Quarrel with the King (8 page)

He had won. He had become what his grandfather had been. He had threatened the throne, defeated the regent, absorbed some of his riches, garnered still more, and had established himself in the position
he may always have thought he deserved to hold: not the 1st Earl of Pembroke, as history knows him, but the twentieth, the inheritor of all that medieval dignity. To do so, he had acted not as his son, grandsons, and great-grandsons would do, in defense of the ancient constitution or the ancient social structures on which the well-being of his estates would rely. Rather, he had behaved as the freelance he was, the hired gun, asserting authority through brutish and coldheaded masculinity. Without this exercise of ignoble power, it is perfectly likely that his dynasty would have ended with him. And so when you look at the beautiful boys in their beautiful silks in the Van Dyck painting, or out across the coiffed perfection of the lawns at Wilton, or at any sign of aristocratic elegance, these moments in 1549 are what need to be remembered. Behind the grace and the nonchalance of riches hangs the mask, with the hatchet mouth and hooded eyes, of the man-killing condottiere founder of the dynasty. This particular quarrel with the king had produced money, land, and the prospect of a well-funded future. No idealism here.

At the end of February 1552, William Herbert's wife, Anne Parr, Countess of Pembroke, died at Baynard's Castle in London. She was thirty-six, the mother of two sons and a daughter. She was buried with huge pomp in old St. Paul's, next to the tomb of John of Gaunt, where her memorial described her as “a most faithful wife, a woman of the greatest piety and discretion” and “her banners were set up over her arms set on divers pillars.” The earl undoubtedly loved her. When he came to write his own will, despite having married again, he said he wanted to be buried “nere the place where Anne my late wife doth lie buried” in St. Paul's. In a perfectly literal sense Anne had brought legitimacy to the Herberts. If William had vigor and ruthlessness, Anne gave the family grace and courage. When Edward VI regranted the manors to the Pembrokes, it was explicitly “to the aforenamed earl, by the name of Sir William Herbert, knight, and
the Lady Anne his wife and the heirs male of their bodies between them lawfully begotten.” She was the joint creator of this extraordinary enterprise. A stained-glass window in a Wilton church shows her kneeling before an open prayer book or Bible—no signs of religious imagery in evidence—in a long armorial mantle on which are embroidered the many quartered arms of her distinguished ancestry. It was that Parr-derived inheritance that gave the Pembroke family any legitimate claim to ancient nobility. And she knew it. On her tomb in St. Paul's, the epitaph reads that she had been “very jealous of the fame of a long line of ancestors.”

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, had become one of the rulers of England, a man without whom no power settlement could be made. He was precisely the sort of figure—independent, dangerous, and unforgiving—whose standing the governments of Elizabeth and the Stuarts would need to erode. His power had been derived from royal patronage, but he had so managed the gift that it had now outgrown its source. Astute buying of lands, the exercise or threat of violence, and the subtle, flickering understanding not only of the best alliance to make but of the moment to desert an ally: all of this had placed him at least partly in control. The Earl of Worcester, the Parrs, his Wiltshire neighbor the Duke of Somerset: all had provided another step up, and at each turn the earl had learned to combine toughness with flexibility, to be the willow not the oak. He knew, in other words, how to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. The Machiavellian truth of Tudor England was that unless men of Pembroke's substance plotted to remain in power, others would plot to remove them. It was a business principle: either growth in the enterprise or collapse.

The young Edward VI spent time down at Wilton, hunting, getting lost, and being entertained by Pembroke as though he were visiting the palace of an eastern potentate. “The King was served in vessels of pure gold,” the imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfvre wrote to the
queen dowager of Spain, “his Council and Privy Chamber in silver gilt, and all the members of his household, down to the very least, in silver. All this plate belongs to the earl, who presented the King on his departure, with a very rich camp-bed, decorated with pearls and precious stones.”

Pembroke habitually carried the sword of state before the sovereign. The untrammeled roughness of his Welsh ancestry (he spoke fluent Welsh himself and was educating his son Henry in the language and its poetry) proved an asset at that brutal court. The imperial ambassadors spread the gossip through Europe: Pembroke could speak no other language than English (untrue), could neither read nor write (probably untrue), and stood at meetings of the Privy Council “shouting at the top of his voice,” in which mood no one dared contradict him (almost certainly true). The memory of 1549 and his assertion of military power were never far from the surface.

As Edward VI sickened, Pembroke and his ally John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and now Duke of Northumberland, plotted for a Protestant succession to the throne that would deprive the Catholic princess Mary of the crown. Their candidate, Lady Jane Grey, was Henry VIII's great-niece, and according to the old king's will was to be the next heir after his own children. She had been a girl in the Parr household and had become a passionate Protestant and a Greek scholar there, reading Plato's
Dialogues
in the original for pleasure and denouncing the Roman Church as the home of Satan. According to her parents' wishes but against her own will, she was quickly married to Northumberland's son, submitting only “by the urgency of her mother and the violence of her father, who compelled her to accede to his commands by blows.” Her sister, Lady Catherine Grey, was married at the same time to Pembroke's eldest son, Henry.

Once again, Pembroke held the fate of England in his hands. Edward died on July 6, 1553. Three days later, Lady Jane was told
she was queen. Pembroke knelt to kiss her hand, at which the sixteen-year-old fell weeping to the floor, speaking of her inadequacy. On July 13, Northumberland left London to capture Mary, who was in Norfolk with an army and with support gathering around her. Once again, Pembroke bent like the willow, sniffed the wind, heard that the people were gathering to Mary's banner in Norfolk, and at this critical juncture abandoned both Lady Jane Grey and Northumberland, his friend and ally. Pembroke got his son Henry to repudiate Catherine Grey. All connections to her were to be severed. On July 19, Pembroke gathered a group of like-minded lords in the great rooms overlooking the Thames at Baynard's Castle and asked them to join him in supporting the Catholic princess even then making her way with her army to London. It was another occasion for shouting. Holding his battle sword in front of him, Pembroke bellowed to the assembled lords, “This blade shall make Mary queen, or I will lose my life.” There was no denying him, and the party went out into the streets of London, where they had Mary proclaimed sovereign of England. Pembroke threw his jewelled cap into the air and tossed his gold-filled purse into the crowd.

Mary was crowned queen in October, and Pembroke was there, carrying the sword of state before her. Lady Jane Grey, Northumberland, and his son Guildford Dudley were all eventually executed. Henry Herbert, Pembroke's son and heir, rejected Catherine, Lady Jane Grey's sister, in a series of vicious letters in which he called her a whore.

Once again, Pembroke became the leathered brawn for the new regime, facing down a Protestant rebellion in London in 1554, fighting a series of largely ineffectual wars against the French on Mary's behalf, bringing the spoils back to Wilton, and entrenching his power base ever more in Wiltshire and Wales. Wilton served as a perfect tool in his display of significance. He spent more time there than in London, entertained foreign ambassadors in his exquisite landscape,
took them out hunting and hare coursing on the downs, and displayed the vast assemblages of men and money that were the undeniable evidence of his standing.

“The handsomeness and commodities of Wilton, with the good appointment and the good furniture thereof, in all things whereof the better has not been seen,” were as impressive as anything England could offer. The most sophisticated Europeans were not entirely taken in. The Venetian ambassador wrote a witty and skeptical account of the strange manners of the English to his masters in the Venetian Senate in August 1554. “The nobility, save as such are employed at court, do not habitually reside in the cities,” the Venetian began, his eyebrows raised,

This reads more like the description by an Englishman of the pleasures of Renaissance Italy: its slight air of loucheness, the sunshine in
their lives, the apparent ease and equality of men and women in the aristocratic milieu. The English by the 1550s had absorbed much of that campagna culture. But here it is clamped to what is also late-medieval behavior, the great gang of the affinity, the display of power, the premodern guarantee of luxury through overt threat and strength. When the king of Spain himself arrived at Southampton to marry Queen Mary, the earl went down to meet him with two hundred mounted gentlemen in black velvet wearing heavy gold chains, accompanied by a body of English archers, their yellow tunics striped with bands of red velvet, the livery of the house of Aragon. This is the social and multiple equivalent of the way the earl himself appeared. Here is the fighting body dripping in pearls, velvet, and gold. It is the essence of Tudor England: luxury as the medium of power; power as the underpinnings of beauty; beauty as the companion of threat.

To a great extent Pembroke came to believe his own propaganda. Where the descent of the crown itself was full of uncertainties and illegitimacies, where the claim on power was not a matter of genetic formality but an exercise in politics and force, then the legitimacy of the Pembrokes as magnates who could raise formidable armies of their own was not in question. They had as much right to be sources of power in their own countries as the sovereign did in the nation as a whole. Magna Carta did not mean nothing. Noble power, in an atmosphere where there was so much harking back to the myths of the Middle Ages, to the Arthurian romance, must have felt like a reality. In a 1562 survey of his estates, Pembroke's surveyor, after discussing the “free” tenants (those who owed the manor no duties) and the “customary” tenants (those whose lives were ruled by the custom of the manor), asked “which of them could be tallaged [taxed] as serfs
ratione sanguinis nativi
” by reason of their native blood. It was still legitimate in 1560s England to ask whether the ownership of a manor and a piece of land involved the ownership of human beings who came attached to that land as soil-bound slaves.

Pembroke's name in England and Wales was surrounded by a halo of violence and power. In 1556, one Thomas White, arrested and interrogated by the Council, reported a conversation he'd heard secretly one evening in an inn with a man called Ashton. Ashton had said

This muttered, half-obscure, secretive talk feels like the last words of the Middle Ages, of great armed power barons stalking the land and holding the central authorities for ransom. That January, Pembroke received a special commission to levy troops for Mary's defense of Calais, a thousand from Wiltshire, a thousand from North Wales, and a thousand from South Wales, by far the largest commission given to any nobleman in the country. He was a figure unthinkable in the modern world, a man too powerful for the state not to use. He had been part of a cabal that had rewritten Henry VIII's will in its own interest. He had helped destroy Edward VI's trusted councillor and protector. He had elevated Lady Jane Grey to the throne and had then destroyed her. Due largely to his support, the English political class had accepted the Catholic queen Mary as she entered London. And he had saved her, by commanding the streets of the city, from the highly dangerous rebellion of Thomas Wyatt and his Protestant bands. Four English sovereigns in a row had, in their different ways, been reliant on Pembroke's goodwill and ability to summon threat.
He had inserted himself like a virus into the body politic of England. This was not so much a quarrel with the crown as a commandeering of it.

Still, for all this potency, the old Wiltshire nobility knew exactly who he was. They treated him as a parvenu. His servants and those of the old lord Stourton, part of the ancient nobility of Wiltshire, brawled in the villages and in the streets of both Salisbury and London over the meaning of
nobility
. The stories were still current in the seventeenth century when Aubrey heard them. Whenever Lord Stourton was returning home from the assizes in Salisbury, his way ran straight past the gates of Wilton. The old man would never lose the opportunity to “sound his Trumpetts and give reproachfull challenging words: 'twas a relique of Knighthood Errantry.”