Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2019
Summary
TO THE RIGHT NOBLE YOUNG LORD, WILLIAM, LORD HARBERT OF CARDIFFE
Most Noble young Lord, and of honourable expectation, although your yong yeares have scarse arrived yet to the bearing of Armes, neverthelesse on the assured hope conceived of your honourable partes, as so nobly each way descended, (whose vertue hath alwayes shined to the glorie of your name and house) I have emboldened my selfe to offer unto your Lordships view and protection, these Militarie discourses, penned upon occasion of conference had with sundry Gentlemen, and by them wished to be published. Many good reasons have moved me to dedicate them unto your Lordship, as well in respect of your owne vertues (resembling altogether that Noble Earle of Pembroke, your Graundfather, and that worthie Sir Phillip Sidney, your Uncle) as also in respect of the great and waightie Commandes which your Right Honourable father doth worthily hold over us in these our Westerne parts and Wales, under our dread Soveraigne. Such as they are, I humbly beseech your Lordship to accept, as from a souldier, who humbly offereth himselfe and his service unto your self, next unto my good Queene and deare Countrie.
Your lordships humbly at command
ROBERT BARRETIt is with the dedication above – and another addressed to William Herbert's father Henry, second earl of Pembroke – that the Elizabethan soldier and author Robert Barret opened his 1598 treatise The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres. Barret invites his dedicatee to contemplate a particular way of viewing himself and assures him on the appropriateness of doing so, given Herbert's noble family and status. Although the eighteen-year-old Herbert had ‘scarse arrived yet to the bearing of Armes’, Barret responds to the great potential his dedicatee had evidently shown through his interest in military affairs, and to what is described to Herbert's father as ‘the Martial vertues already shining in him’. The dedication speaks too to expectations predicated by Herbert's social rank, and assumes a natural, inexorable connection between nobility and military identity. The association between Barret's military subject-matter and his dedicatee is further suggested by an intuitively perceived resemblance between the promise shown in Herbert and the martial reputation of his family.
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- Early Modern Military Identities, 1560–1639Reality and Representation, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019