Quarrel with the King (3 page)

Meanwhile, the two young Herberts, as if in a game of grandmother's footsteps, were making their slow and careful approach to the center of power. Anne became a Gentlewoman of the Queen's Household, and William one of fifty new Gentlemen Spears, as they were called, an extravagantly equipped honor guard with gold chains and gilt poleaxes, an élite band of strong, young, capable courtiers among whom Henry felt at ease. Will Herbert soon rose again to become a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, at a stipend of fifty pounds a year, one of a set of efficient, tough, educated officials of royal government entirely dependent on the favor and will of the king. They were no palace popinjays or playthings of the king but, for him, essential information-gathering, will-enforcing tools of government, diplomacy, and war. Herbert was approaching the crown in order to achieve his independence from it.

Needing to fund the glorious palace-building, war-waging methods of his court, the king's eyes fell on the great medieval estates of the monasteries. In the spring of 1539, the ancient abbey at Wilton, among eight hundred in England and Wales, was dissolved and its wonderful lands taken into the ownership of the crown. Much of the rest of the year at court must have been filled with speculation as to who the recipient of Wilton might be. In May 1540 the door opened: William Herbert received a twenty-one-year lease of the site of Wilton Abbey; in July he was appointed chief steward of all the abbey's lands. He
was knighted, Anne became Keeper of the Queen's Jewels, and that autumn the couple's son Henry was born.

For three years, subject only to the twenty-one-year lease, Wilton remained the property of the crown, but in April 1542 Henry VIII gave it by a “mere motion”—as it is described in the enormous Exchequer document prepared for the King's Remembrancer, the official whose task it was to remember everything that had been done by the king or in his name—to “our beloved Servant William Herbert Knight and Anne his wife.” The gift was for their lifetimes only. The document is vast because it lists the vastness of the gift. The house and site of the abbey “now dissolved” and all our “messuages houses edifices dove houses stables mills barns orchards gardens waters ponds parks lands soil and hereditaments whatsoever” were to go to the chosen couple. The list rolls on and on: manors, lordships, tithes, corn sheaves, grain, hay, “fisheries and the fishings of our waters,” the “twenty and five quarters of salt annually extracted from the salt pits” in Dorset, the “granges mills tofts cottages meadows feedings pastures waste furze heath and marshes,” and all sorts of “fees farms annuities and pensions” that the “last abbess and convent” had been entitled to. The list of places, and of every item in them, was a hymn to accumulation, the beauty of materiality, satisfying the deepest possible lust for land and property. The King's Remembrancer was transferring the ownership of an entire world, and its driving force was the “mere motion” of regal power, a fiat, a breaking of bonds that had persisted for centuries. William Herbert was now in possession of what John Aubrey would call “a countrey of lands and Mannours,” a fiefdom, a power base, and a landscape.

This was good but it was not everything. After their deaths, as things stood, the great estate would revert to the crown. But in July 1543, the world of the Herberts changed. Anne's elder sister, Katherine, to whom she was exceptionally close and who shared with her
a passionate attachment to the reformed religion, married the king. Katherine Parr was a beautiful widow, and the king had fallen in love with her. Both William and Anne Herbert attended the wedding, at which Henry shouted, “Yea!” when asked if he wanted to marry Katherine. Anne helped her sister prepare the black silk nightdresses the king liked his brides to wear, and William Herbert suddenly found himself the royal brother-in-law. Lands, offices, and cash began to flow toward him. As their London house, the new queen gave them the great old palace of Baynard's Castle, on the Thames. With it came the right to bind any traitor “at low tide to a pillar in the Thames near the Castle Wall, leaving him there for two floods and two ebbs.” The totality of power was lapping at the Herberts' shores.

Wilton and its train of beauties became the Herberts' property forever in January 1544. Royal stewardships in Wales followed, and in 1546, William Herbert became Joint Chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber, the position with the steadiest and most regular contact with the king in his most private moments, the soft, potent heart of monarchy.

In the summer of 1543, Herbert had started to erect his new house at Wilton, “a large & high built square of hewen stone.” It was in some ways a Tudor muddle, with pediments and onion domelets, classical busts in circular frames, scallop shells, and out-of-scale columns and pilasters—a collection of ideas borrowed from the Renaissance, with Corinthian capitals and exquisite entablatures all finely executed but with little understanding of the system to which they should have belonged. Herbert liked to wear a large ring on each index finger, and his new house at Wilton was rather like those rings: expensive, flashy, and big. Its lead rain heads and downpipes were decorated with a rich and barbaric mixture of green men and beautiful acanthus leaves twisted into elegant knots. All over the building, as you can still see if you creep in under the attic spaces of the later additions, there are brilliant colors
and gilding and armorial beasts and legendary figures encrusting the walls. The house was an adaptation of the abbey, probably based around the abbey cloister, but it cost more than £10,000, equivalent to the cost of building a good hundred manor houses. Sixteen acres of five-and six-year-old coppice trees were felled to provide the fuel to burn the lime to make the mortar with which the stones were bound together. Those stones came either from the partly demolished abbey or from the abandoned site of the ancient city above Salisbury, Old Sarum, carted in to the palace by the River Nadder all summer long.

Parts of the Tudor house remain embedded in the seventeenth-and nineteenth-century additions, and one porch was preserved by Inigo Jones as a fine example of early Renaissance style, but the effect of Herbert's showiness can be measured by an account of it made in 1635 by a Lieutenant Hammond, who was touring the west of England. He found Wilton as it was just before the transforming Jonesian work on the house had begun. It was a building larded with richness: a gallery “richly hung and adorn'd with stately and faire pictures”; cloth of gold hangings, “over the Chimney peece the statue of King Henry 8th richly cut and gilded ouer,” “the great Dyning Chamber, very richly hang'd”; in it “a most curious Chimney Peece, of Alablaster Touch-Stone and marble, cut with seuerall statues, the Kings and his lordships owne armes richly sett out.” Accounts have survived of marble and jasper doorcases as well as “eight great tables” imported from France.

Buried inside this gilded case was the hidden fist—still there, remarkably, in 1635—something that Lieutenant Hammond felt “may well compare with any in the Kingdome”:

In a special room at the end of this huge private arsenal were the great suits of armor Herbert and his son collected: a suit of armor made in Greenwich for Henry VIII and another for Edward VI, complete suits of Milan armor, “the Lord William his Turkish Scymiter, or sable, and his whole armour for his Horse richly grauen and gilded.”

Could the foundations of power in an English country house ever have been quite so graphically displayed? By the time an inventory was made of the house in 1683, there was both a “new” and an “old” armory. The new had some pistols, blunderbusses, bullet molds, and “bullet guns” stored in it, but the old armory spoke of an earlier world. Piles of muskets, too many for the surveyor to count, were in there among the “hollster pistols” and “bandiloes” (broad belts from which a heavy weapon could be slung). Alongside them, 26 bills (hooks to be used for slashing at hedges or men), 20 “holboards” (halberds, a combination of axe and spear on the end of a seven-foot-long pole), 260 pikes, 92 other pikes, and most chillingly of all, “dog chains.”

Outside the door, this hardman established his own Arcadia. A garden was made with walks, fishponds, and fruit trees and a stable built for eighty horses. The abbey's dovecote, forge, mill, and giant grange for the grain rents from the estate were all left standing. The entire village of Washerne, across the Nadder from the site of the abbey, as well as the vicarage of Bulbridge, were enclosed in a new park and demolished. What had been both common land (the open fields) and “several” land (closes belonging to individuals) was shut up in the park and denied to the people who had farmed it “time out of mind.” Herbert planted a copse and an avenue of trees where the people of Washerne had previously grown their food. The avenue
would later be called Sir Philip Sidney's Walk, as it was there he would stroll, composing the
Arcadia
. Within the park, among the “diverse et pulchre perambulaciones,” as a surveyor in 1562 described it, half English, half Latin, Herbert built “unum Standinge” (a platform) “in quo dominus stare potest ad super vivendum diversa loca pro placito suo” (in which the lord can stand so that he can overlook the various places for his pleasure).

Those few actions, and the few sentences used to describe them, represent the conflict of the two Arcadias. The ancient abbey is destroyed; a palace is built in its place; the poor have their ancient rights kicked away and their houses demolished; and a beautiful stretch of parkland, adorned with trees and pleasure buildings, is installed where the poor's ancestors had lived. The purpose is “pro placito suo,” to calm the great man's troubled mind and to provide the Lord with an easing vision of prelapsarian bliss.

The pleasure park erased the custom of the manor. It wasn't done entirely illegally. Where lands were taken from common grazing, or even from the open field, and enclosed in a park (Herbert would have seven parks in all by the 1560s, and employed a full-time “Regarder,” whose job was to travel round the parks to see that all was well), the peasants received compensation, usually in the form of lowering of rents or a relaxation of the services due to the lord. At Wilton, a seven-acre field called Lampeland was enclosed in Herbert's park. In compensation for its loss, Herbert no longer required the villagers of Washerne to pay seven shillings and eightpence every year for a marsh or meadow called Woodmersh.

That is all very well, but in a system where pressure on food and resources was tight, and where the balance of arable land with hay-growing meadow was finely tuned, removing seven acres of growing ground, not to speak of demolishing houses in a world so deeply dependent for its sense of meaning on the pattern of use of the landscape,
was a form of dispossession that went far beyond the removal of an economic asset and resource. Why was it done? Not only to feed the vanity of a Tudor magnate but also to provide a place of peace and calm in a life of extreme anxiety and stress. The sufferings of the villagers of Washerne are a direct product of the tensions and struggles at the Tudor court.

The silent presence in this life is that of Anne Parr, whose portrait bust appears opposite William Herbert's on one face of the 1540s porch, said to be designed by Holbein, which still exists today in the Wilton garden. But her voice does not survive in the documents. At least at court one can be sure that she played her part in protecting her sister, the queen, in the great crisis that threatened the Parrs and the future of the English Reformation in the summer of 1546. The sickening and increasingly short-tempered Henry VIII had turned against the revolutionary forces he had unleashed through his break with Rome. In this subtly murderous atmosphere, conservatives at court, led by Bishop Gardiner, had tried to frame Katherine as a radical and a subversive. Agents and spies had rifled through the queen's apartments looking for proscribed books and pamphlets in cabinets, chests, and drawers. She kept such items, in fact, in the garderobe, and when the threat became too hot, she had them smuggled out to her uncle's house, only retrieving them after Henry had died. Anne Parr, a passionate believer in the reformed religion and well practiced at secrecy and courtiership, was central to preserving a network of Protestants right at the heart of Whitehall. For a time, in 1546 and 1547, Katherine Parr's chambers were the center of the English Reformation.

John Foxe, the great chronicler of that revolution, described the atmosphere in which Anne Parr lived. The queen was

In February 1546, Katherine ordered some new coffers for her chamber, with new locks, metal hinges, corner bands, and handles with nails: the tools of survival. People around her were being picked off by Bishop Gardiner. In May, a young aristocratic protestant, Lord Thomas Howard, was summoned before the Privy Council and charged with “disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with other young gentlemen of the Court.” Later that week it was demanded that he “confess what he said in disproof of sermons preached in Court last Lent and his other talk in the Queen's chamber and elsewhere in Court concerning Scripture.” Others of her servants, the courtiers, yeomen, and physicians who attended her, were arrested and imprisoned for holding erroneous opinions and engaging in “unseemly reasoning.”