. There was also a “wheat-rick” in the yard, the corn still in the ear, waiting to be threshed on the threshing floor in the barn and then stored in the “old garner”—the granary, which was also somehow within the barn. Threshing equipment, ladders, sacks for flour and winnowings, “and some other baggs” were all kept here, too, along with the barley, part of it threshed when Locke died, part still waiting to be threshed.

This sense of the busy, small-scale farm enterprise invaded large parts of the house, too. The hall was flanked by the buttery on one side (barrels, five pounds of lard, a meat safe, a cheese press, three flitches of bacon, a flagon, and “other small things”) and the brewhouse (a furnace, vats, pails, bowls, iron bars, hooks, and halters), a place in which more washing was done than any beer brewed. Unmentioned, but certainly here, were the willow baskets in which the washing was
taken to the line to dry, perhaps out in the vegetable garden or in the orchard beyond it

The kitchen had all the equipment needed for cooking over the wood fire: chains, hooks, pots, kettles, skillets, spits, forks, frying pans, dripping pans, “and other lumber.” In the loft above it, which must have been warm and dry, the Lockes kept their wool equipment: a pair of scales, some “liden waits” and “one pair of way beames,” ninety pounds of wool worth four pounds, ten shillings, as well as still more “other lumber.” The state of attics in the seventeenth century was not very different to that in any other period.

Beyond this dense concentration of carefully gathered, materially significant, and valuable objects—no mention of a book, a painting, or a musical instrument—was the land: a vegetable garden, an orchard, a set of little closes, and the twenty-seven and a half acres in the common fields. Only ten acres of wheat was sown in them when William Locke died in February. A third of the land had been left fallow, as usual, and the barley for the other third, once it had been threshed in the barn, would be sown by Locke's heirs in the spring, as usual. Locke had three pounds' worth of hay “in the fields,” his contribution to the communal hay stack on which the communal flock was feeding during the winter, and “two dozen of hurdells” with which to fold the sheep on the arable (tillage) that would soon begin to sprout. It is a depiction of an exactly ordained life, of a rootedness.

Of course this is not the whole story. The village was both a sustaining and a fierce, demanding, exclusive, and excluding organism, but what was here undoubtedly feels good. The poorer families are scarcely mentioned. Some families right in the middle of the village were sharing these small houses and barns, which can't have been easy. Ralph Street and his son John, farming a mere three acres, lived in “a dwelling house, sometimes called the stable.” There was a tiny cottage of two rooms, with a little garden and orchard, right out on the
eastern edge of the village, called the Hermitage, for which the annual rent was four shillings, the price of a dozen candles. Strikingly, and unexplainedly, this is the earliest known figurative use of
hermitage
in English (the next was in 1648). Was it a joke? There are certainly other half-jokes in seventeenth-century Wiltshire place-names. Out on the open ground on the other side of Broad Chalke was a cluster of houses called “Little London.” The seventeenth-century hovels belonging to the landless laborers who lived here have gone now, but judging from equivalent places in Wiltshire, called sardonically Little Salisbury, Ireland, Scotland, or Cuckolds Green, this would have been the living place of the poorest of the poor, Broad Chalke's own slum, single-roomed hovels of only ten or twelve feet square, some even ten feet by eight, in which families would attempt to maintain their lives. The floors were often no more than straw on mud. Transient laborers and their families, often, as the place names imply, from the poorer margins of the British Isles, clustered at the edge of these elaborately instituted villages like dogs at a camp.