By Vandyck.
DIED 1649-50.
Tawny coat. Blue bows. Ribbon, Collar, and Order of Garter.
HE was the second son of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, by the beautiful and talented Mary Sidney, the ‘Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,’ of ‘rare Ben Jonson,’ or, as Spenser describes her, ‘the gentlest shepherdess that most resembled both in shape, and spirit, her brother dear.’ Surely those who trace the inheritance of maternal qualities of mind in the child, are at fault in this instance. Philip received his education at New College, Oxford, but he was so illiterate that he could scarcely write his name. He went to Court at an early age; Rowland White, that amusing gossip, calls him ‘Little Master Philip Herbert,’ and three years afterwards says, ‘he is the forwardest courtier that ever I saw, for he had not been here (at Court) two hours than he grew as bold as the best.’
The young man was at that time engaged in seeking a wife, and sued (unsuccessfully) the daughter, first of his kinsman, Sir William Herbert, and afterwards of Sir Arthur Gorges. In 1604, however, he espoused Susan, daughter of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the ceremony being performed with great pomp and magnificence. The King himself sent a fine present.
Sir Thomas Edmonds, in a letter to Gilbert Earl of Shrewsbury, (whose daughter, the Countess of Pembroke, was sister-in-law to Philip Herbert,) says, ‘The gifts of gloves and garters alone amounted to wellnigh a thousand pounds.’ The same authority, speaking of Herbert’s growing favour with James I., says, ‘he is desirous to doe all men goode, and to hurte no man.’ But another contemporary seems nearer the truth when he observes, ‘Sir Philip is intolerable, choleric, and offensive, and did not refrain to break wiser heads than his own.’ He was constantly involved in some quarrel through his arrogance and insolence; and once being at some races at Croydon, he so raised the ire of Ramsay, afterwards Earl of Holdernesse, that the enraged Scot inflicted personal chastisement on Herbert, in the sight of the whole course.
But James made him Privy Councillor, and in 1605 Baron Herbert of Hurland, Isle of Sheppey, and Earl of Montgomery. He was already a Knight of the Bath, and shortly afterwards he received the Garter. Other dignities followed, and on the accession of Charles I., that King continued to distinguish this most unworthy man.
He was made Chamberlain, and Warden of the Stannaries; he is said to have beaten one Thomas May with his Chamberlain’s staff in the banqueting-hall at Whitehall, and to have so far tyrannised over the people of Devon and Cornwall as to have endangered a rising in those counties. Charles I., whose kindness of heart so often betrayed him into culpable weakness, bore with Lord Montgomery’s misconduct for some time, but after a disgraceful scene in the House of Lords between him and the Earl of Arundel, in which blows are said actually to have passed, the King availed himself of this opening to choose another Chamberlain.
Indeed both Lords were committed to the Tower for a time, and from that moment the Earl of Pembroke (for he had succeeded to the ancestral honours on the death of his brother) forsook the master who had laden him with benefits. He ranged himself with the King’s bitterest enemies, and in 1642, being appointed one of the committee that waited on His Majesty at Newmarket, he urged (and that in so unbecoming a manner) that the King should relinquish the control of the militia to the Parliament, that Charles exclaimed indignantly, ‘No, by God! not for an hour. You have asked that of me, was never asked of a king before.’ Lord Pembroke was employed several times in negotiating between the King and Parliament; he became Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, where he was deservedly unpopular. He spoke in the House in a most intemperate and even absurd manner, and in 1649 accepted a seat, as representative for the county of Berks, in Cromwell’s House of Commons. In the January following he died. By his first wife he had seven sons, of whom the fourth, Philip, succeeded him in his titles and estates, and three daughters. His second wife was the celebrated Anne Clifford, daughter and heir of George, third Earl of Cumberland, and widow of Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. He treated her shamefully, endeavouring to force her to give her daughter Lady Isabella Sackville in marriage to one of his younger sons, striving hard to get possession of the young lady’s portion. In a letter to her uncle, the Earl of Bedford, Lady Pembroke says, ‘I dare not venture to come up without his leave, leste he should find occasion to turne mee out of this house, as he did at Whitehalle.’