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

by Adam Nicolson

Quarrel with the King tells the story of the first four earls of Pembroke, their wives, children, estates, tenants, and allies, following their high and glamorous trajectory from the 1520s through 1650—the most turbulent and dramatic years of English history—across three generations of change, ambition, resistance, and war. The Pembrokes were at the heart of it all: the richest family in England, with old blood and new drive, led as much by a succession of extraordinary women as by their husbands and sons.

It is also the story of a power struggle, over a long century, between the family and the growing strength of the English Crown. For decades, questions of loyalty simmered: Was government about agreement and respect, or authority and compulsion? What status did traditional rights have in a changing world? Did a national emergency mean those rights could be ignored or overturned? These were the issues that in 1642 would lead to a brutal civil war, the bloodiest conflict England has ever experienced, in which the earl of Pembroke—who had been loyal till then—had no choice but to rebel against a king who he felt had betrayed both him and his country.

At other times, the Pembrokes both threatened the Crown and acted as its bruisingly efficient and violent agents. They were ambivalent figures: flag bearers for an ancient England and time servers in some of the most corrupt courts England has ever known; fawning courtiers and indulgent landlords; puritanical aristocrats and rebel grandees. Nicolson's book amounts to a study in all the ambiguities involved in the exercise and maintenance of power and status.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Biography, 17th Century, Historical, World History

306 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2008

About the author

Adam Nicolson writes a celebrated column for The Sunday Telegraph. His books include Sissinghurst, God’s Secretaries, When God Spoke English, Wetland, Life in the Somerset Levels, Perch Hill, Restoration, and the acclaimed Gentry. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is supposed to be about the Pembroke family, English nobles who find themselves opposed to the King during England's civil war. In actuality, there is very little Pembroke information in this book. The vast majority of the story is an examination of the notion of "arcadia," the idealism of rural England and the lifestyles of those who lived near the Pembroke estate in Wilton. While this is all interesting stuff, it's not what I was hoping to learn when I picked up this book. I had to go Google certain Pembroke family members to learn anything substantial about them. There are some good bits of history peppered throughout the book, but overall it failed to capture my imagination or really put a face on any of those long-dead Pembrokes.

[Laci Cake · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm a diachronic linguist. I love words and history. And the manner in which someone communicates an idea is important.

I picked up this book under the title of "Arcadia". My background is in Greek mythology, and anything Arcadian is an intense passion for me, having done extensive research on its origins and influences throughout history (so much so that I named my firstborn daughter Arcadia!) Sadly to say, this book's explanations of Arcadian ideals are sadly misrepresented in several examples. According to the description of the book, it's supposed to be the story of the Pembrokes' quest for an Arcadian society. However, in his writing, Nicolson seems to attempt to define (and redefine) Arcadian ideals on almost every page (especially at the beginning), and his language suggests that this is how the Arcadian ideal is universally perceived. It isn't; a terrible inaccuracy. It may be how the Pembroke's viewed Arcadia, but honestly, in his writing, he needs to explicitly weave that in. Forgive me for thinking a book entitled "Arcadia" should be accurate to its namesake.

Secondly, the writing style is just terrible. It reads like a grad student's thesis...one who is uncertain of his own writing skills and follows a very rigid, high-school-like model of a paper. Introduction. Pose a question. Discuss said question. Summarize. Conclude. His metaphors, similes, and adjectives are over-the-top. (My personal favorite is in a description of the fish in the Ebble River: "... and if you wade out barefoot into the shockingly cold water of the river, the small wild brown trout flicker away in front of you, running from your Gulliver-in-Lilliput intrusion.")

Seriously?!?

And finally, the book doesn't know what it wants to be. It doesn't gel. It's sort of a book about...a little of everything during this time period? I didn't know at the time I bought it that it had been published under different titles at least twice previously. Once as "Quarrel with the King", again as "Earls of Paradise", and finally as "Arcadia". There's a lot of information in this book, but it barely scratches the surface of each of these subjects.

So in short, whether you're wanting to read about Arcadia or the Pembrokes... choose another book. There are better ones out there.

[George Ilsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting book, but unfortunately not the same one as indicated on the cover. Perhaps the title "Arcadia, and many tedious details about land use practices" could not get past the marketing department.

There is very little here about the quarrel with the King, and a lush overabundance of information about many other things, perhaps of interest to some.

The failure of this book to deal with its purported subject matter compelled me to finally start reading "A Coffin for King Charles", which I am thoroughly enjoying. Herein, the Earl of Pembroke is mentioned, in passing, just three times.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a well-written book - but one based on a sweeping, loose and unsubstantiated idea. Nicolson builds his whole story on the ideological notion of `Arcadia' as an idealised locus for anti-court, anti-crown politics, and allocates it to the Earls of Pembroke or, rather, the extended Sidney-Herbert family primarily under the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Wilton, he claims, the Pembroke's prime seat, epitomises the values of a harmonised, independent England, free from `courtly' values and politics. The problem with this is that nowhere in any of their writings do any of the sixteenth or seventeenth century Sidneys or Pembrokes express ideas anything like this; nor do their actions bear witness to this idea.

On the contrary, Mary Sidney who married into the Pembroke family, was immensely proud of her Sidney-Dudley heritage. Her father was companion to Edward VI; her mother was a Dudley and one of Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting; her brother was Sir Philip Sidney; their uncle was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's most famous `favourite'. Mary Sidney-Herbert always maintained her contacts with the English court and with European Protestant circles, and ensured that her sons had places at first the Elizabethan and then the Jamesian courts.

For all Nicolson's claims that Philip Sidney was a `disappointed' courtier, he travelled all over Europe as far as present-day Prague and Poland as Elizabeth's ambassador, and was governor of Flushing, a position which his younger brother later took over after his death. Mary's second brother, Robert Sidney, served as Lord Chamberlain to Anna of Denmark, wife of James I, and was replaced by William Herbert, Mary's son, after his death. Given that Nicolson himself discusses the Sidney-Pembroke plot to introduce George Villiers to James I in order to safeguard their own influence, the idea of Wilton as an `Arcadia' remote from politics, `modernity', court patronage and the struggle for power seems severely unsubstantiated. Far from rejecting court and crown, the Pembrokes ensured they were right at the centre of courtly circles wherever they might be physically located.

In any case, Philip Sidney's Arcadia in his texts of that name (The 'old' Arcadia, the revised Arcadia) isn't a safe, calm place of ease, harmony and repose: his prose works depict Arcadia as a dangerously politicised place where the king's abdication of authority leads to chaos and mayhem. It's a subversive space where men dress up as women; where wives try to seduce women who turn out to be men; where one daughter is almost raped; and where the other is seduced outside of matrimony. Even our heroes are almost executed and only the rightful restoration of the king gives order back to Sidney's Arcadian world.

There are many other places where Nicolson makes bold statements of fact with no evidence e.g. that Mary Sidney-Herbert commissioned Shakespeare to write his sonnets to her son William; that the middle-aged Shakespeare fell in love with young William Herbert and made his feelings publicly known in the said sonnets; that she commissioned or arranged a performance of As You Like It to send a message to James I that he shouldn't execute Walter Ralegh, Mary's ex-lover (really?) and succeeded in getting his sentence commuted to imprisonment solely by having James watch her/Shakespeare's play...

So this is a well-written book which gives an aura of knowledge but which is built on extremely shaky, even non-existent, foundations. It makes a nice Romantic idea, but sixteenth and seventeenth century aristocratic families were at home in both court and country and simply didn't divide the two in the way that Nicolson wants them to. Courtly palaces such as Hampton Court, Nonsuch (in Surrey), and Greenwich meant that the `country' was also part of the court, and the tentacles of Wilton, the Pembroke's supposed retreat, were deeply intertwined with the court in all its guises.

I'm afraid this is a book which falls into the pitfalls of a non-specialist writing about the complexities of sixteenth and seventeenth century social, cultural and literary history - ideas are not trans-historical and the pastoral genre from which the idea of Arcadia derives has always been deeply politicised from Virgil's Eclogues forward. An elegant book in terms of writing style - but one which is mistaken in its assumptions and unsubstantiated in its arguments.

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are interested in the history of Wilton House and its Elizabethan inhabitants the Pembrokes, filtered through an investigation into the ‘Arcadian’ pastoral vision that preoccupied many in a turbulent age, you may well find Adam Nicolson's ‘Arcadia’ fascinating. You might also find it frustratingly diffuse and over-written.

But if you read it not just as history but as an exercise in the thing that it is describing –pastoral writing in the tradition of Virgil and Sidney – its true colours shine through. The facts being described are rather less important than the texture and detail of the language being used to describe them, as with the best nature and ‘place’ writing. The book is a kind of prose meditation on the pastoral ideal, the dream world of the Elizabethans and later generations. It is certainly much more enjoyable to read than Sidney’s overstuffed ‘Arcadia'.

The book could have become an idealised snob-fest, but Nicolson is well aware of the harsh economic realities and inequalities that underlie 'Arcadianism'. And yet he is so in love with its healing pastoral vision – as much conservationist as it is conservative, almost communist - that the vision prevails over the reality, and that is where the great pleasure of the book lies.

[Alex Sarll]

A book which is maybe trying to do too much (though especially in non-fiction I'll usually take that over the alternative): a history of the early Earls of Pembroke and their seat at Wilton; and of the land and lords they served (at least until the two duties diverged); and of the idyll they found and for a time preserved; and of the way it was celebrated in art and verse; and of the cold equations of economics underpinning it all. One Herbert gives way to another (many of them also being herberts in the more colloquial sense), and as so often happens in great families the warrior is succeeded by a somewhat bloodless bureaucrat and then a fop, before the last generation on which the book really focuses goes one worse: the poor bastard was a moderate during the Civil War, and as such roundly despised by everyone. Nicolson is under no illusions about the inequality which underpinned the very notion of a sweeping rural park; nor does he entertain any Merrie Olde Englande fantasies about life in an early modern farming village, which he compares to a modern surveillance society, only more so. Yet he also points out how, in practice, it was still arguably better than what followed – not just the outright anarchy and wanton destruction of the Civil War itself, but the less restrained market system, the rackrents and landless labourers of the centuries after that. Obviously there's a contemporary resonance in a story about how Englishmen have always looked back to a lost golden age without noticing how flawed and fragile it was, about a period in which bad systems always seemed to give way to worse, not better alternatives, and factions ended up at each other's throats without anyone being prepared to mount a plausible defence of the way things were meant to be in the first place. And this from a book published in 2008; one wonders how much more finely honed the connections might feel were it to come out now.

The style isn't always ideal; I'm prepared to accept that 'adulate' may be a verb, but I was happier in innocence of that knowledge. More often, though, it sings. Nicolson seems at times to be challenging Pratchett as the modern devotee of English chalkand, "a place that feels like its own middle, the deepest and richest of arrivals", but elsewhere he can be winningly sly, as on the ludicrous The Shepherd's Paradise: "The masque lasted an interminable seven or or eight hours, was largely inaudible and was celebrated as one of the most borng explorations of Platonic purity ever devised"*. While it can occasionally be a trial keeping the generations straight, what with that tendency for old families to keep reusing the same bloody names, the first Earl (though he himself insisted the creation ran much earlier) is sketched especially well, with the nouveau riche tastes of any well-off gangster now sanctified by temporal distance alone, and the suggestion that his handwriting is reminiscent of a bear with a pen. Philip Sidney, who given the title of the book was always likely to loom large, turns out to be one of those figures who was a bigger deal in memory than in life, during which he was mainly the fairly annoying and possibly incestuous brother-in-law of the second Earl. Yes, that could perhaps be construed as impressive in a sense, until you see how little respect said Earl got from anyone, at which point it comes to seem fairly standard. But Sidney is joined in these pages, and at Wilton, by plausible candidates for Mr WH and Little Miss Muffet, by kings and scandalous women, improvers and regicides. On one level, Nicolson is perhaps stating the obvious about the snakes in rural Eden; isn't the first thing one associates with Arcadia the grave's reminder 'Et in Arcadia ego?' And on another, one wonders if he isn't overstating the case for Wilton as the birth of what we now consider the English country house. Once or twice there are bizarre gaps in his knowledge, as when he doesn't know what the holy water springers in the inventory of the armoury might be, or suggests Arcadia was the first image of an earthly paradise in the Christian era – what about Cockaigne? But for the most part this is a deeply researched and intelligently constructed evocation of a certain constellation of seductive, impossible ideas.

*Based on the limited studies of court masques which I couldn't avoid during my degree, this is if anything too kind, but it's a good start.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a certain amorphousness to this book (reflected in its many re-naming's) which naturally leads one to wonder as to its genesis - what sparked Adam Nicolson to write it? It traces the fate of a single family - the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke - through succeeding generations, taking their story as a conduit for tracing the decline and fall of Arcadia: a community-based manner of English country-life, made possible by the aristocrat's benevolent patriarchy and his tenants' grateful acceptance. Partly the book deals with individual family members - how the first earl (a parvenu Welshman) came to be, his wife, the refinements and follies of his descendants, including marrying the sister of Sir Philip Sidney. Another strand labours to define exactly what is meant by 'Arcadia', another still to tie both family and ideology to the broader, shifting political realities.

I suspect what most interests Nicolson is the tension between an unfair economic system and aesthetic beauty, and the thought that one facilitates the other. One recalls the description of Civil War in 1066 and All That: "the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive)." One might also consider Brideshead Revisited as dealing with this idea (Charles Ryder surveying with horror the World of Hooper), but there the author suffers no blissful unease as to which he'd prefer. The problem here is that for the tension to be of any interest one must really believe in the apparent beauty which this aristocratic benevolence facilitated. Nicolson tries, with a long and rapturous description of the Wiltshire Downs, addressed directly to 'You', guiding the reader over meadow and brook towards the rectilinear gardens of Wilton House and its famous double-cube room. Well, to each their own, but I thought it rather lifeless. Evelyn Waugh does it much better in Brideshead, as do others like Walter Pater and Sacheverell Sitwell (the latter, in his survey of British architecture, actually wrote about Wilton House, allowing one to make a direct comparison).
From then on it's difficult to care too much about the many outside forces which threaten to burst this rural idyl. At first it looks like it's the pesky royalists who spoil the fun, wanting as they did to breach their side of the government contract and impose tyranny. But then Cromwell wins and the delicate world is disintegrated anyway by the Free Market, with all its attendant evils (enclosure, draining of fens, rack rents etc., all delineated by historians such as Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson).
Nicolson has a nice eye for quaint details - he suggests a candidate for Shakespeare's mystery W.H., he produces the record of an old cedar tree cut down in the 19th century, possibly the very same planted to commemorate the earl's death; but these do not suffice to patch over the book's essential hollowness.

[Waverly Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classy example of how to write about a historical time period. Nicolson uses everything: literature, law, agricultural practices, paintings, family history to convey a nuanced and sweeping portrait of one particular family during the decades immediately before and during the English Civil War. I read it like one reads a novel, savoring the beautiful writing and the wealth of information delivered.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having already read and pondered some about the Pembroke family of Wilton, which is near Salisbury [1], I must say that I found it of great interest to listen to this thoughtful book about the conflict between the Herbert family of Pembroke (and later Montgomery) and the monarchy. The author stated at the outset that he would discuss the ambiguity of the relationship between the Herberts and the throne, and its relationship to the deeper problems of England during that period, and it did exactly that. A work of profound sensitivity on subjects of art criticism and social history, as well as troubled interpersonal dynamics, this book is also thought-provoking on the problem of centralization, government corruption, and the way that great nobles and other elites are often simultaneously dependent on central authority while also resistant to its demands. Beyond being a work of interest to those fond of studies in the history of the Tudor dynasty and the early Stuart kings, this is a book that contains frightening implications for contemporary British and American history in the enduring tensions between court and country, between centralizing tendencies and between principled localism in opposition to these tendencies.

The author has designed his book in a very straightforward fashion that combines a chronological look at the Herbert family themselves and their troubled relationship with the crown, as well as with other high nobles and Parliament and with each other, as well as occasional digressions to discuss matters of the Van Dyck painting of the Herbert family in the 1630’s and the growing social pressure felt within the English villages, the decline of traditional ways of working the land that included generational continuity and the opportunity for peasants to save the profits after modest rents and the rise of exploitative rack rents, rural vagrancy, and violent stresses among neighbors. The end result is a book, that even if it overuses certain words and expressions like Arcadian or ambivalent and tends to be a bit repetitive in its discussion, its research is impressive and the overall result is a book that is well worth reading or listening to about a fascinating and often unexplored area of the family history of the Herberts in the early period of their rise from obscurity to the point where they served as the reluctant and ambivalent mediators between an increasingly intransigent Charles I and an equally stubborn and altogether radical Parliament, in which the Herberts (and many others) were caught in the middle between the two extremes.

Despite the fact that the book could be a bit boring for some readers who lack an interest in political and social history, art criticism, or the family history of the Herberts, for those who do have an interest in these matters, this book is immensely intriguing. For one, the book gives a longitudinal study of a family demonstrating its humble origins, its search to convert wealth and power that were the result of royal favor to more lasting land and titles from where an independent base could be made, demonstrates the way that elites are often resentful and dependent on central authorities, and how central authorities are simultaneously often resentful and also dependent on elites that help provide the consent of the governed that allows for authority to be exercised [2]. The book is also a helpful reminder of the delicate tension between large-scale demographic pressures that are nearly anonymous and the importance of personal decisions, strengths and weaknesses and choices, in shaping history. Although usually social history and political history, the first emphasizing large groups and demographics and economics, and the second emphasizing the choices and decisions of individuals, are usually seen in opposition to each other, this book manages to find a rich tapestry among the tension between the two approaches, and the result is a book that is immensely worthwhile and intensely thought-provoking.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

[2] See, for example:

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https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

[George Crofts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explores aspects of the period leading up to the English Civil War by exploring diaries, letters, and legal documents of the period.

This is the story of the fourth Earl of Pembroke and how is he in his family had been loyal to the kings of England for generations. There was loyalty but there was also self-interest. The Earl of Pembroke sided with Parliament and the Protestants against Charles I during the English Civil War.

The author also compares the pre-English Civil War world that of of an imagined “Arcadia” comparing the medieval, structures of mutual responsibility between Lord and peasant with the brutal
Lassier Fare capitalism of the 18th Century that followed.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, from 1540 to 1640, and the story of their estates and the people who worked them. The author suggests that this was the end of the Middle Ages and not earlier. The custom of the manor held on to the Civil War, while for the nobility, the Court that raised them was also the institution that sought to undermine their traditional position in society.

[Mary Alice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter, but very confusingly written.

[Angie and the Daily Book Dose · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn’t really prepared for this to be a book about the concept of Arcadia and how it’s applicable to the pastoral relationships of the Pembrokes. I feel misled by the books synopsis and title.

[Em · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I hear the word Arcadia one more time

[Virginia Rounding · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Earls of the title are those of Pembroke, Adam Nicolson tracing their story from William Herbert, the first Earl (who married the sister of Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII) through to the fifth, Philip Herbert, who died, more or less ruined, in 1669. Their paradise was centred a few miles to the west of Salisbury on the great estate of Wilton in the rolling Wiltshire Downs, where Philip Sidney, the epitome of Renaissance man, wrote his pastoral idyll Arcadia, and his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke and wife of the second Earl, reigned over a circle of artists, writers and musicians, all dedicated to creating a heaven on earth, in which artifice would improve upon nature, happy shepherds would frolic in bosky groves, and the social order – everyone in his rightful place and mutually dependent - would reflect the harmony of the spheres. It was a dream rudely shattered by the English Civil War.

The success of the first Earl in building up the fortunes of his family owed something to his ability to bend with the wind of change. Described by Nicolson as a ‘Welsh hardman’ and ‘a bear with pretensions’, William Herbert was fortunate in believing ‘in the religion which the king or queen of the day required him to believe in’. But by the time of the fifth Earl, a Royalist in his heart but a Parliamentarian in his head, such vacillation was no longer counted as virtue.

The Arcadian ideal espoused by the Pembrokes in their heyday also depended on the ability to ignore any inconvenient reality which might obscure the dream, such as the living conditions of the villagers who provided the labour to beautify the landscape and satisfy the material needs of the big house. Nicolson restores the balance by giving at least as much attention to the lives of the lower classes in and around Wilton as to their lords, making rich use of contemporary court records and petitions.

He is not always inclined to stick rigidly to facts, however, making several bold conjectures during the course of his book. The first is to wonder whether, in the daughter of Dr Moffet, ‘the most famous spider expert in England’ and a frequent visitor to Wilton, he has discovered the identity of Little Miss Muffet, who so famously sat on a tuffet. There is nothing apart from the name to back up this identification, but it makes a nice story.

A more contentious suggestion is that the young Will Herbert, born to Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and the second Earl in 1580, may have been the inspiration for the first 126 of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Will Herbert was of ‘exactly the right age’, according to Nicolson, for ‘an early middle-aged Shakespeare’ to have fallen in love with him in the late 1590s. Perhaps, he opines, the Countess had even commissioned the poet to write the first 17 sonnets as a deliberate encouragement to her (then 17-year-old) son to settle down and get married. Well, maybe.

But Shakespeare was certainly a presence at Wilton, and Nicolson’s next conjecture is far more convincing. This concerns the staging of As You Like It at Wilton in December 1603, in the presence of King James. Nicolson interprets the event as an attempt by the Countess to persuade the King to spare Sir Walter Raleigh – who, according to court gossip, was once her lover – from the executioner’s block. The King got the message and Sir Walter was conveyed to the Tower instead.

Though for the most part this book is immensely readable, at times the author is unnecessarily obscure. What, for instance, does it mean to describe the Wiltshire Downs as ‘a place that feels like its own middle, the deepest and richest of arrivals’? And he does write with something of an agenda, assuming that all his readers will agree that ‘the world of the Pembrokes was one which none of us could tolerate now’, and that ‘modern ways’ are always best.

He also gives no sign of recognising, or being interested in, the ways in which Arcadian ideals influenced later generations of artists, musicians and poets, including the 19th-century Romantics and 20th-century composers of the English pastoral tradition (sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘cowpat music’). W. B. Yeats, lamenting a dead friend as ‘our Sidney and our perfect man’, also comes to mind. But Nicolson chooses not to explore any of this, implying instead that the ‘dream of perfection’ vanished, never to return, dispelled by a mixture of Oliver Cromwell and market forces.

[An edited version of this review first appeared in The Telegraph in January 2008.]

[Peter Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Nicolson's highly imformative and readable 2003 work 'Power and Glory' used a text (the King James Bible) as a prism through which to read the world of Jacobean England. In 'Earls of Paradise' he employs a similar approach, with Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' the source text, and 16th-17th Century England the subject. Here, though, the scope is somewhat broader, as Nicolson is interested both in the rise and fall of the 'Arcadian Ideal' in England's cultural life and, in a related manner, the rise and fall of the Earls of Pembroke - power brokers of Tudor England - on whose country estate at Wilton Sidney's poem was composed.

We see the Pembrokes emerging from the uncertainty of post-Reformation England as landowners and political magnates; trusted advisors to Henry VIII, power-brokers in the unstable years that followed, and courtiers to Elizabeth I. With each generation the family grows in prestige, wealth, and power, and their house at Wilton becomes the embodiment of the Italianate aesthetic ideal, the meeting point for a circle of poets that counted Donne, Herbert, and Raleigh amongst its members, the inspiration for Sidney's classic work, and even the setting for a royal command performance of that most Arcadian of Shakespeare's plays, 'As You Like It' before King James I.

That is, however, only half of the story. Nicolson also shows us an England where the simple harmony of Arcadian living, seen in paintings imported from Italy and revived classic texts, is increasingly at odds with a rural, agricultural subsistence culture and economy where the time-honoured bonds of shared responsibility and communal life are being threatened by emergent market forces and deeper social anxieties. As Arcadia is celebrated in the arts, so it moves ever further from reality, until the two worlds fail to recognise each other and collapse in the crisis of the English Civil War.

The Pembrokes, inherently linked as they are to the Arcadian dream, similarly fail to retain a place in a world of shifting socio-political forces and fall, along with so many of their contemporaries, in the chaos of the 1640s. Their Arcadian world was arguably more illusory than real, but the horrors of post-Civil War England were real enough for them, and for the thousands of displaced and impoverished former tenants of their estates. This is not a story that ends happily, for any of those involved.

Nicolson's book has a sad tale at its heart: the downfall of a family, an ideal, and a way of life. It is, however, told with rare skill and attention to detail, whether discussing a Van Dyck portrait or the parish registers of a long-forgotten age. In the age of 'environmental politics' it is also a highly relevant study of our own relationship to Nature: our need to retain the image of an unspoilt, pre-modern past, and our equal attachment to a life that enjoys the benefits that destructive modernity brings for the individual. In the very best historical tradition it holds the past up as a mirror to the present, and both entertains and informs with rare skill.

[Marcella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gets off to a rollicking start, with a gossipy retelling of the first (or twentysomethingth, depending on who's counting) Earl of Pembroke's blood-soaked path from bastardy to glory alongside the creation of his Wilton headquarters. But, then, through a close reading of a family portrait, the book veers into a lengthy discussion of Philip Sidney (who happened to be a Pembroke in-law), his Arcadian ideals, and how they may or may not have informed the fourth Earl, Philip Pembroke's behavior before and during the Civil War. For the author, the vision of an Arcadian ideal was in Philip Pembroke's DNA; I'm not wholly certain this point was proved. I just couldn't believe there was a real method in Pembroke's pathetic waffling.

Unexpectedly, the book really takes off when it leaves the fourth (and blandest-to-date) Earl at court and embarks on a lively and often poignant social history of rural England immediately before, during, and after the horrific upheaval of 10 years of civil war. The author does an excellent job of describing the social and economic tensions that the tightly circumscribed, hierarchical pre-Cromwell world, with its reciprocal ties of obligation stretching from king to pauper, held together. Cleverly, the author uses records that include hearings, letters and other primary sources, so he is able to actually present the ordinarily voiceless in their own words. People are at their most unfiltered when they are in trouble, and Pembroke's unsympathetic personality pales in comparison with this rich vein of humanity, from witty, libelous verses that set a village on its ear, to a poignant plea from a man, in danger of public flogging, whose partner in adultery could save him by marrying him...but refuses.

In the end, the country rebelling against the king was the country turning on (and devouring) itself and its own society. No societal safety net rose in its place; the free market left the poor far less free than before. I ended by caring deeply about what had befallen these people. I had little sympathy left for the Earl, ostensibly the star of this book.

[QOH · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this immediately after the Tyrannicide Brief was....interesting.

Despite the subtitle, the book has almost nothing to do with the Civil War (a hurried bit at the end). Much of it deals with the first earl's brutish rise to power.

A good portion of the text looks at the social structure of an English village prior to the civil war, during the civil war, and after. That's fine, it was interesting, and it was illustrative. The descriptions gave me a real feeling of claustrophobia. I can't conceive of living in such a circumscribed way.

The strange part of the book for me was Nicolson's use of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Philip Sidney (the brother-in-law/uncle of some of the earls) as a lens to view the times and the family. Yes, I know there was a notion of pastoral romance that was shattered by the Civil War and that it would never again return, but from where I sit (my Calvinist forebears all hightailed it out of Britain by 1630), the pre-war situation wasn't ideal to begin with, and it certainly wasn't anything to be prized by those who didn't live at the top of the heap. This made Arcadia just a bit hard to swallow.

I was tempted to remove another star because the author bio states Adam Nicolson is the son of Nigel Nicolson and the grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Because do I care? (No.) Does this improve scholarship? (I doubt it.) Am I supposed to understand that when he quotes his grandmother in the text, this imputes a greater authority? (I have no idea.) In any case: I don't believe in inherited talent, which is probably why I find the concept of nobility so repugnant.

[Andrea Zuvich · Rating 2 out of 5]

I very rarely give any negative feedback on a book about the 17th-century, but this book was a disappointment. For one thing, the title is misleading (which is probably to do with the publisher than the author, I think). I expected it to be devoted to the English Civil Wars period, and yet nearly half the book is in the Elizabethan era. Also, the whole book is mainly about the ideal of ‘arcadia’, which I think was over analysed.

When I looked into it more, I found that the book had been released with a different title, “Arcadia: The Dream of Perfection in Renaissance England” which is a much more appropriate given the contents! I thought it was going to be focusing on the Earls of Pembroke in the 17th century. There were some other things that niggled me; the author’s personal political views seemed (to me) to come out and I never like that. But then the author began stating theories and rumours as facts. "No portrait remains of William, the third Earl, as he was when Shakespeare fell in love with him". Pure speculation. I noticed earlier on that Nicolson also stated Robert Dudley was Elizabeth's "lover" - this, too, has never been proven. 80% through the book, we finally got to learn about the family during the English Civil Wars. The book redeemed itself slightly in the end but was ultimately unsatisfying.

[Liz De Coster · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew going into this book that I was already somewhat familiar with some of the people and events it would cover. My concern choosing this book was that I would find the material repetitive, when my real problem turned out to be following the thread of the book.
I found the narrative structure, which alternates sections on the Pembroke family and on Wiltshire and the areas surrounding the Pembroke estate, gave the impression of one book stuffed into another. Just as the reader is getting into the flow of one story, the focus changes. This is not helped by the writing style, which was over-the-top, full of unnecessary linguistic flourishes.
The author makes good use of primary sources, including land surveys and quarter session rolls, but fails to delve into most of them. For a person unfamiliar with the players, I expect this book would be hopelessly confusion. If you don't already know who Cromwell is, don't read this book, which somehow manages to cover the war without referencing his first name. For somebody interested in the social history of the region or periods covered, there may be enough here to make it worth your time.

[Alexa Segur · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started reading this book, I expected to find something akin to a soap opera tale of the Pembrokes during the first half of the 17th century. However, a good third of the book, if not more, is about a family's rise to nobility in the 16th century. I found this part interesting because it gave me a different point of view of the happenings around the Elizabethan court. I was not expecting this... I also learned about their take on arcadia, something I had heard about but knew very little of in reality. I also like how Nicolson compares the Pembrokes view of arcadia to the realities of actual village life of the time.

I am not done reading this book yet (I'm reading it on and off along with some other books). I am about three-quarters of the way into it though, and am happy about what I've learned so far. I did not expect it to be a grand read, but I did expect to learn a few things, which I did.

I give this book a 3.5. I would have given it a 4 if it had been a tad bit more linear when moving from one chapter to the next.

[David R. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nicolson falls a little flat with this treatment of the Herberts, earls of Pembroke from their debut in the 1530s to their fall in the English Civil War. We learn a great deal more about the family's "Arcadia" period and about the lives of their tenants than we do of the "Quarrel". It's even unclear to me that there truly was a quarrel: Charles I had greater concerns than with one egocentric noble.

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed a lot about this book, it is an interesting snapshot of the family it profiles. But the thesis of this quarrel which somehow lead to the civil war never quite pulls together. What might be missing is a slightly larger context and how this family's interests fit into the other struggles going on around it. There's some done around issues of land, but without really saying how it fell to one side or another.

[Helen Carolan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was allegedly a tale of the powerful Herbert family from late medieval times to the civil war. At least that's what the cover informed me. It wasn't. This was a book about the land. Hedges ,ditches, fields and woods. Somewhere in the midst of it was the occasional mention of the Herberts. After two chapters of reading about ditches and the like I was so bored I lost the will to live. Dreadful book.

[Deb · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I learned from this book - not as much as I expected to learn. It was all very airy-fairy, and too much conjecture about the meaning of a painting, without enough reinforcement from primary sources.

However, the afterword has a great summary of what happened during the Georgian period and the crash after Waterloo that parallels exactly what is happening today.

[Yooperprof · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best works of history I've read in recent years. Very interesting investigation of a place - Wiltshire, near Salisbury; a family - the Herbert dynasty, Earls of Pembroke and important political magnates in Tudor-Stuart England; and an idea - the concept of Arcadia, the rural paradise of the bucolic pastoral countryside.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

An informative book, if slightly overwritten from time to time. Most unfortunately, the title changed as this book made its way across the Atlantic; it was originally "Earls in Paradise," which is much truer to the social and cultural snapshot to which much of the book is devoted. The American title suggests more of a political history, and this tome is surely not that.

[Tammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite book that I've read on the subject but I think that says more about me and my preferred writing style than it does about the author. I'm dying to see the family's house, still home to the Earls of Pembroke (check out their website http://www.wiltonhouse.co.uk/) -- simply breathtaking.

[Jennifer]

I was really excited about this book and very disappointed. I read two chapters and think he needed more edits. There were many repetitive sentences and he overused references to Arcadia. I had to put it down and now I have to hunt for another history book for the holiday weekend. Grr...

[Donna Jo Atwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

For over one hundred years the Earls of Pembrooke served their country and feathered their nest--and a beautiful nest it became. But the time came when a choice had to be made between Charles I and the Commonwealth. And it all came tumbling down. One hundred years of an English family.