George Herbert, Earl of Pembroke

LC name authority rec.nr98035007

LC Heading: Pembroke, George Herbert, Earl of, 1850-1895

Biography:

Herbert, George Robert Charles, thirteenth earl of Pembroke and tenth earl of Montgomery (1850–1895), travel writer, the eldest son of Sidney Herbert, first Baron Herbert of Lea, and Elizabeth Herbert, daughter of Lieutenant-General Charles Ashe À Court Repington, was born in Carlton Gardens, London, on 6 July 1850, and succeeded his father as second Baron Herbert of Lea on 2 August 1861, and his uncle as earl of Pembroke and Montgomery on 25 April 1862. He was educated at Eton College, but because of poor health spent much time in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Egypt, and Palestine. He made two voyages to the south Pacific before the age of twenty-one, accompanied by Dr George Henry Kingsley. The second voyage ended in shipwreck and the loss of their yacht on a coral reef in the Ringgold Islands, Fiji, all on board making their escape to an uninhabited, uncharted island. After ten days the weather improved, the party set sail in three of the yacht's boats, and, while endeavouring to make the Nanuku passage, south of the Ringgold Islands, were picked up by a Swedish schooner. The voyages were described in Lord Pembroke and Dr Kingsley's South Sea Bubbles, by the Earl and the Doctor (1872).

Lord Pembroke married, at Westminster Abbey, on 19 August 1874, Lady Gertrude Frances Talbot (d. 1906), the third daughter of Henry John Chetwynd Talbot, eighteenth earl of Shrewsbury. In 1874 Disraeli appointed him under-secretary for war (his father had earlier been war secretary), but ill health led him to resign his post in 1875. He never accepted office again, and rarely spoke in the House of Lords, although he was still interested in public affairs. He took an active part in the volunteer movement and commanded the South Wilts battalion until within a few months of his death. He built and endowed the Pembroke Technical School near Dublin, where children learned industrial crafts. He died childless at Bad Neuheim, Hesse, on 3 May 1895 and was buried at his seat, Wilton House, near Salisbury. He was succeeded by his brother Sidney Herbert.

H. E. Maxwell, rev. Elizabeth Baigent

H. E. Maxwell, ‘Herbert, George Robert Charles, thirteenth earl of Pembroke and tenth earl of Montgomery (1850–1895)’, rev. Elizabeth Baigent, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/13027, accessed 16 Nov 2015]