Quarrel with the King (25 page)

But if these large themes are in play, it is also fundamentally a painting of a family. There could be no meaning in riches if there were no heirs to enjoy them. His brother William had died childless but Philip had been careful to assemble a family. Three children had died young, with great sorrow for the parents, in the years before 1620. But many others had survived. His daughter Anna Sophia had married his ward, the enormously rich Robert Dormer, who in 1628 had become the Earl of Carnarvon. Charles, Lord Herbert, and his brothers Philip, William, James, and John were the boys Thomas Chaffinge had referred to so encouragingly in his sermon. After the Duke of Buckingham was assassinated, Buckingham's daughter Mary Villiers and her brothers had come to live with the Herberts, as her mother had married a wild Irish Roman Catholic lord and the king did not want the Villiers children brought up Catholic.

To this ensemble, after the death of his first wife Susan, Philip added one of the most intriguing figures of Stuart England: Lady Anne Clifford, the Dowager Countess of Dorset. By the time she married Philip, in June 1630, only two weeks after William had finally been buried in Salisbury Cathedral, she had suffered years of bullying and denial by her first husband, her relations, by the king, and by the court in general. She was a product of the greatest of English families, her mother a Russell, her cousin the Earl of Bedford, and her father the Elizabethan buccaneer George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, tournament champion, captain of the
Bonadventure
against the Spanish Armada in 1588, conqueror of the Spanish at Puerto Rico, and winner of the golden prize Henry Pembroke had offered for his first horse race on the Wilton downs in the 1590s.

The Clifford earls of Cumberland had been the great medieval magnates of the northwest, with one generation after another dying in battle. They controlled vast estates in the Pennines and the Lake District. Those lands always descended to the “heir of the body” of the current
earl, regardless of the heir's sex. Anne Clifford's father died “of a bloody flux” without a son in 1605, but he left his lands to his brother.

For decades, Anne and her mother waged a legal battle to recover them, gathering stupendous piles of ancient documents by which to prove Anne's rights to them, compiling biographies of those noble ancestors, becoming an authority on the ancient constitution by which the great magnates of medieval England had maintained their independence of the crown. In 1609, she married the spendthrift rake Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who sided with her enemies in trying to coerce her into surrendering her claim on lands that were rightfully hers. Dorset tried every way he could to make her conform to his and her uncle's patriarchal dominance: threats of separation, refusal to sleep with her when she knew she was fertile, shaming her in public by flirting with his mistress, Lady Penniston, cancelling her jointure—the income from the lands to which she would have a right if he died before her—terrorizing her servants, and taking away from her the daughter on which she doted.

Anne was tiny, only four feet ten inches, but indomitable. James's queen Anne gave her “warning not to trust [her] matters absolutely to the King lest he should deceive me,” and when confronted with the demands of the Cumberlands as voiced by the king himself in 1617, she stood up to him with a courage that is astonishing for a twenty-seven-year-old woman, even more so with the court largely ranged against her.

Unsurprisingly, her spirits had often sunk under the relentless pressure and lack of respect. Retreating to the comfort of a diary, she was often “sad to see things go so ill with me.” She bore Dorset five chil
dren, two girls who survived and three sons, all of whom “dyed young at Knowle, in Kent, where they were born.” After Dorset himself died in 1624, she came into her jointure of £2,000 a year, but Dorset's own heir and brother continued to persecute her, and her troubles deepened when she suffered a violent attack of smallpox “which disease did so marter my face that it Confirmed more and more my mynd never to marrie againe.”

This was the woman Philip Herbert married at the Bedford house of Chenies on the first of June 1630. There were many surprised that he married her at all: a forty-year-old ravaged by smallpox, with the reputation for independence of mind and pugnacity of spirit. And why should she, a woman perfectly well provided for, enter into a marriage with a man whose own reputation was not entirely sweet-smelling? Partly there were material considerations: her meager income from the Sackville lands, his enormous wealth (an income of perhaps £20,000 a year), and his position at court. Gossip was against them: “nor did there want divers malitious illwillers to Blow and foment the Coals of discontent betwixt us,” she wrote much later. But there were also many aspects of their two backgrounds which would have brought them together. Both would have considered they came from the ancient not the modern court aristocracy. Both had been tutored by the poet Samuel Daniel in their youths. The works of Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Michael Drayton—all of them part of the Pembroke circle of patronage, all of them Arcadianists—were in her library. She even erected and paid for a monument in Westminster Abbey to Spenser, who had been her mother's client. Both families had long-standing connections to John Donne, who enjoyed Anne's company. She could talk of anything, Donne once said, “from slea-silk to predestination,” the whole range of existence from God's mind to the kind of fluffy silk which would ball up like cotton wool. It is not inconceivable that this marriage was more than a corporate alliance
and that these two battle-scarred veterans of the court world saw in each other the possibilities of happiness.

This is the family portrayed in the great Van Dyck portrait. In 1634, the long-laid plans for the wedding of Mary Villiers and Charles Herbert had come into focus. The convoluted, debt-ridden Buckingham estate was finally to be granted probate in March 1635, and the prospect of that tangle being resolved may have prompted the earl into action. Equally, his fifteen-year-old-son Charles was approaching the age when he would be sent abroad with a tutor to visit Italy. In July 1634, Mary's mother, the Duchess of Buckingham, settled on the outline of an agreement with the earl. Swathes of Pembroke lands in Dorset, Glamorgan, Monmouth, and Wiltshire were to be transferred to the young couple in return for the £25,000 Mary would bring in her wake. The great alliance of new money and old status, conceived in the 1620s as a solution to the deep split then threatening the court, was at last to be achieved.

Then, very nearly, disaster struck. Mary began to fall in love not with the intended heir, Charles, but with his younger brother. “The young lady began to affect the younger brother Philip Herbert,” George Garrard, a court gossip, wrote,

This particular twelve-year-old girl was not going to shipwreck the elaborate corporate deal. The ceremony was eventually conducted at the end of Christmas 1634 “by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the closet at Whitehall. It was done privately, and few invited, and sooner than was intended.”

The financial details had not been settled and were not to be until the following May, when a huge vellum document with four sealed blobs of sealing wax, each the size of a squash ball and deeply impressed with the seals of the participating parties, was finally signed: Mary's mother and stepfather, the Earl of Antrim; the Earl of Northampton (a courtier); Pembroke himself, Sir Thomas Morgan of Wilton and Ruperra; and Sir John Thorowgood of London (a government official) all witnessed the transfer and commitment of lands and money “in consideration of a marriage heretofore had and solemnized.”

The money flows were enormous. The earl was to assign all his lands in Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Monmouth, and Glamorgan to his son, keeping for himself only an interest in them for the rest of his life. There could, in other words, be no going back on what he now agreed to give to the new couple. The duchess, for her part, agreed to give her daughter “twentie thousand pounds of lawfull money of England.” She would pay it in instalments of £4,000 a year for five years, beginning at Michaelmas 1634. In addition, Lady Mary was to hand over £5,000 from another inheritance, her grandfather's, which she had already received. The earl agreed to spend this money, plus an additional £15,000 of his own, on lands that he was going to give to the children and that would provide Lady Mary with the £4,000 a year jointure after Charles died. If either of them died “after the said intended marriage and before cohabitation or before the said Lady Mary shall atteyne the age of sixteene yeares,” then the whole deal was off. All money was to be repaid to the duchess, and the earl was free of his obligations to either his son or Lady Mary. The deal was to be concluded “by making of conveyances and assurances by Counsell learned on both sides before Xmas next, as convenientlie as may be done.” There was no thought whatsoever that these two people, aged fifteen and twelve, would sleep together until they were substantially older, perhaps not for the next four years.

One other development had occurred in these busy months: Pembroke's marriage to Lady Anne Clifford had collapsed. She had resisted his claims over her lands in the north. He had refused the claim she would traditionally have made over a third of his lands after he died, and together they signed a document in which each stated their claim:

But this was only a symptom of a deeper underlying malaise. Anne Clifford had been shaped by her sufferings. It is no coincidence that she became a diarist, because her life had turned into one of withdrawal and privacy. “I stay'd much in the Country,” she had written when with Lord Dorset at Knole, “having many times a sorrowfull & heavy heart, and being condemn'd by most folks because I would not consent to the agreement [with her husband], so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert.” It would turn out no better with Pembroke.

She had retired not into widowhood but into diaryhood, an exceptionally rare condition in the early seventeenth century, a river running unmingled through the waters of a family. Two further levels of unhappiness should be added to this picture. Sometime in December 1634, in the days before the wedding between his son Charles and Mary Villiers, Pembroke ejected Anne Clifford from his lodgings in Whitehall. From then on, at least for the next fifteen years, she was to live in one of his houses in Wiltshire or London, but only rarely with him. The immediate cause is unknown, but the context is more pitiable still. Anne became pregnant twice with Philip Herbert, bearing “two sons that were born both before their time while I lived at Whitehall.” Both premature sons died at birth.

It is sometimes assumed that the frequent death of children in premodern England caused no grief in their parents. This is untrue. No explicit record remains of Anne's reaction to the death of these Herbert sons, but there is a letter from her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, written on the death of a son and heir of her own, Robert Clifford. Half coherent with grief, it is addressed to the family chaplain and translator of the King James Bible, Dr. John Layfield:

These are the circumstances in which the “mighty large piece of the Ea of Pembrooke and all his family by Vandyke” was made. Everything in this long story can be seen to contribute to its meaning, and its strange and enigmatic qualities become clearer in the light of the family's story.

It is a drama of fertility, time, and death, much of its meaning carried by the subtle ballet of the hands sewn through the picture. The Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, on the right, are already the parents of a young heir, Charles, born two years before. They glow with sexuality and health: Anna Sophia's bosom is deeply revealed, and between her fingers she holds a single pearl, standing for the precious heir whom she and her husband have conceived. Their hands dabble together in an unmistakably sexual way, the only sign of human contact in the painting. Theirs is the realm of fecundity and fullness. But still their eyes do not meet. No member of the family, in fact, looks at any other. Each is alone in his glorious world, and none is more glorious than Anna Sophia's husband, Robert Dormer, earl of Carnarvon, at this stage in his life a traveller and gambler, a notorious womanizer and rake, and a man filled with the vigor of an active life.