As I have probably mentioned before, whenever I’ve felt sufficiently in funds I have bought antiquarian and private press books, persuading myself that, if the need ever arose, I could sell them again at a handsome profit. This is a spurious argument but I am always persuaded by it. Private press books are, or should be, objects of the printer’s and illustrator’s art, and the best are eminently readable into the bargain. A recent addition to my small collection is The Autobiography of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an impressively large Gregynog folio. Reading it and reading around it has been exhilarating.

The Herberts stem from William ap Thomas, a member of the Welsh gentry, subsequently knighted, who by marriage acquired wealth, prestige and eventually a grand property, Llansantffraed Court, between Abergavenny and Raglan. His second wife was Gwladys Ddu, the daughter of Dafydd Gam, the Davy Gam of Henry V, and it is quite possible that as a young man he too fought at Agincourt. He died in 1445 and you will find him in full armour lying beside his wife on the impressive tomb they share in the Priory Church of St Mary, Abergavenny. The Herbert name was adopted when William ap Thomas, who had fought on the side of Edward IV in the Wars of the Roses, was granted the title Baron Herbert of Raglan. His son, also Sir William, dropped the Welsh patronymic. The Herberts were then firmly established as a prominent if not the pre-eminent mid-Wales family early in the sixteenth century and, in the usual way by marriage and astute purchase (and, doubtless, here and there sharp practice) extended ownership and influence over large tracts of Wales, north and south, even as far as Caerleon. Their copiously emblazoned family tree includes the poet George Herbert (1593–1633) and his older brother Edward (1583–1648), two of the ten children of Richard Herbert (d. 1596) and Margaret Newport (1565–1627). That the widowed Margaret, patron and friend of John Donne, who elegised her in ‘The Autumnal’, re-married a much younger John Danvers may suggest that a great deal of the physical liveliness and quick intelligence of her sons came from her. Another branch of the Herbert clan descended from William ap Thomas bears the ‘incomparable pair of brethren’ William Herbert (1580–1630) 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and Philip (1580–1630) Earl of Montgomery, to whom Shakespeare’s First Folio is dedicated. The latter was known as ‘the Welsh Lord’ and (we are told in The Dictionary of Welsh Biography) was ‘twitted with need for an interpreter’.

Edward is paradoxically described in the same source as ‘a vain, sensitive man, a bold and profound thinker… a strange mixture of philosopher and buffoon’. He is the Renaissance figure reclining in a glade in reproductions of the exquisite full-length portrait miniature by Isaac Oliver that now resides in Powis Castle. Edward was born at his grandmother’s house a few miles over the border at Eyton, Shropshire, but his home was Montgomery Castle, a link in the chain of mostly early thirteenth-century fortresses built to keep down the Welsh. By his own account he was so sickly as an infant and so slow to speak that it was feared he was deaf and he was left untutored in his early years. At seven he began making up for lost time. Aged nine he was taught Welsh, the everyday language of the host of peasants who scratched a living from the Herbert lands, and in due course he acquired Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish. He was twelve when he was enrolled at University College, Oxford, but was shortly afterwards recalled home on the death of his father. For dynastic reasons, in 1598, Edward, now fifteen, was married to Mary, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of another branch of the Herbert family and, accompanied by his bride and his mother, returned to Oxford. In his memoir he disarmingly observes of this match that, ‘having a due remedy for that lasciviousness to which youth is naturally inclined, I followed my book more close than ever’. After a decade of marital content, he fell into dispute with his wife regarding the inheritance of their children in the event of his death and her re-marriage. Because she refused to agree the guarantee he sought, he left her, pregnant, and departed for the continent.

Wherever he went his handsome looks and swashbuckling behaviour attracted attention. Visiting Paris in 1608, he was introduced to M. de Montmorency, the Constable of France, and was entertained by Marguerite de Valois and the Princess de Conti, impressing with his style and gallantry. In July 1610 he crossed the Channel again, on this occasion in the company of Lord Chandos and with serious purpose. In a fresh phase of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), an English expedition had been mounted under the command of Sir Edward Cecil to join Dutch, Brandenburg and Palatine forces besieging Juliers (Jülich), then occupied by the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II. Herbert claimed to be among the first to enter the city. And when war flared there again in 1614 he returned as a volunteer in the army of the Prince of Orange. He had a hunger for war and adventure not easily satisfied and, if peace was unavoidable and no one available with whom he could pick a quarrel and fight a duel, a passion for learning. He studied antiquities in Rome and attended lectures at the university in Padua. Perhaps at last tiring of armed conflict, he leaned on his capacity for forging friendships with European nobility and sought the role of ambassador, eventually successfully. He opened negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Henrietta Maria, but there were other European alliances at stake and a falling out with King James led to his dismissal in 1624. Payment for his diplomatic services had been at best irregular and often entirely neglected: he left Paris deeply in debt. An Irish peerage was the kingly response and, after further petitioning, the gift of the manor of Ribbesford in Worcestershire. In May 1629 he was made Lord Herbert of Cherbury and in June 1637 became a member of the council of war. But his allegiance to Charles was not strong. He fended off invitations to join the king’s forces and retired to his castle, where in due course he surrendered to troops of Sir Henry Middleton.

Before leaving Paris in 1609 he oversaw the printing of a philosophical work, De Veritate, Prout Distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibili, et a Falso (‘On truth, in distinction from revelation, probability, possibility, and error’), which is recognised as the basis of Deism – belief in God as the Supreme Being that created the universe, but does not intervene in it. God’s presence is revealed through Nature, and not in mystical revelation however mediated. (One suspects R.S. Thomas was Deist rather than orthodox Christian.) This does not imply an unshackled human free-for-all; Edward Herbert emphasised the roles of virtue and piety, and of remorse and repentance for sins. He found followers in Voltaire and Rousseau, and in Thomas Paine. It is unsurprising then that a fair number of America’s Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, might have thought of themselves as Deists.