Quarrel with the King (27 page)

“Charles R.”: the king had signed this letter, with its ominous mixture of command and entreaty, by putting his large feathery signature, the pen scarcely touching the paper, at the head of the secretary's text.
But Pembroke ignored it, and the letter remains today in the House of Lords where it arrived that spring day. England was en route to civil war. The two sides were gathering their troops all over the country. In August, after the harvest had been taken in and men could turn their thoughts to war, Charles raised his standard at Nottingham and began to collect his army around him. Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, was with him. The Earl of Pembroke, Dormer's father-in-law, was not.

The discontent had surfaced, and in Clarendon's words, “every man [became] troubled and perplexed.” Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, the long-standing Pembroke client, who with William Pembroke had written private Arcadian love poems thirty years before, had said to the House of Commons in July 1642 that “If blood once again begins to touch blood, we shall presently fall into a certain misery and must attain an uncertain success.” The sense of the community of England, of a single organism connecting crown and people through the ancient constitution, had broken down, and for the next decade, as they repeatedly expressed it, the body of the country was at war with itself. It was “an intestinal war,” “the troubles,” the “unnaturall war,” “the late unhappie difference.” For Philip Skippon, the roundhead commander at Marlborough in December 1642, the royalists were “a race of vipers, that would eat the passage to their ambitions through the entrails of their mother, the Commonwealth.” The favorite term used by parliamentarians for royalists was
malignant
, as if they were a disease of the body. If they had possessed anything like the frame of mind that could produce this expression, they would have recognized the Civil War as a form of autoimmune disease, the tissues of the body filled with its own hostile antibodies, a war in which not only liberty but the entire
constitution
of the body—a word that in its political and physical senses still preserves this ancient analogy—was endangered.

The war was brutal, not only in its battles, where the proportion of dead in infantry units could at times reach 75 percent, usually under
the swords of the cavalry, or in the aftermath of sieges, whether of towns or fortified manor houses, where rage and revenge exacted a terrifying price from the defenders. A man emerged from one of these sieges with his mind so destroyed that he spent the rest of his life crawling around on all fours, hoping to be mistaken for a dog. Nor only in the dreadful weather, the cold and rain, which beat almost ceaselessly, winter and summer, in the early 1640s. Nor in the disastrous harvests, particularly in the middle of the decade, which left swathes of England hungry and weakened. Nor in the attacks of the plague that ravaged the hungry villages. Wilton, Bemerton, and Fugglestone were all devastated by the disease, which killed some of the people and kept others shut up so that they could not work but “during wch tyme they were inforced to waste and consume that small porcion of estate wch they formerly had gotten by their hard labour to ye utter impoverishinge of them and theire families,” so that “as they have died in the plauge so now will they dye with famen also.” Village after village made “a miserable cry to the magistrates,” imploring the authorities for aid.

More than that, the Civil War was a brutal eruption of anarchy, rape, theft, and violence, of gang dominance and gang attack, of pervasive lawlessness, which spread across the country, terrified ordinary people, gave free rein to thugs and thieves, and turned the roads through the Arcadian valleys of Wiltshire into places no ordinary man or woman would dare travel. Everything that sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England had feared, against which the idea of Arcadia had been set, became a reality in the 1640s: a breakdown of order and even of meaning, a sense that no one knew anymore what mattered or what they believed in. The only constant, becoming ever more urgent as the years of war and turmoil rolled on, was a desire for a better time, a time in the past, an increasingly golden age of peace and happiness.

Wiltshire was turned over time and again. Already by March 1643 “the ways are now very dangerous to travel in by reason of the interrup
tion of soldiers.” Pembroke abandoned Wilton for his London houses and sent his estranged wife, Lady Anne Clifford, to live in Baynard's Castle, where she could look after his paintings and treasures. Detachments from both sides camped from time to time in the great rooms at Wilton and at Ramsbury, with the troopers quartered in the stables, the household servants providing meals for the officers. Pembroke's son-in-law, the Earl of Carnarvon, on the enemy side, spent a night in the house with other cavalier commanders in late May 1643. The king himself spent a few nights at Ramsbury, and at the very end of the war the king's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, held court with one or two of the Wiltshire cavaliers for a few days at Wilton. Around these passing wartime ironies, the county became a battle zone, controlled by Parliament to begin with, then taken by the royalists making raids from Oxford; its many country houses became armored hardpoints in the war, besieged and stormed, first by one side then the other, often sacked with astonishing and terrible ferocity, the women raped, the children abused, while armies marched across the ravaged lands between them.

The men and women of the county found themselves in a labyrinth of contradiction, not sure how or why the country had come to this, nor what their part in it all should be. Where before they had known what their rights and restrictions had been, now they were to answer to strange masters on strange grounds. Arguments they were only faintly familiar with had erupted into their lives. “Do you not thinke the condition of the poor Countryeman hath not suffered a sad alteration,” one anonymous Wiltshireman asked at the end of 1642, “from a state wherein he knew what was his owne, and was not capable of any violence for which he was not sure of a remedy and reparation, to this, where he receives commands under the penalty of plundering and hanging from persons of whom he never heard, for horses, for money, for personall attendance, for which he can find no ground?”

Few sights are more pathetic than the marks of illiterate Wiltshire
men from these villages, perhaps related to the symbols with which they identified their sheep in the common flocks, put at the end of the hundreds of petitions and complaints to the justices that detail the damage and destruction done to their lives in these years:

“'Tis indeed a sad and miserable condition we are fallen into,” the anonymous Wiltshireman wrote. He was addressing his friend, an MP at Westminster. Why, he asked, had the war even begun? They were “weltering in one anothers bloud before we know why we are angry, and to see our houses and towns fired and our Neighbours and Friends taken prisoners, by men who do not onely speake the same language with us, but are of our owne families and of the same (or seeme to be of the same) Religion.” Violence and viciousness had erupted in precisely the way the whole culture had been designed to prevent.

There was “a strange dejection in the spirits of the people,” this Marlborough man continued, “& if I am not cozened, an inquisitivenesse, by questions they did not use to aske. Who raised armies first? Why they did it? What the Commonwealth wanted? Whether the king hath denyed anything was not in his lawful power to deny?” And was the prize worth the grief that would inevitably come?

All certainty had gone, all trust and assurance. On Monday, December 19, 1642, when the country was deep into the first bloody phase of civil war, when the forces of king and Parliament had already shed each other's blood, Pembroke made a speech in the House of Lords. On the instigation of the queen, he had been shut out of the king's councils, and the anarchy he sensed around him, both social and political, had made him defensive. He did not feel that his allies in the House of Commons would remain allies for long. This was, as he said, the speech of an honest man, and all he was looking for was “an accommodation” between the warring sides. In its straightforwardness, its lack of guile, its deeply conservative conception of him as a grandee, and in its fearful, honest pleading with his peers, the speech might stand as his credo, his apology for himself and the decisions of his life. It was the statement of a man whose only intention was “to scape undoing.”

The earl clearly liked what he said, as he had the speech printed and distributed. The words of his enemy and rival the fearsomely godly Lord Brooke were then also printed in response. In their two speeches, one can see, in fierce confrontation, the revolutionary opposed to the man for whom revolution is a greater disaster than the ills it aims to cure. It is the meeting of radicalism and gradualism, between the ferocity of first principles and the beliefs of someone such as the Earl of Pembroke, for whom continuity between past and future was more important than anything that might be put in its place.

T
HE
E
ARL OF
P
EMBROKE'S
S
PEECH FOR AN
A
CCOMMODATION SUNDAY
19
DEC
. 1642

Lord Brooke then replied with a speech like a sword, a denial of every Arcadian principle of accommodation, gentleness, hierarchy, love, and custom: