APPENDIX 5
Besides the Mathews, the other great family to gain from the Wars of the Roses was undoubtedly the Herberts. As we have seen, Henry Herbert, the 2nd Earl of Pembroke, married Mary Sidney, the sister of Sir Philip and Sir Robert Sidney. She was a rather amazing woman who, it has been suggested, was very likely the author of the plays we attribute to Shakespeare. As the evidence for this is presented very well by Robin P Williams in her book Sweet Swan of Avon, I won’t go into it here. What I will say is that Mary, Countess of Pembroke, is one of the very few people with the poetic skills, education and access to source materials to be considered as candidates for this ultimate accolade. Also, if it was her who wrote the plays, it would explain why Ben Jonson, a friend of hers, referred to Shakespeare as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, for the Hampshire/Wiltshire Avon flowed through her lands at Wilton and there is a portrait of her wearing an elaborate lace collar embroidered with swans. Coincidence? I think not. As further evidence for the family connection, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, had two sons, William and Philip. It was they who, following her death, arranged and paid for the publication of the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays without which they may have disappeared from memory. So, at the very least, we have the Herbert family to thank for the preservation of the greatest literary corpus in the whole of English literature.*
Mary’s eldest son, William, inherited his father’s title of Earl of Pembroke. However, his brother Philip is said to have caught the eye of the bisexual King of England and Scotland, James I (formerly King James VI of Scotland), who thought he had attractive dancing legs.
Accordingly, he was awarded (for what services we can only guess at) the title of Earl of Montgomery. Then, following the death of his brother without an heir, he took over the Pembroke title, too. The two titles have continued to run together in this family ever since. The 17th Earl of Pembroke (14th Earl of Montgomery), who died in 2003, was a film director. His most famous movie was Emily (1976), an erotic, ‘coming of age’ film that starred Koo Stark in the title role. Her subsequent affair with Queen Elizabeth’s second son, Prince Andrew, gave the film some notoriety which it probably didn’t deserve. The present holder of the earldoms is the 17th Earl’s only son, William Alexander Sidney Herbert. He seems to have inherited his father’s artistic bent and has a first class degree in Industrial Design. However, a promising career in this line was cut short by the death of his father and the need for him to take charge of the Pembroke Estate. This includes Wilton House, where there is a statue of Shakespeare and where Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, once lived.
At present, the Earl of Pembroke has no male heir, which means that should anything happen to him, the family’s titles and properties would go to Henry George Reginald Herbert, the 8th Earl of Carnavon. This title dates back to the mid-18th century when it was given to Major General William Herbert, younger brother of the 10th Earl of Pembroke. The most famous holder of the Carnarvon title is the 5th Earl, George Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, who sponsored Howard Carter’s dig for the tomb of Tutankhamen. The Earl died in 1923 as a result of a mosquito bite he received in Egypt when he went there to view the tomb of King Tut. Naturally, this was put down to the pharaoh’s curse on whoever would disturb his final resting place, even though Howard Carter, who actually excavated the tomb, lived on for many years. Nevertheless, curse or no curse, the 5th Earl brought back many treasures from Egypt, and these today, perhaps including some small items from the tomb of Tutankhamen, are held in a private museum in the family seat of Highclere Castle.
This huge, imposing mansion is near Newbury in Berkshire. It stands on earlier structures going back to the 9th century, but was largely rebuilt by Sir Charles Barry, the architect who designed the current Houses of Parliament in London. It is in the Jacobean style, which was popular in the early Victorian period. Currently, it is being used as the set for the successful TV series Downton Abbey. There is an irony here, for the main plot of the first series of this upstairs/downstairs soap opera centred on the risk that the fictional Earl of Grantham has no son, and there is a risk that his daughters will lose the family home and estates to a cousin. In real life, it is the Pembrokes who face this risk, while the Earl of Carnarvon, who lives in the real Downton Abbey, is the titular heir to Wilton House and will remain so unless the present Earl of Pembroke produces a son.*
Three earldoms in one family might seem sufficient; however, Sir William Herbert, the 1st Earl of Pembroke, married Anne Parr, the sister-in-law of Henry VIII, and had a second son, Sir Edward Herbert. Descended from him are the Earls of Powis, a title that has been restored to the family on more than one occasion after the extinction of the male line. The family seat of this branch of the Herbert family is Powis Castle, a magnificent building near Welshpool in mid Wales. Without going into details, the family had many ups and downs before eventually, in 1801, the heiress, Henrietta Herbert, married Edward Clive, who was re-created as a new 1st Earl of Powis by George III. Edward Clive was the fabulously rich son of Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’), who established British supremacy in Bengal for the East India Company. Using the Clive fortune, the new Earl of Powis and his wife were able to renovate Powis Castle and its gardens to become one of the greatest houses of the 19th century. Today it has been taken over by the National Trust, and the gardens have recently been restored back to their days of baroque glory. Meanwhile, visitors to the house are able to catch a glimpse of 18th-century India in the Clive Collection. This includes textiles, armour, silver, jade and ivory – in fact, everything one associates with India in the very earliest days of the British Raj.
Another line of Herberts culminated in the Marquises of Bute, who, in Victorian times, became the richest family in Britain. As Philip Herbert, the 7th Earl of Pembroke and 4th Earl of Montgomery, had no son, his titles passed to his brother Thomas. However, he did have a daughter, Charlotte, and she inherited family property in Wales, principally in Cardiff. She married Thomas Hickman, 1st Viscount Windsor, and they had a son who later only had a daughter, Charlotte Jane Hickman. She, however, married John Crichton Stuart, 1st Marquis of Bute. Their grandson was John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquis of Bute. It was he who appreciated the importance of Cardiff as a port for shipping coal and steel to the British Empire. Accordingly, he built the Bute Docks, which at the time was a licence to print money.*
His son, the 3rd Marquis of Bute, was quite different in character. A devout Roman Catholic, he rebuilt Cardiff Castle and Castel Coch (near Merthyr Tydfil) as Gothic follies. The décor of Cardiff Castle celebrates the Welsh heritage of the Arthurian Age, while Castel Coch, a more personal family retreat, focuses on his family’s descent from King Lucius and the early Christians of the Glamorgan Dynasty. Although still very wealthy by ordinary standards, the Marquises of Bute lost much of their legendary fortune over the succeeding generations. The present holder of the title, the 7th Marquis of Bute, prefers not to use it and is generally known instead as ‘Johnny Dumfries’ or ‘Johnny Bute’. Now retired, he is a former racing driver who is most famous for winning the Formula 3 championship in 1984 and the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1988. He also drove for Lotus in Formula 1 in 1986 alongside Ayrton Senna.
As for Raglan Castle, the original family seat of the Herberts at the time of the Wars of the Roses, this was inherited by Elizabeth Herbert, the granddaughter of William Herbert, the 1st Earl of Pembroke, who was beheaded in 1469. She married Sir Charles Somerset, who was descended from John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, in turn descended from John of Gaunt, Earl of Lancaster and third son of Edward III. The Somersets, therefore, were minor royalty and could trace their line back to William the Conqueror. Charles Somerset was awarded the title Earl of Worcester, and Raglan became the seat of this branch of the family. In the 1630s, Edward ‘Lord Herbert’, the son of the 5th Earl of Worcester, built a machine that used steam power to pump water to make a fountain from the moat. The invention was never taken further, but this is the earliest known use of what was obviously a steam engine.
During the Civil War of the mid-17th century, Raglan suffered badly. The Worcesters were on the side of the King and refused to surrender the castle to Parliamentary forces. It was sieged and eventually surrendered to General Fairfax and the Roundheads. He ordered that the castle be slighted, ie made uninhabitable. Charges were placed and considerable damage done to the walls, but the main loss was the library. This was either burned or looted, and as a result many valuable Welsh manuscripts were lost. In the ancestry tracing series Who Do You Think You Are? it was revealed that the comedian Alexander Armstrong is directly descended from the Earls and Marquises of Worcester. He is, therefore, not only of royal, Norman descent, but also from the Herberts. Clearly, this family is full of surprises!
____________________
* See Chart 23: Herbert Earls of Pembroke, Montgomery and Carnarvon, page 248
* See Chart 24: The Herbert Earls of Powis, page 250
* See Chart 25: The Herbert ancestry of the Marquises of Bute, page 251