Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War

by Adam Nicolson

Book Overview

In Quarrel with the King, Adam Nicolson, the bestselling author of God's Secretaries and Seize the Fire, explores questions of loyalty, power, betrayal, and rebellion, as witnessed through the life... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061154318
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Arcadia

Probably few people have a better understanding of the time honoured relationship between manor, village and town that characterized much of English history throughout the centuries as Adam Nicolson. One might say that because as the resident occupant of Sissinghurst Castle this is an understanding that comes from a life time of experiences. This book is not a collection of Nicolson's experiences as it is the story of the Herbert family of Wiltshire and their relationship with the king, several of them in fact, Henry VIII-Charles I as well as two queens, Mary I and Elizabeth who proved to be just as troublesome as the kings, if not more formidable. The Herberts were masters of court politics and despite being relatively newly placed members of the nobility (the first earl acquired his title only from Henry VIII and really due to the fact that he and the king had married the Parr sisters), they sought to exercise the full range of privilages of the established nobility. Though a combination of guile, fortunate marriages and one timely divorce, the Herbert's prospered throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries, winning in some cases their quarrels with the king and furthering their position through a variety of methods, some even involving the procurement of sexual partners for the monarch (and in one case a member fo the family filling that role). All of this sordid business led to the patronage of great poets such as Sir Phillip Sidney and Shakespeare (the third earl is the Mr. W.H. of the sonnets). It was Walton Abbey that provided the setting and inspiration for Arcadia, the countess of the era, the wife of the second earl being Mary Sidney, the sister of the poet, a relation of most of Elizabeth's privy council and a poet in her own right. The setting is still a wonder reflecting the original earl's employment of Hans Holbein to design the original house and the fourth earl's use of no less a figure than Inigo Jones to design the house as it mainly exists today (in combination with the Gothic touches added by James Wyatt in the 19th century). Aside from personal agrandizement, if the Herberts stood for anything it was the preservation of the decentralized state of local magnates against the centralizing force of the king and his court. While the Tudors gained greater control over England after the wars of the Roses, the Stuarts, as history demonstrates, totally inept in this area as reflected by the outbreak of Civil War during the reign of the second member of the house of Stuart (and declining monarchical prestige throughout the 17th century). Where this ideology fit, if it can be called an ideology and not just self interest, was within the larger context of the relationship between the manor and the tenants who provided the means to hire the leading architects and artists of the day which characterized Wilton. The chapter in which Nicolson addresses these issues is somewhat surprising and sets his book beyond a mere fami

A Vanished Way of Life...

Adam Nicholson's 2008 "Quarrel With The King" is a beautifully written history of the powerful Herbert family in the century leading up to the English Civil War that began in 1642. The Herberts, of uncertain Welsh origin, made their position by service to King Henry VIII, staying close to the monarchy while building their own inland empire. As Earls of Pembroke, their embrace of an ancient lifestyle with its privileges and obligations put them on a collision course with King Charles I and a movement toward powerful central government. The Civil War would ultimately lead to a more restricted kingship, but at tremendous cost. Nicholson's detailed examination of the 16th century country manor is at the heart of the book. The lord of the manor and his leaseholders worked the land within a tight web of mutual obligations. The arrangement may look constraining to the modern reader, but it was allowed the maximum sustainable output from the land, year after year. The Herberts embraced this lifestyle, indeed idealized it as a naturalistic "Arcadia", and would defend it against the modern market-based economy and centralized politics to come. Nicholson provides an intimate portrait of four generations of Herberts, including insights into the lives of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs of the day. A Van Dyke family portrait serves as an extended metaphor for the fate of the Herbert family. "Quarrel With The King" is not for everyone. Navigating long swaths of meditation over the concept of Arcadia and its impact on English society may require a cheerfully dedicated student of English history. Nevertheless, Nicholson's superb and insightful prose carry the day. "Quarrel With The King" is highly recommended as a thoughtful read.

"This story is about the end of an old world, not the making of a new one"

Adam Nicolson found the subject for his latest book on a countryside walk through Wiltshire. Realizing that he was walking past a stately home, Wilton House, Nicolson ventures inside, walking boots and all, exploring the onetime home of the Herbert family, the earls of Pembroke. Inside, he discovers a giant group portrait circa 1634, the largest work ever painted by van Dyck. The ten family members, all slightly larger than life-size, "dominate, as they were meant to, the gilded space in front of them," Nicolson writes. "As I stood there, I wanted, above all, to hear them speak. What did they believe in? What led this family to its prominence?" The answer to his questions form part of the book, but his research into the history of the Herberts in the 16th and 17th century ended up taking him well beyond that, to examine the family not just as notable people in their own right but as symbols of a changing time. The result is an intelligent and engaging history of a vanished world, captured in detail and with with great care; an original and important work that will be of immense interest to anyone curious about English society and politics from Elizabethan times through to the Civil War. Nicolson chronicles a time of immense change for England by telling the stories of several generations of a single aristocratic family -- the Herberts -- as well as those of their friends, rivals, allies, their monarchs, their tenants and servants. The approach is successful and the result is a gripping story that begins with the first earl of Pembroke, one William Herbert. He was simply one of many ambitious men clustered around Henry VIII hoping for advancement until two marriages -- his own to humanist scholar Anne Parr, and that of Anne's sister Katherine to Henry VIII as his sixth and final wife -- pushed the family to the front ranks of the aristocracy. William was a power broker par excellance ("a very late medieval warlord", Nicolson argues), helping Lady Jane Grey to the throne then rapidly abandoning her to support the accession of the late king's daughter, Mary, only to turn his support to Elizabeth on Mary's death in 1558. His son, Henry, by contrast, became one of the earliest of the breed of modern officials, Nicolson recounts, and married someone as influential in her own way as Anne Parr was in hers: Mary Sidney, one of the most brilliant women of Elizabethan England and patron to countless scholars, artists and poets, including Shakespeare, Spenser and her own brother, Sir Philip Sidney. Nicolson devotes considerable attention to Sidney's famous prose work, Arcadia, and to the role it played in creating for the Pembrokes and their friends a framework through which they could conceive and honor the communal, hierarchic and traditional society from which they sprung, even as it came under challenge from upstarts and money-grubbers -- in brief, from modernity and an increasingly authoritarian monarchy. "Something real and valuable" was under siege