Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson Page B

had in part abused but for whom he felt a deep affection.
    Two yeoman conductors with black staves led the procession, followed by a hundred poor men, walking “ij and ij,” or two by two. Mr. William Morgan, one of the many Welshmen in London for the funeral, carried the earl’s banner, ahead of “the Defunctes gentlemen ij and ij,” that is, the greatest of his gentry tenants from all those lands spread across England and Wales. Two secretaries followed, as befitted a man of business, then all the knights and squires who were beholden to him, then the chief officers of his household (his steward, his treasurer, and his comptroller). In all of this, it was a funeral indistinguishable from a king’s. Another banner carried by his neighboringWiltshire knight, Sir George Penruddock, from Compton Chamberlayne, in the valley of the Nadder, who had been with Pembroke fighting the French for Queen Mary; then the York herald with Pembroke’s coat of armor, carrying his helm and crest; the Chester herald carrying the shield on which Pembroke’s arms were emblazoned; the Richmond herald carrying his sword; and finally the Garter king of arms carrying his coat of arms, accompanied by two “Gentleman Ushers” with white rods. One of these gentleman ushers, dressed up for the occasion, was in fact Roger Earth of Dinton, just across the valley of the Nadder from Compton Chamberlayne, who had been arrested in August 1553, described as “Servaunt to The’erle of Penbroke,” and thrown into the Fleet prison for fighting in the streets of London with one of the servants of Lord Stourton. Gentleman usher or brawling member of the affinity: in this life they were the same thing.
    The coffin itself was carried by eight gentlemen, some from Herbert’s Welsh lands, some from Wiltshire, and eight yeoman assistants, including a ranger of his forests and men from Wyley and Broad Chalke. Further knights and gentlemen, all hooded, processed into St. Paul’s, followed by the young Henry, the new Earl of Pembroke, followed by the great of Elizabethan England: the Lord Chancellor, Sir Nicholas Bacon; the Earl of Leicester; Sir William Cecil; Lord Howard of Effingham; and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. Finally came the long, long line of the dead earl’s yeomen, the copyholders of his estates across the breadth of the realm, and the servants of other noblemen and gentlemen mourners, all of them in black, “ij and ij,” for minute after minute through the great west door of St. Paul’s.
    As a formality, this accumulation of people was the definition of nobility. It was the household in full performance, the affinity in commemoration of death. Everything about this funeral procession enacted the realities of sixteenth-century power: the spread of lands and of people on them; the conspicuous expense of such elaborate obsequies; the intimacy with the great of the court and the royal administration; the sense that if this was not, in actuality, a fighting band, it was not long since it had been. There were men here who had been with the earl on the bridge in Bristol in 1528; who had helped him destroy the papist images in the 1530s; who had stood with him against the rebels in 1549; again in the streets of London at the accession of Queen Mary; again when Thomas Wyatt had threatened the Catholic queen in 1554; again on the battlefields of France, when the great suits of armor were brought home to Wilton; and who had, of course, chased with him, day in and day out, across the Arcadian hunting grounds of Wiltshire.
    At the end of it, after “a certain collect” had been read and the chief mourners had departed, the officers of William Herbert’s household were left alone to see the body buried. “Which officers did put the defunctes staff into the graue and brake each of their own staves and cast them into the graue with him.” The founder of the dynasty was dead and