Herbert, EDWARD, LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY, soldier, statesman, poet, and philosopher, was born of the ancient and noble House of Herbert, apparently on the 3d March 1583, at Eyton in Shropshire. He was sent to Oxford in his twelfth year, and before he had quite quitted his studies he married an heiress considerably older than himself. On the occasion of the coronation of James I. he was made a knight, and invested with various offices. He left home, accordingly, for France in 1608, and in Paris lived in terms of intimacy with the Constable Montmorency, Isaac Casaubon, and other distinguished men. After a brief return to his native country, he set out again in 1610 for the Low Countries, where he joined the arms of Maurice of Orange; and he again offered him his services in 1614. After a campaign, he travelled through Germany and Italy on horseback, and went as far as Venice, Florence, and Rome. On his way back he got into trouble through an attempt which he made to raise a troop of Protestant soldiers in Languedoc for the Duke of Savoy. Shortly after, he returned to England, and was made a member of the Privy-council; then sent to France, first as extraordinary ambassador, and then as ordinary ambassador. He tried, but without much success, the difficult task of negotiation between Louis XIII. and his Protestant subjects, was ultimately dismissed, and in spite of eager solicitation never received any further appointment. He was elevated first to be a peer of Ireland, and then in 1629 to be a peer of England, with the title of Baron Herbert of Cherbury. When the Civil War broke out he at first sided with the royalists, but ultimately surrendered his castle to the parliamentarians, with whom he afterwards lived on easy terms. He was commonly regarded as having saved his possessions at the expense of his honour. He died in London, 20th August 1648.
The work by which Herbert, the friend of Donne, Selden, Ben Jonson, Grotius, and Gassendi, was best known to his contemporaries is his De Veritate—an anti-empirical theory of knowledge, which in many respects anticipates the common-sense philosophy of the Scottish school, and is at times even Kantian. His De Religione Gentilium (1663) is a 'natural history of religion,' by means of which Herbert finds that all religions, amidst their extravagances or follies, recognise what were for him the five main articles of religion—that there is a supreme God, that he ought to be worshipped, that virtue and purity are the main part of that worship, that sins should be repented of, and that there are rewards and punishments in a future state. In virtue of this 'charter of the deists,' Herbert is not unjustly reckoned the first of the deistical writers. The Expeditio Buckinghami Ducis (1656) is a vindication of his patron's ill-fated expedition. The ill-proportioned Life and Reign of King Henry VIII. (1649) glorifies Henry overmuch, and is by no means accurate. His best-known work, the Autobiography, a brilliant picture of the man and of contemporary manners, may fairly be regarded as a masterpiece in its kind; but it is disfigured by overweening conceit and self-glory in his own personal beauty, noble blood, valour in Quixotic duels, favours from famous ladies, and generosity, and is not to be regarded as veracious. It comes down only to 1624. The Poems, Latin and English, which may be divided into sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, satires, miscellaneous lyrics, and occasional pieces, reveal in their author a representative of Donne's, or the 'metaphysical,' school; many, in the judgment of a recent editor, are of real and true poetry, in some respects resembling Browning, in some anticipating Tennyson. See Rémusat's monograph on Herbert (Paris, 1874); Churton Collins's edition of the Poems (1881); and Sidney L. Lee's edition of the Autobiography, with introduction and continuation (1886).