ABSTRACT
At first sight, Lord Herbert of Cherbury appears an unlikely candidate to have attempted to write a comprehensive and authoritative history of the life and reign of Henry VIII. 1 Born near Shrewsbury c. 1582, Edward Herbert was the eldest son and proud descendant of an Anglo-Welsh gentry family, which traced its pedigree to the Norman Conquest and boasted ancestral links with numerous noble and gentry families.2 He attended University College, Oxford in 1596-1600 and thereafter gained admission to court society and experience of county government before departing on a belated grand tour and seizing the opportunity for military service in the Low Countries.3 In 1619, despite having attracted notoriety for his duelling and courtly womanizing, he was despatched to France as ambassador to the court of Louis XIII. 4 He quickly overcame his inexperience and earned a reputation as a fierce diplomat, but exceeded his brief by working to support James I’s son-in-law, the Elector Palatine in the Bohemian crisis, and irritated the French king by his efforts to prevent persecution of the Huguenots.5 Temporarily abandoned by his patron, the duke of Buckingham, Herbert was recalled from
France in some disgrace in 1624 and raised begrudgingly to the lowest rank of the Irish peerage.6 His attempts to secure admission to the Privy Council proved unsuccessful though in 1629 he achieved promotion to the English peerage.7 Generously fêted by contemporaries for his intellectual gifts, and having already achieved distinction as a philosopher and poet, Herbert seemingly turned his scholarly talents to writing history in an attempt to win favour and revive his flagging career.8 Although his enthusiasm sometimes wavered, Herbert devoted much of the 1630s to the laborious task of producing a thorough and, so far as he was able, impartial account of the Tudor king whom he described as ‘subject to more obloquies, then any since the worst Roman Emperours times’.9
