NOTES RELATING TO THE

PORTRAITS.

WILLIAM HERBERT, EARL OF PEMBROKE.

THE portrait of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, which serves as frontispiece, is from a fine print in the British Museum. The engraving was executed, as the appended inscription shows, from a painting by D. Mytens, by the order of Philip Herbert, his brother, who succeeded to the title. It has thus some right to precedence before other engravings as representing William Herbert in the latter part of his life, about the age, perhaps, of forty-five. At the Portrait Exhibition of 1866 a portrait was exhibited, said to represent William Herbert, with staff of office in hand. It depicted a man old and broken down in constitution. If this was really a portrait of William Herbert, it must have been taken, it would seem, very shortly before his death, when, possibly through the cause mentioned by Clarendon, his constitution had been fatally undermined, and his strength and vivacity were vanishing. The source of our portrait is clearly not the painting at Wilton, engraved by Lodge, and attributed to Vandyck. A comparison with Lodge's portrait makes this sufficiently evident. Indeed, if Vandyck painted the Wilton portrait, it would

1

1 For a sight of a photograph of this portrait I am indebted to Mr. L. G. Holland, assistant librarian of the National Portrait Gallery.

seem that the portrait must have been executed after William Herbert's death from some previous representation; and this is, I believe, asserted to have been the fact. The present Lord Pembroke is said to have lately acquired a portrait of William Herbert by Mytens; but I am unable to say whether this portrait is identical with that from which the British Museum engraving was executed. There is no difficulty in supposing that a man of the appearance represented in the engraving may have been, from eighteen to twenty-one, exceedingly handsome.1

The MS. on the authority of which the autograph (of reduced size, however) is given is in the British Museum. The initial of the Christian name is not prefixed, though William Herbert's father seems always, or usually, to have signed "H. Pembroke," in accordance with what had been

1 The following from a letter of Sir Dudley Carleton's to Mr. Winwood, dated January 1604, and given in the Winwood Memorials (vol. ii. p. 43), may be added here as of interest on more than one account :-William Herbert is brought before us as an actor; Philip Herbert was one of Shakespeare's patrons, according to the Folio of 1623, and it is noteworthy that the lady he married was sister to the Bridget Vere who in 1597 was about to be married to William Herbert (p. 45):

"On St. John's Day we had the Marriage of Sir Philip Herbert and the Lady Susan performed at Whitehall, with all the Honour could be done a great favourite. The Court was great, and for that Day put on the best Bravery. The Prince and Duke of Holst led the Bride to Church, the Queen follow'd her from thence. The King gave her, and she in her Tresses, and Trinketts brided and bridled it so handsomly, and indeed became her self so well, that the King said, if he were unmarried he would not give her, but keep her himself. The Marriage Dinner was kept in the great Chamber, where the Prince and the Duke of Holst, and the great Lords and Ladies accompanied the Bride. The Ambassador of Venice was the only bidden Guest of Strangers, and he had place above the Duke of Holst, which the Duke took not well. was a Mask in the Hall, which for Conceit and Fashion was suitable to the Occasion. The Actors, were the Earle of Pembrook, the Lord Willoby, Sir Samuel Hays, Sir Thomas Germain, Sir Robert Cary, Sir John Lee, Sir Richard Preston, and Sir Thomas Bager. No Ceremony was omitted of Bride-Cakes, Points, Garters, and Gloves, which have been ever since the Livery of the Court."

At Night there

the ordinary custom. The practice, indeed, continued by no means unusual for a good while afterwards, showing that the individual name was not by any means so fully merged in the title as is now the case. This is of some importance with regard to the matter discussed on p. 72.

MARY, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE.

This portrait, the original of which is at Penshurst, is of importance with reference to the words of the third Sonnet :

"Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime."

The allusion is entirely accordant with the beauty of "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother."

MRS. MARY FITTON.

When I wrote what is to be found on page 80 (note), I had not seen the coloured sculptures, in Gawsworth Church, of Lady Alice Fitton and her children, Edward, Richard, Anne, and Mary. I might possibly have done so, if I had not been influenced by the statement of Mr. J. P. Earwaker (East Cheshire, vol. ii. p. 582) that the figures just alluded to "show traces of having been highly coloured." 1 Such

1 Of this monument Earwaker says: "It was placed in memory of DAME ALICE FITTON, the widow of Sir Edward Fitton, Knt., and daughter and heiress of Sir John Holcroft, of Holcroft, co. Lancaster, Knt., who was buried at Gawsworth, Jan. 4, 1626-7. She is represented wearing a large hood, her head resting upon her right arm, her left hand being placed on a book which rests on her knees. In front of her are the kneeling figures of her two sons, Sir Edward Fitton, the first Baronet (so created in 1617), and then deceased (he died in 1619), and Richard

"traces," it seemed, would not give satisfactory evidence as to Mary Fitton's hair and complexion; and I did not suppose that any very trustworthy representation of the lady's features would be found. I was agreeably surprised, on a visit which I made with express reference to this work, to find that the colouring was in a much better condition than Earwaker's remark had led me to expect, and that the sculpture had been executed in a good style of monumental art. There was the dark complexion, together with the black hair and eyes, so graphically depicted in the second series of Sonnets. The colour of the sculptured Mary Fitton was the more remarkable as her brother Edward is represented on the monument as fair with a light moustache. The features also showed accordance with Shakespeare's repeated assertion that the lady of the Sonnets was not beautiful. And that the lips and the eyes were features expressing the predominance of sensual passion was not to be mistaken. That such a woman should exercise a certain kind of fascination on the opposite sex can scarcely be difficult for a spectator to believe. The expression of Mary's face contrasts strongly with that of her sister, Lady Newdigate. If the monument was executed in 1626 or later, Mary Fitton must have been forty-eight years old. The face in the sculpture would seem to represent a younger person. Perhaps, like her brothers, she may have been already dead, and the sculptor may have been compelled to work from a

Fitton, Esq., who died in 1610. Behind her are the kneeling figures of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. These figures are all habited in the costume of the early part of the seventeenth century, and show traces of having been highly coloured." The monument has now no accompanying inscription, referring to the figures, but the identification might have been inferred with probability from the contiguous Fitton monuments, from the costumes, and from the known facts with regard to Lady Alice and her children. Mr. Earwaker, however, was so fortunate as to possess a seventeenth century MS. of "Cheshire Church Notes," which gave more direct evidence. See his note on page above mentioned, and vol. i. p. xxvi.