Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson

at the height of his career. He was keen for the Roman Catholic duke of Norfolk to marry the Queen of Scots, by then a captive in the north of England. Elizabeth heard rumors of this suggestion, Norfolk was sent to the Tower, and Pembroke was arrested. By then two of the old northern magnates, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, had raised armies from their affinities in order to release the Queen of Scots from captivity. Pembroke seemed to Elizabeth to have been involved in this reassertion of noble power. For their own purposes, that is what the two earls were claiming. A little pathetically, he wrote to the queen in December 1569:
    From my poore Howse at Wilton
    My name is moast falselye and wickedly abused by the wicked Protestation of those two traitorous Erles.
    I do reverently before God, and humbly before your Majestie, protest that in all my Lief I was never privey to so muche as a Mocion of any Attempte either of these bankcrupte Erles, or of any Mans ells, against either Religion (in defence whereof onelye I am redie to spill myblood) or yet your Majesties Estate or person; and that I am redie against them, and all Traitors to make good with my Bodie when and howsoever it shall please your Majestie to commande: For God forbid that I should lieve the Houre, now in mine olde Age, to staine my former Lief with a spot of Disloyaltie.
    There is the willow bent full double. Of course he had never changed sides; of course his only interest was in the validity of the true religion; of course he had never plotted with any other grandee about how they might steer the riches of England into the strong chests in the strong rooms and armories at Wilton. God forbid that anything so impure had ever passed though his mind!
    John Aubrey, listening to the Wiltshire gossip about the 1st Earl of Pembroke seventy-five years later—this was a story from his great-uncles, the Brownes of Broad Chalke—heard that “in Queen Elizabeth’s time some Bishop (I have forgot who)”—it was in fact the Bishop of Winchester—“was sent to him from the Queen and Council”—actually of his own accord—“to take Interrogatories of him,” to ask him some legal and technical details about his landholdings. The bishop, although Aubrey didn’t hear this detail, wanted to get back the manor of Bishopstone in the valley of the Ebble, just to the east of Broad Chalke.
    So [the bishop] takes out his pen and inke, examines and writes. When he had writt a good deale sayd the Earle, “Now lett me see it.”
    â€œWhy,” quoth the Bishop, “your Lordship cannot read it?”
    â€œThat’s all one, I’le see it,” quoth he, and takes it and teares it to pieces. “Zounds, you rascall,” quoth the Earle, “d’ee thinke I will have my throate cutt with a pen-knife?”
    It seems they had a mind to have pick’t a hole in his Coate, and to have gott his Estate.
    This wonderful story, as if folktales were being constructed even in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Wiltshire, has a deep moral and historical truth to it. This is nothing but the modern, literate, bureaucratic state trying to take back from the unlettered warrior, the ancient earl who depended for his standing on his physical presence, his leadership of men and his native cunning, the lands on which his existence relied. Here, in a few lines, modernity, legal and lettered, nibbles at the ancient conditions. The historical truth of the story is that the bishop attempted to have a private act of Parliament passed, but a covey of Pembroke-sponsored MPs in the House of Commons saw him and his bill off. But the emotional and metaphorical truth is not in that account. It is here in the Brownes’ memory and in Aubrey’s delighted retelling of it: the sense that the modern world was a clever cheat, the ancient earl a blind and muscled colossus.
    The same anxiety fuels Aubrey’s final