Courtier, Scholar, and Man of the Sword

Lord Herbert of Cherbury was a flamboyant Stuart courtier, soldier, and diplomat who acquired a reputation for duelling and extravagance but also numbered among the leading intellectuals of his generation. He travelled widely in Britain and Europe, enjoyed the patronage of princely rulers and their consorts, acquired celebrity as the embodiment of chivalric values, and defended European Protestantism on the battlefield and in diplomatic exchanges. As a scholar and author of De veritate and The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, he commanded respect in the European Republic of Letters and accumulated a much-admired library. As a courtier, he penned poetry and exchanged verses with John Donne and Ben Jonson, compiled a famous lute-book, wrote a widely-read autobiography, commissioned exquisite portraits by leading court artists, and built an impressive country house. Herbert was an enigmatic Janus figure who cherished the masculine values and martial lifestyle of his ancestors but embraced the Renaissance scholarship and civility of the early modern court and anticipated the intellectual and theological liberalism of the Enlightenment. His life and writings provide a unique window into the aristocratic world and cultural mindset of the early seventeenth century and the outbreak and impact of the Thirty Years War and British Civil Wars. This volume examines his career, life-style, political allegiances, religious beliefs, and scholarship within their British and European contexts, challenges the reputation he has acquired as a dilettante scholar, boastful auto-biographer, royalist turncoat and early deist, and offers a new assessment of his life and achievement.

Christine Jackson is Emeritus Fellow and Dean of Degrees at Kellogg College, Oxford. She was previously Associate Professor in Early Modern History at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education where she directed and taught undergraduate and postgraduate programmes for twenty-five years. Her research interests and publications have migrated from the early modern economy and society to early modern elites, and over the past decade she has been focussing on the study of the extraordinary life and extensive writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

- Introduction - GREAT EXPECTATIONS - 1: A Promising Youth - 2: Chafing at the Bit - COURTLY ADVENTURES - 3: French Leave - 4: Courtier and Swordsman - 5: Citizen of the World - DIPLOMATIC INTERVENTIONS - 6: Changing Times - 7: My Lord, the Ambassador - 8: The Fickleness of Princes - INTELLECTUAL OCCUPATIONS - 9: Intellectual Ambitions and Interests - 10: Philosopher and Theologian - 11: Royal Historian - 12: Musician and Poet - COURT AND COUNTRY - 13: Noble Preoccupations - 14: 'Treacherous Herbert' or Man of Honour? - Epilogue