Quarrel with the King

Adam Nicolson

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061980350
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica moderna

Spanning the most turbulent and dramatic years of English history—from the 1520s through 1650— Quarrel with the King tells the remarkable saga of one of the greatest families in English history, the Pembrokes, following their glamorous trajectory across three generations of change, ambition, resistance, and war. With vivid color and fascinating detail, acclaimed historian Adam Nicolson recounts the story of a century-long power struggle between England's richest family and the English Crown—a fascinating study of divided loyalties, corruption, rights and privilege, and all the ambiguities involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status.

Chapter 1

THE LONG ROAD TO CIVIL WAR

1540–1650

In this book a great family, one of the richest and most glamorous of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, pursues a long arc of ambition, success, failure, and collapse. It is not an exclusively private story, because the family—the earls of Pembroke, their wives, children, and dependents—was deeply involved, for over a hundred years, in the central concerns of England. They saw themselves, in many ways, as an alternative to royalty. In their great house at Wilton, near Salisbury, they could entertain the king and his court as though welcoming them to a different state. They controlled tens of thousands of England’s most beautiful acres, and still more in Wales, and many thousands of tenants and followers. Land, money, politics, art, and patronage were their realms. They could summon armies and, through them, impose their wills. They could gather vote-changing clusters of politicians in both houses of Parliament. As England’s greatest patrons, they could sponsor poetry, plays, paintings, houses, gardens, and landscapes, all of which proclaimed their virtues, their fortitude, their antiquity, and their worth. Another England belonged to the Pembrokes, an older and premodern country set against almost everything the modern state hoped to impose upon it.

For a century, from about 1540 onward, this family maintained a long, simmering quarrel with the king, one that flickered across the decades, part opposition, part seduction, part manipulation, and part denial. Only, finally, in the 1640s did it erupt in civil war, a dreadful and destructive conflict that released into the towns, villages, and highways of England precisely the anarchy and violence the country had dreaded for so long. The basis of the quarrel was power, a struggle between a government that needed and wanted to concentrate ever more authority in itself and its agents, and the ancient nobility of England—or at least those such as the Pembrokes, who saw themselves in that light and who thought of their role as the guardians of an ancient and balanced community of which they were the head and whose integrity the newly assertive, power-grabbing crown was disrupting and breaking.

It is a premodern story but there are many modern echoes in it: Was government a question of agreement and respect? Or authority and compulsion? What status did traditional rights have in a changing world? Did an emergency mean those rights could be ignored or overturned? Or was an emergency precisely the time when rights should be respected? This is not the usual, modern tale of freedoms struggling to assert themselves against an ancient and intolerant authority. The Pembrokes’ story is the opposite of that: a long rearguard action by provincial grandees who found their ancient power, and the ancient independence of the communities they governed, under threat. In that way, this story is about the end of an old world, not the making of a new one. Almost every aspect of the Pembrokes’ view of themselves was retrospective: old family, old authority, old ways of being, old values. And nearly every aspect of what they hated was new: new men, new money, new forms of authority, the new demands of the modern world.

The Pembrokes had no interest in individual freedom, only in the maintenance of their position as power brokers, with access to all the sources of money and authority they considered their due. But they were astute, and the need to survive and thrive in the modern world, combined with their energy and appetite, inevitably meant a complex engagement with that world. These “grandeez and gloriosoes” of Renaissance England were deeply embroiled in the court world from which they felt such distance. They were rebels, but they were also courtiers. For year after year, they sucked money from the crown they despised. Generation after generation carefully manoeuvred for influence and the ear of the king. Few families, in fact, managed so adroitly to surf the successive waves of royal power and favor. Each wave they caught brought another gush and surge of cash and influence. That, in fact, is their central paradox: nearly everything they had came from the king, but the more they had, the more they could afford to oppose him. The Pembrokes came to look like the ultimate cavaliers, but in the end they would be parliamentarian. At different times, they both threatened the crown and acted as its bruisingly efficient and violent agents. These were rebels not to be found plotting in a dimly lit garret but either dancing in the candlelit halls and delicious arbors of royal pleasure or actually commanding royal armies and sponsoring royal display. They were, in other words, highly ambivalent figures: flag carriers for an ancient England and time servers in some of the most corrupt courts England has ever known. The sense of distance between the Pembrokes and the crown, of the quarrel itself, was never quite absent but only rarely showed its fully naked face. It could be said that this book is a study in the ambiguity necessarily involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status.

 

A simple act of curiosity lies behind my writing it. Many years ago, I was walking through the beautiful valley of the Nadder, in Wiltshire, in southern England, a cool and lovely clearwater stream that makes its way between the chalk downs on either side. The trout and grayling were flickering in the shallows, and bunches of meadowsweet were flowering on the banks. Just to the east of Salisbury, the river slides past the garden of Wilton House. I had been walking all day and, still in my heavy boots, I paid for my ticket, entered the house without quite knowing what to expect, and found myself in the greatest sequence of seventeenth-century rooms in England. It was a revelatory moment. I suddenly understood how wonderful a palace in the trees could be, the meaning of provincial, non-urban, exquisitely refined power.

Wilton’s climax, one of the central moments of English culture, is the huge saloon known in the seventeenth century as the “great Dining-roome, or Roome of State,” now called the Double Cube. It is thirty feet wide, thirty high, and sixty long—Palladian proportions, created here, almost certainly by Inigo Jones, in the 1630s. But the decoration is so rich that the harmonics of the room nearly disappear beneath it. Carved swags, gilded encrustations, and suspended pompoms hang from the walls. There is a vast fruitiness to it all; apples, peaches, and pears drip from every surface. Nothing is held back. It is grand but it is friendly grand. A giant cove, painted with putti, pan masks, and still more bowls and swags of fruit, reaches up to the ceiling. Around the marble fireplace, mannerist motifs—broken pediments, swagged consoles—jostle with the gilded statues of Bacchus and Ceres, the god and goddess of country riches. The whole complex is a shrine to fertility, a space designed for enjoyment, an arrival.

I stood there excited, bowled over by the completeness of this hidden, ancient world. But there was more: this climax of a glamour-thick room had its own climax within it. On the west wall is an enormous portrait of the family who owned and created it. Seventeen feet wide and ten deep, it is the largest painting ever made by Van Dyck, a joint portrait of the 4th Earl of Pembroke and his children. Each of the ten figures it portrays is just larger than lifesize and they dominate, as they were meant to, the gilded space in front of them. The portrait was painted in the late winter of 1634 or the spring of 1635, and it shows the Pembroke family at the sunniest and most optimistic moment of their existence. It is a wedding picture, the forerunner to and perfect model for tens of millions of paintings and photographs in the centuries to come. The oldest surviving son, fifteen-year-old Charles, Lord Herbert, in scarlet, was to marry a young heiress, the twelve-year-old Mary Villiers, who was to bring to the marriage a dowry of £25,000, roughly equivalent to two thousand years’ wages of a Wiltshire shepherd.

Above them, the three dead children of the family, with garlands of roses in their hands, float on clouds as putti. The younger brothers to the left and the older sister with her husband to the right, the elegant bronzed cavalier Earl of Carnarvon, surround the Earl and Countess of Pembroke, who sit centrally, facing us, as if king and queen.

The painting is full of grace and aristocratic poise, of riches at ease with themselves, of what now would be called privilege and was then considered nobility. You can’t help but stand back and gaze at its beauties as I did that afternoon. It exudes a distant and forgotten handsomeness, an abandoned world of elegance and power, neither stiff nor louche but regal and familial. But there is something not quite settled about the painting. As you look at it a little harder, that atmosphere becomes a bit uncertain. It is not blankly smug as an eighteenth-century depiction of a great family might be; nor assertive and singular as it might have been a century earlier. Inside this painting’s grace are hints of anxiety and melancholy, of a world teetering on collapse, of love thwarted and happiness denied, of ambivalence as the companion of glamour.

I looked at these people, so distant and so present, in the very rooms they would have known and loved, near the great series of south windows over the valley of the Nadder, where they would undoubtedly have ridden and played. As I stood there, I wanted, above all, to hear them speak. What did they believe in? What led this family to its prominence? What did the signals in the painting mean? Why was that woman holding a pearl between her fingers? Why did that man dabble his fingers with hers? What were the implications of the strange space they were in, half public, half private, half on display, half acting out a set of hidden relationships? And what would become of them in the cataclysm of civil war that would overtake England within seven years of the painting’s being finished?

The room stewards had to usher me out of the house as closing time approached, but I knew I would return, and over the last two years I have been able to plunge myself knee-and elbow-deep into the world of the Pembrokes. I soon realized that this was a world hinged to inheritance, to what the past had given it. I knew that to understand the figures in the painting, I had to go back to their grandfather, a violent and bruisingly ruthless figure in Tudor England, the 1st Earl of Pembroke, who acquired Wilton in the 1540s. More than that, though, I had to explore the world surrounding their beautiful painting: the luxurious saloon, the perfect lawns, the sliding river, the woods, fields, and villages extending from here to the horizon, all of which they owned. The Wilton landscape and the social structures embedded in it were intimately connected to their most cherished beliefs. To understand the painting, I had to understand the world in which it was made.

The story of this family, their manoeuvrings and struggles, tracks the history of Renaissance England. Tudor Wilton was a place of brutalist display. Elizabethan Wilton was the home of Sir Philip Sidney and his dazzling sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, who created here the dream of Arcadia, that perfect world where strife was over and turmoil done. Mary’s sons William and Philip were very probably the lovers, respectively, of Shakespeare and James I, and the promoters, from the 1610s to the 1640s, of a vision of England that looked back to a more beautiful and happier time, before the corruptions, ambitions, and squalor of the Stuart court had destroyed it. Everything Shakespeare and Sidney wrote about the possibilities of a finer world found its embodiment here. Wilton became the headquarters for its own brand of Arcadian idealism, the early, aristocratic progenitor of communal and environmental ideas that set itself against the dirty, hungry power plays of city, crown, and court in Whitehall.

Few families can have had such a powerfully heritable culture. In a remarkable act of continuity, the Pembrokes transmitted their conservative, Arcadian idealism from generation to generation, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters each playing their part for more than a hundred years. Central to their idealism was the belief that the beautiful world over which they presided did not rely for its meanings on the state. They were not in the condition of servants to the king. Far from it: they represented virtues the crown and court knew little of. That was the most intriguing aspect of all: these beautiful people in their silks and their glimmering cavalier hair turned against the king in the 1640s. The great painting by Van Dyck was a picture not of conformity and settlement but of a family that had rebellion—and a longing for a better world—burning in their hearts.

Chapter 2

THE MAKING OF THE PEMBROKES

1527–1546

The man who would become the 1st Earl of Pembroke was as tough, powerful, and cynical, and his wife as serious and high-minded, as anyone in sixteenth-century England. Together, they embodied the two streams of Tudor life: the untrammeled brokering of power through violence, threat, and political flexibility, and the cleansing of the mind through education and integrity. William Herbert and his wife Anne were the rootstock of the Wilton Arcadia: its necessary power; its longing for goodness.

William Herbert was a Welsh hardman. He may not have been able to read and could scarcely write his own name—those signatures of his that survive, in an age of sometimes exquisite handwriting, waver and wobble from one letter to the next, unable to distinguish lower from upper case, not even pursuing a straight line across the page, but intent on a flourish here and there, the writing of a bear—a bear with pretensions—into whose paw someone has thrust a pen. According to John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century gossip, Herbert was “strong sett, but bony, reddish favoured, of a sharpe eie, sterne looke” and his portraits confirm that stark, bullish quality, depicting his feet planted four square beneath him, his eyes cold, his impatient face scarcely connected to the finery in which he has been dressed, one hand holding gloves but ready for the sword, the other clasping the staff of office as if it were a stick he might hit someone with. Everything is fixed, obdurate, immovable; the man is as substantial as the material world to which his life and passions are directed. Herbert was the acquirer of riches and the founder of a dynasty. The Elizabethan historian William Camden called him “an excellent man, who was in a manner, the Raiser of his own Fortunes,” and Aubrey, “of good naturall parts, but very colorique.” He was an English condottiere whose hatchet mouth and unforgiving eye founded a dynasty. Spirit barely flickered inside him. He was no Arcadian, but without him Arcadia could not have flowered.

Neither William Herbert nor his descendants wanted to see themselves as arrivistes. They wanted to look as if they had always been at the heart of significance, and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Pembrokes did their best to cover up some slightly flaky origins. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had been entirely Welsh. Not until the late fifteenth century were they even called Herbert. (No one knows where the name came from.) Instead, out of the mists of Wales and time emerged Jenkyn ap Adam, who begat Gwylym ap Jenkyn, who begat Thomas ap Gwylym, who married Gladwys, the Star of Abergavenny (her dowry was a park full of deer), and together they begat William ap Thomas, who took a large body of Welsh archers to Agincourt in 1415. His son, Gwilym Ddu, “Black Will,” marauded and burned his way across England in support of the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and as his reward was made Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV. This slashingly successful warrior, the first Welshman to become an English peer, who for years ran the whole of Wales as his fiefdom, had several illegitimate children, one of whom, Richard, had as his lordship the poor, steep Vale of Ewyas in the Black Mountains, a place that is still full of small, edge-of-subsistence farms, houses pushed into the hillside, heart-stopping beauty, and unrelenting rain.

No one could ever imagine that Ewyas was the threshold of power, but it is the place from which the young William Herbert, Richard’s second son, emerged to conquer his world. From a modern perspective, it is not surprising as a background to a tough, violent, imposing, and driven life—a grandfather of heroic proportions, a near-fatal lack of social standing, the stain of illegitimacy, and the fate of the second son: disinheritance even from his father’s small patrimony.

That essentially meritocratic view was not how it was seen at the time. When William Herbert was finally made Earl of Pembroke in 1551, he did not boast his climb to power, nor call himself the “1st Earl.” There was no honor in that. As far as he was concerned, he was the 20th Earl of Pembroke, heir in line direct to the previous nineteen, of nine different creations, who had battled their way across the Middle Ages. It was the grandest of inheritances. The pretentious George Owen, Elizabethan antiquarian and remote relation of the Herberts, whom Owen adulated, was still relishing the ancient power of the earls of Pembroke in the late sixteenth century. The earldom of Pembroke, Owen wrote, “was in auncient tyme a County Palatine,” not subject to any king’s power. The earl “had the commanding and leading of all the people of his country to make warres at his pleasure. He had within his Country nine castles of his owne and twelve seigniories or manors which were parcell of his Countye…”

In an era of increasing bureaucratization of government, and an emasculation of the old magnates of medieval England, there was a frisson to this manly independence, which a mere created earl or baron could scarcely rival. It is not surprising that any memory of the illegitimacy of William Herbert’s father was quietly soothed away. Here was a man conducting his life as a power-broking baron in the mold of his ancestors.

What Owen does not mention in his catalogue of honor is that the first time this William Herbert made his mark on the world, it was as a murderer. His father had died in 1510 when William was three, and the boy went to live in the household of his relation by marriage, the Earl of Worcester. Worcester was a warrior, administrator, diplomat, and the great producer and showman of Henry VIII’s court. He was responsible for the tournament ground and pasteboard palaces set up for the meeting of Henry VIII and François I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the summer of 1520. It was Worcester who arranged for five thousand people to be shipped across the Channel to France to organize this event. Vast quantities of timber and glass were brought to the site. Three hundred knights took part in the tournament, over which Worcester himself presided as one of the judges. William Herbert, aged thirteen, was at his side, as his page, learning the intimacy of power and glory.

Worcester died on April 25, 1526, and that year William Herbert appears as a “gentleman pensioner” at the court of Henry VIII. It was the lowest rung of court life. One could be a gentleman pensioner and still be thrown into jail for debt or be arrested on suspicion of treason, but it was the necessary first step on the road to significance. But then Herbert’s career came adrift. On midsummer’s eve 1527, a time for drinking and feasting, bonfires, high spirits, sex, and violence, there was an incident in Bristol, the great seaport already spreading its networks to the New World, that might have destroyed him.

The mayor of Bristol, a man known as Thomas or “Davy” Broke and later described by the hostile protestant preacher George Wishart as “a knave and gorbely [fat] knave,” together with his “brethren”—perhaps “that droncken Gervys, that lubber Antony Payne, & slovyn William...