Tacitus in Neville’s Hands

In September 1599 Neville warned Robert Cecil that England should not count too confidently on Henri IV’s gratitude. Invoking “the saying of Tacitus,” he explained that a benefit can become a source of hostility when repayment seems impossible. English aid might leave the French king feeling burdened by an obligation rather than bound by thanks.¹

Neville used Roman history to explain this diplomatic problem, and he expected Cecil to recognize the Latin.

Tacitus’s immediate example was Gaius Silius, whose claim that his troops had preserved Tiberius’s throne made his services intolerable to the emperor. Neville transferred that psychology from a ruler’s resentment of a servant to relations between monarchies.²

This was one of four documented occasions, over more than a decade, on which Neville used Tacitus to explain political conduct. The other three concern a threatened coup, a favourite’s withdrawal and a king’s loss of public goodwill.

The English summaries below paraphrase his application except where quotation marks are used; where given, the Latin tags retain his wording. The fuller readings and source distinctions follow.

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. Such actions, he said, were of the kind that Tacitus described as non laudantur nisi peracta: they were not praised until accomplished, and “would be interpreted by the success.”³

The source is Otho’s speech to the troops in Histories 1.38. Otho presents the dangerous nature of the undertaking as a reason to finish it without delay. Neville uses the same thought to expose the risk. An action whose justification depends upon success places its participants at the mercy of the outcome.

That conjunction of deed, completion and success matters to the opening of Macbeth’s assassination soliloquy. Chapter 31 places the passages together and reproduces Neville’s autograph confession. Here the point is his handling of Tacitus: he shortens the Latin, changes a singular undertaking into a class of actions and adds an English explanation.

Who has had enough?

On 11 March 1605/6, Neville reported to Winwood that the Earl of Dunbar had gone to Scotland and might retire altogether. His question shifts into Latin: had those who received everything grown weary, or those who gave everything?⁴

The sentence adapts Annals 3.30, where Tacitus considers why favour seldom lasts. Neville puts the recipients first, reverses Tacitus’s order, and balances receiving everything against giving everything. The thought belongs to Tacitus; its compact arrangement serves Neville’s report of the court.

Grenewey’s English translation keeps the givers first and the longer description of recipients with nothing left to desire. Neville’s Latin reshaping therefore deserves attention in its own right. He was doing more than inserting a translated commonplace.

When every action is ill taken

Near the close of his Advice on Parliament, Neville returns to the difficulty of governing after trust has failed: seu bene seu male facta premunt. In the early printed text of Histories 1.7, the sense is that a disliked ruler’s actions count against him whether done well or badly.⁵

The tag concludes an argument about James’s reputation and his relations with Parliament. A new proposal would be judged through the memory of earlier grievances. Neville uses Tacitus to explain why the king must repair that relationship rather than rely on the merits of another scheme for raising money.

Across these documents, Neville repeatedly turns ancient history into an account of living people. He selects a situation in Tacitus, changes its application, and uses it to explain a motive or predicament: a king burdened by benefits, conspirators dependent upon success, a favourite whose welcome may have worn out, a ruler unable to recover trust. This is an observable practice of composition, beyond the possession or reading of classical books. Shakespeare’s transformation of historical sources can be considered alongside Neville’s own transformations.

Tacitus behind Shakespeare’s historical plays

Tacitus describes a soldier who kills an enemy and begins to strip the body, only to discover his own father. He embraces the corpse, weeps, asks forgiveness and blames the civil war. In 3 Henry VI, the son approaches his victim hoping to find money:

SON
…
This man, whom hand to hand I slew in fight,
May be possessed with some store of crowns,
And I, that haply take them from him now,
May yet ere night yield both my life and them
To some man else, as this dead man doth me.
Who’s this? O God! It is my father’s face,
Whom in this conflict I unwares have killed.
…⁶

The discovery during the search for valuables gives the comparison its force. In a 1985 article, David Womersley, now Oxford’s Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, also identifies accidental encounter, service on opposing sides, tears, appeals for forgiveness and blame directed at civil war. He distinguishes this sequence from the familiar general image of fathers and sons fighting one another. There is no close verbal borrowing, but the accumulated circumstances make Tacitus a substantial source proposal.⁷

The English version appeared in Henry Savile’s 1591 translation. Savile had been Neville’s tutor and continental companion, and their friendship continued long afterwards. Neville’s repeated use of Tacitus thus sits beside a particularly close connection to its English translator. Richard Grenewey’s Annals followed in 1598, widening English access to the historian.⁸

George R. Price proposed a further source connection in a 1961 article. In Annals 2.13, Germanicus conceals his rank and listens to his soldiers on the eve of battle, hearing himself praised. Henry’s borrowed cloak and unrecognized visit to the camp in Henry V follow the same sequence: Pistol first praises him; the later encounter with Bates and Williams turns reassurance into an argument about kingship. Disguised rulers already appeared on stage, but the fuller sequence gives Price’s comparison its force. Chapter 22 examines it in detail.⁹

Neville’s four uses provide the firmer part of the case. They show him applying the historian to diplomacy, conspiracy, patronage and Parliament, sometimes quoting, sometimes reshaping. The plays’ source questions meet a documented reader whose relationship with Tacitus extended into the practical business of his life.