Quarrel with the King (23 page)

T
HE
P
ERFECTING OF
W
ILTON
1630–1640

T
he story has at last returned to the great Van Dyck family portrait at Wilton, which takes its place in a period that, at least on the surface, had been full of contentment. England in the 1630s then, Lord Clarendon would later write in his silky Augustan phrasemaking, had been “the garden of the world,” blessed with “the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age, for so long time together, have been blessed with,” enjoying “a full, entire undisturbed peace,” glowing in “the general composure of men's minds.” Compared with the situation in Europe, where Germany in the Thirty Years' War, was “weltering in its own blood,” Great Britain was a haven of civility. Scotland was at peace, Ireland had been “reduced to profitable husbandry,” England was rich, “flourishing with learned and extraordinary men,” where government revenue was higher than ever, the navy stronger, the king “the greatest example of sobriety, chastity and mercy that any prince hath been endowed with.” England
was “a pleasant promontory” from which the general grief of Europe could be surveyed.

After the death of William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, Wilton and its world became the property of his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery. In the eyes of many, Philip scarcely measured up to the great tradition. He may have been named after Philip Sidney, his godfather, but he was no poet, no politician, and no great speaker. He was gruff where his brother had been steady and dignified. He had a reputation for violence. He was addicted to hunting. He wasn't very clever. More than that, though, he was a court man, a friend of Buckingham and of the Villiers clan. The Pembroke adherents were all full of one question: Would Philip, the 4th or 23rd Earl of Pembroke, maintain the tradition? Would he fight for the dream of a better England against a crown at whose table he had supped for decades?

The answer to that question lies in two parts: during the 1630s, Philip Pembroke served his king; only after the catastrophic turn of events in 1642 did he turn against him. He would become the rebel earl, and the grounds on which he rebelled were precisely those on which his family had based their position for so long. The Pembrokes had a dignity not to be slighted. They believed in the organic wholeness of the ancient constitution. The behavior of the new men—with new counsels surrounding Charles—supplanting the ancient nobility, was not to be tolerated. The rebellion, when it came, would be a profoundly conservative act.

Little of that appeared on the surface in 1630. When Philip inherited Wilton, he looked like a king's man to the core, and without hesitation, in public, the serious men who had gathered around his brother began to apply the pressure. A sermon was delivered at Baynard's Castle in late April 1630, preached on the life and legacy of the earl who had just died. It was the work of a Jacobean divine called Thomas Chaffinge, born in about 1581, of whom little else is known. The words of his sermon, “The Iust Mans Memoriall,” ring out like a summons to
seriousness, a sudden revelation, under the surface of court intrigue, money and manipulation, of an intense and radical Protestant agenda. It was a pointer to the fact that this family was not merely, like the Earl of Carlisle, let alone the Duke of Buckingham, engaged in self-enrichment and self-promotion. The Protestant inheritance from the time of Philip Sidney remained a moral imperative for them. Chaffinge's sermon, in magnificent, old-fashioned Jacobean language, reads like the voice of their consciences speaking.

In the printed version, Chaffinge began with an “Epistle Dedicatory,” addressed to Philip. Seventeenth-century England sanctioned truth telling, whether from the dwarf fools who played at court and who even went on diplomatic missions or from preachers; divine authority allowed them to step beyond the bounds of deference. Chaffinge addressed Philip directly:

This was the burden of inheritance: to have William Pembroke, the wise moral statesman, as a brother and Philip Sidney, the warrior on behalf of virtue, as an uncle was both a spur and a goad.

There was an implication here, not stated, but clearly understated, that Philip was not good enough. He had the genetic background, he could certainly be charming, but did he have the moral backbone? Was he not an indulger of physical and material passions?

That was the puritan paradox: never more elevated than when self-abasing, and never more heightened than when dealing with the great of the world, whose elevation was exceptionally fragile:

Anyone listening to this, with the memory in their mind of what happened to the Duke of Buckingham, would have experienced a shimmer of schadenfreude, a form of aesthetic and moral pleasure at the con
ventions of courtly life being so ruthlessly stripped away. The life of worldliness at court would always be anxious at its own instability; both God and Arcadia provided a refuge from it. That elision of categories is exactly what Chaffinge then embraced, drawing on the botany of the Bible, looking around him at the next generation of Herberts gathered in Baynard's Castle, and from the sound of it, knowing exactly the look and atmosphere of Wilton. William, the dead earl, was not dead.

Chaffinge, once he had opened this vein of Arcadian Protestantism in his sermon, went on to explore and exploit it. England was anxious. It was like “a darke, cold, stormy tempestuous night.” Wouldn't anyone envy William the dead man his peace? He was like a man “a-bed and asleepe,” while the rest of us were “vp and awake,” suffering the storms and troubles of existence. There was a possibility that “the abomination of desolation, the idol of the Masse” would appear again in England. There was even the prospect of civil war again in England “of Ensigne borne against Ensigne, and Crosse against Crosse.” But William, lucky man, would see none of it.

The whole Herbert family would have been in the congregation listening to Chaffinge's magnificent words. Surrounded by the pomp and glory of Baynard's Castle, they could scarcely have believed what he had to say. They would have loved and not despised the “Elizian Fields and Ayery Paradises” at Wilton, and would not have considered the dazzling collection of paintings that Philip Pembroke was then already gathering as “dung and darknesse.” All flesh may have been grass but was lovely for that; the sermon fell on deaf ears. Philip's Wilton was to be a shrine to beauty, and a particular form of high-minded, Italianate beauty for which Pembroke and the king shared an appetite. Wilton's brand of Arcadianism was clearly descended from the elevated world Philip Sidney had made there fifty years before. For more than ten years, there is no sign whatsoever that the Pembokes had any kind of quarrel with the king.

Philip's upbringing and his frame of mind had been formed in the rumbustious atmosphere of James's court, and at least according to Clarendon, he remained rough in that Jacobean way. Clarendon—his enemy in the Civil War—saw him as a clumsy oaf, a man left over from an earlier age, who got away with his rudeness and stupidity because he was rich and influential. He would make himself look more significant than he was by

This bitter and grudging description of one courtier by another was written many years afterward. Others wrote of Philip's kindness and grace. Even Clarendon, in a passage of his manuscript that he struck out of the published history, confessed that he felt “great kindness for him and was never without a desire to serve him, having been formerly beholding to him for many civilities when there was so great a distance between their conditions.” He was in fact “a man to be relied on in point of honour and fidelity.” Something of the complexity of Philip Herbert's real character emerges from that cancelled aside. He was both a civilized and an angry man.

As Lord Chamberlain he presided over a court that was far more refined and controlled than anything James I's courtiers would have known. Charles was an intensely pious person. He never went hunting in the morning before he had been at public prayers and would not tolerate even the lightest and wittiest of jokes about religion in his presence. A certain chillness had come about the court when he succeeded his father. “He was not in his nature very bountiful,” even the hyper-loyal Clarendon later admitted. “He paused too long in the giving, which made those to whom he gave, less sensible of the benefit.” He insisted on precision and orderliness. He liked quiet. He didn't enjoy
the company of strangers nor of very confident men. Presumptuousness was the ultimate source of failure at the Caroline court, largely perhaps because Charles himself was not intellectually confident. There was a sense of inner weakness about him, which showed itself as stiffness, rigidity. He was, in fact, a cultural puritan, disliking excess or even gaiety, and once saying that the victory in a drinking contest of a particular earl—not named in Clarendon's story—was nothing to be proud of, “that he deserved to be hanged.” Soon afterward, when the earl came “into the room where his Majesty was, in some gayety, to shew how unhurt he was from the battle, the king sent one to bid him withdraw from his Majesty's presence; nor did he in some days after appear before him.”

The ramshackle warren of the old palace at Whitehall, where some two thousand rooms, many of them not redecorated since the 1550s, were surrounded by a labyrinth of closets, garrets, and kitchens, would not have appealed to a king who required clarity, order, propriety, and calm. Nor would the unfailingly public nature of his own existence have satisfied him. One instruction issued by Charles reveals the habits of the Jacobean court he hoped to reform: “None of our bedchamber whatsoever are to follow us into our secret or privy room when we go to ease Ourself, but only our Groom of the Stool.”

All of this means that the geometry of the relationship between Philip Pembroke and the king was complicated. At one level, Philip was a rough old Jacobean, more used to frankness than refinement, precisely not the sort of figure with whom the king felt at ease. Philip also had behind him the old Pembroke tradition of maintaining a critical distance from the luxuries of court, a distance Chaffinge and others were urging him to maintain. Against that, it was of course significant that Philip and the king had been brought up together. They had known each other all their lives. They also shared a deep love of
Italian art. When opening deliveries of paintings from his agents in Italy, Charles chose to have Philip alongside him (with Inigo Jones and others) to judge the paintings' quality, something the king had never done with William Pembroke.

It was a relationship in which intimacy and distance were sewn tightly together. The ambivalences within it can be seen as a reflection of something larger: of the Pembrokes' long relationship to the crown, and more than that of what had happened to the idea of Arcadia in the fifty years since Philip Sidney wrote his romance at Wilton. Arcadia had begun as a covert attack on courtliness and tyranny. But in the intervening years, the court itself had adopted Arcadia. By the 1630s, withdrawal from court to a life of (imagined) Arcadian purity, a return to the goodness of the old world, was something enthusiastically embraced by the king and court. The anti-courtly drive of Arcadianism was itself a courtly phenomenon, never more central to courtliness than in the prewar years of Charles's reign. Throughout the early seventeenth century, proclamations had been made “commanding the repaire of Noblemen, knights and gentlemen of qualitie, unto their mansion houses in the Country, there to attend their services, and keepe Hospitalitie.” Just as the coherence of the kingdom depended on the largesse of the king, the workings of the country required the hospitality of the great lords in what was called their “countries.” The urgency of these appeals heightened under Charles.