The Parentage Tradition

Appendix B

A seventeenth-century account makes Henry Neville the grandson of Henry VIII. It comes from the family of Sir Thomas Overbury, the courtier who supported Neville’s bid to become secretary of state. Thomas’s father, Sir Nicholas Overbury, was a Middle Temple lawyer and MP for Gloucester. Nicholas Oldisworth, who recorded Sir Nicholas Overbury’s recollections in 1637, was Sir Nicholas’s grandson through his daughter Muriel and therefore Thomas’s nephew. The transmission is thus from the courtier’s father to the courtier’s nephew.¹

Thomas’s importance to Neville was political. As Jackie Watson explains in Epistolary Courtiership and Dramatic Letters (2024), he was the intimate adviser of James I’s favourite, Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, later Earl of Somerset. Neville and Ralph Winwood relied on Thomas to promote their claims through Carr. This is the background to Sir Nicholas’s recollection, which first praises the ambassador and recalls the secretaryship campaign, then turns to Neville’s father:

Sir Henry Neville was a wonderful wise man, whom Sir Thomas Overbury would fain have made the King’s Secretary, and once brought him to be sworn; but Somerset interrupted him, as not loving him for being against the Countess. He was son to that Henry Neville who was bastard to King Henry VIII.¹

The two Henry Nevilles must be distinguished. The prospective secretary was the ambassador, who died in 1615. The man alleged to have been Henry VIII’s son was his father, who died in 1593. Oldisworth’s compilation survives as British Library Add MS 15476; the passage quoted here is the printed transcription published in The Herald and Genealogist in 1874.

“Somerset” in this retrospective account is Carr; “the Countess” is Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, whom Carr married in 1613. Thomas opposed the marriage. He died in the Tower in September 1613, a death that led to the poisoning scandal discussed in Chapter 48, where Dudley Digges’s deposition records his conversations with Neville about Overbury and Carr. Sir Nicholas Overbury’s account therefore came from a family closely involved in the political struggle around Neville, though its parentage claim remained a recollection recorded more than twenty years after the ambassador’s death.¹

Another version appears in an anecdote published by Lord Braybrooke in 1850 from a volume of Berkshire pedigrees. Elizabeth calls the elder Neville “Brother Henry”; he protests that the court will consequently think him a bastard. The lost identification of Braybrooke’s source prevents a firm date being attached to that telling of the story.²

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Braybrooke printed this anecdote alongside the masque episode discussed in Chapter 38. The two passages concern different generations: the elder Henry Neville in the Elizabeth story and his father, Sir Edward Neville, at the masque. The lost pedigree reference leaves the anecdote’s date and transmission uncertain; the printed note establishes its publication in 1850, rather than verifying the reported conversation.

Thomas himself supplies the contemporary comparison of Neville with Henry VIII. After his imprisonment in the Tower in April 1613, he continued to write secretly to Carr. In Letter 41 of Watson’s edition he instructs him:

Call Neville hereafter Similis and because he is like Hen 8;

The same letter assigns James I the name Julius and Pembroke Niger, alongside precautions about seals and messengers. Similis was a name for use in clandestine political correspondence, and Thomas expressly explains it by Neville’s likeness to Henry VIII. The letter is undated; Watson places it soon after the arrest, probably in late April or very early May 1613. It describes resemblance, not a father–son relationship.³

The masque account offers a straightforward explanation for the ambassador’s reported resemblance without requiring a royal-paternity story. As Chapter 38 shows, Holinshed describes Sir Edward Neville, the ambassador’s grandfather in the recorded family pedigree, as resembling Henry VIII so closely that Wolsey mistook him for the king. A resemblance already attributed to his grandfather could therefore have continued through the Neville family. The ambassador’s likeness to Henry VIII need not imply descent from the king.

The biography records the father’s documented royal connections: Henry VIII was his godfather, granted him an annuity in 1539, left him £100 and included him among the witnesses to his will. The family pedigree identifies his father as Sir Edward Neville, executed in 1538. Royal favour and a later parentage story are separate pieces of evidence. The sources establish the existence of the tradition; they do not settle its biological truth.