styled Ld. Herbert 1636-50; suc. fa. 23 Jan. 1650 as 5th earl of PEMBROKE
First sat 26 Apr. 1660; last sat 9 May 1668
MP Wilts. Apr. 1640, Glam., Nov. 1640-53, 1653-60
bap. 21 Feb. 1621, 4th but 1st surv. s. of Philip Herbert†, 4th earl of Pembroke, and 1st w. Susan (1587–1629), da. of Edward de Vere†, 17th earl of Oxford; bro. of William Herbert‡, James Herbert‡, and John Herbert‡. educ. privately (tutor, Griffith Williams),1 Westminster sch.; Exeter Coll. Oxf., matric. 20 Apr. 1632; travelled abroad (France, Italy) 1635–7. m. (1) c. 28 Mar. 1639, Penelope (1620–c.1647), da. and h. of Sir Robert Naunton of Letherington, Suff. and wid. of Paul Bayning†, 2nd Visct. Bayning, 1s.; (2) 1649, Katherine (d. Feb. 1678), da. of Sir William Villiers, bt. of Brooksby, Leics. 2s. 5da. d. 11 Dec. 1669; will 28 Aug., pr. 22 Dec. 1669.2
Mbr., council of state 1651–2;3 pres. council of state 3 June–13 July 1652;4 commr. council of trade 1660–8.
Ld. lt. Som. (jt.) 1640–2,5 Mon., Brec., and Glam. Mar.–July 1642; custos rot. Pemb. by 1650–d., Wilts. by 1650–60, Mont. by 1650–60, Derbys. by 1650–2?, Glam. 1660–d.6
Capt. earl of Pembroke’s Regt. of Horse 1639;7 col. Regt. of Horse 1659.8
Mbr., Co. of Royal Adventurers in Africa 1660–3,9 Royal African Co. 1663–d.;10 treas. Council of the Royal Fishing 1661–d.11
Likeness: oil on canvas by Sir Anthony van Dyck (group portrait of family of Philip Herbert, 4th earl of Pembroke), c.1634-5, Wilton House, Wilts.
Philip Herbert’s great-grandfather William Herbert, ‘a mad fighting young fellow’ and from 1543 brother-in-law of Henry VIII, was granted the former monastic buildings and lands of the Abbey of Wilton in Wiltshire in 1544 and in 1551 was created earl of Pembroke. Over the next century the earls of Pembroke were powerful figures in both the family’s ancestral lands of south Wales and, increasingly, in Wiltshire, where they made the grand residence of Wilton House a centre for literary and artistic patronage, as well as the base of their regional power. The younger of the second earl’s two sons, Philip Herbert†, was in addition created earl of Montgomery in 1605, was made lord chamberlain in 1626, and became the 4th earl of Pembroke upon the death of his elder brother in 1630. Rich (his income from land and offices was estimated at £30,000 p.a.), powerful, irascible, and a supporter of godly Protestantism, Pembroke and Montgomery was an important figure in the opposition to Charles I.12 During the civil wars he largely sided with the party against the king, although he continued to negotiate with the king and to advocate a settlement right up to Charles I’s execution. He was made a member of the council of state in February 1649 and was one of only three peers to stand as a commoner in elections to the Rump, being returned in April for Berkshire.
In March 1639, the 4th earl’s son and heir, then styled Lord Herbert, married Penelope, the widow of the very wealthy Paul Bayning, 2nd Viscount Bayning, as part of a concerted effort by the Herbert family to ‘swallow the whole of Bayning’s estate’.13 He was returned, while still under age, for the county of Wiltshire in the Short Parliament and for Glamorgan in the Long but, unlike his father, he took no active part in the civil wars and withdrew from the Commons after Pride’s Purge. He returned to his seat in July 1649 and was elected to the council of state in December 1651, even acting as its president briefly during the summer of 1652.14 During the Protectorate he was occupied with reprising the role of previous earls of Pembroke as patrons of literature, maintaining the Cavalier poet Sir John Denham‡ and the linguist Sir Richard Fanshawe‡, both of whom served as tutors to his eldest son, William Herbert, styled Lord Herbert (later 6th earl of Pembroke).15 The earl was presumably also preoccupied during this time by his growing brood of seven children from his second wife, Katherine Villiers, even though this was a notoriously fractious marriage.16
In May 1659 Pembroke re-entered politics when the Rump was reconvened upon the fall of the Protectorate; he and one of the only other peers still sitting in Parliament, William Cecil 2nd earl of Salisbury, appear to have played a prominent part in its proceedings.17 When the House of Lords reassembled in the Convention, these two peers were seen as traitors, both to their king and to their class. Rumours circulated in early May – spread by, among others, the former Cromwellian-turned-royalist Edward Montagu earl of Sandwich – that Pembroke and Salisbury were going to be excluded from the House.18 Perhaps not wishing to make himself too visible, Pembroke appears not to have exercised his electoral interest fully in Wiltshire, Glamorgan, or Monmouthshire in the elections to the Convention. His fellow parliamentary reprobate, Salisbury, seems to have been annoyed by Pembroke’s failure to support Salisbury’s son, Algernon Cecil, in the elections for Old Sarum, where Pembroke owned a deciding number of burgages.
Pembroke was able to take his seat on the second day of the Convention, 26 Apr. 1660, and sat for just under three-quarters of its meetings until the recess on 13 September. When he returned on 6 Nov. he was less attentive to the business of the House, coming to only one-third of the meetings before the Convention was dissolved at the end of December. The busiest period of his activity – in any of the Restoration Parliaments – was in May 1660, when the former parliamentarian peers were still the majority force in the House. On 27 Apr. he was named to the select committee assigned to draw up heads to be presented in a conference on the means to heal the ‘breaches and distractions’ of the kingdom; as a result of this conference, on 2 May 1660 he was placed on the joint committee which was to draft the answer to the Declaration of Breda. In total he was named to 13 committees in May, including those for the reception of the king and for settling the militia, and on 30 May he reported from the select committee on the bill to confirm the ordinance for a monthly assessment. From 1 June to the time of the recess in September he was named to only six committees, including those for the bills to provide supply for the disbandment of the army and for the confirmation of the judicial proceedings of the Interregnum. When the Convention met again in the winter of 1660 he was nominated to two committees on bills for the restoration of royalists to their estates and was added to the committee on the bill to abolish the court of wards.
On 2 May he was also named to the committee of petitions and it is here that Pembroke was most active in the Convention. It is difficult to estimate the extent of his leading role in the committee in its early weeks, as the minute books do not begin to indicate the committee’s chairmen until 1661, but the frequency of his reports to the House from the committee suggests his importance. The committee minutes note (as the Journal itself does not) that he reported to the House on 3, 7, and 12 May, first on Uriah Babington’s petition to be reinstated as keeper of Greenwich Park and House, and then on the dispute between Walter Long and Lady Jermyn over the office of registrar of chancery.19 Pembroke almost certainly chaired the committee meetings on 14–19 May because on 16, 17, and 21 May he reported to the House on the different matters discussed over those days: the right of the royal bargemen to take into their care the barge Brigantine; the restoration of Thomas Bushell to his estates; the dispute between the East India Company and Daniel Skinner; the complaints of the Fellows of New College, Oxford; and the petition of John Baker.20 From June his influence may have been diluted by the influx of royalist peers into the House, many of whom were added to the committee. In June he reported on the petition of Dr Nicholas to be Master of St Nicholas’ Hospital and on three occasions he reported from the committee on petitions arising from the ongoing disputes and violence over the drainage of the Hatfield Level.21 Other matters with which he was involved were the petition of John Poulett 2nd Baron Poulett, and the attempt to settle the differences between John Paulet 5th marquess of Winchester, and his son, Charles Powlett, Lord St John (later duke of Bolton).22
Ironically, considering his past involvement with the regimes of 1649–53, Pembroke became heavily involved in the petitions from an old royalist family seeking revenge against its former Parliamentarian and republican oppressors. He was the principal chairman on the various petitions and bills of Charles Stanley 8th earl of Derby, and his mother, Charlotte, the countess dowager of Derby. Their disputes included their own differences, as well as matters relating to the execution of James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby, and the 8th earl’s attempt to reclaim the sequestered Stanley estates which had been sold during the Interregnum. The countess dowager’s petition against her son’s title as hereditary lord of the Isle of Man was referred to the committee of petitions, and a subcommittee (of which Pembroke was a member) set about arranging an amicable agreement, which Pembroke reported to the House on 8 June.23 The following day the dowager countess’s petition to have those men who had judged and sentenced to death her husband in the 1651 Parliament exempted from the Bill of Indemnity was referred to the committee for privileges. Pembroke had already played a part on this committee, having reported on 6 June regarding the right of the House in choosing its own Speaker. He chaired and reported from the committee meeting which decided to order the appearance of those named in the countess’s petition. The extensive testimony of Derby’s judges was heard from 6 to 30 July; Pembroke almost certainly conducted these hearings, as he reported to the House on a number of other issues heard before the committee during that period, and the minutes explicitly name him as chairman on 30 July. He reported to the House from the committee on 6 Aug. that the late earl had been tried by an illegal court martial.24
In addition, on 13 June Derby’s bill for the recovery of his estates in north Wales (sold under duress, as he claimed, during the Interregnum) was introduced in the House and referred to the committee of petitions, which heard extensive testimony from 27 June to 12 July.25 Pembroke was probably acting as chair during these meetings, for on 14 July he reported the Committee’s conclusion that there had been ‘force and fraud’ in gaining the conveyance from Derby. On 17 Aug. Pembroke was appointed to the committee on Derby’s bill to reclaim his lands but realization of the potential conflicts between this bill and the bill for confirmation of judicial proceedings, for which Pembroke was also a committee member, led to continuous postponements and the bill was dropped by the end of the Convention. Carrying on from his activities on behalf of victims of the Interregnum, on 30 July 1660 Pembroke also reported from a select committee that the bill for reparations to the marquess of Winchester for his many sufferings during the civil wars was fit to pass.
In the months of the recess Pembroke turned his attention to matters outside Parliament and became involved in many of the colonial projects then being discussed at court. In early November he was made a commissioner on the newly established council of trade and navigation, although he was not reappointed when new letters patent were issued in 1668. In early October Samuel Pepys‡ first noted Pembroke’s plans to join with James Stuart duke of York, to finance an expedition to look for gold on the west coast of Africa, and Pembroke was among the members when the first charter for the Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa was issued in December 1660.26 He was again included when this group was reincorporated as the Royal African Company in 1663.27 He was made treasurer of the Council of the Royal Fishing in 1661, although Samuel Pepys was later to be highly critical of ‘the loose and base manner’ in which he handled the voluntary contributions for the welfare of fishermen.28 His acceptance by the restored regime was signified by his role as cupbearer and bearer of the spurs at the coronation of Charles II in April 1661.29
With renewed confidence, Pembroke exerted his influence in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament. The Welsh county of Glamorgan returned as one of its knights Pembroke’s eldest son and heir, William, the last occasion when the county returned a member of that family. By this time Pembroke was concentrating on building up the family influence in Wiltshire instead. There he was able to assure one of the candidates, Charles Seymour‡, son of Francis Seymour Baron Seymour of Trowbridge, of all the votes under his control. In his own borough of Wilton he followed the preference of the local-born secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas‡, whose father had served successive earls of Pembroke earlier in the century. He threw his influence behind the return of Nicholas’ ward Thomas Mompesson‡ and his eldest son, Sir John Nicholas‡. When the younger Nicholas chose to sit for Ripon instead, the elder Nicholas was able to persuade Pembroke to support the former royalist propagandist and current licenser of the press Sir John Birkenhead‡, a strange choice as Pembroke’s father, the 4th earl, had been one of the most frequent targets of Birkenhead’s sarcastic pen. For Old Sarum, where Pembroke appears to have been the dominant burgage owner, he ensured the return of Nicholas’ younger, and less able, son Edward Nicholas‡ and Sir John Denham‡, whom he had protected at Wilton during the Interregnum but who was now serving as surveyor of the king’s works.30
Pembroke came to just over half of the sittings of the first (1661–2) session of the Cavalier Parliament. He was most involved in the first part of the session until the summer adjournment of 1661, being present at 83 per cent of the meetings. It was Pembroke who presented to the House on 15 June the petition for the office of lord great chamberlain of Aubrey de Vere 20th earl of Oxford. Oxford was not only his mother’s distant kinsman but had been married to one of Pembroke’s stepdaughters. Pembroke was named to few committees – only nine – but in some of these he took an active part. Derby’s bill was reintroduced in the House on 24 May 1661 and the committee appointed on 7 June was first assigned to determine whether the bill infringed the provisions of the recently passed Act for Confirmation of Judicial Proceedings and Act of Indemnity. Pembroke chaired the meetings of 11 and 14 June which considered this issue and reported to the House on 15 June that both the judges assisting and the committee itself considered that the bill did not contravene those acts. On 18 June the House referred the many petitions against the bill to the committee, which, under the chairmanship of Pembroke, considered them in detail two days later. It was almost certainly he who reported a week later that the committee would leave it to the House to determine whether Derby should be relieved.31 By this time the tide of sympathy was beginning to turn against Derby and on 16 July it was ordered that further consideration of Derby’s case would not be heard until after the recess.
One of the more significant of Pembroke’s activities in this early part of the Cavalier Parliament was his chairmanship of the committee considering the Quakers’ petition in late May 1661. This was very much to his heart because Pembroke had been dabbling in Quaker meetings in London since at least 1658. By 1659 contemporaries such as Pepys clearly considered him a Quaker.32 In February 1660 he was gratefully singled out by a Friend as the only member in the Long Parliament, then in its final days, still supporting liberty of conscience.33 Pembroke’s associations continued despite the more hostile atmosphere of the Restoration. Several of his trusted menial servants appear to have been dangerously close to the ‘Anabaptist and Presbyterian’ underground always suspected of rebellion, while by April 1664 the French ambassador considered Pembroke ‘the best friend and greatest partisan of all the fanatics of the world’.34 A year later ‘the Quaking Lord the earl of Pembroke’ allegedly warned the king that the end of the world was nigh, but nevertheless declined Charles’s jesting offer to take Wilton House off his hands, replying ‘No, and please your majesty, it shall die with me’.35 Charles II continued to find Pembroke a figure of fun and in 1668 regaled Pepys and other courtiers with accounts of the Quaker earl’s swearing oaths on the tennis court and his strange theories on Adam’s original sin.36
It was only fitting, then, that Pembroke took the chair of the committee assigned in late May 1661 to consider the controversial petition of the Quakers and ‘to cure the distempers of these people’. He had the duty, presumably unpleasant for him, to report to the House on 31 May that the committee had rejected almost all of the Quakers’ requests – such as dispensation from being compelled to swear oaths in court, from removing their hats before their betters, and from attending the services of the national church.37 He was involved in Quaker matters again when the House resumed proceedings in the winter of 1661–2 (of which he attended only 36 per cent of the meetings) and he was added to the committee for the bill concerning Quakers on 27 Nov. 1661. In committee on 12 Dec., with the high Churchman John Egerton 2nd earl of Bridgwater, in the chair, Pembroke presented a paper from his religious brethren which appears to have concerned ‘the business of putting off or taking off their hats’.38 Consideration of this bill was long and drawn out. By 16 Jan. 1662 the House was still not satisfied with the committee’s many alterations and ordered the bill to be recommitted for what was by then the third time, in order that the strictures of the bill ‘may extend only to Quakers’ and not other sectaries. This limitation in turn ran into opposition from the Commons; the final version reported and passed on 27 Feb. 1662 extended the bill’s penalties to all ‘those that shall maintain that all oaths are unlawful’.39 Even with this last-minute widening of its targets, the passage of the Quaker Act must have been distressing to Pembroke.
On 13 Jan. 1662 Pembroke was named to the committee on yet another bill from the earl of Derby for the restoration of lands sold during the Interregnum. The chairmanship was now in the hands of other peers.40 This time the bill actually passed both Houses of Parliament, albeit with a protest in the House led by Edward Hyde earl of Clarendon, but it received the royal veto at the end of the session. Apart from the committees on the Quaker and Derby bills Pembroke was nominated to only five other committees during this latter part of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament and was added to that for the uniformity bill on 27 Feb. 1662 – a cruel irony, for that was the day that the Quaker bill was passed.
Pembroke attended just under a quarter of the meetings in the 1663 session and left on 8 May, when the House formally gave him dispensation to be absent. Four days later he registered his proxy with Anthony Ashley Cooper Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), who had represented Wiltshire in the Nominated Assembly, all three Protectorate Parliaments, and the Convention before being raised to the peerage. Pembroke’s absence was similarly excused in the middle of the session of spring 1664, when he still managed to attend just under half of the sittings and was nominated to only one committee. He was more active in committees in the 1664–5 session, even though he only came to a quarter of the sittings. In late January and early February 1665 he was named to four committees and on two occasions chaired the committee on the bill to make the river Avon (which flowed through Wilton) navigable. At another meeting of this committee he desired that a proviso preserving his rights as bailiff and keeper of the river be included in the bill.41 He also reported from the committee for privileges on 7 Feb. 1665 regarding the accusations made against Thomas Howard earl of Berkshire, of having received stolen goods. He only came to three meetings of the short session of October 1665 and to none at all during 1666–7, for which he again registered his proxy with Ashley on 16 Jan. 1667.
Pembroke was more attentive to the proceedings of the winter of 1667, coming to 55 per cent of the meetings. He joined in the attack on Clarendon, perhaps blaming him for the persecution of his Quaker brethren. He subscribed to the protest of 20 Nov. 1667 against the House’s refusal to commit the lord chancellor without specific charges, and on 7 Dec. he was named to the committee on the bill for Clarendon’s banishment (his only committee for that session). On 17 Feb. 1668, shortly after Parliament resumed after its winter recess, Pembroke’s absence was formally excused. When he reappeared at the beginning of March he sat for just over a quarter of the meetings and was named to only one committee, that on the bill for the preservation of timber in the Forest of Dean on 28 April.
Perhaps he was already suffering from the illness which would eventually fell him, for he did not attend any of the meetings of the following session of autumn 1669 and died on the day that session was prorogued, 11 Dec. 1669. His peerage and principal estate at Wilton descended to his only child by his first wife, William. His cousin by marriage, George Villiers 2nd duke of Buckingham, and his son-in-law, John Poulett 3rd Baron Poulett (husband of his eldest daughter, Susan), were appointed as executors. They were directed to sell his fee simple lands in Berkshire and Wiltshire for the payment of his debts and for the benefit of Mary and Philip Herbert (later 7th earl of Pembroke), his two eldest children by his second wife. His remaining four unmarried children were to get only five shillings each.
C.G.D.L.- 1 Bodl. Carte 214, f. 337; Oxford DNB (Griffith Williams).
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/331.
- 3 CSP Dom. 1651–2, p. 43.
- 4 Ibid. 291, 328.
- 5 CSP Dom. 1640, p. 641; 1640–1, pp. 45, 85, 86.
- 6 The Names of the Justices of the Peace in England and Wales (1650), 73, 74, 75; A Perfect List of All Such Persons as … Are … Justices of the Peace (1660), 59. For a full list of his commissions during the civil wars see HP Commons, 1640–60.
- 7 CSP Dom. 1637, p. 55; 1638–9, pp. 575, 582; Addenda 1625–49, p. 607.
- 8 CSP Dom. 1659–60, p. 131.
- 9 Davies, Royal African Company, 64; Sel. Charters, ed. Carr, 172–7.
- 10 CSP Col. 1661–8, no. 408.
- 11 CSP Dom. 1661–2, p. 83; 1663–4, p. 138; Bodl. Clarendon 92, ff. 148v–157.
- 12 Ibid. 144.
- 13 CSP Dom. 1638–9, pp. 605, 622; 1639, p. 205; HMC Denbigh, v. 66.
- 14 CSP Dom. 1651–2, p. 291.
- 15 Oxford DNB (Sir John Denham); CSP Dom. 1658–9, pp. 449, 580; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 218; Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe (1907), 122–3; Surr. Hist. Cent. G52/2/19/32.
- 16 HMC Finch, i. 77; Notes which Passed, 56.
- 17 CSP Dom., 1659–60, p. 135; TNA, PRO 31/3/105, p. 82; PRO 31/3/106, p. 20.
- 18 Pepys Diary, i. 127; Bodl. Clarendon 72, ff. 165–6, 240.
- 19 PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12 May 1660.
- 20 Ibid. 14, 15, 16, 17, 19 May 1660; HL/PO/CO/7/1, pp. 4, 7.
- 21 PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3, 20, 27 June 1660.
- 22 Ibid. 22 June 1660.
- 23 Ibid. 6 June 1660.
- 24 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 15, 36–41, 48–49.
- 25 PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3, 13, 27 June, 3, 7, and 12 July 1660.
- 26 Pepys Diary, i. 258; Davies, Royal African Company, 64; Sel. Charters ed. Carr, 172–7.
- 27 CSP Col. 1661–8, no. 408.
- 28 CSP Dom. 1661–2, p. 83; 1663–4, p. 138; Pepys Diary, v. 294.
- 29 CSP Dom. 1660–1, p. 584; E. Walker, A Circumstnatial Account of the Preparations for the Coronation of . . Charles II, pp. 89, 125.
- 30 HP Commons, 1660–90 i. 436–7, 455–6, 459–60, 513–14; CSP Dom. 1640–1, p. 183.
- 31 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, 23–24, 26, 29, 33–34.
- 32 Letters … of Early Friends ed. A.R. Barclay, 59 ; Somers Tracts, vi. 304; Bodl. Carte 73, f. 325.
- 33 Letters … of Early Friends, 75–77.
- 34 CSP Dom. 1661–2, p. 523; 1663–4, p. 27; TNA, PRO 31/3/113, pp. 124–30.
- 35 HMC Hastings, ii. 150–1.
- 36 Pepys Diary, x. 150–1.
- 37 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, p. 12.
- 38 Ibid. p. 88.
- 39 Ibid. pp. 91, 95, 98, 103, 148.
- 40 Ibid. pp. 100, 105.
- 41 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 42, 43, 47.