W E would rather be enemies of the Herberts than their

annalists. Not even in England is there a family of which the history is so inextricable, so confused by multitudinous branches, so conglom- erated by interlineal marriages, so burdened with whole races all bearing the same name. After infinite trouble, and drawing out a pedigree worse than that of a Scottish chief, we have made the history of the main branches clear to ourselves, but if our readers want it to be equally clear to them, they must give it nearly as much attention as we did. If any reader conceives the obscurity to be a fault of our own, we advise him to make out the history of any one Herbert for himself ; it will discipline his character better than a course of Euclid.

The origin of this family is lost in obscurity. Its real founder was William Herbert, lord of Ragland, in Morunouth- shire (which lordship he is said to have derived from his grand- mother, Maud, daughter and heiress of Sir John Morley, the hereditary owner thereof), by some said to have descended from Henry Fitzroy, one of the natural sons of Henry I., and by others, from Henry FitzHerbert, Chamberlain to that King, and husband of Julian Corbet of Alcester, Warwickshire, mistresa of the King. H ever this may be—and the pedigrees are entirely at variance with each other—the father of William Herbert is said to have been Sir William-ap Thomas, who lived at Ragland Castle in the re:gn of Henry V., and is said to have married Gladys, daughter of Sir David Gam. It is more certain thaf William Herbert had a younger brother Richard, who became the ancestor of the Lords Herbert of Cherbury, and of the late, and through an heiress of the present, Earls of Powis. William Herbert attached himself in the Wars of the Roses to the cause of the House of Yo:k with un- wavering fidelity, and so distinguished himself both in the field and in council that on the accession of Edward IV. in 1461 he became one of the most influential members of that King's Council of State, under the designation of Sir William Herbert, Knight, and on the 8th of May in that year he had a grant of the offices of Chief Justice and Chamberlain of South Wales, and the Stewardship of the Commons of the Shires of Carmarthen and Cardigan and Chief Forester in those counties for life. On the 26th July he was summoned to Parliament as William Herbert de Herbert," and became a Baron of Vie realm. On September 7th he had a grant of the Stewardship of the csstle and lordship of Brecknock, and of all other the castles of Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham, in South Wales. On the 3rd of February, 1462, by letters patent reciting his great services in discomfiting the Lancastrian lords Henry, Luke of Exeter, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, and James, Earl of Wiltshire, a grant was made to Lord Herbert in general tail of the castle, town, and lordship of Pembroke, of the hundred and lordship of Castle Martin, the lordship of St. Florence, the lordship and forest of Coydrath, the castle, lorthhip, and town of Tenby, the lordships and bailiwicks of West Pembroke and East Pembroke, the bailiwicks of Dougledy, Eons, and Kemp, the moiety of the ferry of Burton, the castle, town, and lordship of Gilgarran, the lordships and manors of Emlyn, Metnordyve, and Diffynbrian, the forest of Kenendryn, the castle, lordship, and town of Laustephan, the lordships and manors of Penryn and Le Verie, of Osterlowe, Trayne, Clyntone, and St. Clare, of Magoure and Rsdwyke, the castle, manor, town, and lordship of Goderich, and the lordship and manor of Urcher- field, with its appurtenances in the marches of Wales and county of Hereford ; also of the manor and lordship of Walwenes Castle, part of the possessions of James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire, attainted. Next year Lord Herbert was made a Knight of the Garter, and accompanied King Edward in an expedition into the North. In the 3rd of Edward he was made a Justice in the county of Merioneth, and on the 161 June had a grant of the honour, castle, manor, and borough of Dunster, in Somerset, with the manors of Minehead, Carhampton, and hundred of Carhampton, of the manor of Escantok alias Cantokeshed and Ivelon, the manors of Chilton and Blancome in Devonshire, Stonehall and 1Vodehall in Suffolk, and of all other the lands of Sir James Lutterell, Knight, which by his attainder came to the Crown. In October, 1466, E lward being determined to raise a new nobility to counteract the old feudal aristocracy, and to intermarry these new peers with the relations of his Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, made a match between Maria, sister of the Queen, and William, eldest son of Lord Herbert. From this time at least Lord Herbert incurred the deadly hatred of the old nobility, at the head of whom stood Warwick the Kingmaker. King Edward, however, continued to heap honours on him. In the 7th year of his reign he made him Chief Justice of North Wales for life, and he was also made constable of the castles of Carmarthen and Cardigan, and on the 8th September, 1468, he was created Earl of Pembroke, and had the same year a grant in general tail of the castle, town, borough, and manor of Haverford West, and was constituted Chief Forester of Snowdon, Constable of Conway Castle, and Governor of that town. In the August of this year Harlech Castle was taken by the Earl and his brother, Sir Richard Herbert, his constant companion in his warlike achieve- ments. This was considered a great feat, and is recited as such in the patent creating the Earldom. The Lancastrian captain who held it had been a soldier in the wars of France, and said that, whereas he had kept a castle so long in that country that he made the old women in Wales talk of him, he would now keep Harlech Castle so long that he would make the old women of France talk of him. Nevertheless he surrendered to Sir Richard Herbert on condi- tion that the latter should do all he could to save his life. King Edward, however, repudiated Sir Richard's authority to grant life to any one, and would have executed the prisoner if Sir Richard had not entreated him either to restore the captain to his strong- hold and send some one else to take him out, or to take his, Sir Richard's, life instead, which -was the best proof he could give the captain of having done his best to save his life. The King, thereupon, granted Sir Richard the captain's life, but refused to bestow on him any other reward for the service he had performed in taking the castle. Sir Richard was less successful with his own brother, the stern Earl of Pembroke. The Earl having taken prisoners seven brothers who were outlaws, and had committed many evil deeds and murders, ordered them all to be hanged. Their mother coming to the Earl, upon her knees entreated him to pardon two at least of her sons, and Sir Richard seconded her request. But the Earl said they were all equally guilty, and he could make no distinction. They were accordingly all hanged. On this the mother, "with a pair of woollen beads on her arms," on her knees cursed the Earl, praying God's mischief might fall to him in the first battle he should make. So ran the tradition iii Sir Richard's family. The following year (1469) the curse was realized. Warwick and Clarence had raised an insurrection in the North, directed nominally against the Queen's family and the new peers. Their own connection with it was still unavowed, but they secretly directed it. King Edward advanced to Newark to meet the insurgents, but finding them too strong fell back to Nottingham, and sent to Pembroke and Lord Stafford to join him. But the in- surgents were too rapid for them, and cut off their junction with the Royal forces. Pembroke and his brother had 7,000 or 8,000 men, Stafford 5,000, chiefly archers from Somerset and Devon. They encountered the Northerners at Hedecote or Edge- cote, near Banbury, and were repulsed by them, the insurgents thereupon posting themselves on a hill near Banbury to await the arrival of Warwick and Clarence. The Earl and Lord Stafford resolved to attack them here at once, but unfortunately quarrelling about their lodgings at an inn, Stafford marched off the field with his archers, and left the Herberts to fight alone. There is a tradi- tion that after the Earl had put his men in order of battle he found his brother, Sir Richard, at the head of his men leaning upon his poleaxe in a pensive manner. Whereupon the Earl said, "What, doth thy great body [for he was higher by the head than any one in the army] apprehend anything, that thou art so melan- choly ?—or art thou weary with marching, that thou dost lean thus upon thy poleaxe ? " Sir Richard replied that he was neither, of which the Earl should see proof presently, "Only," said he, " cannot but apprehend on your part lest the curse of the woman with the woollen beads fall upon you." The battle proved fatal to both brothers. The Earl fought desperately, and, Sir Richard twice cut his way with his poleaxe through the opposing army but at last they were overpowered and taken prisoners. Four thousand Welsh fell and fifteen hundred of the Northerners. The two distinguished prisoners were carried to Northampton, and there the next day, July 27, 1469, they were both beheaded by order from Warwick and Clarence. Such were the usual sequels of victories in the ruthless wars of the White and Red."

Earl Pembroke made his will, which still remains, on the day of his death, and it is in the form of a request to his wife to dis- charge the duties of guardian and executor. " Wyfe, pray for me," it ends, "and take ye said office yat ye promised me, as ye had in my lyfe my heart and love. God have mercy upon me, and save you and our children, and Our Lady and all the Saints in heaven help me to salvation." His wife was Anne, daughter of Sir Walter Devereux, and sister of the first Lord Ferrers, of Chartley, the ancestor of the Earls of Essex. By her he had William, his heir and successor in his honours, and three other sons. He also left by his mistress, Maud, daughter and heiress of Adam-ap- Howell Graunt, two illegitimate sons, the elder of whom, Sir Richard Herbert, of Ewyas, is the ancestor of the present Earls of Pembroke and Carnarvon.

We had better first exhaust the legitimate lines. William, second Earl of Pembroke, was not a man of any mark. In 1479, King Edward being desirous of investing his son, Prince Edward, with the Earldom of Pembroke, it was resigned to him by William Herbert, who instead, was on July 4, 1479, created Earl of Huntingdon. He was one of those who fol- lowed King Edward's body as chief mourners ; but he seems to have acquiesced in the assumption of the government by Richard of Gloucester, and was constituted, November 13, 1483, Justice of South Wales, notwithstanding his marriage to a sister of Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Her death may have contributed to this result, for we find the Earl on February 29, 1484, entering into covenants with King Richard to take his daughter, "Dame Catherine Plantagenet," to wife before the Feast of St. Michael following, and to make her a jointure of lands to 2001. a year, the King undertaking to settle lands and lordships on them and their heirs male of 1,000 marks a year, 600 at once and the rest after the death of Thomas Lord Stanley, they to receive in the meantime instead 400 marks per annum out of the lordships of Newport • Brecknoek, and Hay, and the King to be at the charge of

the wedding. The young lady, however, died before the mar- riage took place. But when Richmond landed in Wales the lierberts wavered between the two parties, somewhat like the Stanleys, Richmond counting on the support of the Earl's brother, Sir Walter, and then being greatly alarmed at reports that he was in arms to bar his progress. Had the Herberts stood by the House of York at this juncture, the expedition of Richmond must have been crushed before it could enter England ; but seemingly the Woodville interest prevailed with than, and we find the Earl of Huntingdon one of the peers sum- moned to the first Parliament of Henry VII. in 1486. He died in 1491, leaving only a daughter, Elizabeth, who married Sir Charles Somerset, natural son of Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and thus "carded away the fair castle of Ragland with many thousand pounds yearly from the heir male" of the Herberts. From this marriage descends the present Duke of Beaufort. The lines of all the legitimate brothers of the second Earl of Pembroke and Earl of Huntingdon died out or ended in females, one of whom, the heiress of the line of Sir George Herbert of St. Julian's, married, as we shall see, the first Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

This Cherbury branch were derived from Sir Richard Herbert, of Montgomery Castle, a younger son of that Sir Richard Herbert of Colebrook who was beheaded at Northampton with his brother, the first Earl of Pembroke. He was Steward in the time of Henry VIII. of the lordships and marches of North Wales, East Wales, and Cardiganshire, and in this capacity acquired a singular reputa- tion for justice. He followed diligently the family example of hunting out and punishing outlaws and thieves, but he made little money out of this employment. His son Edward, after spending most of his means at Court, became a soldier, and served in France, Scotland, and the various civil contests in England during the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary with good success. He had the spirit of accumulation much more than his father, and acquired so much money that he was enabled to purchase the greater part of the estates which descended to the Lords Herbert of Cherbury. He occupied himself afterwards in hunting down the outlaws in the mountains of Montgomeryshire, and his power and station became very great in the district. He kept open house, had a table twice covered every week with the best that could be got, and kept a great establishment. In his old age he built a large low house at Black-hall, and removed there from Montgomery Castle. He sent his sons to the University, and settled them all on different estates. Three of them became the ancestors of peers, viz., Richard, Matthew, and Charles. Richard, the eldest son, described by his son, Lord Herbert, as "black-haired and bearded, as all my ancestors of his side are said to have been, of a manly and somewhat stern look, but withal very handsome and well compact in his limbs," was a man of great courage, which he displayed signally in an attempt to assassinate him in in the churchyard of Lanerval, where, with the assistance of one John-ap-Howell Corbet, he put his assailants to flight, and though severely wounded walked home to his house at Llyffyn. He was a Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and a Justice of the Peace. He was a man of some acquirements, and his son claims for him the reputation that his personal enemies found justice at his hands. He had seven sons and three daughters by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Richard Newport, who used to say of the number of her children that it was Job's number and Job's distribution, "and bless God that they were neither defective in their shapes nor in their reason." Two of her sons were remarkable men, Edward, the eldest, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and George, the fifth son, the well-known religious poet and author of the prose work "The Priest to the Temple." Of him Lord Herbert says, "My brother George was so excellent a scholar that he was made the public orator of the University in Cambridge, some of whose English works are extant, which though they be rare in their kind, yet are far short of ex- pressing those perfections he had in the Greek and Latin tongues and all divine and human literature. His life was most holy and exemplary, inasmuch that about Salisbury where he lived beneficed for many years he was little less than sainted. He was not exempt from passion and choler, being infirmities to which all our race is subject, but that excepted, without reproach in his actions." He was born April 3, 1593, and had studied foreign languages in hopes of rising to be Secretary of State, but being disappointed at Court, took orders and became Prebend of Leighton Bromswold in 1626, and in 1630 Rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, and died in 1632. His mother was a remarkable woman, who after the death of her husband took the entire management of her sons, and HI said to have acted in this office with the greatest judgment. She continued a widow for twelve years, and then married Sir John Danvers (one of the High Court of Justice on Charles I., whose

heiress married the strange Villiers of the Purbeck branch). Dr. Donne celebrates her mature beauty thus :—

"No spring nor summer beauty has such grace

As I have seen in an autumnal face."

Her eldest son, Edward, one of the most eccentric characters of his age, was born in 1581, at Montgomery. He went to Oxford,

his mother and her elder children accompanying him there, and became a member of University College. In 1598, at the age of seventeen, he married Mary Herbert, daughter of Sir William Herbert, and heiress of the St. Julian's branch, a lady six years his senior, but who by her father's will incurred forfeiture of the greater part of her property if she married any but a Herbert.

The very handsome lad Edward Herbert was her choice, but the marriage does not appear from her husband's account to have been ultimately a happy one. He returned with his wife to Oxford, and there pursued his studies with great assiduity till 1600, when he came to London. Thence he proceeded to the Continent, and distinguished himself in the Netherlands along with the English forces there. He was constantly seeking and incurring all kinds of unnecessary dangers, and became a great duellist, and a gallant expert in all the accomplishments of the time,

love-making included. But the courtship seems generally to have proceeded in the first place from the ladies themselves. On his

return home, after the accession of James I., his learning recom-

mended him to the notice of that King, and he was made a Knight of the Bath, and in 1616 sent Ambassador to France. Here he quarrelled with the French favourite, De Luynes, and was recalled at the request of the French King ; but, on the death of De Luynes, again sent to Paris in the same capacity. Here he pub- lished (1624) his work, " Tractatus de Veritate, prout distingai- tur it Revelations, 4 Verisimili, Is Possibili, et it Falai)." He

returned to England the next year, and was created an Irish peer as Baron Herbert, of Castle Island, Kerry, 31st December, 1624.

From this time he lived either among the gaieties of the Court or immersed in literary pursuits. On the 7th May, 1629, he was made an English peer, as Baron Herbert, of Cherbury, in Shropshire. In 1645 a third edition of his " Tra,ctatus" appeared, accompanied with

a treatise "De Religione Gentilium, Errorumque spud eos Causis." When the Civil War broke out he at first espoused the cause of

the Parliament, but subsequently abandoned it, and died August 20, 1648. He maintained the theory of innate ideas, and made a "cer- tain instinctof the reason the primary source of all human knowledge."

He made religion consequently to be grounded, "not on revelation or historical tradition, but on an immediate consciousness of God and of divine things." His faith thus formed was that "there is a God whom man ought to honour and reverence ; a life of holiness is the most acceptable worship that can be offered Him ; sinners must repent them of their sins, and strive to become better ; and after death every one must expect the rewards or penalties befitting the acts of this life." He was succeeded as second Lord Herbert, of Cherbury by his son Richard, who was in great favour with

Charles I., and died in 1655, leaving a family, of whom his sons Edward and Henry became successively third and fourth Lords Herbert of Cherbury, but left no issue, the latter, who rose in arms in Worcestershire for the Prince of Orange at the Revolution, dying April 21,1691, when the first peerage of Cherbury became extinct.

But on the 28th of April, 1694, it was revived in the person of Henry Herbert, son and heir of Sir Henry Herbert, sixth brother of the first Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Master of the Revels to James I. Henry, the first Lord Herbert of Cherbury of the second crea- tion, died January 22, 1709, and was succeeded by his son Henry, second Lord Herbert, who died in April, 1738, without issue, and the title again became extinct. It was revived again in 1743, in a descendant of Matthew Herbert, of Dolgfiog, uncle of the first and celebrated Lord Herbert of Cherbury. This Matthew "went to the Low Country wars, and after some time spent there came home, and lived in the country at Dolgilog " near Machynlletth, upon a house and fair living," says Lord Herbert, "which my grandfather bestowed upon him." His grandson, Richard Herbert of Dolgilog, and Oakley Park, Shropshire, married Florence, sister of Edward and Henry, third and fourth Lords Herbert of Cherbury, of the first line,—and their eon, Francis Herbert of Dolgilog, left

a son, Henry Arthur, who becoming in 1738 heir male of the family, was on December 21, 1743, created Lord Herbert of Cherbruy.