WILLIAM HERBERT, EARL OF PEMBROKE. His character is not only one of the most amiable in lord Clarendon's History, but is one of the best drawn; not being marked with any strong lines, it distinguishes the delicacy of that happy pencil, to which the real pencil must yield of the renowned portrait-painter of that age.Vandyke little thought, when he drew sir Edward Hyde, that a greater master than himself was sitting to him. They had indeed great resemblance in their manners; each copied nature faithfully. Vandyke's men are not all of exact height and symmetry, of equal corpulence; his women are not Madonnas or Venuses; the likeness seems to have been studied in all, the character in many his dresses are those of the times. The historian's fidelity is as remarkable; he represents the folds and plaits, the windings and turnings of each character he draws; and though he varies the lights and shades as would best produce the effect he designs, yet his colours are never those of imagination, nor dis Hist. of the Rebellion, vol. i. p. 57. posed without a singular propriety. Hampden is not painted in the armour of Brutus; nor would Cromwell's mask fit either Julius or Tiberius. "The earl of Pembroke," says another writer3, "was not only a great favourer of learned and ingenious men, but was himself learned, and endowed to admiration with a poetical geny, as by those amorous and not inelegant aires and poems of his composition doth evidently appear; some of which had musical notes set to them by Hen. Lawes and Nich. Laneare." All that he hath extant, were published with this title, "Poems written by the Right Honorable William Earl of Pembroke, &c. whereof many of which are answered by way of Repartee, by Sir Benjamin Ruddier, Knight5; with several distinct Poems, written by them occasionally and apart." Lond. 1660, 8vo. › Wood's Athenæ, vol. i. p. 546. [To the earl of Pembroke, Davies of Hereford inscribed his Wittes Pilgrimage; Anton, one of his Philosophers Satyrs; Browne, his Britannia's Pastorals; and Ben Jonson, his two books of Epigrams. The former of these, in his Scourge of Folly, has a most quibbling compliment "to the much ho noured lord, worthy of all honourable titles, for courage, wit, and learning, William earl of Pembroke."] [Hayman, in his Quodlibets, 1628, seems thus to portray sir B. Rudyerd; "the wise and learned:" "A poet rich, a judge, and a just man, In few but you are all these found in one."] [Anthony Wood tells an extraordinary tale of lord Pembroke, namely, that he died suddenly on the 10th of April 1630, according to the calculation of his nativity, made several years before by Mr. Thomas Allen of Gloucester-hall 4!! Had his lordship possessed a credulous mind, it might have been suspected that this astrological prediction had worked upon his feelings, and occasioned a temporary suspension of the animal faculties, which was too hastily concluded to be dissolution; for Mr. Granger states it as an accredited fact in the Pembroke family, that when his lordship's body was opened in order to be embalmed, he was observed, immediately after the incision was made, to lift up his hand. This remarkable circumstance, adds the biographer, compared with lord Clarendon's account of his sudden death, affords a strong presumptive proof that his distemper was an apoplexy 5. Athen. Oxon. vol. i. col. 546. Lord Clarendon relates, that general Morgan and others having met at Maidenhead with some persons dependent on the earl of Pembroke; one of them at supper drank a health to the lord steward: upon which another of them said "that he believed his lordship was at that time very merry, for he had now outlived the day which his tutor Sandford had prognosticated upon his nativity he would not outlive; but he had done it now, for that was his birth-day, which had completed his age to fifty years." The next morning, by the time they came to Colebrook, they met with the news of his death. t Biog. Hist. vol. i. p. 330. Smith's Diary, in Sloan MS. 886, says lord Pembroke died of an apoplexy, at Baynard's castle. So lord Clarendon also states, "after a full and cheerful supper." The luminous character of this peer drawn by our noble historian, and so deservedly applauded by lord Orford, seems to challenge entire citation. "William earl of Pembroke was the most univer sally beloved and esteemed of any man of his age; and having a great office in the court, he made the court itself better esteemed and more reverenced in the country. And as he had a great number of friends of the best men, so no man had ever the confidence to avow himself to be his enemy. He was a man very well bred, and of excellent parts, and a graceful speaker upon any subject, having a good proportion of learning, and a ready wit to apply it and enlarge upon it: of a pleasant and facetious humour, and a disposition affable, generous, and magnificent. He was master of a great fortune from his ancestors, and had a great addition by his wife; but all served not his expence, which was only limited by his great mind and occasions to use it nobly. "He lived many years about the court, before in it; and never by it being rather regarded and esteemed by king James than loved and favoured. After the foul fall of the earl of Somerset, he was made lord chamberlain of the king's house, more for the court's sake than his own; and the court appeared with the more lustre, because he had the government of that province. As he spent and lived upon his own fortune, so he stood upon his own feet, without any other sup 6 Lady Mary Talbot, the daughter of Gilbert earl of Shrews bury. See Lodge's Illustr. vol. iii. p. 200. |