In this article, Dr David Scott explores the surprisingly agressive side of a famous aristocratic philosopher …

In an era of religious extremists and violent conviction-politicians such as Oliver Cromwell, Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury seemingly stands out as an altogether gentler and more ‘modern’ figure. An accomplished scholar from an early age, he learnt many languages in an effort ‘to make myself a citizen of the world as far as it were possible’ (J.M. Shuttleworth (ed.), The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London, 1976), p. 17). In his most famous work, De Veritate (1624), he argued that all faiths rested on innate, rationally-apprehensible truths, and that Christian rituals and mysteries were no more valid or necessary for true piety and virtuous living than those of any other religion. From here it was but a short step to complete toleration, without the need for different churches or the dogmas that Europeans had been killing each other over since the Reformation. For Herbert, ‘God’s church is all mankind’ (HMC Portland, iii. 8).

This same enlightened, conflict-averse outlook is thought to have shaped Herbert’s approach to statecraft and to the great political issues of his time. Commissioned by Charles I to write a history of Henry VIII’s reign, Herbert used the work to highlight the importance of winning over Parliament and the people when reforming the church. So too, when England was convulsed by civil war in 1642, he questioned whether Parliament had gone too far in challenging royal authority – and was briefly imprisoned by the House of Lords for his temerity. Thereafter he retired to his family seat at Montgomery Castle on the Welsh border to sit out the fighting as safely as he could. Above all, we are told, he avoided the most pernicious of the multiplying sectarianisms of the 1640s – party politics.

In fact, Herbert’s dealings with the king and Parliament during the 1630s and 1640s were anything but conciliatory in tone or objective. Having served as ambassador to France in the early 1620s, he had alienated Louis XIII and been recalled for agitating in support of Europe’s Protestants and against the Catholic dévots – or the ‘bigot party’ as he called it – at the French court; James I had wanted a more emollient representative in Paris. Herbert took his recall and lack of subsequent reward for his services as a stain upon his honour and reputation, and spent the next 15 alternately complaining to and trying to ingratiate himself with James’s successor, Charles.

A self-perceived expert on national security and international affairs, Herbert wrote a policy paper in 1635 in which he advised the king to enter into ‘a strict league with the Low Countrymen’ for control of the Narrow Seas and to intercept Spanish treasure fleets from the Caribbean. The English and the Dutch together, he thought, ‘may take that part of the West Indies which affords those treasures wherewith the Spaniard has corrupted the counsellors and invaded the dominions of the greatest princes of Christendom’ (W.J. Smith (ed.), Herbert Correspondence (Cardiff, 1968), p. 86). This ‘blue-water’ strategy – maritime supremacy and colonisation to challenge Spain and other ‘popish’ powers – had been touted at court since Elizabethan times and would underpin British foreign policy until the Napoleonic era.

More unusual was Herbert’s capacity to support the Protestant cause while heartily detesting the Calvinist predestinarianism of its most zealous champions – those in England branded Puritans. The idea that God had preordained most humans to damnation he thought ‘a blasphemy so great that those who indulge in it seek to destroy not merely human goodness, but also the goodness of God’ (E. Herbert, De Veritate, ed. and trans. Meyrick H. Carré (Bristol, 1937), p. 300). His dislike of predestination has been detected in the advice he gave Charles in 1640 to continue the war against Scotland’s Calvinist rebels – even though only the most hard-bitten anti-Puritans still believed the king had the resources or the popular support to win it. Yet it was not Herbert’s piety that was on show here so much as his desire to gratify Charles and to salvage English national honour from the consequences of royal mismanagement. In the Parliament that the king was forced to summon after defeat by the Scots, Herbert appears to have voted consistently with the loyalists before they were driven away from Westminster in 1642 by the parliamentarians. Herbert the warmonger had turned, apparently effortlessly, into Herbert the party politician.

Herbert had been a keen duellist in his youth, but by the time of the civil war he was too old and infirm to fight. Instead, he spent his retirement at Montgomery Castle in 1642-4 revising his ideas on England’s government – following trains of thought that, from a royalist standpoint, led deep into enemy territory. In one of his papers from this period he rehearsed an argument favoured by leading parliamentarians: that the nobility were obliged to restrain the monarch ‘by arms’ if he ‘set himself professedly against the whole kingdom … In this case the peers are to deliver the land to which they are sworn…’ (National Library of Wales, Herbert of Cherbury manuscripts, E5/3/44, ff. 3, 4v). The claim that the nobility possessed a rightful authority to preserve the kingdom from royal tyranny had respectable medieval roots, but in the context of Parliament’s determination to cut the monarchy down to constitutional size, it carried highly radical implications. It also suggests that war, whether against the Spanish, the Scots or the king, remained one of Herbert’s go-to instruments of national policy.

At the first approach of a parliamentarian army to Montgomery in 1644, Herbert surrendered his castle and returned to London. Re-admitted to the Lords, he gravitated towards the Presbyterians, who were the dominant faction at Westminster by late 1646. In a deal that restored his castle to him, he supported the return of a Presbyterian candidate in the election at Montgomery in 1647 to replace his royalist son Richard as the borough’s MP. At Westminster his agents courted prominent Presbyterians, while in the Lords he voted with this group for a quick settlement with the now defeated king. For a man supposedly above party politics, Herbert had adapted to this factious new environment surprisingly well.

Herbert died in 1648 – just a few years before Oliver Cromwell took charge of England’s land-grab against the Spanish in the Caribbean. Whether Herbert would have accepted transatlantic slavery as a vital part of this imperial enterprise is not hard to guess. Although his ecumenist and rational views on religion appeal to modern sensibilities, as a royal adviser and political thinker he was every bit as bellicose and obsessed with English ‘liberties’ and greatness as most other politicians of his day. Herbert and the Lord Protector had more in common than we appreciate.

DS

The biography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury will appear in the forthcoming Lords 1640-60 volumes; for studies of his son, Richard Herbert, and of Oliver Cromwell, see the recently-published Commons, 1640-60.

Further reading:

Christine Jackson, Courtier, Scholar, and Man of the Sword: Lord Herbert of Cherbury and his World (Oxford, 2021)

Sidney Lee, The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (2nd edition, London, 1906)

David A. Pailin, ‘Herbert, Edward, first Baron Herbert of Cherbury and first Baron Herbert of Castle Island’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

R.W. Serjeantson, ‘Herbert of Cherbury before Deism: The Early Reception of the De veritate’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. 16 (2001), pp. 217-38