Free Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson Page B

in several pieces; occasionally many wounds of which any one would have been fatal; bodies left halved.
    There is a disturbing echo in this story of the use of a park as a place for a hunt. The king’s phrase—“put them down, overrun, and slay them”—is curiously reminiscent of the account of a successful pursuit of a quarry. This was the manly excitement of the hunt taken to its ultimate, a point of view summarized by one Richard Blome, the author of the late-seventeenth-century Gentleman’s Recreation . Hunting, as Blome described the tradition,
    is a commendable Recreation …a great preserver of Health , a Manly Exercise , and an increaser of Activity ;…it recreates the Mind , strengthens the Limbs , and whets the Stomach ;…no Musick is more charming to the Ears of Man , than a Pack of Hounds in full Cry is to him that delights in Hunting …
    Hunting was universally seen as training for war, or rather, more than that, as a form of nostalgic and pretechnological war that reminded its noble participants of what war must have been like before an awkward, ugly modernity contaminated it. Sir Thomas Elyot, the Tudor theorist of government, had recommended that sixteenth-century Englishmen should use only the javelin in the hunt, because that is what Xenophon had recommended in ancient Greece, and it alone would preserve the nobility of the exercise. James I, a passionate huntsman, would have no gun come anywhere near the parks where he pursued deer, because the use of guns, as he told his son Prince Henry, was a “theevish forme of hunting.” Grandeur was antique.
    When in the following decade William Herbert paraded through London (the old dowager queen of Scots, Mary of Guise, was visiting), he had with him “a hundred great horses, mounted by a hundred horsemen,” their coats lined with velvet, gold chains around their necks, white feathers in their hats, wearing the Pembroke badge of thewyvern, the winged dragon, “and every [man] havyng a new gayffelyns in ther hands.” That is a word to raise the hackles on one’s neck. Was it javelins the men and women of Washerne were hunted with, as Elyot recommended, that summer afternoon in 1549? Was it a kind of pig-sticking? The elision was commonplace in the sixteenth century of any difference between a working man and a brutish beast. Shakespeare’s Venus uses a “javelin’s point a churlish swine to gore”—and one is left in no doubt that her churlish swine, with his brawny sides, his hairy bristles, and short, thick neck, living in his “loathsome cabin,” is a kind of animal Caliban, a dirty commoner, to be gored by the lovely, javelin-wielding elegant men, with feathers in their hats, chains around their necks, and beauty in their faces.
    William Herbert’s pursuit and slaying of the tenants who had presumed to enter his park represents the most disturbing compaction of the binary worlds of Arcadia and violence: a dreamlike killing of people in a consciously aestheticized place, the reality of human death for once taking over from the playacting of deer death, the heart-pumping chase, the satisfactory conclusion, the restoration of calm.
    Having used his Welsh tenants to kill his Wiltshire tenants, William Herbert then took the former to war. He was certainly—and from the point of view of his own interests, rightly—excited by it. The summer of 1549 would turn him from a successful adventurer into one of the central power brokers of the Tudor state. He brutally suppressed a Catholic rebellion in the West Country, and emerged from it at the head of an army with which, ominously, he then turned for London.
    The crisis rippled on into the autumn. The cold, brusque, rigid, and aloof idealism of the Duke of Somerset, still in London with the king, had alienated most of his supporters in the council: landlords such as Herbert, who had suffered invasions of their parks or