Quarrel with the King Read online

  Could the foundations of power in an English country house ever have been quite so graphically displayed? By the time an inventory was made of the house in 1683, there was both a “new” and an “old” armory. The new had some pistols, blunderbusses, bullet molds, and “bullet guns” stored in it, but the old armory spoke of an earlier world. Piles of muskets, too many for the surveyor to count, were in there among the “hollster pistols” and “bandiloes” (broad belts from which a heavy weapon could be slung). Alongside them, 26 bills (hooks to be used for slashing at hedges or men), 20 “holboards” (halberds, a combination of axe and spear on the end of a seven-foot-long pole), 260 pikes, 92 other pikes, and most chillingly of all, “dog chains.”

  Outside the door, this hardman established his own Arcadia. A garden was made with walks, fishponds, and fruit trees and a stable built for eighty horses. The abbey’s dovecote, forge, mill, and giant grange for the grain rents from the estate were all left standing. The entire village of Washerne, across the Nadder from the site of the abbey, as well as the vicarage of Bulbridge, were enclosed in a new park and demolished. What had been both common land (the open fields) and “several” land (closes belonging to individuals) was shut up in the park and denied to the people who had farmed it “time out of mind.” Herbert planted a copse and an avenue of trees where the people of Washerne had previously grown their food. The avenue would later be called Sir Philip Sidney’s Walk, as it was there he would stroll, composing the Arcadia. Within the park, among the “diverse et pulchre perambulaciones,” as a surveyor in 1562 described it, half English, half Latin, Herbert built “unum Standinge” (a platform) “in quo dominus stare potest ad super vivendum diversa loca pro placito suo” (in which the lord can stand so that he can overlook the various places for his pleasure).

  Those few actions, and the few sentences used to describe them, represent the conflict of the two Arcadias. The ancient abbey is destroyed; a palace is built in its place; the poor have their ancient rights kicked away and their houses demolished; and a beautiful stretch of parkland, adorned with trees and pleasure buildings, is installed where the poor’s ancestors had lived. The purpose is “pro placito suo,” to calm the great man’s troubled mind and to provide the Lord with an easing vision of prelapsarian bliss.

  The pleasure park erased the custom of the manor. It wasn’t done entirely illegally. Where lands were taken from common grazing, or even from the open field, and enclosed in a park (Herbert would have seven parks in all by the 1560s, and employed a full-time “Regarder,” whose job was to travel round the parks to see that all was well), the peasants received compensation, usually in the form of lowering of rents or a relaxation of the services due to the lord. At Wilton, a seven-acre field called Lampeland was enclosed in Herbert’s park. In compensation for its loss, Herbert no longer required the villagers of Washerne to pay seven shillings and eightpence every year for a marsh or meadow called Woodmersh.

  That is all very well, but in a system where pressure on food and resources was tight, and where the balance of arable land with hay-growing meadow was finely tuned, removing seven acres of growing ground, not to speak of demolishing houses in a world so deeply dependent for its sense of meaning on the pattern of use of the landscape, was a form of dispossession that went far beyond the removal of an economic asset and resource. Why was it done? Not only to feed the vanity of a Tudor magnate but also to provide a place of peace and calm in a life of extreme anxiety and stress. The sufferings of the villagers of Washerne are a direct product of the tensions and struggles at the Tudor court.

  The silent presence in this life is that of Anne Parr, whose portrait bust appears opposite William Herbert’s on one face of the 1540s porch, said to be designed by Holbein, which still exists today in the Wilton garden. But her voice does not survive in the documents. At least at court one can be sure that she played her part in protecting her sister, the queen, in the great crisis that threatened the Parrs and the future of the English Reformation in the summer of 1546. The sickening and increasingly short-tempered Henry VIII had turned against the revolutionary forces he had unleashed through his break with Rome. In this subtly murderous atmosphere, conservatives at court, led by Bishop Gardiner, had tried to frame Katherine as a radical and a subversive. Agents and spies had rifled through the queen’s apartments looking for proscribed books and pamphlets in cabinets, chests, and drawers. She kept such items, in fact, in the garderobe, and when the threat became too hot, she had them smuggled out to her uncle’s house, only retrieving them after Henry had died. Anne Parr, a passionate believer in the reformed religion and well practiced at secrecy and courtiership, was central to preserving a network of Protestants right at the heart of Whitehall. For a time, in 1546 and 1547, Katherine Parr’s chambers were the center of the English Reformation.

  John Foxe, the great chronicler of that revolution, described the atmosphere in which Anne Parr lived. The queen was

  very much given to the reading and study of the Holy Scriptures, and that she, for the purpose, had retained divers well learned and godly person to instruct her…[and] every day in the afternoon for the space of an hour one of her said chaplains in her privy chamber made some collation to her and her ladies and gentlewomen of her privy chamber, or others that were disposed to hear; in which sermons they ofttimes touched such abuses as in the church then were rife.

  In February 1546, Katherine ordered some new coffers for her chamber, with new locks, metal hinges, corner bands, and handles with nails: the tools of survival. People around her were being picked off by Bishop Gardiner. In May, a young aristocratic protestant, Lord Thomas Howard, was summoned before the Privy Council and charged with “disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with other young gentlemen of the Court.” Later that week it was demanded that he “confess what he said in disproof of sermons preached in Court last Lent and his other talk in the Queen’s chamber and elsewhere in Court concerning Scripture.” Others of her servants, the courtiers, yeomen, and physicians who attended her, were arrested and imprisoned for holding erroneous opinions and engaging in “unseemly reasoning.”

  In the last two weeks of July, Bishop Gardiner attempted to close the trap on the Parrs. According to John Foxe, the protestant martyrologist, Gardiner whispered in the king’s ear that Katherine and her ladies were holding, discussing, and propagating views that even by the king’s own laws were heretical. More than that, “he, with others of his faithful councillors, could within short time, disclose such reasons cloaked with this cloak of heresy, that his majesty could easily perceive how perilous a matter it is, to cherish a serpent within his own bosom…”

  “They rejoice and be glad of my fall,” the queen had written two years earlier in a set of private prayers.

  They be assembled together against me. They strike to kill me in the way before I may beware of them. They gather themselves together in corners. They curse and ban my words everyday, and all their thoughts be set to do me harm. They watch my steps, how they may take my soul in a trap. They do beset my way, that I should not escape. They look and stare upon me. I am so vexed that I am utterly weary.

  The Protestant condition had martyrdom at its heart. Its self-conceived purity was isolated in a world of sinners. A court was a nest of enemies, and only in the sacredness of the soul’s relationship to God was there any refuge. At some level, there was a connection here—one that will run throughout the story of this family—between a Protestant desire for safety away from the failings of the world and the ideal of Arcadian bliss, a place devoted to the demands of love and purity of motive. Protestantism and Arcadianism in that way sat hand in hand, bridging the secular and religious cultures of early modern England. Both were driven by the demand for retreat and for a stilling of the clamor. Each represented an equal and opposite reaction to the disturbance and trauma of modernity, the speeding up of the flywheel, the sense that the world was getting old and corrupt, with beggars on every street and every corner, where inflation and debasement of the currency was rife, simplification was good, the ancient was a refuge, rents did not produce what they had in the past, order was under threat, bread was too expensive, old systems of authority looked creaky and irrelevant, and there was no calm in the world.

  One seventeenth-century Puritan preacher, Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman, saw the grave itself as a gazebo, or a place like the standing in the park at Wilton, as somewhere drenched in peace. “Your Wives, your Husbandes, your Sonnes and Daughters, whose departing you so much lament,” he told a funeral congregation, “are but stept aside into their retiring rooms, their cool Summer-parlours, the shady cool Grove of the Grave to take a little rest by sleep….” Rest, the end of the drama, and silence: Renaissance England wanted nothing more. It is the subject that Hamlet dwelt on again and again: searching for somewhere in which the agony was over, where the flesh that he described either as too solid, too sullied, or too sallied—all three readings are relevant—would at last melt and resolve itself into a dew. Hamlet was a Protestant prince but he was also an Arcadian, at home not in the world of strife to which his ancestors had all belonged, but in the place of reflection and quiet. His soliloquy is itself an Arcadian form.

  The natural end of Gardiner’s plot against Katherine Parr and her circle was the arrest, interrogation, and execution of the queen and those about her. It reached its climax in the first week of August. Gardiner’s men had been into the queen’s apartments. Anne Parr’s closet, as well as those of the other gentlewomen of the chamber, had been searched, but nothing had been found. The books were well away. Nevertheless, Gardiner felt he had enough evidence against her to persuade the king to issue a warrant for her arrest and committal to trial. Katherine guessed nothing, but by chance the warrant, at least according to John
Foxe, fell out of the pocket of her enemy the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley. It was found on the paving stones by one of the queen’s pages, or perhaps by her doctor, and immediately brought to her.

  Her courage left her and she fell into a fit of hysterics, taking to her bed. When the king came to see her, she spoke to him without guile, asking what it might be that she had done wrong. The next day she had recovered, went to him in his chamber, told him she was “a silly poor woman”—meaning not that she was stupid but that she was innocent—and the king was her “only anchor, supreme head and governor here in earth, next unto God, to lean unto.”

  But there was no certainty in this court, and Gardiner continued with his plot to destroy Katherine Parr. She and the king had moved to Hampton Court, and it was there in the first week of August 1546 that the final act was played. Henry, Katherine Parr, Anne Parr, and the other gentlewomen of Katherine’s court were in the Privy Gardens when suddenly, without warning, Wriothesley himself appeared among the gravel walks and box-lined beds. He had forty armed guards with him, and together they approached the royal party. Katherine watched for the king’s reaction. By this stage in Henry’s life, no one could be certain which way he would turn, or which set of loyalties he would respond to. The needle, quite arbitrarily, could flick either way. Would this, as it had been for other queens, be the moment of denial? Or had her confession of weakness and dependence been enough? Her life and future hung in the balance as Wriothesley approached down the gravel paths. But for Henry, there was no hesitation. The king, in an apoplectic rage, took Wriothesley roughly aside and shouted at him. “Knave! Arrant knave! Beast and fool!” Wriothesley was ordered from the palace with his men, and Gardiner’s plot collapsed. The radical Protestant party, of which the Parrs were a central element, would be safe for the rest of the reign, and what the Herberts had, they would keep.

  The first stage was over. William Herbert had wheedled his way into the confidences of the king. His wife, Anne Parr, had with her sister, Queen Katherine, outfaced the Roman Catholic conservatives intent on destroying her. The Herberts were in possession of Wilton but not yet secure enough to pose any threat to the crown. The stain and poverty of William’s illegitimacy had been eased away. The foundations were being laid for future glory, and Wilton was to be its theater.

  Chapter 3

  A COUNTREY OF LANDS AND MANNOURS

  THE WORLD THE PEMBROKES ACQUIRED

  England in the sixteenth century was less a single state than a gathering of separate countries, each full of intense local loyalties and habits of being. Deep communality and tight local networks lay at the heart of the country. Each landscape was a world in itself, and the fifty thousand acres or so of Wiltshire lands and manors the Herberts acquired from the crown in the 1540s were then, and remain today, among the most desirable in the kingdom. The Herberts had landed in the best that England could offer. Even though the Herbert paradox was in play—they only possessed their estate because the crown had granted it to them—this was to become their country, the place where their most rooted loyalties lay. The story of their relationship to the crown cannot be understood without the picture behind it of the world they had now acquired. Their lands and manors were the counterpoint to the cynical realties of the struggle at court. The realities of an owned estate can explain conservative rebellion. The lands themselves are the vision behind the great Van Dyck painting.

  Early on a summer morning—and you should make it a Sunday, when England stays in bed for hours after the sun has risen—the chalk downland to the west of Wilton slowly reveals itself in the growing light as an open and free-flowing stretch of country, long wide ridges with ripples and hollows within them, separated by river valleys, with an air of Tuscany transported to the north, perhaps even an improved Tuscany. Seventeenth-century scientists thought the smoothness of the chalk hills meant they were part of the sea floor that had appeared after Noah’s flood had at last receded. It was old, God-smoothed country and pure because of it.

  This morning, you will have it to yourself. At first light, the larks are up and singing, but everything else is drenched in a golden quiet. Shadows hang in the woods, and the sun casts low bars across the backs of the hills. You will see the deer, ever on the increase in southern England, moving silently and hesitantly in the half-distance. It is a place of slightness and subtlety, wide and long-limbed, drawn with a steady pencil. Above the deeper combes, on the slopes that the Wiltshiremen call “cliffs,” the grass is dotted with cowslips and early purple orchids. Gentians and meadow saxifrage can still be found on the open downland. Chalkhill Blue butterflies dance over the turf. Fritillaries and white admirals are in the woods. The whole place, as Edward Thomas once described the shape of chalkland, is full of those “long straight lines in which a curve is always latent…”

  This feeling of length—slow changes, a sense of distance—is at the heart of the Wiltshire chalk. It is not a plain, because everywhere the ground surface shifts and modulates, but it is nowhere sharp. It is full of continuity and connectedness, a sense that if you set off in any direction you would have two or three days’ journey before anything interrupted you. This, in other words, is a place that feels like its own middle, the deepest and richest of arrivals.

  John Aubrey, the great seventeenth-century gossip and antiquarian, whose family rented a farm in one of these valleys, called his treasured country “a lovely campania,” a perfect Champagne country. There is no marginality; instead, settlement, rootedness, stability, removal from strife and trouble. “The turfe is of a short sweet grasse,” Aubrey wrote of the place he loved, “good for the sheep, and delight-full to the eye, for its smoothnesse like a bowling green.” The most delicious things here were the rabbits, “the best, sweetest, and fattest of any in England; a short, thick coney, and exceeding fatt. The grasse is very short, and burnt up in the hot weather. ’Tis a saying, that conies doe love rost-meat.” The rabbits’ tastiness was a sign of the country’s beneficence.

  These wonderful lands—the chalk downs and the lush watered valleys of the rivers that run between them—spread over eighty square miles, were the core of the Herbert estate. Every element of the perfect life is here. High on the chalk ridge just to the west of Wilton is the great royal hunting ground of Grovely Wood, set up as a forest by the Saxon kings, so old that it formed no part of the system of parishes that were created around it before the Norman conquest. It is one of the twenty-five hunting forests mentioned in the Domesday Book, the precious reserves in which the king alone had the right to kill game. Grovely—its name perhaps a memory of the patches of rough woodland growing here when the Saxons first arrived—is still thick with bluebells and wood anemones in the early summer.

  From the top of the downs, long droves descend into the valleys of the rivers that cut through the chalk tableland. Honeysuckle and wild clematis drape themselves across the hedges. The sun breaks into the droves past the thorns that are thick with mayflower. Cow parsley is just sprouting in the verges, the wheat and barley still a dense green in the fields beside you. It doesn’t matter which river valley you choose: the Ebble, or the Nadder, or the Wylye. Each of them will still greet you like a vision of perfection, the perfect interfolding of the human and the natural that is at the heart of the Arcadian idea. The chalk streams (all three of them still have the Celtic names they had in pre-Roman Britain) emerge in bubbling springs all along the valley sides. The water that has percolated down through the chalk hits a layer of clay and comes to the surface. Along that springline, below the arable fields but above the floodable valley bottoms, are the villages. Their emergences are beautiful, soft, weed-rimmed places where the water erupts in shallow mushrooms and riffles. It is as if the water is simmering in the pools before making its easy way down to the main rivers that slope off to the east.