Quarrel with the King (26 page)

Next to that fertile and engaging pair is its opposite: the hands of the countess are folded together in a way that is repeated nowhere else in the entire body of Van Dyck's work: an explicit gesture of enclosure and melancholy, shut off from those around her. The marriage of the Earl and Countess of Pembroke, both of them shadowed and pushed back within the picture, is barren. Her sons have died, and their relationship has failed. Her averted eyes and her folded hands are the gestures of a woman who is no longer “mingleinge anie part of [her]
streames” with this family. She is central but absent, her gaze averted, her relationship with everyone around her cut away and inarticulate.

Beside her, but not touching her, the earl, Lord Chamberlain, the high official who is in charge of the Royal Household, holds his white staff of office easily in the relaxed and lengthened fingers of his left hand. With his other hand he reaches forward to the virginal promise of Mary Villiers, gesturing openly toward the heart of the young woman who is to marry his son. These are the signs of power. She, however, holds a closed hand to her virginal womb, a form of self-preservation even as she is to be married. In the picture space she is nearly but not quite connected to Charles, Lord Herbert, in red, who holds his left arm out as if in love, an openness to the world, but the hand itself is reflexed and withdrawn, perhaps also a sign of his virginity.

These three pairs make a diagrammatic set: fertility achieved, barrenness accepted, breeding promised. The younger brother, Philip, sharing with his brother the reddish brown hair that had come down through the generations, hangs back on the edge of this group of six, not part of it and not quite distinct. Is it too much to see in his portrayal the story recounted by George Garrard, of love disappointed, of his place in Mary Villiers's heart usurped by his older brother, not because love required it but simply because their father and her mother insisted? And is there an element, in Mary Villiers's own look of disdain, of a discontent with this marriage that was forced upon her for dynastic reasons?

The final elements are the two sets of three children on the left of the painting. The three young Herbert boys on the ground are gloriously alive with their hounds and their books. The three young Herberts who died as children are above them as angels, throwing roses into the wedding party. The painting as a whole flickers between content and discontent, between a celebration of the beauty of existence and recognition of its sorrows and travails. As a whole it is not unlike Thomas
Chaffinge's sermon on mutability, time, beauty, inheritance, and grief. Behind them all, Arcadia recedes into an inscrutable perfection.

The painter was a man of the world, ambitious, rich, and realistic, and this painting is part of that urban, entrepreneurial world. If a sitter could not pay for his portrait—Van Dyck usually charged £50 to £60 for a full-length (three years' stipend for a country vicar), £30 for a half-length, and £20 for a head-and-shoulders portrait; the Wilton group portrait cost more than £500—the artist would quite happily sell it to someone else. Those who required portraits from him had to book a series of appointments in advance. He would never paint a sitter for longer than an hour at a time and would usually have assistants complete the painting once the head and hands were done. Sitters sent their clothes to the studio, where hired models posed in them and Flemish specialists, employed by Van Dyck, painted the sumptuous cloths. There was something of the factory about the process, but during the precious hours in which the master's eye was engaged with his subject, Van Dyck's easy manners and self-possession encouraged in those who stood before him what was called at the time “an eloquence of the body,” a poise, a form of bodily control that implied spiritual and social distinction.

As they stood within the lit circle, Van Dyck charmed them as a photographer might. The way these people appear in his paintings was the way he encouraged them to appear in that discriminating atmosphere. Preliminary sketches of the two Carnarvons have survived: between those sketches and the finished oil painting, Van Dyck simplified some details of clothing, loosening and romanticizing it, but he did not change substantially the way the people stood or looked. These are portraits not inventions, even if what they portray was as much an aspiration as a reality.

Here, then, consciously drawing on roots that dive many generations and many decades back into the English past, is the climax of this
Arcadian civilization. Its regal air intersects with a subtle, individualized psychology. Its subject is nobility, but its method questions the simplicity of that word. For all the charm of its presentation, its alluring surface, this is not a trivial or decorative object. It is about power and vulnerability, and its dressing of that power in these silks is itself an Arcadian act. Its governing paradox is that the man at the center, the ageing earl, the most weakly portrayed figure on the canvas, is the man who is making all the decisions. Time is conquering him. Van Dyck would paint him again, two or three years later, worn down, sitting heavily within the frame, the vitality of hope ebbed out of him.

Overall, the atmosphere of the painting is not quite secure. There is nothing cruel in it, nor even unkind, but it is full of uncertainty, hesitation, and even surprise, a tentativeness that makes complacency impossible. Where are they? Not in a comfortable interior, as they would have been in both the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but half inside and half out, half in a theater, half in the margins of a palace. Nor is there a settled middle to the painting. What seems to be central flickers from the earl and countess to the young Mary Villiers, who stands in front of them. The geometrical center in fact hovers in the awkward space between Mary's head and the body of Charles, the young lord in red, a charged absence at the heart of the painting.

Once you become alert to this sense of insecurity in the painting, it seems pervasive. Look at Philip, the younger of the two glamorous young Herberts, wearing the color called “carnation” in the seventeenth century. There is no ease in him. His pose is uncertain and his face unsure. A little less edgily, his elder brother stands beside him, performing it seems to nothing but the air. Only the three young boys at the left-hand side, framed by their dogs, a greyhound and a setter, are immune to this atmosphere, yet to enter the world of knowingness, sophistication, and uncertainty inhabited by their elders. (But even the dogs carry a signal: the ownership of setters and greyhounds was
made illegal by a royal proclamation in 1638. Any greyhound found within ten miles of the court was to be hanged. Their presence here could also be taken as a statement of lordly independence from royal autocracy.)

In the painting, each of the subjects' hands in turn gives, blesses, meets, contains, promises, protects, challenges, and suggests. There is a play here to do with love, family, selfhood, engagement, and distance, between closedness and openness, intimacy and removal, spread across the whole width of the picture. These are the signals fitted to this particular moment, a marriage but not yet a sexual union, which will have to wait until both bride and groom are older.

Van Dyck had a famous and treasured ability to give a scene the sense that it was a caught moment, to imply from his nearly mobile figures that within a second their perfect arrangement would change and collapse. It is a stilled dance. Transience was at the center of his art, and here it is set against its opposite. Behind the figures, two enormous certainties preside: the landscape of perfection on the left, receding into deep-shadowed calm, and in the center-right, the vast coat of arms on the cloth that hangs behind them all, the inheritance of nobility, an assertion of the permanence from which they come. But do those certainties transmit themselves to the anxious figures in the foreground? Or do they serve to throw those figures into question? How do the two glorious young men really compare to the solidity and fixity of the two fluted columns behind them? They seem momentary beings by comparison, balanced on the balls of their feet, no more lasting or substantial than the clouds or the putti or the fading of the sun.

The beauty and allure of this picture is its central acknowledgment that complacency and fineness cannot coexist. The highest condition, it seems to say, is one of uncertainty and doubt. A questioning form of irony and intelligence is applied here to a conventional ideal. The sense of movement and of the contingent in Van Dyck's baroque mas
terpieces is the embodiment of that uncertainty. A body that hesitates between the steps of a platform, that makes a gesture that is at the same time withheld, that displays a sense of grace but does so in shadow: these are the ambivalent qualities to which one instinctively still responds. Look beneath the surface of this painting and you see in it a story not of worldly glory but of transience and fragility, of failure and disconnection, of the place of death and the erosion of time even in the most perfect circumstances. This is a painting that might be entitled
Et in Arcadia Ego
. But that poignancy of decline and infertility is not the only meaning here. Its light falls not on a tomb but on the beautiful, pale, glowing optimism of the young faces for whom the future holds out buoyant promise.

The portrait was probably finished by the end of May 1635. By then, Pembroke had arranged that

The commander of the fleet in the Channel was instructed by the Lords of the Admiralty “to cause some of the ships of the fleet to transport the Lord Chamberlain's sons to Dieppe,” and on June 6, 1635, the ship
Swallow
carried them there. They were on their way to Italy, the heartland of the civilization with which their father was in love.

In the middle of March 1636, nine months after the two boys had left England for the continent, the news reached London. They had been staying in Venice. Philip wrote a thank-you letter to Lord Feilding, Buckingham's nephew and the English ambassador, for the “excessive courtesies and great civilitie” he had shown to his boys when they were there. They had moved on to Florence and in that city, just
after Christmas, Charles, Lord Herbert, died of smallpox. The earl “took the news most grievously” and did not emerge from his rooms in the Cockpit at Whitehall for more than a week.

It has often been said that the death of Charles ruined the earl's financial prospects because the great £25,000 Villiers dowry was withdrawn on his death. But that misunderstands the nature of the marriage agreement, which was designed to be equal on both sides. Mary Villiers's mother would no longer have to produce the money, but Philip, Earl of Pembroke, would no longer have to give the jointure of £4,000 a year to his widowed daughter-in-law. The deal had been balanced, and works at Wilton did not stop at Charles's death. The earl's annual income, including the £6,000 a year from his deranged sister-in-law, was now about £30,000 (at a time when it was possible to build a perfectly good manor house for £150.) There is, in fact, a slight and poignant memorial at Wilton to Charles's disappearance from the scene. In the hunting room, decorated with painted panels derived from Tempesta's scenes of different forms of hunt around the world—the bludgeoning of crocodiles and the sticking of ostriches, men hiding from their prey dressed as cows, or underwater wearing rocklike hats to trick the wild duck—the painter Edward Pierce inserted here and there images of the fourth earl and his heir. The boy who is represented was not Charles but the younger brother, Philip, who had risen to take his place.

Mary Villiers was still at Wilton in 1636 when Van Dyck painted her as a fourteen-year-old widow, low in the picture space, black bows on her bosom and at her waist for her dead husband, a rose in her hand as a sign that she would marry again. The king wanted her back at court, but Mary was refusing, even as early as March 1636, to succumb. Within eighteen months, she had married the king's cousin, James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, a young and naive Scotsman, “of small
experience in affairs,” fiercely loyal to the crown. Mary brought him her £25,000 dowry, and in doing that, this high-spirited and strong-willed woman swam out of the Pembrokes' lives.

Van Dyck's painting of a wedding had become an epitaph. It was, of course, a chance event, but after the death of Charles Herbert, the tide starts to ebb. The integration of court and country on which Philip Pembroke had based his life for so long, and of which Wilton was the symbol as the Palace in the Trees, now began to fall apart. The Pembrokes' quarrel with the king would soon be resumed.

T
HE
C
ATASTROPHE OF
C
IVIL
W
AR
1640–1650

B
y the beginning of the 1640s, all over England, the old arrangements began to break up. In May of that year, Pembroke's son-in-law, Robert Dormer, the Earl of Carnarvon, was trying to raise a militia in Buckinghamshire for the war against the Scottish Presbyterians. He was meeting with little but reluctance from a gentry who had been subjected to forced loans and “new unheard-of taxes” and who were not now interested in paying for the king's desire to spread a richly Episcopal church to Scotland.

In Wiltshire it was worse. Pembroke and his sons accompanied the king to the north, but other Wiltshire gentry only sent money, at best. Some refused to do that. In the summer of 1640, soldiers were pressed from all across the county. John Nicholas, successor to Sir Thomas Morgan as steward of the Pembroke estates, wrote to his son Edward, clerk to the Privy Council in Whitehall. John was in the family house at Winterbourne Earls, in the beautiful valley of the Bourne, just north of Salisbury. “It begins to be bad enough here,” he wrote on June 1, 1640.

That image of the hand of the poor chalkland farmer Robert Nott—he died in 1660—being sliced off by a small platoon of passing soldiers introduces the 1640s, as if the gentleness and expressiveness of the hands in the Pembroke family portrait, the linking gestures between them, had turned to this.

The world had darkened. The king's use of his prerogative powers in the 1630s had thrown the entire basis of the state into question. “We must not only sweep the house clean below,” John Pym, the leader of the radical party in the House of Commons, told Edward Hyde, one of the old Pembroke adherents, that summer. “We must pull down all the cobwebs which hang in the top and corners, that they might not breed dust, and so make a foul house hereafter; we now have the opportunity to make our country happy, by removing all grievances, and pulling up the causes of them by the roots.”

This was the deepest possible change. The cluttered ancient arrangements that were the essence of custom no longer seemed adequate. The great jurist Sir Edward Coke had repeatedly quoted an old saw: “out of the old fields, as men saith, cometh new corne fro yere to yere.” To Pym and his allies, that frame a mind no longer seemed valid. It had been betrayed by a crown that had ruled without a parliament for a decade, had imposed illegal taxes, had imprisoned people wrongfully, had suborned the judiciary, and was steering the church away from the purity of its Protestant Reformation and toward the sinks of Roman Catholic iniquity.

If the lord had betrayed the copyholders of the manor, the copyholders no longer owed him any allegiance. The mutuality had gone. Instead, for Pym and his followers, a kind of brutal clarity was needed, a sweeping away of the unreliable superstructure of monopolies, forced loans, income from the sale of wards, and all the other baggage of inheritance. The ancient constitution had failed. The king and his ministers had failed England, and England needed to move on to a more enlightened and clarified future. The king saw all this clearly enough. The idea of Pym's party in Parliament, he said, was “to erect a universal over-swaying power to themselves.”

The deep disenchantment of England soon focused on the most powerful and uncompromising minister of the crown, Sir Thomas
Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. He was not only guilty, Pym thought, “of vanity and amours,” but as president of the Council both in Ireland and in the north of England, he had tried to “subvert the ancient fundamental laws of these realms of England and Ireland and to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government, against law.”

That spring, as the bill for the condemnation of Strafford was being debated in Parliament and in the Council Chamber, mobs gathered at Westminster and even within the precincts of Whitehall Palace:

Eighty or so lords had heard the arguments for Strafford and against, but in the end only forty-six dared attend on the crucial day. Thirty-five of them voted for his death. Pembroke was among them. Only eleven lords dared to defend Strafford. Pembroke was acting according to the tradition he had inherited: a support for the ancient constitution against the inroads of royal government and its arrogant officers. On May 3, 1641, he moved still further against the king, telling the angry anti-Strafford crowd jostling outside Westminster Hall that “His Majesty had promised they should have speedy execution of justice to their desires,” a set of words that reached the ears of Charles and his queen and condemned Pembroke in their minds. It was a
moment when the old amalgam was falling apart and choices had to be made. Pembroke was on the side of the country, a position that was in effect Arcadia turned political.

On May 12, 1641, after the king had reluctantly given his authority for the act, Strafford was executed on Tower Hill for treachery against the English nation; a crowd of two hundred thousand exulted in his death. The king would never recover from what he thought of as his betrayal of a loyal servant. He was clear in his mind: Pembroke, even if acting in defense of the ancient constitution, had himself betrayed his sovereign and his duty. It was the conflict of idealisms that would lead to war.

The tension at Westminster in that hot and close summer would finally burst and destroy Pembroke's career in July. The trigger for the crisis was trivial but symptomatic of this complex, involuted world. As part of his wife's dowry, Philip, Lord Herbert, now the earl's eldest surviving son and heir, had come into possession of some lands in Sutton Marsh, in the south Lincolnshire fens. It was one of the most contested pieces of land in England. The rights of commoners, who had been accustomed to living off the wildfowl and fuel from the marshes, had been extinguished by a set of aristocratic landlords who had drained, improved, and privatized their property. Along with other drained fens, it had become the scene of regular riot and destruction

On top of that, Herbert's title to these fenlands was in dispute with, among others, the king's cousin the Duke of Lennox, now the husband of the very Mary Villiers with whom Philip, Lord Herbert, had once been in love and on whom Pembroke had once been relying for her dowry. As yet another ingredient in this tangle, Lennox's sister, Elizabeth Stuart, was married to Henry Howard, Lord Mowbray and Maltravers, the heir to the Earl of Arundel, part of the Howard family that had been long-standing rivals and enemies of the Herberts. Maltravers, of enormous wealth himself and one of the major investors in
fen drainage, had in 1626 married this girl against the king's wishes. William Pembroke and Philip Montgomery, as Privy Councillors, had both been part of the decision to commit him to the Tower.

Now in the fiercely heightened atmosphere of the summer of 1641, polarized by the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford in May, amid whispers of an army plot to take over Parliament in the king's name, and in the presence of the bellowing crowds outside the Parliament House, this angry nest of aristocratic enmities and rivalries came to a head. Lennox, Pembroke, and Maltravers, as well as Lord Seymour, an old rival of Pembroke for local influence in Wiltshire, were all members of a small committee of the House of Lords whose task it was to consider the petitions of the people. The young Philip Herbert was also in attendance himself, acting as a messenger between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Pembroke had voted for the execution of Strafford; Maltravers had made himself conveniently absent for the day; Lennox was one of the eleven who had voted to save Strafford. The summer was hot and overpowering. Smallpox and the plague were spreading in the City. One puritan MP had proposed a bill “for the gelding of Jesuits.” According to a document in the papers of the House of Lords, taken down from witnesses the following day, the tension burst at a meeting of the committee on July 19, 1641.

It began with a pedantic discussion about an ancient statute from the time of Henry IV that had been dragged up by one of the lawyers in one of the Sutton Marsh cases. The Duke of Lennox arrived late to the committee, heard the phrase “Sutton Marsh,” and asked what they had been discussing. Pembroke, looking across the table and pointing toward Maltravers, said, “No man named Sutton Marsh till you named it.”

It was a catastrophe. Pembroke had lost his temper often enough before and had even hit people with the staff of office, which Van Dyck had shown resting so elegantly in his fingers. But he was not to get away with it this time. His hurried, draft apology, written the same day as the incident, survives among the papers of the House of Lords, scratchy and no more than half legible:

Both he and Maltravers were sent to the Tower. On July 21, Pembroke made his apology to the House of Lords for his “miscarriage towards your lordships.” The opportunity was too good for the king to miss. He had long been exasperated by Pembroke's rough and uncourtly behavior and took the chance to “send to him by a gentleman usher for his staff.” The symbol of authority was removed from him and his career at court ended in humiliation. Efforts by Parliament to have him appointed Lord Steward of the Household were rebuffed by the king. Pembroke, as the inheritance from his grandfather the first earl, from Philip Sidney, and from his brother might all have suggested, was being pushed into the arms of those who were opposed to the king.

It was utterly humiliating. Pembroke could not “choose but think 44 years' service ill requited to be thus disgracefully dismissed.” The atmosphere at Westminster was filled with anxiety and threat. At the end of October an anonymous gentleman on horseback gave a porter a letter for Pym, with twelvepence to deliver it. When Pym opened it in the chamber of the House of Commons, a filthy and bloody rag that had been drawn through a plague sore fell from his hands. The letter said: “Do not think a guard of men can protect you if you persist in your traitorous courses and wicked designs…If this do not touch your heart, a dagger shall.”

Early in January 1642, after word had reached the king that Parliament would try to impeach his Catholic queen, Charles went with a party of one hundred troopers to the House of Commons to arrest the leaders of the anti-Stuart faction. They had escaped before he arrived, but the military intervention was an irrevocable and disastrous step. Charles had become a king who was prepared to threaten the nation gathered in Parliament with military force. On January 10, he
left London and gradually made his way north, attempting to persuade the country that his task was to defend the liberties of England against the prospect of an increasingly tyrannical parliamentary government. The body of England was pulling apart into head and limbs, each claiming they were the true heirs of the integrated whole. After Parliament decided to raise its own army in March 1642, war was inevitable. By May the king was in York, and from there, on May 30, 1642, he wrote to Pembroke. That letter, a folded foolscap sheet, has survived. It is the fulcrum of this story, the point at which this family's long double commitment to king and country splits apart.