General Notes

William, took surname Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, so created 8 Sep 1468, as also earlier 26 July 1461 Baron Herbert/Herberd by writ, KG (1461/2); knighted 1449, served Hundred Years War (captured by French 1450 at Formigny), Yorkist during War of the Roses, Sheriff of Glamorgan and Morgannoc and Constable of Usk Castle 1459, MP Herefs 1460-61, Chief Justice and Chamberlain of South Wales 1461, granted 3 Feb 1461/2 castle, town and lordship of Pembroke, with other castles, following surrender of Pembroke Castle to him by Lancastrians five months previously, Chief Justice of North Wales 1467; married c1455 Anne (living 1486), daughter of Sir Walter Devereux, and was beheaded 27 July 1469 following his capture at the Battle of Edgcot, near Banbury, Oxon, one or three days earlier; The 1st Earl of Pembroke of the 1468 creation also had two or more illegitimate sons; one of them, by Mawd, daughter of Adam (Turberville) ap William ap Howell Graunt.  [Burke's Peerage]

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When the Lancastrian insurrection [War of Roses] broke out in 1469, Edward IV commissioned the Sir William Herbert, Knight, Earl of Pembroke, and his brother, Sir Richard Herbert, Knight of Coldbrook, to command an army of 18,000 Welshmen against the rebels. In July of 1469, the army was defeated at the Battle of Edgecote. The Herberts were captured by Richard, earl of Warwick and beheaded the next day in Northamptonshire. They were buried in the priory chapel on July 27, 1469, beneath the arch which separates the Herbert Chapel & the choir in St. Mary's Priory Church.

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Copied from Herbert, George biography, 88.1911 encyclopedia.org/H/HERBERT_GEORGE.htm:
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His sons William and Richard both partisans of the White Rose, took the surname of Herbert in or before 1461. Playing a part in English affairs remote fron the Welsh Marches, their lack of a surname may well hav inconvenienced them, and their choice of the name Herbert can only be explained by the suggestion that their long pedigree from Herbert the Chamberlain, absurdly represented as a bastard son of Henry I, must already have been discovered for them.  Copies exist of an alleged commission issued by Edward IV to a committee of Welsh bards for the ascertaining of the true ancestry of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom "th chiefest men of skill in the province of South Wales declar to be the descendant of Herbert, a noble lord, natural son b King Henry the first", and it is recited that King Edward, after the creation of the earldom, commanded the Earl and Sir Richard his brother to "take their surnames after their first progenito Herbert fitz Roy and to forego the British order and Inanner".  But this commission, whose date anticipates by some years the true date of the creation of the earldom, is the work of one of the many genealogical forgers who flourished under the Tudors.

Sir William Herbert, called by the Welsh Gwilim Ddu or Black William, was a baron in 1461 and a Knight of the Garter in the following year. With many manors and castles on the Marches he had the castle, town and lordship of Pembroke, and after the attainder of Jasper Tudor in 1468 was created Earl of Pembroke. When in July 1469 he was taken by Sir John Conyers and the northern Lancastrians on Hedgecote, he was beheaded along with his brother Sir Richard Herbert of Coldbrook.

The second Earl while still a minor exchanged at the kingís desire in 1479 his Earldom of Pembroke for that of Huntingdon.  In 1484 this son of one whom Hall not unjustly describes as born "a mean gentleman" contracted to marry Katharine the daughter of King Richard III, but her death annulled the contract and the Earl married Mary, daughter of the Earl Rivers, by whom he had a daughter Elizabeth, whose descendants, the Somersets, lived in the Herbertís castle of Raglan until the cannon of the parliament broke it in ruins. With the second Earlís death in 1491 the first Herbert Earldom became extinct.  No claim being set up among the other descendants of the first Earl, it may be taken that their lines were illegitimate.  One of the chief difficulties which beset the genealogist of the Herberts lies in their Cambrian disregard of the marriage tie, bastards and legitimate issue growing up, it would seem, side by side in their patriarchal households.  Thus the ancestor of the present Earls of Pembroke and Carnarvon and of the Herbert who was created marquess of Powis was a natural son of the first Earl, one Richard Herbert, whom the restored inscription on his tomb at Abergavenny incorrectly describes as a knight. He was constable and porter of Abergavenny Castle, and his son William, "a mad fighting fellow" in his youth, married a sister of Catherine Parr and thus in 1543 became nearly allied to the king, who made him one of the executors of his will. The Earldom of Pembroke was revived for him in 1551. It is worthy of note thatíall traces of illegitimacy have long since been removed from the arms of the noble descendants of Richard Herbert.

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on the history of the Earldom of Huntingdon:

Eight years later William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, gave up his existing Earldom to the Crown and was made in compensation Earl of Huntingdon.  So even at this late date a peerage title could be treated as something which one could simply resign.  [Burke's Peerage, p. 1474]