The Audley End copy of Justus Lipsius’s 1574 edition of Tacitus contains hundreds of annotations by Henry Neville and Henry Savile.1 We cannot be sure when they were written. As Chapter 2 shows, Savile appears to have clarified and supplemented Neville’s imperial genealogy on the rear end page, suggesting some work during their studies together.
Four surviving documents trace Neville’s use of Tacitus through his political career: an embassy dispatch, his confession after the Essex rebellion, a letter after his release, and his Advice to King James on Parliament. The table gives the Latin and translation before the passages are examined in context.
| Document | Neville’s Latin and translation | Source and application |
|---|---|---|
| Letter to Robert Cecil during the French embassy, 24 September 1599 | beneficia eo usque laeta sunt dum videntur exolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur (Benefits are welcome so long as they seem repayable; when they far exceed repayment, hatred is returned instead of gratitude)2 |
Annals 4.18: Tiberius’s resentment of Silius’s services explains the danger in Henri IV’s debt to Elizabeth.3 |
| Confession after the Essex rebellion, 2 March 1601 | non laudantur nisi peracta (They are not praised unless carried through). Neville adds that the action “would be interpreted by the success.”4 |
Histories 1.38: Otho’s encouragement to complete a coup becomes Neville’s explanation of its danger. |
| Letter to Ralph Winwood after Neville’s release, 11 March 1606 | an hos satias ceperit cum omnia acceperint, an illos cum omnia tribuerint? (Has weariness overtaken those who have received everything, or those who have given everything?)5 |
Annals 3.30: Neville reverses the order and applies the question to Dunbar’s possible withdrawal. |
| Advice on Parliament (acknowledged 14 May 1614) | seu bene, seu male facta premunt (Whether done well or badly, actions weigh against him)6 |
Histories 1.7: the hated ruler’s predicament explains James’s need to restore trust. |
When gratitude turns to hatred
Writing to Robert Cecil from Paris on 24 September 1599, during his French embassy, Neville invoked Tacitus to explain the danger in Henri IV’s debt to Elizabeth:
Besides your Honor remembreth the saying of Tacitus, beneficia eo usque laeta sunt dum videntur exolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur (benefits are welcome so long as they seem repayable; when they far exceed repayment, hatred is returned instead of gratitude).2
English aid might leave the French king feeling burdened by an obligation rather than bound by thanks.
Tacitus’s example was Gaius Silius, whose claim that his troops had preserved Tiberius’s throne made his services intolerable to the emperor. Neville applied that account of a ruler’s resentment towards a servant to the relationship between Henri IV and Elizabeth.3
The same danger appears in Titus Andronicus. Titus helps secure the imperial throne for Saturninus, who soon resents the obligation.
Paulina Kewes describes Saturninus’s accession as a “botched election” that “ushers in an ugly spell of imperial tyranny.”7 When Bassianus carries off Lavinia, Saturninus turns on Titus:
SATURNINUS
[…] Full well, Andronicus,
Agree these deeds with that proud brag of thine
That said’st I begged the empire at thy hands.
— Titus Andronicus, 1.1
Later, he interprets Titus’s support as an attempt to control him:
SATURNINUS
Sly, frantic wretch, that holp’st to make me great
In hope thyself should govern Rome and me.
— Titus Andronicus, 4.48
Silius claimed to have preserved Tiberius’s throne; Titus helped Saturninus obtain his. Silius’s claim provokes Tiberius’s resentment; Saturninus treats Titus’s service as a boast and a bid for control. In both, the ruler resents owing his power to another man.
A coup judged by its outcome
In his confession after the Essex rising, Neville recalled his response to the proposed armed entry into the court:
that this was an action of the nature of those which, as Tacitus saith, non laudantur nisi peracta (they are not praised unless carried through), and would be interpreted by the success;4
The source is Otho’s speech to the troops in Histories 1.38:
nullus cunctationis locus est in eo consilio quod non potest laudari nisi peractum (There is no room for hesitation in an undertaking which cannot be praised unless carried through)4
Neville’s wording is shorter and plural, referring to a class of actions rather than a single undertaking. His English gloss makes the dependence on success explicit. Otho presents the danger as a reason to finish the coup without delay; Neville uses the same thought to expose the risk of the proposed enterprise.
Who has had enough?
On 11 March 1606, Neville wrote to Winwood about the Earl of Dunbar’s possible retirement. Dunbar had gone to Scotland:
and hath already put away some of his officers, and intends to put away the rest, as it is thought with a purpose to retire wholly, an hos satias ceperit cum omnia acceperint, an illos cum omnia tribuerint? (has weariness overtaken those who have received everything, or those who have given everything?)5
Neville adapts Annals 3.30, where Tacitus considers why favour seldom lasts:
an satias capit aut illos cum omnia tribuerunt aut hos cum iam nihil reliquum est quod cupiant (whether weariness overtakes either those who have given everything, or those who have nothing left to desire)5
Neville asks first about those receiving favours, then those giving them—the reverse of Tacitus’s order. He also replaces “nothing left to desire” with “received everything.” Richard Grenewey’s 1598 English translation retains Tacitus’s order and longer wording.
When every action is ill taken
Near the close of his Advice on Parliament, Neville explained why restoring goodwill mattered before seeking further financial support:
whereas otherwise whiles dislikes continue seu bene, seu male facta premunt (whether done well or badly, actions weigh against him).6
The phrase comes from the early printed text of Histories 1.7. Tacitus’s preceding words, et inviso semel principe (and once a ruler is hated), supply its setting.
The tag concludes an argument about James’s reputation and his relations with Parliament. Any new proposal would be judged against earlier grievances.
Macbeth and Henry V
Macbeth’s assassination soliloquy turns on the hope that killing Duncan might settle everything. The maxim Neville quoted in his confession makes approval depend on completion, while his English gloss turns on success. Chapter 31 places the passages together and reproduces Neville’s handwritten words.4
In Henry V, the king’s disguised night visit among his soldiers follows the sequence George R. Price identified in Tacitus’s account of Germanicus: concealing his rank, moving through the camp at night and hearing himself praised. Chapter 22 develops that comparison.9
The father and son in 3 Henry VI
In Henry Savile’s 1591 translation of Tacitus’s Histories (3.25), a soldier discovers that the enemy he has mortally wounded is his father. In 3 Henry VI, the same sequence unfolds: the killing, the search for valuables, recognition and the grieving appeal for pardon. The table quotes the 1623 First Folio.10
| Sequence | Tacitus, translated by Savile (1591) | 3 Henry VI, 2.5: First Folio (1623) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. He fatally wounds the man he is fighting. | “having wounded him deadly” | “This man whom hand to hand I slew in fight” |
| 2. He searches the body for valuables. | “going about to rifle him” | “May be possessed with some store of crowns, And I that (haply) take them from him now” |
| 3. He discovers that the man is his father. | “came into knowledge of him” | “Who’s this? Oh God! It is my father’s face” |
| 4. He weeps and asks his father’s forgiveness. | “with tears and lamentable voice he besought his father’s ghost, not to impute this impiety unto him, nor abhor and detest him as a parricide” | “And pardon, father, for I knew not thee. My tears shall wipe away these bloody marks” |
The central sequence already appears in The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, the 1595 octavo. The Folio includes two further points of contact with Tacitus: the son’s tears and his father’s having been pressed into service by his master, the Earl of Warwick. David Womersley identifies the accumulation of circumstances as the important connection. The general horror of fathers and sons killing one another was familiar; recognition while searching the body, followed by grief and an appeal for forgiveness, gives this comparison its particular force.11
Notes and sources
For the Audley End copy of the 1574 edition and photographs of its annotations, see Ken Feinstein, “The Audley End Tacitus and Henry Neville”, and the discussion in Chapter 2. Robert Sidney’s annotated Tacitus at the British Library (C.142.e.13) is a copy of Lipsius’s later, 1585 edition, published after his continental travels with Neville and Savile. His ownership inscription is dated 20 January 1585/6. See Joel Davis, “Robert Sidney’s Marginal Comments on Tacitus and the English Campaigns in the Low Countries,” Sidney Journal 24.1 (2006), pp. 1–19, at p. 1, for the edition, inscription and successive layers of annotation; CELM’s Robert Sidney bibliography lists the study.↩︎
Henry Neville to Robert Cecil, Paris, 24 September 1599 O.S., in Memorials of Affairs of State, edited by Edmund Sawyer (London, 1725), I, 106–108, especially 108. The letter explicitly names Tacitus and quotes Annals 4.18 in Latin. Neville’s wording is retained in the block quotations; English spelling and capitalization are lightly modernized. Latin typography is normalized, including accents and long s. Parenthetical English translations accompanying the Latin are supplied here; they are not Neville’s words.↩︎
Tacitus, Annals 4.18, English translation, LacusCurtius. Sejanus instigates the attack on Silius, but the maxim concerns Tiberius’s reaction to Silius’s claims of indispensable service.↩︎
Neville’s autograph confession, 2 March 1601, The National Archives, SP 12/279, document beginning at fol. 15, manuscript record; also printed in Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1601–1603 (London, 1870), 5–8, vol. CCLXXIX, no. 11, especially p. 7. Tacitus, Histories 1.38: quod non potest laudari nisi peractum. The quoted clause begins “that this was” in Neville’s declaration; its wording is retained, with spelling modernized. His plural wording and English gloss are distinct from Tacitus’s sentence. Chapter 31 reproduces the autograph witness. The Latin text of Otho’s sentence is also available in Histories 1.38.↩︎
Neville to Ralph Winwood, 11 March 1605/6, Sawyer, Memorials, II, 198; Tacitus, Annals 3.30, Latin. Sawyer prints an hoc satias ceperit cum omnia acceperint, an illos cum omnia tribuerint? The manuscript reads hos, as printed in the table: Northamptonshire Archives, Montagu volume 37, second page of the letter. Sawyer’s hoc is a discrepancy in the printed text, not the manuscript reading. The letter is dated 11 March 1605 Old Style (1605/6). The chapter gives the year as 1606, beginning the year on 1 January; the Julian day and month are not converted to the Gregorian calendar. Richard Grenewey, The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus (London, 1598), Annals 3.30, p. 73, digitized edition.↩︎
Neville, Advice Touching the Holding of a Parliament, in S. R. Gardiner, History of England, II (London, 1863), Appendix V, 389–394, especially 394. Tacitus, Histories 1.7, early printed Latin wording. Facta premunt occurs across the early printed tradition and does not identify a particular Lipsius edition. The passage establishes use of the Latin tag, not ownership of a surviving volume. For the acknowledgment in the Commons on 14 May 1614, see Clayton Roberts and Owen Duncan, “The Parliamentary Undertaking of 1614,” English Historical Review 93, no. 368 (1978), pp. 481–498, at p. 493, article. For the early printed context, see C. Cornelii Taciti libri (Lyon, 1551), scan, image 540.↩︎
Paulina Kewes, “‘I Ask Your Voices and Your Suffrages’: The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” The Review of Politics 78.4 (2016), 551–570, doi:10.1017/S0034670516000589; quotation checked in the accepted manuscript, p. 19. Kewes analyses the play’s succession politics; the comparison with Silius in Annals 4.18 and Neville’s quotation of that passage is made here, not by Kewes.↩︎
Titus Andronicus, 1.1 and 4.4, Folger Shakespeare Library. Both passages are present in the 1594 quarto: Internet Shakespeare Editions, 1.1 and 4.4. Neville’s letter documents his use of the Tacitus passage in 1599; it does not date his first reading of it.↩︎
George R. Price, “Henry V and Germanicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12.1 (1961), pp. 57–60; Tacitus, Annals 2.13, Grenewey (1598), p. 36; Womersley, p. 472 n. 7, on the prior dramatic convention. Shakespeare, Henry V, 4.1. The parallel concerns the disguised night visit; broader military similarities are not added as separate evidence.↩︎
Tacitus, Histories 3.25, in Henry Savile, The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba (Oxford, 1591), p. 129, EEBO–TCP A13331. “Rifle” means plunder or search for valuables. Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, 2.5, First Folio (1623), p. 156, TLN 1193–1195, 1198, 1207–1208, Internet Shakespeare Editions. The table presents selected excerpts, with spelling and light punctuation modernized; verse line breaks are retained within cells. The earlier 1595 octavo, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, QLN 995–1005, already contains the killing, search for money, recognition and pardon. The son’s tears and the father’s explicit conscription by Warwick occur in the Folio passage, not in the octavo. Savile’s father is “called to serve” in the legion; the Folio’s is “prest by his Master” (TLN 1203).↩︎
David J. Womersley, “3 Henry VI: Shakespeare, Tacitus, and Parricide,” Notes and Queries 32.4 (1985), pp. 468–473, especially pp. 470–472. Womersley distinguishes a detailed circumstantial connection from verbal borrowing. His proposed dating consequence depends on accepting Savile as the route and is not adopted here. For a broader discussion of Tacitus’s influence on Shakespeare’s historical method, see Sonia Massai, “The artfulness of historical playwriting in Richard III: Shakespeare and English Tacitism,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 114.1 (2024), pp. 72–85.↩︎