Quarrel with the King Read Free Page B

sometyme did me seke”), which describes just such a moment of unadorned and immediate love:
    When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall
    And she me caught in her armes long and small
    Therewithal sweetly did me kysse
    And softly said dere hert howe like you this
    Love itself might also be seen as a form of Arcadia, a private place in which the fever and anguish of being is soothed away.
    William Herbert was about eight years older than Anne Parr. Adrawing by Holbein, probably made when Anne was about twenty, in 1535, shows her as she was when William fell in love with her. As an image, it is a universe apart from Herbert’s tense and wary assertion: calm, pure, and controlled, with a clarity and directness about her eyes and a firmness but no meanness in her mouth, she seems all spirit. It was a marriage of opposites. It is a strikingly Protestant image, nearly shadowless, a form of portraiture motivated by truth and clarity, a product of the Reformation with the removal of the dark and its substitution with the clear-eyed, clear-skinned vision of Englishwomen such as Anne Parr.
    In 1531, as an orphaned sixteen-year-old after her mother died, Anne had come to court to serve as a maid-in-waiting to Henry VIII’s sequence of wives. She was the daughter of a gentry family of no great wealth or standing but one that since 1483, over four generations, had served England’s queens. Her mother, Dame Maud Parr, had been both confidante and lady-in-waiting to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and now both Anne Parr and her elder sister, Katherine, were serving in the household of Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, Princess Mary. Sir Thomas Parr had died in 1517, and both girls had been brought up, along with their brother, William, by the formidable Dame Maud, who was fluent in French and maybe also in Latin, a manager of lands and contracts, an educational theorist, and friend of the humanist scholars Thomas More and Roger Ascham. Dame Maud had provided her daughters with the richest possible humanist education, setting up a small school in their house in Leicestershire. Its methods had been modeled on the program Thomas More had ordained for his own family, teaching the children philosophy, mathematics, Latin, French, Italian, chess, the study of coins, art theory, medicine, and rigorous training in the Scriptures. Anne had emerged a scholar. In later life she would become patron of Fellows at St. John’s College,Cambridge. She sent two of her sons to Peterhouse. Roger Ascham, who became Elizabeth I’s tutor, borrowed Anne’s copy of Cicero and quoted Ovid in the letters he wrote her. The fineness and purity that glows from the face of Anne drawn by Holbein was no illusion.
    Both Anne and her sister would become champions of the reformed religion that swept through England in the 1530s. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that their education in the highest and most sophisticated form of Renaissance humanism prepared the ground for a skeptical attitude toward the inherited ways of the Church. Anne Parr, in other words, looks like a Protestant in the making. She also looks like William Herbert’s better half. They were probably married late in 1537, when she was twenty-two and he thirty-one.
    No one could have predicted that they would be the foundation of one of the great families of England. Anne had remained no more than a maid-in-waiting, a body servant, to the evolving sequence of queens; William was still an Esquire of the King’s Body. They were without any prospect of inheritance, landless, and disconnected from that great engine of power but playing their hands in the life of the court, the only place where that condition could be altered. “Upon the bare stock of their wits, they began to traffic for themselves.” Over the next twenty years, the two of them played that game more successfully than anyone else in England.
    William’s attitude toward