Herbertus Regis Camerarius, the ancestor of all the Herberts, was Chamberlain in fee to Henry I., two of whose charters he attests at Windsor in 1101. There are only conjectures as to his lineage, of which in reality nothing whatever is known. He died “not long before 1130,” and left, according to Eyton, three sons: 1. Herbert Fitz Herbert; 2. Stephen Fitz Herbert; and 3. William Fitz Herbert, Archbishop of York in 1143, who was canonized by Pope Honorius III. in the succeeding century. Herbert filled his father’s place at Court, and married one of the numerous mistresses of Henry I., Sibil (or Adela) Corbet, mother of Reginald de Dunstanville, Earl of Cornwall, and daughter and co-heir of the Domesday baron, Robert Corbet, on whom the King had bestowed the Royal manor of Alcester in Worcestershire. They, again, had three sons: 1. Robert; 2. Herbert; and 3. Henry. Robert Fitz Herbert, “the third lineal Chamberlain of his family, succeeded to the office and estate of his father, ere Henry II. had been three months on the throne of England,” and had d. s. p. before 1165. His heir was his brother Herbert, whose wife Lucia was a daughter, and eventually a co-heiress of Milo de Gloucester, Earl of Hereford, Lord High Constable of England. For some reason or other, that remains unexplained, this Herbert was out of favour with Henry II. “It is evident that he was admitted to far less than a full share of the inheritance which should have come to him by his wife and mother; and there is some proof that at one period he was under total forfeiture. . . . Before King Richard had reigned a year, he recovered part of his wife’s inheritance, and later on the moiety of Alcester.”—Eyton. His sons were: 1. Reginald, who left no children; 2. Peter, his successor; and 3. Matthew, the reputed ancestor of Vincent Fitz Herbert surnamed Le Finch, of Netherfield in East Sussex, from whom the Earls of Winchilsea claim descent. But, according to Eyton’s pedigree, Matthew’s grandson and last male representative, Matthew Fitz John, who was summoned to parliament in 1296, died s. p. in 1309-10.

Peter Fitz Herbert, “being,” as Dugdale informs us, “very obsequious to King John at the time of his differences with his Barons, was reputed one of his Evil Counsellors” (though he afterwards fell off in his allegiance); and took an active part in affairs during his reign. He is credited with three wives; one of whom, Isabel, daughter and co-heir of the William de Braose who was hanged by Llewellyn in 1229-30, brought him the Welsh lands of Blayntheleveny and Thalegard. She was then (according to Dugdale) the widow of David-ap-Llewellyn, the son of her father’s executioner! Accordingly, in the next generation, Reginald Fitz Peter is enrolled in the ranks of the truculent Barons-Marcher, summoned in 1257 “to fit himself with Horse and Arms and attend the King at Chester to resist the Incursions of the Welch;” and two years later commanded “to reside in those Parts, with all his Power, to prevent their further hostilities.” His son, John Fitz Reginald, was a baron by writ in 1294; but the summons was never repeated to any of his successors, nor can I find any further notice of them.

John’s younger brother, Peter, is believed to be the ancestor of the Earls of Pembroke. But, as all his descendants were settled in Wales, we have to search for them in the mysterious mazes of Welsh genealogy, in which hereditary surnames are apparently unknown. Sir Bernard Burke, who intrepidly threads his way through this formidable labyrinth, derives from him no fewer than seven other families: the Prodgerses of Gwarrindhû; the Morgans of Arxton; the Joneses of Llanarth; John Jones of Llanarth assumed the name of Herbert not many years ago. the Gwynns and Raglans of Glamorganshire; the Hughes of Coelwch or Killough; and the Powells of Perthyr. I have not the power— nor indeed the ambition—of tracing out any of these. If the posterity of John Lord Fitz Herbert was even approximately numerous, the two brothers together may be said to have founded a colony.

William, Lord of Raglan Castle, in right of his grandmother Maud de Morley, with whom Dugdale commences the pedigree, was the eldest son of Sir William-ap-Thomas, knighted by Henry V. for his valour in the French wars. He was an excellent soldier and a staunch Yorkist, whose exploits in the Wars of the Roses had been of such signal service to the cause, that no reward seemed too great for him when Edward IV. came to the throne. He was summoned to parliament, magnificently endowed with the spoils of the attainted Lancastrians, and appointed Justiciar and Chamberlain of South Wales, and Chief Forester in all those counties for life. Nor was this all. Year by year he seemed to grow in favour with the King, as fresh grants and fresh honours poured in upon him. In 1463 he received Dunster Castle and all the lands of Sir James Luttrel; in 1466 the offices of Justiciar of North Wales, Forester of Snowdon, and Constable of Conway; in 1468 was created Earl of Pembroke—taking his title from one of his newly acquired possessions It was on the occasion of his receiving this Earldom that he and his brother Sir Richard were desired "to take their surnames after their first progenitor, Herbert Fitz Roy, and to forego the British manner, whose usage is to call every man by his Father, Grandfather, or Great Grandfather’s name.” It appears that his descent had been made cut by the Welsh authorities, from “Herbert, Son Natural to King Henry I.”: and in 1469 was made a Knight of the Garter “for having won the Castle of Harlow by assault, it being one of the strongest Forts throughout all Wales.” But his career terminated in disaster during the following year. He and his Welshmen were outnumbered and routed at Danesmoor near Edgcote, having been sent to put down the Lancastrian rising under Sir John Conyers and “Robin of Riddesdale.” Humphrey Stafford, Earl of Devonshire, had joined him at Banbury with “6000 good Archers to assist”; but upon some paltry quarrel about lodgings, forsook him in face of the enemy, and left him to fight the battle against formidable odds. He was taken prisoner, and with his brother, Lord Rivers, and others, beheaded the next day by order of the Duke of Clarence and Warwick the King-maker. By his wife, Anne Devereux, he left, besides six daughters, three sons: 1. William, his successor; 2. Sir Walter; and 3. Sir George, of St. Julian’s-upon-Usk.

William, the heir, surrendered his Earldom to the King, who wished to give it to his own eldest son; and was instead created Earl of Huntingdon in 1479. Richard III. named him Justiciar of South Wales, and betrothed him to his daughter, the Lady Katherine Plantagenet; but the little princess “died in her tender years,” and his wife was Mary Widvile, a daughter of the Lord Rivers who had been beheaded with his father at Northampton. Their only child, Elizabeth, married Sir Charles Somerset, the illegitimate son of Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, who was created Earl of Worcester in 1514, and is the ancestor of the present Dukes of Beaufort. She brought him Raglan Castle and a great Welsh inheritance: but some share in her father’s estates passed to her uncle, Sir George, whose descendant and representative married Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1595.

In addition to this numerous family born in wedlock, Lord Pembroke left two bastard sons that bore his name: Sir Richard Herbert of Ewyas, and Sir George Herbert of Swansea. Sir Richard married a Glamorganshire heiress, and had, with other children, a son known as Black Will Herbert, who, beginning life under very poor auspices, successfully achieved a brilliant position at Court 14 He was,” writes old John Aubrey, "borne in Monmouthshire. He was (I take it) a younger brother, a mad fighting young fellow.’Tis certain he was a servant to the house of Worcester, and wore their blue coate and badge. My co. Whitney’s great aunt gave him a golden angel when he went to London.

One time being at Bristowe, he was arrested, and killed one of the sheriffes of the city. He made his escape through Back Street, through the then great gate in the Marsh, and gott into France. In France he betook himself into the army, where he showed so much courage and readinesse of wit in conduct, that in a short time he became eminent, and was favoured by the King, who afterwards recommended him to Henry VIII. of England, who much valued him, and heaped favours and honours upon him. Upon the dissolution of the Abbeys, he gave him the Abbey of Wilton, and a country of lands and manours thereabout belonging to it. He gave him also the Abbey of Ramesbury in Wilts, with much land belonging to it: Cardiff Castle, in Glamorganshire, with the ancient crown lands belonging to it. He married Anne Parr, sister of Queen Katherine Parr, daughter and co-heir of Thomas Parr, I thinke, Marquesse of Northampton, by whom he had two sons, Henry, Earl of Pembroke, and Edward, the ancestor of the Lords Powys. He was made conservator of King Henry 8. He could neither read nor write, but had a stamp for his name. He was of good naturall parts, but very colericque. In Queen Mary’s time, upon the return of the Catholique religion, the nunnes came again to Wilton Abbey; and this William, Earl of Pembroke, came to the gate which lookes towards the court by the street, but now is walled up, with his cappe in his hand, and fell upon his knees to the Lady Abbess and nunnes, crying peccavi. Upon Queen Mary’s death, the Earl came to Wilton (like a tigre) and turned them out crying, ‘Out, ye jades! to worke, to worke—ye jades, goe spinne!’”

He received the Earldom of Pembroke from Edward VI. in 1551. Camden calls him “an extraordinary man,” who obtained favour and employments at the courts of four successive and very different sovereigns; and Sir Robert Naunton attempts to explain how this was done. “This Earl and the old Marquess of Winchester were ever of the King’s Religion, and over-zealous Professors. Being younger Brothers Lord Winchester was the eldest son of a noble house in the legitimate line, and heir to a considerable estate in Hampshire. (yet of Noble Houses) they spent what was left them, and came on Trust to the Court: where, upon the bare stock of their wits, they began to traffick for themselves, and prospered so well, that they got, spent, and left more than any Subjects from the Norman Conquest to their own times. Whereunto hath been prettily replyed, ‘that they lived in time of dissolution.’”

Lord Pembroke’s marriage with the Queen’s sister materially advanced his interests under Henry VIII.; and he sought an even more ambitious alliance for his eldest son, whom he married to Lady Katherine Grey. But, “finding that great mischief had like to have befallen him” through this match with the blood royal, he actually caused Lord Herbert to repudiate the poor lady, and found him another wife, whose father, Lord Shrewsbury, was then high in favour with Queen Mary. This Lady Anne Talbot shortly after died; and the third Lady Herbert (afterwards Countess of Pembroke) was the Mary Sidney immortalized in Ben Jonson’s epitaph: u Underneath this marble hearse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother: Death, ere thou hast slaine another Wise, and fair, and good as she, Time shall throwe a darte at thee.”

It was to her that Sir Philip Sidney dedicated the “Arcadia” he had written in her house at Wilton. Her eldest son, William, “the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man in that age,” succeeded the Earl of Somerset as Chamberlain to James I.; and “having a great office at court, made the court itself better esteemed and more reverenced in the country. And as he had a great number of friends of the best men, so no man had ever the confidence to avow himself to be his enemy. He was a man very well bred, and of excellent parts, and a graceful speaker upon any subject, having a good proportion of learning, and a ready wit to apply it, and enlarge upon it: of a pleasant and facetious humour, and a disposition affable, generous, and magnificent.”—Lord Clarendon. His marriage with Lady Mary Talbot, daughter and coheir of Gilbert Earl of Shrewsbury, was “most unhappy, for he paid much too dear for his wife’s fortune by taking her person into the bargain,” and both his children died young. A book of his poems (addressed to Christiana, Countess of Devon­shire under another name) was published in 1660. He died in 1630 “of an apoplexy after a full and cheerful supper,” and the title passed to his brother Philip, who “by the comeliness of his person, his skill and indefatigable industry in hunting,” had become a favourite courtier of James I.’s, and been created Earl of Montgomery in 1605. Philip’s second wife was one of the most remarkable women of her day, the celebrated heiress, Anne Clifford, sole daughter of George third Earl of Cumberland, and at that time the young widow of the Earl of Dorset She brought him no children, and the present Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery—the thirteenth bearer of the title—descends from her husband’s first marriage with Lady Susan Vere. A grandson of the eighth Earl was created Baron Porchester of Highclere in Hampshire in 1780, and Earl of Carnarvon in 1793.

All the other titles of honour granted to the house of Herbert are extinct The only three legitimate lines descended from a brother of the first Earl of Pembroke (of Edward IV.’s creation) Sir Richard Herbert of Colebrooke in Monmouthshire, “that incomparable hero, who (in the history of Hall and Grafton as it appears) twice passed through a great army of Northern men with his pole-axe in his hand, and returned without any mortal hurt.” He had been sent with his brother and some Welsh levies against the Lancastrians under Sir John Conyers and “Robin of Riddesdale,” shared his defeat at Danesmoor, and was beheaded with him at Northampton. His son and namesake, Steward of the Marches of North and East Wales and Cardiganshire under Hen. VIII., was the father of Edward Herbert, who, having in early life spent most of his means at Court, “became a soldier, and made his fortune by his sword.” He bought a considerable estate, and built a house at Blackhall, It was afterwards burnt down. Montgomery Castle had been the original scat of the family. where he kept up such lavish hospitality, that “it was an ordinary saying in the county at that time, when they saw any fowl rise, ‘Fly where thou wilt, thou wilt light at Blackhall.’” This open-handed Welshman had four sons: 1. Richard, of whom came the Lords Herbert of Cherbury; 2. Matthew, ancestor of the Earls of Powis; 3. Charles, father of the Earl of Torrington, and 4. George, of New College, Oxford.

Richard, the eldest, could boast of two sons whose names were famous in their generation, and are unforgotten in our own—Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and George Herbert, the poet and divine. “George Herbert’s tender and poetic spirit started back from the bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his devotion in the outer associations that the piety of ages had grouped around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, and the awful mystery of sacraments.”—Green's History of the English People. Edward was a soldier, a scholar, and a courtier:—a brilliant cavalier, brave to a fault in the field, and keenly sensitive on the point of honor, yet withal a deep and original thinker, whose philosophical writings are in advance of his age. His biography is best told in his own words. He early went to reside in France; served under the Prince of Orange in 1610: then travelled in Italy; and in 1616 was sent as Ambassador to the Court of Louis XIII. He received his first peerage (an Irish one, for he had a “fair estate” in Ireland) for his diplomatic services from James I.; and “having approved himself likewise a most faithful servant to King Charles I. as well in Council as in Arms,” was created Lord Herbert of Cherbury in Shropshire in 1629. Yet, on the breaking out of the Civil War, he, in the first instance - though but for a short time - sided with the Parliament. He died in 1648. When not yet fifteen, he had married a kinswoman six or seven years his senior, the heiress of Sir William Herbert of St. Julian’s in Monmouthshire (enjoined by her father’s will to wed none but a Herbert,) by whom he left three children. His eldest son, an enthusiastic loyalist, who is computed to have raised in all two thousand eight hundred men at his own cost for the King’s service, succeeded as second Lord Herbert of Cherbury, but the title expired with the last of his two grandsons in 1691. It was twice revived by fresh creations; first, three years afterwards, in favour of his nephew, with whose only son it again came to an end in 1738: then, in 1743, it was granted to a grandson of Matthew, already mentioned (see above), Henry Herbert of Oakley Hall, who, having married Barbara, only daughter of Lord Edward Herbert, and niece and heiress of the last Marquess of Powis, further received the Earldom of Powis in 1748. But it seemed fated never to endure. His son died s. p. in 1801; and the husband of his daughter Henrietta, Edward Lord Clive, eventually obtained the Earldom, and took the name and arms of Herbert.

The title of Earl of Torrington had been granted in 1689 by William III. to Arthur Herbert, an officer in the navy, who, deprived of his commission by James II., had crossed over to Holland and joined him while still Prince of Orange. He went disguised in the garb of a common sailor, having undertaken the perilous task of conveying the treasonable paper that invited William to the throne. For this service he received the command of the fleet, and was placed at the head of the Admiralty. “But both as Admiral and First Lord he was utterly inefficient Month after month the fleet which should have been the terror of the seas lay in harbour while he was diverting himself in London. The sailors, punning upon his new title, gave him the name of Lord Tarry-in-town. When he came on shipboard he was accompanied by a bevy of courtesans. There was scarcely an hour of the day or night that he was not under the influence of claret. Being insatiable of pleasure, he necessarily became insatiable of wealth. Yet he loved flattery almost as much as either wealth or pleasure. He had long been in the habit of exacting the most abject homage from those who were under his command. His flag-ship was a little Versailles. He expected his captains to attend him to his cabin when he went to bed, and to assemble every morning at his levee. He even suffered them to dress him. One of them combed his flowing wig, another stood ready with his embroidered coat Under such a chief there could be no discipline.” - Macaulay. Yet, during the very next year, he took command of the united Dutch and English fleets, and disgraced our flag by retreating before the French under M. de Tourville, and abandoning to them the coast of the Isle of Wight Positive orders were dispatched to him to fight; Lord Devonshire—alone of all his colleagues—urged his instant dismissal. "It is my duty, Madam,” he said to the Queen, “to tell your Majesty exactly what I think on a matter of this importance; and I think that my Lord Torrington is not a man to be trusted with the fate of three kingdoms.” His words fell on unheeding ears. On the following day Torrington engaged the French off Beachy Head, placing the Dutch ships in the van, and leaving them to bear the brunt of an unequal contest for many successive hours, while he himself held aloof. They fought with great gallantry, but the result could only be a crushing defeat. Torrington was at once sent to the Tower, where he remained for six months. He was then tried by court-martial, and though acquitted, dismissed the service. He died in 1716.

He, again, left no posterity. But the lineage of the old Yorkist captain has not altogether passed away. Some descendants of the first Sir Richard are still to be met with in Ireland, the Herberts who own the beautiful domain of Muckross on the romantic shores of Killarney.

One other branch there was, derived from a younger son of the first Earl of Pembroke of the existing creation, Sir Edward Herbert of Poole-Castle (as it was then called) “the fair red castle on the hill” now known as Powis, which either he, or his father, had purchased from the Greys. His son William, Lord Powis, received a peerage from James I: and his successor in the second generation become Earl of Powis in 1674, and Marquess of Powis in 1687. James II. had no more faithful and devoted adherent. “He was,” says Macaulay, “generally regarded as the chief of the Roman Catholic aristocracy, and, according to Oates, was to have been prime minister if the Popish plot had succeeded.” He loyally followed the fallen fortunes of his master, and shared his exile at St. Germains, where he bore the titles - never recognized in his own country—of Marquess of Montgomery and Duke of Powis. One of his five daughters was the brave Lady Nithsdale that saved her husband’s life. - See Herries. He died outlawed, for refusing to make his submission to the new government; but his son was restored in blood, and to the dignities of Earl and Marquess of Powis. Both titles became extinct in 1748, for this son never married, and devised Powis Castle and the whole of his estate to the kinsman who had married his niece, and was created Earl of Powis (as already stated) in the course of the same year.

The title of Lord Herbert of Lea was borne by a statesman and politician of our own day, Sidney, second son of the eleventh Earl of Pembroke; but was merged in the higher title when his son succeeded to the Earldom in 1862.