Quarrel with the King (14 page)

This sense of urgency in Mary, needing to steer her son and heir toward the otherworldly perfection of her dead brother, was driven, it seems clear, by Will's inclination to the very opposite. He was wandering toward the usual appetites of young men. Even eighty years later, Clarendon, writing his history of the Civil War, thought Will had been “immoderately given up to women.” What becomes particularly intriguing, though, is that precisely this set of circumstances, and the very same set of images that Muffet relied on, would repeat themselves within three or four years at another and more significant level.

There have been many candidates for the beautiful, aristocratic, reluctant-to-marry, sexy young man addressed with such overwhelming passion in the first 126 of Shakespeare's
Sonnets
, but none fits the circumstances as closely as Will Herbert: from a family of immense standing, which was of famous beauty in both men and women; with
the initials W.H., those given by the publisher's dedication of the
Sonnets
in 1609 to “The Onlie Begetter of These Insuing Sonnets”; of exactly the right age (born in April 1580) for an early middle-aged Shakespeare (born in April 1564) to fall in love with in the late 1590s; with a history behind him of his parents commissioning poets, whom they had known professionally, to urge him on to virtuous paths; seen as the “green shoot” of the family, with the next generation's harvest latent in him, imagery on which Shakespeare memorably drew; and, as it turns out, with a wild and amorous nature but a deep reluctance to marry, exactly the subject of the first seventeen sonnets.

The Pembrokes had almost certainly come to know Shakespeare in the early 1590s, when he was writing for a touring company, of no great success, subsidized by Henry and known as Pembroke's Men. Shakespeare had also written
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
for another aristocratic patron, the Earl of Southampton. It would be entirely appropriate, and even resourceful, for Mary Pembroke to turn to this brilliant, youngish court poet to address her increasingly wayward son. The first seventeen sonnets—more conventional than the rest, “sugared,” as they were described at the time, in a Sidneyan way—clearly form a group. Repeatedly playing on the same themes, they urge the young man to marry, to extend his line through children, not to let age destroy his beauty but to further it in children, an extension of the gifts his famous family has given him. The imagery plays around Will's
impresa
, “Stat messis in herba.” Just as the harvest lies latent in the bud, the passage of the year erodes the beauty of the spring.

The setting is polite Arcadia: it is courtly and contained; the herds mill around the house; the woods are shady and the fields produce their harvest. The world turns on its Virgilian axis. This is Wilton, if beautifully animated by that vision of the barley sheaves on their funeral bier, white and bristly in the paleness of high summer, and suddenly shocked by the fruitless summoning of the “wastes of time” amid all this fecundity.

It is also a celebration of the defiance of Time's scythe, the victory of marriage and progeniture over the shadow of age and death. Shakespeare's sonnet, for all its local beauties, is driven by a need to defy time because the family corporation required it. This sonnet, which, along with the other first sixteen, is patronage poetry, involving no disturbance to any social or sexual hierarchy, was perhaps delivered, it can be conjectured, to Will Herbert, perhaps at Wilton, perhaps with the indulgent overseeing of his mother and father, on April 8, 1597—there is a great deal of spring imagery in these first sonnets—which was the heir's seventeenth birthday. Shakespeare had taken up where Thomas Muffet had left off, playing a decorous role as prompter of virtue. The poems feel like what they were: a commission, a birthday present, a paid-for imploring, dedicated to the understanding that only by the com
plex of marriage and negotiation, of getting and begetting, can a person defeat his own mortality. That in effect is the voice of worldliness, of a good deal well done. The poems are driven by the understanding that this family could maintain its dignity and potency, its wealth and significance, only by the individuals within it submitting to the corporate ideal. If these assumptions are true, Shakespeare was co-opted for a moment as a bit player in the long Pembroke struggle to win.

Still, Will Herbert would not conform. In 1595, marriage had been proposed between the young Will and Elizabeth Carey. On September 25 of that year, the Carey parents were to visit Wilton, where “great preparacon was made for them,” but they never came. Will had by then met Elizabeth, and the match was broken off “by [William's] not liking.” Henry was in no position to force his son into a marriage he did not like and cancelled the engagement. Sir George Carey was enraged “that lord Pembroke broke off the match between Lord Harbert and his daughter.”

Next, Bridget de Vere, the daughter of the Earl of Oxford and the granddaughter of Lord Burghley, was suggested. The families manoeuvred toward each other. Burghley sent Mary some special medicine from London, and she wrote to him in her increasingly convoluted style:

That might have been the way to address someone fifteen or twenty
years earlier, but the late Elizabethan world had moved on to a quicker and more impatient rhythm. Mary wrote another letter of almost equal inflatedness to Sir Robert Cecil, Lord Bughley's son. “To bee silent now finding so iust cawse to be thankfull were a wrong to yow and an Injury to my selfe whose disposition hath euer held yow in very worthy regard…” In her Wilton outpost, it looked as if Mary Pembroke, still only thirty-six, had begun to lose touch with the ways of the world. The whole Pembroke enterprise was starting to look shaky.

Burghley was also worried. His granddaughter Bridget was only thirteen, but there would be no consummation of the marriage until Will had come back from his travels. Would Bridget stay with the Pembrokes then or with her parents? The money was to be discussed by their agents, but the principles were clear. He would give a jointure equal to the dowry, plus a good allowance every year. Oxford himself was keen “for the ionge gentelman as I vnderstand he hathe been well brought vp, fayre conditioned, and hathe many good partes in hym.” Again, though, the match came to nothing. Henry Pembroke, increasingly ill and short-tempered, had, it seems, insulted Robert Cecil, perhaps suggesting that the rather recent descendant of impoverished Welsh farmers, as the Cecils were, should not have the pretension to become Viscount Cranborne. The fact of the Herberts' own bastardy was by now well buried.

Mary Pembroke had to try to make good the damage and wrote to Robert Cecil in her high Elizabethan style.

It was no good. The wickedness of court, its life juice of malice and gossip, had broken her designs.

Henry, now chronically ill, was desperate to see his elder son married before he succeeded to the earldom. If he were unmarried and under twenty-one at Henry's death, the Pembroke estates would fall into the Court of Wards (then in the hands of the Cecils), and his wardship would be sold off to the highest bidder, who would in turn suck from the Pembroke fortunes as much as he could in the few years that remained before Will turned twenty-one in 1601. Still another marriage, to a niece of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, was suggested, half arranged, and then failed to materialize, in the summer of 1599.

Meanwhile, in Herbert's life, another eruptive passion broke loose. From those first seventeen sonnets, Shakespeare's sequence suddenly comes alive with the reality of his love for this beautiful and feckless young man. Shakespeare, feeling aged himself, is rendered powerless in his presence: “Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonesse,” he pleaded, pitiably subject to Will's grandeur and carelessness. “How many gazers mightst thou lead away, / If thou wouldst vse the strength of all thy state? / But doe not so, I loue thee in such sort,/ As thou
being mine, mine is thy good report.” The poetry leaves behind the formal, dancelike qualities of the Petrarchan world with all its reliance on the inaccessible girl of unimpeachable beauty, and replaces her with some of the great truth-telling, homosexual, often brutally misogynistic, willfully complex, and psychologically agonized love poems in the language. It is as if the lid had been lifted on the Elizabethan world, the formality taken away, and the reality exposed to air. The fuel for that poetry was not only love, lust, sex, and desire but also the pains that came in the wake of that desire, a longing for Arcadian peace, a place of resolution beyond the torments of daily existence, beyond all conflict, but also a recognition that time, death, and mortality had their place in Arcadia.
Et in Arcadia ego.
Far from urging the boy to a life of heightened virtue, Shakespeare fell in love with him as he was, as both the embodiment of delicious and beautiful sexual delight and the object of a love that went far beyond the worldly manoeuvrings on which the directors of the family business were intent.

Everything in the
Sonnets
drifts into the metaphors of hierarchy, land, inheritance, the law, the court, the embroiled nature of life, as if life itself, in the modernity that swept from one negotiation to the next, was at the same time the great webmaker and the great eroder. Time digs furrows in our brows. Life and time remove from us the happiness we thought we had. Even the things that seemed for a moment unapproachably ours are rubbed down and worn away. “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end.”

The great and life-affirming paradox for Shakespeare is that only in the place made by the poem itself, in the actual written poem, can love and beauty remain impervious to time. Only there, in what the poet can do, can things of value be safe. Love itself can hurt, but there is a pervasive sense throughout the long sequence of the
Sonnets
that the poem, in its jewel-like existence, is itself the Arcadian space, the
place in which hurt cannot occur and where perfection is removed from the erosions of weakness and time. The three words that appear more often than any other in Shakespeare's
Sonnets
are “
fair
,
kind
, and
true
.” As a fugue on these themes, the sequence is a longing for goodness in a treacherous world. It is a realm in which grace has a chance, where truth can be spoken and love remain true. The poem itself is a park.

That itself is a Sidneyan idea. In the most famous paragraph of the
Defense of Poetry
, written by Sidney at Wilton, he makes precisely this Platonic claim: only in art can perfection be found, and Nature must regard the perfection of art's forms with envy:

The poets alone can deliver a golden world. It is perhaps impossible now to read some of these poems as they might have appeared when their first manuscript copies were read by the beautiful boy of distinguished lineage to whom they were first addressed. But if they do not illuminate the life of William Herbert, which they might, they at least illuminate for sure the world in which he lived, thought, and felt.

This may be an unexpected turn for this story but it is perfectly integral to it. The Pembrokes' quarrel with authority begins in military strength; transmutes into the literary complaint of the
Arcadia
; takes a high-minded and religious turn in the hands of Mary Sidney; and in the putative love affair with Will Herbert described in Shakepeare's
Sonnets
becomes even more otherworldly, a challenge to the ordinary world not by confronting it but by removing oneself from
it, looking for victory in unbridled retreat. That love affair is in many ways a teenage phenomenon. In the 1590s, even after his father's death in 1601 and right up until Elizabeth's death two years later, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, continued to behave badly and willfully. He quarrelled with his father and mother. He had an affair with Mary Fitton, one of the queen's maids of honor, made her pregnant, acknowledged he was the father, but refused to marry her. He was thrown into prison and then banished to Wilton, where he bewailed his rustic fate. Even by the time the queen died in March, Pembroke was still only twenty-three years old.