ABSTRACT
On 26 April 1630, the Venetian Ambassador reported from London to the Doge in Venice that the Third Earl of Pembroke ‘has died suddenly, to the great sorrow of the whole Court, owing to his great qualities’. Pembroke was a carefully educated intellectual whose early career and subsequent reputation were almost destroyed by an unfortunate scandal. The arts and literature of the Jacobean and Caroline periods would have been much poorer but for the Earl of Pembroke’s patronage. The ‘rare piece of brass’ may be the statue by Le Sueur made about the time of Pembroke’s death, supposedly after a sketch by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, which now stands outside the Bodleian. Recovering his rightful political role under Elizabeth’s successors, Pembroke devoted his life to furthering the interests of his family and friends, England and Protestantism. A corrective is badly needed, in the face of the adverse judgements passed on Pembroke by Clarendon, S.R. Gardiner and various other scholars.
