Quarrel with the King Read Free

to Agincourt in 1415. His son, Gwilym Ddu, “Black Will,” marauded and burned his way across England in support of the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and as his reward was made Earl of Pembroke by Edward IV. This slashingly successful warrior, the first Welshman to become an English peer, who for yearsran the whole of Wales as his fiefdom, had several illegitimate children, one of whom, Richard, had as his lordship the poor, steep Vale of Ewyas in the Black Mountains, a place that is still full of small, edge-of-subsistence farms, houses pushed into the hillside, heart-stopping beauty, and unrelenting rain.
    No one could ever imagine that Ewyas was the threshold of power, but it is the place from which the young William Herbert, Richard’s second son, emerged to conquer his world. From a modern perspective, it is not surprising as a background to a tough, violent, imposing, and driven life—a grandfather of heroic proportions, a near-fatal lack of social standing, the stain of illegitimacy, and the fate of the second son: disinheritance even from his father’s small patrimony.
    That essentially meritocratic view was not how it was seen at the time. When William Herbert was finally made Earl of Pembroke in 1551, he did not boast his climb to power, nor call himself the “1st Earl.” There was no honor in that. As far as he was concerned, he was the 20th Earl of Pembroke, heir in line direct to the previous nineteen, of nine different creations, who had battled their way across the Middle Ages. It was the grandest of inheritances. The pretentious George Owen, Elizabethan antiquarian and remote relation of the Herberts, whom Owen adulated, was still relishing the ancient power of the earls of Pembroke in the late sixteenth century. The earldom of Pembroke, Owen wrote, “was in auncient tyme a County Palatine,” not subject to any king’s power. The earl “had the commanding and leading of all the people of his country to make warres at his pleasure. He had within his Country nine castles of his owne and twelve seigniories or manors which were parcell of his Countye…”
    In an era of increasing bureaucratization of government, and an emasculation of the old magnates of medieval England, there was a frisson to this manly independence, which a mere created earl or baron could scarcely rival. It is not surprising that any memory of the illegitimacy of William Herbert’s father was quietly soothed away. Here was a man conducting his life as a power-broking baron in the mold of his ancestors.
    What Owen does not mention in his catalogue of honor is that the first time this William Herbert made his mark on the world, it was as a murderer. His father had died in 1510 when William was three, and the boy went to live in the household of his relation by marriage, the Earl of Worcester. Worcester was a warrior, administrator, diplomat, and the great producer and showman of Henry VIII’s court. He was responsible for the tournament ground and pasteboard palaces set up for the meeting of Henry VIII and François I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the summer of 1520. It was Worcester who arranged for five thousand people to be shipped across the Channel to France to organize this event. Vast quantities of timber and glass were brought to the site. Three hundred knights took part in the tournament, over which Worcester himself presided as one of the judges. William Herbert, aged thirteen, was at his side, as his page, learning the intimacy of power and glory.
    Worcester died on April 25, 1526, and that year William Herbert appears as a “gentleman pensioner” at the court of Henry VIII. It was the lowest rung of court life. One could be a gentleman pensioner and still be thrown into jail for debt or be arrested on suspicion of treason, but it was the necessary first step on the road to significance. But then Herbert’s career came adrift. On midsummer’s