Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Herbert
The poetic canon of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, is extremely uncertain. The younger John Donne, who edited Pembroke's Poems (1660), is ambiguous about the sources of the manuscripts he used: in his dedication to Christiana Cavendish, Countess of Devonshire, the editor claims that he used manuscripts from her hand; in the preface to the reader, he states that the poems were from Henry Lawes and Nicholas Lanier. Gaby E. Onderwyzer speculates that the poems on the first twenty-eight pages may be from Christiana, with the poems in the remainder of the volume (which has poems by Pembroke mixed with unattributed poems by Sir Edward Dyer, Henry Wotton, Sir Walter Ralegh, Henry King, Thomas Carew, John Corbet, John Grange, Sir Thomas Nevill, and William Strode) possibly supplied by Lawes and Lanier. The British Library Catalogue ascribed Of the Internal and Eternal Nature of Man in Christ (1654) to Pembroke on the basis of a manuscript note by George Thomason, but the attribution is doubtful.
William Herbert was born at Wilton in Wilts and was the eldest son of Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, by his third wife, Mary Herbert. Tutored in childhood by Samuel Daniel, he matriculated on 8 March 1593 from New College, Oxford, where he studied for two years. He seems to have moved to London in 1598 to attend Queen Elizabeth. Prior to his father's death on 19 January 1601, William impregnated Mary Fitton, a lady of the court and a favorite of the queen, but refused to marry her, and his son died soon after birth. Pembroke was committed to the Fleet prison and later banished from court. On 4 November 1604 he married Lady Mary, the wealthy daughter of Gilbert Talbot, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury.
Pembroke traveled in elevated literary circles: Sir Philip Sidney was his uncle and George Herbert his kinsman; Samuel Daniel, John Donne, Sir John Harington, Philip Massinger, Inigo Jones, and, particularly, Ben Jonson were his friends. Jonson told William Drummond that "every first day of the new year he had 20lb sent him from the Earl of Pembrok to buy books." Jonson dedicated Catiline His Conspiracy (1611) and his Epigrams (1616) to Pembroke and addressed Epigram 102 to him. Pembroke also deserves credit for inspiring Jonson's song, "That Women Are But Mens Shaddowes": "Pembrok and his Lady discoursing the Earl said the Woemen were mens shadowes, and she maintained ym, both appealing to Johnson, he affirmed it true, for which my Lady gave a pennance to prove it jn Verse, hence his Epigrame." Chapman inscribed a sonnet to him in his translation of the first 12 books of The Iliad (1609) and Francis and Walter Davison's Poetical Rhapsody (1602) is dedicated to him. He and his brother Philip are "the incomparable pair of brethren" to whom Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) is dedicated; they had known Shakespeare as a member of James I's company of actors. Pembroke's role as the "W. H." of Shakespeare's sonnets has been the subject of debate, though not now credited. In Athenæ Oxoniensis, Anthony Wood describes Pembroke's status among his contemporaries: "He was not only a great favourer of learned and ingenious men, but was himself learned, and endowed to admiration with a poetical geny, as by those amorous and not inelegant aires and poems of his composition doeth evidently appear; some of which had musical notes set to them by Hen. Lawes, and Nich. Laneare."
On 25 June 1603, Pembroke was made a Knight of the Garter. He accompanied King James to Oxford in August of 1605 and was granted an M.A. degree. Pembroke had a great interest in explorations of America as shown by his membership in various companies that financed colonization. From 1614 he was a member of the East India Company; he became a member of the king's council for the Virginia Company on 23 May 1609; an incorporator of the North-West Passage Company on 26 July 1612; of the Bermudas Company on 29 June 1615; and of the Guiana Company on 19 May 1627. A part of the Bermudas was named for him, and the Rappahannock River in Virginia was once the Pembroke river. He became chancellor of Oxford University on 29 January 1617, and in 1624 Broadgates Hall was replaced by Pembroke College. In April 1621 he defended Francis Bacon against charges of corruption. In March 1625 Pembroke attended the deathbed of James I at Theobalds. He carried the crown at Charles I's coronation on 2 February 1626. In 1629 Pembroke donated part of the Barocci library (some 250 Greek manuscripts) to the Bodleian Library, specifically requesting that the manuscripts should be borrowed by students. According to Wood, Pembroke died suddenly at his London house, Baynard's Castle, "of an apoplexy after a full and chearful supper." He was buried in the family vault in Salisbury Cathedral. His funeral sermon by T. C., The Just Man's Memorial, as it was delivered at Baynard's Castle before the interment of the Body, was published in 1630.
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