Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson Page A

remembered story of the earl, which shares the same dreamlike, emblematic quality. As he lay dying in early 1570, one desperate phrase, the end of all his dreams and nightmares, was on his lips, repeated again and again: “They would have Wilton, they would have Wilton.” Underneath that armored carapace, and never given voice in the official record, only remembered here in the gossip of the chalkstream valleys, was a desperate anxiety over the status and the lands for which he had lusted and fought for so long. It is a recognition that his noble power, his gathering of armies, his assembling of crowds of liveried and chain-bedecked followers, his country of lands and manors, was, in truth, as fragile as a vase.
    On December 23, 1567, “remembering the uncertainty of man’s life and to how many perils and casualties the same is subject”—something of which Pembroke would have been all too aware—hehad made his will. He left £400 each to the poor of the ward around Baynard’s Castle, in Salisbury, and in Hendon, near London, where he had yet another house. Apart from a few legacies to his other children, he left everything to his son Henry.
    But late on the evening of March 16, 1570, in his apartments in Hampton Court, feeling death coming near, he had his younger son Edward and the Earl of Leicester, son of his old friend Northumberland, whom he had betrayed, come to his bedside. Death had given him a conscience. His second wife was to keep her own clothes and jewels, which would otherwise have gone to Henry. He left his “newest fairest and richest bed” and his greatest jewel to the queen, to Leicester his best gold sword, and to his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, his second-best gold sword.
    Leicester then left the bedside, and the dying earl was alone with his son Edward and the physicians. His dying thoughts are recorded. His second wife, Mary Talbot, whom he had married for her money and connections—she was the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury—was to be looked after, to be allowed to stay in Baynard’s Castle; his daughter Anne was to be given £500; but more than that, anxiously and insistently, the ordinary men who had been with him and looked after him during his life, were to be cared for by Henry, Lord Herbert, his heir.
    That my lorde Herbert do consider Thomas Gregorie and Tidie with money for their travaile and paines beside that he hath bequeathed to them in annuity that he speciallie do appointe to Francis Zouche and Charles Arundell fit and good annuities for them. That he have special care of Henrie Morgan George Morgan Phillipp Williams Robert Vaughan and Thomas Scudamore and either entertaigne them into his service payinge them their wages beforehandor else appoint them sufficient annuities That he do entertaigne his household and keep them together.
    It was his last stated wish that his son should keep his affinity together. Philip Williams was William Herbert’s secretary; Robert Vaughan, his treasurer; Thomas Scudamore, one of the gentlemen who carried his coffin. Herbert died the following morning, aged sixty-three, the climacteric, thought to be the most dangerous year of one’s life, being the multiple of the two magic numbers, nine and seven.
    His funeral, on April 18, 1570, was the greatest possible statement of the man he had become and of the dynasty he had created. The reverse of a beautiful portrait medal of the earl cast in 1562 showed a Welsh dragon, or wyvern, by a classical tempietto and carried the motto “Draco Hic Virtus Virtutem Custos”—This dragon the true guardian of the virtues. That is how William Herbert saw himself; the man of violence protecting the good: the humanist inheritance that Anne Parr had brought to this family, the radical Protestantism in which, for all the necessary trimming, William and Anne almost certainly shared a belief, and the people of his lands, whom he