A Promising Youth

The Crown’s dependence upon the gentry to govern the provinces grew during the sixteenth century and education and family connections became the key routes to public service. Chapter 1 explores Herbert’s birth, upbringing, and educational background and their long-term impact upon his character, public career, and private life. It considers the ambitions of his parents for their first-born son and the role played by his mother and Newport grandmother in shaping the early development of his elite masculine values, commitment to the preservation of family honour, and Protestant beliefs and practice. It examines Herbert’s enthusiasm for study, his classical education under the supervision of private tutors, and his experience of university education and socialization in late-Tudor Oxford. It probes the repercussions of his father’s untimely death, the arrangements for his wardship, his acceptance at age fifteen of an ambitious but ultimately unhappy marriage to an older Herbert heiress, and the family’s relocation to London.