PHILIP HERBERT,

EARL OF PEMBROKE, AND FIRST EARL OF MONTGOMERY.

THIS

HIS very singular and eccentric person, for we will not call him nobleman, as he thought fit to divest himself of that dignity, as well as to all claim to it in its more general sense, was the second of the two sons of Henry, fourth Earl of Pembroke of his surname, by his third Lady, Mary, the amiable and accomplished daughter of Sir Henry, and sister of Sir Philip, Sidney.

Of the sort of education bestowed on a son of parents in every way so exalted there can be no doubt, but we have no particulars of it, save that it was concluded at New College in Oxford: all else that is certain is that he derived no profit from it, for Anthony Wood tells us that "he was so illiterate that he could scarcely write his name.” His high rank, and probably a restlessness of temper for which he was ever remarkable, brought him to Elizabeth's court at a time of life uncommonly early. That agreeable newsmonger Rowland White, in a letter to Sir Robert Sidney, of the nineteenth of April, 1597, calls him "little Mr. Philip Harbert ;" and in another, of the twenty-sixth of the same month, in the year 1600, written from the court, says " Mr. Philip Harbert is here, and one of the forwardest courtiers that ever I saw in my time, for he had not been here two houres but he grew as bold as the best." His chief anxiety at this time seems to have been, naturally enough, to get a wife, and in each of those letters different ladies are mentioned to whom he was then a suitor; one of them the heir of his kinsman, Sir William Herbert of Monmouthshire, the other of Sir Arthur Gorges, but both those enterprizes failed.

Presently however after the accession of James this inclination

was fully gratified, and by a very splendid alliance. He married on the twenty-seventh of December, 1604, Susan, daughter of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and their nuptials were celebrated with an expense and magnificence almost unparalleled in the annals of courtly extravagance. Sir Thomas Edmunds, recounting several particulars of them, on the following day, in a letter to Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, one of whose daughters was married to Philip's elder brother, William Earl of Pembroke, says "the charge of the gloves and garters given were esteemed to amownt to well near a thousand powndes; his graunte is passed unto him for his twelve hundred pound land, and it is expected that 'erre it be long, the King will also bestowe some dignitie on him." Sir Dudley Carleton too, in a letter, nearly of the same date, detailing at large an abundance of circumstances which attended the marriage, some of which it would be improper as well as unnecessary, to repeat here, tells him that "the presents of plate, and other things given by the noblemen, were valued at two thousand five hundred pounds; but that which made it a good marriage was a gift of the King's of five hundred pounds" (p ann.) "land, for the bride's joynture:" and Rowland White again, on the fourth of February, writes to Lord Shrewsbury"Mr. Sandford and myself have dispatched the greate gifte his Mate bestowed upon hym, and we doe yeld him a very good account of our labour for he hath two brave seates in Kent and Wiltshire." Indeed all the private correspondence of the nobility at that precise period abounds with such recitals.

Such circumstances in the story of a mere youth, a younger brother, of no fame nor attainments, might seem singular, but the fact was that he possessed singular beauty of countenance and person, in the knowledge and practice of all the little fopperies and artifices that could contribute to the adornment of which he excelled. It has been again and again repeated that such qualifications were irresistibly attractive of James's regard, and on these precious pretensions Philip Herbert, whom he presently knighted,

gained his favour almost in the hour of the arrival of that Prince in London. "The young worthy Sir Philip," says Mr. White, in the letter last quoted, " growes great in his Majestie's favor, and carries it without envy; for he is very humble to the greate Lords; is desirous to doe all men good; and hurtes no man." Doubtless he spared no pains till this period, and for some time after, to disguise his real character, and of this, for he abounded in cunning, he was fully capable. The truth is that his mind and heart were wholly without principle, as well as without any amiable affections ; that his temper was furious, almost to madness, and that he was withal a notorious coward. Osborne, a bitter memoir writer of the time, to whom he was well known, tells us that he was " intollerable choleric and offensive and did not refrain to break many wiser heads than his own." His perpetual quarrels with persons of distinction were at once the amusement and disgrace of the Court, in one of which, at a horse race at Croydon, Ramsay, a Scot, who was afterwards created Earl of Holderness, chastised him personally with impunity in the presence of thousands: such was the man whom James on his arrival in England first chose as his favourite, and called to his Privy Council; and on whom, in addition to the great pecuniary bounties just now mentioned, he conferred, on the fourth of May, 1605, the dignities of Baron Herbert, of Shurland, in the Isle of Sheppey, and Earl of Montgomery, and, shortly after, the Order of the Garter.

Charles the first, one of whose few foibles was to cherish, without due discrimination, a kindness for those whom his father had distinguished, placed this unworthy man in the high station of Lord Chamberlain of his household, and appointed him Warden of the Stanneries, in both which offices he grossly misconducted himself. In the one, to give an instance from many of his brutal intemperance, he is recorded to have beaten Thomas May, a well known literary character of the time, with his Chamberlain's staff, in the banquetting house at Whitehall: and in the other, to have driven the people of Devon and Cornwall nearly to insurrection

by the tyrannies and exactions with which he tormented them. His shameful irregularities, according to a sort of charity not unfrequent in judging of the conduct of the great, were considered for some years as foibles and eccentricities, but the time soon arrived in which he was to give the last finish to his absurdities by assuming the character of a statesman and an orator, and to crown his faults by the addition of the basest ingratitude. In May, 1641, on the very eve, if it might not be said already to exist, of the grand rebellion, he quarelled violently in the House of Peers with the Lord Mowbray, eldest son of the Earl of Arundel, and some blows, or menaces of blows, passed. They were committed the next day to the Tower, under the authority of the House, and Charles, at length weary and ashamed of longer countenancing so unworthy a servant, availed himself of an opportunity so favourable, and deprived him of his staff.

From that hour he ranged himself with the most bitter enemies of the Crown, to whom the importance conferred on him by the noble estates to which he had a few years before succeeded, together with the Earldom of Pembroke, on the death of his accomplished elder brother, rendered him a welcome acquisition. Fully conscious however of his inability to furnish any other means of aid to their detestable cause, as well as of the dangers which might be incurred to it by the well known folly and fury of his conduct, they admitted him into no degree of their confidence, and employed him only in the company, and under the observation, of trusty persons. Thus he was a commissioner, with several other of the malcontent Lords whom the King was obliged to name, for the treaty with the Scottish rebels at Ripon in 1640; and again, in the spring of 1642, one of the Committee appointed by both houses to present their outrageous declaration of that time to his Majesty at Newmarket. On that occasion the indecent importunity with which he pressed the King to abandon for a time to the Parliament the controul of the militia drew from his mild and bounteous master an expression which perhaps

never before fell from his lips-" No," said Charles, " by God not for an hour. You have asked that of me in this was never asked of a King, and with which I would not trust my wife and children." When the King, after the battle of Edgehill, alarmed the Parliament by marching to the neighbourhood of London, this Earl was sent to him, with several members of each House, to make that sham overture of peace which ended in the ineffectual negotiation at Oxford, in January, 1643, where also he was one of the commissioners, as well as in that of Uxbridge in the following year.

On the death in 1630 of his elder brother, William, Earl of Pembroke, who had held that dignified office, he had been, strangely enough, chosen Chancellor of the University of Oxford, into which he now used, but, to the honor of that great body, almost wholly without effect, his utmost influence to introduce the fanatical and republican principles which he had lately assumed. He was a frequent speaker in Parliament, and disgraced even the cause in which he had embarked by the intemperate absurdities which he uttered there; and was mean and impudent enough to print from time to time as his speeches the compositions of others, many of which are still to be met with. Thus he pursued his wayward course till the final abolition of the dwindled legislative body to which he had long been an incumbrance, and at length concluded it by accepting, on the sixteenth of April, 1649, a seat, as representative for the County of Berks, in Oliver Cromwell's spurious House of Commons. He died on the twentythird of January in the succeeding year.

This strange and bad man, as might be expected, was the constant object not only of the mixed hatred and contempt of the more zealous Cavaliers, but of the keen satire and ridicule which many of them were so capable of bestowing on him. From a multitude of such of their lampoons as are still extant, I venture to insert the following, not only for the sake of some strokes which it exhibits of genuine humour, but because the hints which