Quarrel with the King Read Free Page A

eve 1527, a time for drinking and feasting, bonfires, high spirits, sex, and violence, there was an incident in Bristol, the great seaport already spreading its networks to the New World, that might have destroyed him.
    The mayor of Bristol, a man known as Thomas or “Davy” Broke and later described by the hostile protestant preacher George Wishart as “a knave and gorbely [fat] knave,” together with his “brethren”—perhaps “that droncken Gervys, that lubber Antony Payne, &slovyn William Yong, and that dobyll knave William Chester,” all leading Bristol merchants and all identified by Wishart as Broke’s associates—were coming back into the city after some duck shooting. Unexplained, William Herbert, already with the reputation of “a mad fighting young fellow,” was there with a gang of Welshmen to meet them on the bridge. They began to talk and “for want of some respect in compliment” fell into an argument and then a rage. A fight broke out, and Herbert killed one of the merchants, a man called Richard Vaughan, from an old and distinguished Bristol family.
    The incident fits. Herbert’s origins in South Wales were just across the Severn. The Bristol men would have known he was an illegitimate son. Herbert had by now spent most of his life in the heady atmosphere of court, wearing the badge first of his kinsman the Earl of Worcester, then of the king himself, acquiring the sheen and courteousness of that world. His own honor would have been both high and tender in his mind, and now he found himself insulted by a party of drunk, duck-hunting Bristol merchants. Of course he turned to his knife.
    Herbert and the Welshmen who were with him “fled through a gate into the Marsh and escaped in a boat with the tide.” After that, wanted for murder, named in a Bristol’s coroner’s report as the man who did it, Herbert disappeared. Nothing is known of him for the next seven or eight years. John Aubrey thought he had gone to France, to the Valois court, but as Herbert in later life was unable to speak French, that is unlikely. Maybe he went to ground in Wales, surrounded by the protective world of his Herbert connections, sheltered by the common understanding that Welsh fighters had long since been killing fat Bristol merchants. Either he, or someone else called William Herbert, killed “one honest man” in Newport in South Wales in 1533, and his servant was convicted of killing yet another Welshman the following year. Brutality lay at the center of his life.
    In 1534 Herbert was still being described as a “late gentleman ofthe household,” but soon after that he returned to court, was readmitted to the glowing circle near the king, and in 1535 was promoted to become “an esquire of the body,” an honorific but one that implied a further penetration of the layers surrounding the sovereign. The story of this family over a period of more than one hundred years is hinged, at least in part, to that bodily geometry; closeness to the king, to his actual body, his breathing presence, is the one variable that governs their fortunes. Thuggery and exile among the ancestral comforts of South Wales was one thing; sharing the same physical space as the fount of all honor and the source of all lands was quite another.
    On returning to court, Herbert met Anne Parr, the woman he would marry. She and Herbert may have fallen in love. Neither had any fortune to bring to the marriage. Both were orphans. Both were making their way in the world of the court. And Henry VIII’s court in the 1530s was one where love affairs were frequent and courtly love admired and practiced as necessary and civilizing elements of the Italianate courtier’s life. The most beautiful lines written in Tudor England are by Thomas Wyatt, in his poem bemoaning the un-Arcadian, treacherous world of calculation and disloyalty at court (“They fle from me that