Free Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson

consistently seek to defend, not only as their property but as the foundation of their existence, as their moral universe.
    William Herbert’s relationship to this system was deeply ambivalent. He was a new man, who had made his own way in the world and had established himself and his family in a position of enormous wealth. At the same time, as he saw it, he was also heir to the great inheritance of his forebears, the medieval earls of Pembroke. This was the contradiction deep within him, one that would play itself out again and again in the story of this family. Was he a member of the ancient nobility, committed, like Norden’s ideal landlord, to the welfare of the people dependent on him? Or was he a ruthless self-seeker, dependent for his standing on his relationship to the crown? Was he a new-made man or the defender of old England against a rapacious modernity? Was he a part of the system or a disruption to it? And how, if these two positions came into conflict, would he behave?

Chapter 4
THE EXERCISE OF NOBLE AUTHORITY
    T HE F IRST E ARL AS P OWER B ROKER 1549–1570
    T he crisis in William Herbert’s life erupted in the spring of 1549, as the roads began to dry and people could begin to move. Henry VIII had died two years before and had left the throne to his son, Edward VI, still only a boy of nine. The boy’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had become Lord Protector, king in all but name. William Herbert had begun the new reign as Somerset’s ally, but their ways had soon parted. Somerset was cold, arrogant, and even priggish. Increasingly he monopolized the boy king and his instruments of power. The atmosphere at court had turned vicious. One of Herbert’s allies, Sir William Paget, wrote to Somerset: “Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster, before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy…. And that was to follow mine advise in all your proceedings more than any other man’s.”
    No sense of communality here; only mutual distrust. The duke, as regent and Lord Protector while Edward VI was still a minor, had issued proclamations to the effect that landowners should return to the old ways of doing things, that they should consider themselves stewards and fathers of their little commonwealths. New men had behaved badly. Enclosures of what had been either open field or common land, either for private gain or for the pleasure a park could afford, ran against this communitarian ethic. In Somerset’s hands, the custom of the manor was making a renewed claim against the lordly Renaissance desire for spreading parkland.
    In addition, the long history of English radicalism, founded on that element in the Bible that saw men as equal in the sight of God, fed the sense of outrage. If Isaiah could warn, “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place [left], that they [i.e., the landowners] may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!” it was inevitable that the rioters would demand, “Why should one man have all and another nothing?” What was there to stop the people of Washerne who had been evicted from their houses and had had the seven acres of Lampeland taken from them to reclaim what was theirs in the sight of God and apparently of the Lord Protector?
    In April 1549, reports began to come in to the Privy Council in Westminster of peasants creating havoc in many parts of the country. There was nothing new in that: a long tradition of English violence had bubbled away for generations. But there was no doubt that the 1540s were a desperate time in southern England. Not only were there many estates in which the lax government of the abbeys had been replaced by hardheaded modern men, harder-headed than most. The underlying economic situation was desperate, too. The