The century or so before the Civil War, the era of the Tudors and early Stuarts, did not think well of itself. Contemporaries lamented the decline of social responsibility in the nobility and gentry, the erosion of honour and virtue, the spread of enclosures, the parasitism and arrivisme of wealth, and the emptiness and falsity of its display. The picture has often been endorsed in later generations, from both the traditionalist Right and the anti-aristocratic Left, but Adam Nicolson has an altogether happier image of the period. There flourished, he tells us, a ‘communal wisdom’, ‘in which principles of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded’. Its ‘heart’ or ‘heartland’ — favourite words of his — is to be found where the centre of his book lies: at Wilton House, the Wiltshire home of the Earls of Pembroke that was built and rebuilt during the period, and in the lovely array of downs and valleys and farms of the neighbouring Pembroke estates.
I fear that Nicolson, in studying a ‘dream of perfection’, has done some imagining of his own. Other favourite words are ‘organic’ and ‘organism’. He celebrates the ‘organic unity’ and ‘organic integrity’ of a society ‘alive with a sense of jointness, of a joint enterprise between the different connected parts of the social organism’. Admittedly the ideal often collided with realities of suffering or cruelty or injustice. By the Civil War, in any case, the ‘mechanisms’ of the ‘organism’ were not being ‘properly oiled’, and ‘the mutuality had gone’. But the price England paid is evident in the 18th century, when great estates had ‘lost’ their social ‘soul’. The countryside was turned into mere décor and was dressed in ‘a Savile Row suit’.
I don’t know where he gets all this from. There is much to savour in his keenly felt and delicately phrased descriptions of landscape and agricultural activity, of Wilton House, of members of the Pembroke family and of their portraits, and much in them for the visitor to that part of the world to learn and observe. But his historical framework is a muddle. The most insistent terms of the book are ‘Arcadia’ and ‘Arcadian’, which, as he deploys them, align a vision of stress-free social coordination with a yearning for perfection of landscape. Arcadia was a rugged mountainous region of the Peloponnese to which Theocritus and Virgil had given a pastoral literary identity, and which the Renaissance imagination made into a place of beauty. Nicolson’s prompt is the composition at Wilton around 1580 of some — we don’t know how much — of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, the brother-in-law of the second Earl of Pembroke, a moment that made Wilton the ‘headquarters’ of Arcadianism. But the claim that Sidney’s account of the Arcadian countryside ‘is a description of 16th- century Wiltshire’ is shaky, and anyway the landscape is almost the only commendable thing about his Arcadia, a fraught and disintegrating society. Sidney was not alone in giving pastoral poetry, which the Renaissance made a choice instrument of social and political criticism, an Arcadian setting. Milton did it in his masque Arcades. But Arcadia figures far less prominently in Renaissance discussions of politics or society than you might guess from Nicolson’s language.
His definitions of Arcadianism are so loose and so various that he can find it anywhere. What he calls ‘ambiguities’ in the term produce confusion or contradiction. ‘Arcadian balm’ offered escape from politics, but Arcadianism was also ‘the dream of power’. Protestantism is claimed to have gone ‘hand in hand’ with Arcadianism, but also to have repudiated it. Arcadianism was the enemy of absolute monarchy and courtly corruption, so that in the civil war the parliament fought for Arcadianism, the king against it. But there was also a ‘crown-dominated’ Arcadianism, and Charles I, who loved Wilton, adopted a prayer from Sidney’s story before his execution.
Inevitably Hamlet was ‘an Arcadian’, longing as he did for release from strife, and the soliloquy being ‘an Arcadian form’. Shakespeare’s sonnets are set in ‘a polite Arcadia’. The story, which comes from the Victorian author of the Eton Boating Song, that Shakespeare was once at Wilton for a performance of As You Like It draws Nicolson into the long queue of excited hunters of topicality in Shakespeare, and into the postures of strained ingenuity familiar from that pursuit. He ‘explains the play’ by presenting the Wilton performance, with the third earl himself perhaps playing Orlando in a text rewritten for the occasion, as a coded and successful bid to dissuade James I from having Sir Walter Raleigh executed in 1603. Like most biographical hypotheses about Shakespeare, of whose life we know so little, Nicolson’s has the solitary advantage that it can’t be disproved.
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