Quarrel with the King (16 page)

His answer was to send Wharton his sword by a messenger and ask him “to take the measure of the Sword, for the earl would not take one hair's breadth of advantage at his hands.” They were to meet, alone, the following morning. William Pembroke's life might have ended there, but the king had heard of the argument and by his command no duel was fought.

Status anxiety, a man's honor endlessly under negotiation, a rivalry between Scots and English, a tense world in which tennis games, the hunting field, the racecourse, gambling, women, your relationship to the king, the chair one was given at dinner—all provided arenas in which offense might be taken and violence done. The king's habit of showering honors on his favorites and selling titles to the rich, whatever their background, served only to exacerbate the sense among the old aristocracy that the bonds of society, the old certainties were under threat. A frenzy of dueling and gambling overtook the court, as though honor and luck had constantly to be demonstrated. Courtiers would bet on which of their footmen could run fastest from St. Albans to London, on whether the king of Spain would turn Protestant (long odds there), and of course on horses, cocks, and dogs. At every stage, offense waited in the wings. Of the two brothers, Philip, in the less established and more vulnerable position, was more likely to turn to violence. Even though he had a lifelong habit, which would finally
erupt in a fateful contretemps on the eve of civil war, of hitting his fellow courtiers, he had no greater reputation for violence than any other. The culture had turned febrile.

William Pembroke was rich enough and secure enough not to need to engage in this posturing. The illegitimacy in his ancestry had long been forgotten. Without any effort, he could act the easy dignified noble of ancient lineage and vast wealth, independent of the sometimes desperate market in favors and standing at court. He was known in particular for his generosity. When the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Gervas Elways (or Elwes), was hanged for his part in the famous murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, the Elwes estate, worth more than £1,000 a year, came to Pembroke. But without hesitation, William gave it away to Elwes's widow and children. Ben Jonson described how his “noblesse keeps one stature still, / And one true posture, though besieged with ill.” That dignified, unshowy self-possession is how Mytens painted William, and it is exactly the tone of Clarendon's later portrayal:

In that way, the two incomparable brethren were aligned on either side of the great cultural fault line of the age: William, the earl, stand
ing on his own dignity and ancient wealth, loved in the country, able to look the succession of favorites in the eye without fear or favor, a hero for passionate Protestants and intellectuals, a man of words; Philip, of no great intellectual dignity, delightful where his brother could be “accounted melancholy,” fascinated by the visual and physical aspects of culture, a creature of the very court culture of which William remained at least in part skeptical and removed.

For both William, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, the tournaments or barriers that were held at court, and the dazzlingly expensive masques that were part of the same culture of courtly theatricality, were some of the principal stages on which this complex of attitudes could be displayed. In the usual interfolding of inheritances, much of Jacobean court culture derived from the Sidneyan court-critical world. The
Arcadia
itself is full of the fantasia of Elizabethan medievalism, knights in armor that was “blew, like the heauen,” shields showing “a greyhound, which ouerrunning his fellow, and taking the hare, yet hurts it not when it takes it.” Others were “armed in a white armour, which was al guilded ouer with knots of womans haire, which came downe from the crest of his head-peece, & spred it selfe in rich quantitie ouer all his armour”; some “all in greene, both armour and furniture, it seemed a pleasant garden, wherein grew orange trees; which with their golden fruites, cunningly beaten in, and embrodered, greatly enriched the eye-pleasing colour of greene.” On his shield, the green knight had “a sheep, feeding in a pleasant field, with this word,
Without feare, or enuie
. And therefore was called the Knight of the sheep.” His opponent “was all in milke white, his attiring els, all cutte in stares.” Even now one can sense the shudder of romance that these images of a purified, distant, idealized, meaning-drenched world sent through the Elizabethan and Jacobean imagination.

As descendants and carriers of that tradition, the Herbert brothers
appeared in tournament after tournament and masque after masque. It was a world that was from the beginning deeply connected to the imagery of Arcadian and rural retreat.
The Masque of Blackness
, in 1605, in which Susan de Vere and Pembroke's cousin (and mistress) Lady Mary Wroth both danced, opened with a curtain showing a hunt making its way through the woods. In that masque, as in the many that followed over the next thirty-five years, the pattern unfolded of disorder turning to order, or sometimes of order falling into disorder followed by an even more cosmic level of order. This was the story with which for decades the court, at quite enormous expense, consoled itself. Everything would be all right in the end. There was a higher and a better reality, removed from the grubbiness of the everyday, and none were better qualified to embody it than these dancing nobles. Nobility was fineness, and they were the vehicles for it. It could take any number of forms—medieval or classical, martial or pastoral, exotic or ancient—but the story was always the same: the lives they were leading, and the people they were, held within them the possibility of distinction.

So high were these ideals—the masques were not exactly stories, but glittering enactments of the nobility latent in this world—that money was irrelevant. In the wedding masque called
Hymenaei
, staged on January 5, 1606, in which both Susan, Countess of Montgomery, and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, danced their parts as masquers, one John Pory, a poor Greek scholar, looked on in amazement:

As citizens of Arcadia, they had their hair “carelessly (but yet with more art than if more affected) bound under the circle of a rare and rich coronet.” Naturalness was virtue. The sequins and silver thread sewn into their costumes glittered under the massed candlelight. The metal-thread lace—silver for the great, copper for the lesser masquers—chevronned all over the costumes, caught the highlights from the candelabra. All this combined with the glamour and exoticism of Inigo Jones's Italian-derived costumes to amaze the court audience among whom the masquers, at the climax of the performance, would descend to dance, blurring and even erasing any boundary between the imagined, perfect world of the masque and the world of the court itself.

Alongside the masquing came the tournaments, twenty-seven of them staged at court between 1604 and the moment when the tradition came to an end in 1622. Philip Montgomery was often the star. On June 1, 1606, four Knights Errant of the Fortunate Islands (the king's cousin the Duke of Lennox and the earls of Southampton, Pembroke, and Montgomery) issued a universal challenge: “To all honourable Men at Arms, Knights Adventurers of hereditary note and exemplary nobleness, that for most maintainable actions do wield either sword or lances in the quest of glory.” They had “four indisputable propositions” to defend:

1. That in the service of Ladies no knight have free will.
   
2. That it is Beauty maintains the world in Valour.
   
3. That no fair Lady was ever false.
   
4. That none can be perfectly wise but Lovers.
   

It was pure Philip Sidney, even if denuded of its political burden. At the barriers staged for the knighting of the young Protestant Henry, Prince of Wales, on Twelfth Night 1610, Philip Montgomery won the prize. The show began against a Jonesian backdrop in which medieval
and classical architectural elements were jumbled together, portraying “the fallen House of Chivalry” where Chivalry was “Possessed with sleep, dead as a lethargy.” Inevitably, the antics of Philip and the other youngbloods of the court restored it to full life. No expense was spared. The skills of trumpeters, silk merchants, painters of the shields, chariot makers, bit makers, and cutlers were employed to work the silver velvet into caparisons for the horses; to make dresses for pages and grooms; to devise subclassical, mannerist designs for the helmets descended from Cellini, with cumulus clouds of ostrich feathers above them; to build tents like caves or castles; to prepare lamp bearers dressed as centurions; and even at one point to introduce an elephant covered in its own jewelled cloth and castle, which trundled around the tiltyard too slowly for any sense of drama to survive.

The masques were, for all their materiality, an escaping of the material world. There was a bewitching fluency in Jones's designs, a sense for the first time in English draughtsmanship that the dross of existence was being left behind. These entertainments were not dramas, just as the almost obsessively repeated hunting expeditions were not acting out anything except reality. As the hunt was theatrical but not fictional, and as the park was a kind of dreamland but one that could be owned, the masque was a theater of the real, a making visible of the highest of ideals.

But this community of honor was not mere playacting. It had its political dimension. Even in the first decade of James's reign, a political and cultural grouping began to form around the Pembrokes, and the Sidneys, that was opposed to the cynical, passionless, unidealistic managerialism of the Cecils. This informal opposition cherished, if perhaps underground, a resistance to autocracy and a belief in the possibilities of an Arcadian ideal. It was deeply retrospective. In the early years of James's reign, after his brief honeymoon was over, there was a feeling that the great moment of Englishness had gone. Sidney
was dead; Leicester and Essex, his heirs, were both dead; Elizabeth was dead; and who had they all been succeeded by but simpering minions and a Scots king, “the cold northern breath,” as the poet Michael Drayton, a Pembroke client, described him. For Drayton, only among people like Samuel Daniel and Sir William Alexander—both also Pembroke clients—was there any continuity, any hope for the virtue of England. There you could find “men from base enuy and detraction free / of vpright harts and humble spirits.” The freewheeling materialism of Jacobean England, the vivid corruption of the court, the opening of the royal shopping center, Britain's Bourse, on the Strand, drove these cultural conservatives into an embattled place where purity was longed for. Much of the hope focused on the young Henry, Prince of Wales, who promised to be a martial champion of English virtue, unlike his soft, peace-obsessed, degenerate, boyfriend-dabbling father.

Pembroke might have become the natural leader of this party, but at least as a young man in his twenties he did not have the drive. “For his person he was not effectual,” Francis Bacon said of him, and his political programme suffered from drift. Others claimed the center of royal attention and policy. None was more successful than a young Frenchified Scots page called Robert Carr, who managed to break his leg at a tilt in front of a solicitous King James, who nursed him to health and taught him Latin while lying on his sickbed. Carr soon climbed on to the escalator of Jacobean favor: a knighthood, the viscountcy of Rochester, the earldom of Somerset, manors, lands, and the scattering of golden pennies that in the words of Thomas Dekker, the great satirist of the age, made “spangle babies of them all.” Finally, in July 1614, the king made Robert Carr, Lord Chamberlain, the man in charge of the royal household, the hinge between royal favor and royal favorites, “because he would bestow a place so near himself on the friend whom he loved above all men living.”

The rise of the Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, was a defeat not only for Herbert interests—Montgomery was at the same time quietly eased out of the glow of royal kindness—but for the Protestant interest as a whole. Carr was closer to the pro-Catholic, pro-Spanish interest at court. The fortunes of the Sidney-Herbert party were at low ebb. But Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, Earl of Somerset, was to experience a fall as rapid as his rise. He arranged with the king for Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, part of the fiercely pro-Spanish Howard family, with whom he had fallen in love, to be granted a divorce from her husband, the Earl of Essex, on the publicly humiliating grounds that the poor earl could not get an erection when in bed with her. The trial was fixed, the Earl of Essex exposed to ridicule, and the divorce granted. Carr then married Frances himself. At their wedding she appeared with “her hair long over her shoulders in brazen token of her virginity.”