Quarrel with the King (30 page)

Repeatedly, Parliament sent him as one of their commissioners to negotiate with the king. But that, too, came with its humiliations, as Parliament would not allow the commissioners freedom to negotiate without reference back to Westminster. Late one night, in the very cold January of 1645, at the negotiations between the two sides at Uxbridge, Pembroke came to pour his heart out to his old friend
and client Edward Hyde, later to be Lord Clarendon, who was one of the king's commissioners at the negotiations. Pembroke sat with Hyde for many hours, trying to persuade him that the king should consent to Parliament's demands. Hyde was adamant that the crown could not submit, as the only outcome of that submission would be tyranny in England. Pembroke then confessed that he, too, thought “there was never such a pack of knaves and villains as they who now governed in the parliament.” Pembroke was “of the moderate party,” and they needed this treaty to work. Otherwise there would be a coup and England would become a republic. Hyde “told him if he believed that, it was high time for the Lords to look about them, who would be then no less concerned than the King. [Pembroke] confessed it, and that they were now sensible that they had brought this mischieve upon themselves, and did heartily repent it, though too late, and when they were in no degree able to prevent the general destruction which they foresaw.” Only if the king agreed to their demands would they be able “to recover all for him that he now parted with, and to drive those wicked men who would destroy monarchy out of the kingdom, and then his majesty would be greater than ever.”

Hyde thought Pembroke and his fellow parliamentary commissioners both contemptible and ridiculous, “so broken were they in their spirits, and so corrupted in their understanding, even when they had their own ruin in view.” Pembroke left him late in the evening, a pitiable sight, scarcely the same man who had posed for William Larkin with his ostrich fathers and his coral bracelet so long before.

The family had fallen apart. Pembroke's sons had stayed with him. Two of them, Philip and James, became members of Parliament. But his glamorous son-in-law, Robert, Earl of Carnarvon, had become a leading and courageous cavalry commander on the other side and had been killed, casually, in the evening of the first battle of Newbury in 1643, when a parliamentary trooper recognized him after the
battle was over and ran him through with his sword. Carnarvon's wife, Anna Sophia, had very nearly died of smallpox the same year. Their son, Charles, the young boy born in 1632 and represented by the pearl between Anna Sophia's fingers in the great Van Dyck portrait, was painted by his successor the young Lely perhaps in that year. The young boy's pose looks as if it deliberately reflects his father's in the family portrait, one foot raised on a step, his head turned to look, the color and manner of his clothes also a form of inheritance from his father. In the background, the Arcadian trees were painted by Lely withered and broken under the blast of war. It is just possible that this painting was made for Pembroke, the boy's grandfather, a sign that his love for his daughter's son spread across any ideological divide. Among the executors' accounts preserved at Hatfield is an item: “Paid to Mr Lilly painter for severall pictures made for the late earle of Pembroke the sume of £85.”

 

A
fter the defeat of the king and the fall of his headquarters at Oxford, in July 1646, Pembroke was sent to Newcastle with Parliament's propositions. Charles had been given a copy privately sometime before. He asked Pembroke and the other commissioners

It was a good remark, symptomatic of the collapse of any authority Pembroke might have had. Pembroke stayed with the king as
Charles was moved under house arrest to the giant Elizabethan palace of Holdenby, in Northamptonshire, walking with him on “the Long Gravel-Walk” of the garden there, maintaining a fond and “mirthful” relationship with a man who had known him all his life, “and not without some difficulty held pace with him, his Majesty being quick and lively in his Motion.” When on June 3, 1647, the king was kidnapped by the army officer George Joyce, on Cromwell's orders, arriving at Holdenby at dawn, with five hundred armed troopers behind him and “a cockt pistol in his hand,” Pembroke went with the king in the coach to Cambridge, Newmarket, and eventually to Hampton Court.

In these years of disaster and dissolution, Pembroke's affection for the king grew and flowered. The king was not allowed his old Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to attend him, and Pembroke arranged for his cousin Thomas Herbert to play that role. Herbert watched the two of them carefully. “The earl of Pembroke (let others say what they will) loved the King in his Heart, and had certainly never separated from him, had he not (by the Procurement of some ill-willers) been committed to the Tower, and his White Staff taken from him, only by reason of a sudden and unhappy falling out.”

Thomas Herbert also recorded the most poignant of all tales to do with Pembroke at the very end of Charles's life, a prisoner in the unhappy, Orwellian world of Westminster in 1648, with its whisperings and deceits, its sense of unbridled power lurking an inch or two beneath the surface of life, the air of mutual treachery. Thomas Herbert had at times been failing to wake up in the morning and the king had tried through the offices of the Earl of Pembroke to get him a repeating watch with an alarm. Herbert, in the third person, described a visit to Pembroke's rooms in the Cockpit at Whitehall. Pembroke

But neither king nor Herbert had seen anything of the watch.

What were they to do? Could they accuse this military high-up of theft from the king? Not then.

Herbert did of course tell the king this story. “Ah,” he said. “Had he not told the Officer it was for me, it would probably have been delivered; he will know how short a time I could enjoy it.”

In January 1649 Pembroke was appointed by parliamentary ordinance to the court that was to try the king. But Pembroke could not bring himself to attend and remained in his beautiful rooms in the Cockpit, from where he “swore he loved not to meddle with businesses of life and death and (for his part) hee would neither speake against the ordinance nor consent to it.” He had not signed the king's death warrant but he had done nothing to save him.

The king was executed on January 30, 1649. One of his last acts before he stepped out from the Banqueting House window and on to the wintery scaffold was to give Thomas Herbert his gold watch. Pembroke, with his old friend the Earl of Salisbury, watched the execution, quite dispassionately, from his lodgings in the Cockpit. On the scaffold, Charles I prayed to God: “Look upon my misery with Thine eye of mercy and let Thine infinite power vouchsafe to limit out some proportion of deliverance unto me.” John Milton would reveal in
Eikonoklastes
that this prayer was not the king's own but was a quotation from
Arcadia
. By using it, Milton maintained, the king had polluted “prayer itself, by borrowing to a Christian use prayers offered to a heathen god, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen fiction praying to a heathen God; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia
.” For Milton, it was symptom of everything that was wrong with royalism: no access to the divinely revealed truth, no belief in liberty, no pride in what a freeborn God-fearing Englishman should take pride in. And Milton had no trouble binding together the two Arcadias.

Anyone who still longed for this crown-dominated Arcadian world, Milton wrote, showed

This was probably true. The English could not bear too much liberty, nor the fear of tyranny, which came in liberty's wake.
Eikon basilike
, the king's own (ghosted) justification of his life and kingship, went through thirty-six editions in 1649 alone. Hunger for a Restoration had surged on the execution of the king.

Pembroke himself would be dead within a year, a year during which the new regime would continue to humiliate him. The Council of State discussed whether they should demolish his castle in Cardiff; whether his art treasures should be sold along with the king's for the good of the country; whether soldiers should or should not be quartered in Durham House, the earl's London residence since 1640; whether he should be allowed to keep the keys to the doors and gates into St. James's Park, or if they would be better off in the hands of Colonel Pride. On March 19, 1649, the House of Lords was abolished by an act of Parliament that declared that “The Commons of England [consider] by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England.” Although there had been talk the year before of making Pembroke a duke, he now became a member of the House of Commons, sitting alongside his sons, as member for Berkshire, a move ridiculed in the London broadsheets as “an ascent downwards.”

Pembroke was not well. He was seriously ill in May, again in June, and again in July, running up apothecaries' bills for £122 over the summer. His digestion was failing him, and the painful affliction returned in the autumn. Mr. Metcalfe, the apothecary, was paid ten shillings a day for attendance, making large quantities of “alterative ale, issue powder and deobstructive electuary” to get the bowels working. The most expensive was sweet powders containing musk and amber, which were thought to aid the digestion and “intestinal elimination.” Everything known to seventeenth-century medicine was thrown at Pembroke:

On Christmas day he had a “syrupe of marsh mallows with liquorice and maydenhaire” followed by conserve of bugloss and borage, a mysterious “Box of tabletts” along with “Syrupe of jujubes.” On and on the treatments went until January 28, 1650, when he had a possett, a gargarisme with syrup, a cataplasm, and finally “a cooling Julipp,” which would cost his estate 2s 8d and after which he died. The sum total for all of this was another £177 17 10, the price of good house. The executors were having none of that and reduced the bill by £65.

On Pembroke's death, bitter, spoof accounts by secret royalists of his last hours were quickly printed and published on the streets of London, the ranting visions of a man guilty of killing his king, of pursuing nothing but his own appetites. “Dam' me,” Pembroke is meant to have muttered on his deathbed,

Then, after his guilt, his desires: