Neville’s Surviving Prose

The collection of Neville’s surviving prose used in this book contains roughly 137,000 words. Most of the letters come from his French embassy and the years of his imprisonment. The embassy dispatches, chiefly addressed to Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, were written for an official audience that included the Queen. From the Tower, Neville wrote to Cecil seeking clemency and release. Three other documents survive alongside the letters: his Case and confession, explaining his involvement in the Essex rising, and his later Advice to James I about calling a Parliament.

These texts preserve only a very small part of a lifetime’s correspondence. The collection contains no letters dated before 1590, and many later years are represented by none or only a handful. The table makes the imbalance clear: the embassy years of 1599 and 1600 alone account for more than half the letter records.¹,²

Zero means no record in this collection, not that Neville wrote no letters that year.

The recipients show a similar concentration. Robert Cecil accounts for 106 records; Ralph Winwood, Neville’s secretary in France, for twenty-nine; and Thomas Windebank, a clerk of the signet who handled royal correspondence, for eight. Together they account for about 85 per cent of the collection’s letter records. Most concern state business, political affairs or the management of Neville’s estate. They give us a much fuller picture of his public and practical writing than of his private life.

What each witness preserves

Some letters survive in Neville’s own hand, others in copies or letters written by a secretary and signed by him. A major printed source is Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, edited by Edmund Sawyer and published in London in three volumes in 1725. It brings together diplomatic correspondence and state papers drawn chiefly from Sir Ralph Winwood’s papers, supplemented by those of other officials. The collection includes letters by Neville, Cecil and other correspondents, not simply letters written by Winwood.¹

Most of the letters printed in Sawyer’s edition also survive in manuscript. John O’Donnell’s transcriptions provide the principal body of manuscript transcriptions used here.

These sources preserve different kinds of evidence. Sawyer supplies the text of many letters, but his eighteenth-century spelling and punctuation cannot establish Neville’s own practice. Manuscripts and transcriptions that retain their original forms are needed for spelling comparisons; handwriting claims require the manuscript image. Quotations in this book are generally modernized for readability while preserving the words and their meaning.

Neville assessing his sources

In Paris, Neville undertook historical research for the English lawyer Dr Julius Caesar. On 7 June [1599], he explained how he had approached Caesar’s question about the French Catholic League:

I have … not spared both to search the story which particularly doth set down the proceedings of the League, and to consult with those who now remain in Paris, whom I hold not to be ignorant in a cause of that quality, in their own commonwealth.

The written history supplied dates for Marseille’s revolt and return to obedience, but Neville was dissatisfied: “that which I find doth not satisfy me.” He intended to ask Villeroy, the French secretary of state, for fuller information when he next wrote or went to court.³

The Case, confession and Advice

The letters are accompanied by three documents that widen the view of Neville’s prose.

His Case, printed by Sawyer from a paper the editor described as entirely in Neville’s own hand, reconstructs his involvement in the events surrounding the Essex rising. It explains his intentions, meetings and decisions under the pressure of accusation. The separate declaration of 2 March 1601, usually called his confession, survives in the original manuscript in Neville’s hand.⁴

Neville’s Advice turns from personal defence to political counsel. It considers the king’s financial difficulties and the conditions under which Parliament might offer relief. Here the writer weighs courses of action and their consequences for the relationship between king and subjects. Gardiner’s printed edition provides a public text for comparison; the surviving manuscript copies require their own collation. Neville acknowledged writing the paper in the Commons on 14 May 1614. For the Advice, this book follows Gardiner’s edition and the manuscript witnesses rather than the corpus transcription. Authorship and the readings of particular copies are separate questions.⁵

Checking the text beneath the count

Searches use a consistent text so spelling variation does not hide a phrase. Where an identified source supplies a different original form, the collection preserves it separately. Spelling comparisons must use the appropriate source forms.¹

From surviving prose to comparison

The collection permits tests of a word in dated correspondence, a recurring sequence of argument, or language across recipients. Each can be rerun without the Case, confession and Advice, or with the printed and manuscript-transcribed groups examined separately.

A result dominated by Cecil dispatches requires a different explanation from one found across private letters, diplomatic reporting and political counsel.

Chapter 12 compares Neville’s language in context with that of other diplomats and dramatists; Chapter 13 examines diplomatic vocabulary around the embassy years; Chapter 14 compares recurring two-word sequences across the plays. Each explains which texts it includes and how they are counted.