Richard II and the Neville Family

Richard II: making an ancestor a hero

Holinshed gives John of Gaunt a brief death notice; Richard II gives him a deathbed scene in which he speaks for England and confronts the king. Gaunt was Henry Neville’s direct ancestor: his daughter Joan Beaufort married Ralph Neville, first Earl of Westmorland, and their son Edward began the Abergavenny line from which Henry Neville descended. Shakespeare makes Neville’s ancestor the dying counsellor whose warning the king refuses to hear.¹

Holinshed’s notice names the house in Holborn where Gaunt died and records his burial beside Blanche at St Paul’s. The chronicle subsequently describes Richard’s exactions and the complaint that the kingdom had been set to farm. The play gives that indictment to Gaunt while he is still alive, turning historical commentary into the ancestor’s prophetic judgment.²

Gaunt’s importance extends beyond one celebrated speech. Despite dying early, he has the fourth-largest speaking part in the play; up to his final speech, he supplies about a quarter of its dialogue. Shakespeare gives this ancestor extraordinary room to speak.³

In Richard II, 2.1, the play first tells its audience why Gaunt’s words deserve to survive him:

GAUNT
O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony.
[…]
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past.⁴

Dying gives Gaunt’s counsel urgency and the freedom to confront his king. His prophetic England speech follows:

GAUNT […]
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
[…]⁴

The repeated “This” accumulates England’s glories while withholding the sentence’s decisive verb. When that verb finally arrives, all the magnificence becomes the subject of a humiliating transaction:

GAUNT […]
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out–I die pronouncing it–
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.⁴

England’s glories collapse into leased property; its protecting sea encloses shame. Richard has already proposed farming the realm. Gaunt turns that policy into national humiliation.⁵

When Richard arrives, Gaunt confronts him directly. The sick man diagnoses the healthy king as the one whose deathbed is the whole country. Richard threatens him; Gaunt refuses to retreat. The king’s cruelty confirms the old man’s judgment. After Gaunt’s death, Richard seizes his property, and York protests the destruction of lawful inheritance. The play thus follows the patriotic speech with an act that proves its accusation.⁴

Already a father, counsellor and grieving brother, Gaunt becomes England’s moral voice at his death. As with Westmoreland in Henry V, Shakespeare enlarges the role of Neville’s ancestor and gives him words that define the play.

John of Gaunt, the Neville branches, and Shakespeare

John of Gaunt (1340–1399)
Duke of Lancaster — Richard II
            │ daughter
Joan Beaufort (c.1379–1440) ── married ── Ralph Neville (c.1364–1425)
                           │           1st Earl of Westmorland — Henry V
              ┌────────────┴──────────────┐
              ↓                          ↓
Edward Neville (d. 1476)       Richard Neville (1400–1460)
Lord Abergavenny               Earl of Salisbury — 2 Henry VI
              │                          │
              ↓                          ↓
George Neville (d. 1492)       Richard Neville (1428–1471)
Lord Abergavenny               Earl of Warwick, “the Kingmaker”
              │               2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI
              ↓
Sir Edward Neville (d. 1538)
              │
              ↓
Sir Henry Neville (d. 1593)
Of Billingbear
              │
              ↓
Sir Henry Neville (c.1563–1615)
Ambassador to France

Arrows show parent to child; the marriage line joins Joan and Ralph. Edward and Salisbury were brothers; Warwick was Edward’s nephew. Henry Neville descends through Edward: Salisbury and Warwick belong to the collateral branch. Gaunt and Ralph are direct ancestors. c. means approximately; d. means died.¹

Gaunt’s transformation belongs beside the changes to Westmoreland’s role in Henry V (Chapter 22): in both plays, Shakespeare gives Neville’s ancestors a larger part in the nation’s history.

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The family in Henry VI

The Neville family references are already present in the 1594 quarto of 2 Henry VI, published as The First Part of the Contention. Warwick declares, “The Nevilles are thy subjects to command” (2 Henry VI, 2.2); Suffolk invokes “the Nevilles’ noble race” while attacking Warwick’s parentage (2 Henry VI, 3.2); and Warwick swears by “old Neville’s crest” (2 Henry VI, 5.1). All three appear in that early printing as well as in the 1623 Folio.¹

Richard II before the Essex rising

On 7 February 1601, the day before the Essex rising, a specially requested play about Richard II was performed at the Globe. Augustine Phillips, one of the players, later testified that the company had objected because the play was old and unlikely to draw a paying audience. The men who requested it offered an additional forty shillings. Sir Gelly Meyrick’s examination independently records the outing to the Globe and a play involving the killing of Richard II. Together, the examinations document the performance conventionally identified with Shakespeare’s Richard II.⁶

Later that year, Elizabeth reportedly made the comparison herself. On 4 August 1601, while examining a catalogue of the Tower records with the antiquary William Lambarde, she reportedly declared:

I am Richard II, know you not that?

Lambarde answered by referring to Essex’s ingratitude. Elizabeth continued:

He that will forget God will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was forty times played in open streets and houses.⁷

In his 2013 article, Jason Scott-Warren strengthens the authenticity of this exchange through a manuscript copy sent in 1627 by Lambarde’s son-in-law Thomas Godfrey to Sir Edward Dering. The remark has an early documentary history: it is not merely an anecdote first appearing in eighteenth-century print.⁷

For Neville, this political crisis was personal: Southampton and Danvers had outlined the plan to seize the court to him at Drury House on 2 February. The play about a king’s deposition was revived five days later for men in that same circle. The history that honoured his ancestry had become entangled with the crisis that brought him to the Tower (Chapter 6).

The “Parliament Sceane”: 1608

In 1608, during Neville’s return to political prominence, a new title page for Richard II advertised “new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard.” The fourth quarto was the first printed edition to include Richard’s public surrender of the crown. Its advertisement made Parliament itself a selling point.⁸

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The first quarto appeared in 1597, followed by two editions in 1598. All three omit the extended passage in which Richard enters Parliament and relinquishes his crown. They do not omit the whole parliamentary scene: the surrounding action, including Carlisle’s protest against judging the king, was already present. What readers gained in 1608 was the confrontation with Richard himself. The First Folio of 1623 would print a fuller, differently transmitted version of that passage.⁹

The distinction matters because “new additions” does not establish when the passage was written. It may preserve material withheld from the earlier printings, or a later revision. Censorship is a substantial scholarly explanation, not a documented instruction surviving from the censor. The publication date is secure; the composition history remains disputed.⁸¹⁰

What makes the passage especially relevant here is the Commons’ role. Richard is pressed to read accusations against his government so that his removal will seem justified. When Bolingbroke tells Northumberland to stop, Northumberland answers:

NORTHUMBERLAND
The commons will not then be satisfied.¹¹

Bolingbroke has obtained the crown, but the demand for public justification persists. Cyndia Susan Clegg argues that the passage’s political sensitivity lay particularly in its representation of parliamentary authority. Her comparison with Holinshed shows how Shakespeare compresses separate proceedings and brings the Commons’ demands into the action of Richard’s surrender. In the 1608 text, Northumberland’s request for the commons’ suit and the command to fetch Richard form one speech; the Folio assigns the command to Bolingbroke. In Clegg’s reading, the quarto’s allocation of these lines makes the Commons’ initiative especially prominent. Clegg relates this treatment to Elizabethan controversy over Parliament’s power to determine the succession.¹⁰

Parliament did not sit in 1608; the publication falls between the sessions of 1606–07 and 1610, during an important phase of Neville’s political recovery. Elected for Berkshire in 1604, he received twenty-six committee appointments that session and forty-two in 1606. In the Union debates of 1606–07, the Commons drew on his diplomatic knowledge of France and Scotland. By 1608 his return to public business was well established, and his parliamentary connections were strengthening: his daughter Elizabeth married Sir Henry Berkeley, brother of the MP Sir Maurice Berkeley, who also became a trustee of Neville’s estates. When Parliament met again in 1610, Salisbury treated Neville as one of the Commons figures whose cooperation was needed to negotiate over royal revenue and impositions.¹²

Thus the “Parliament Sceane” reached print during the years in which Neville was developing the parliamentary influence that would define his later career. The connection is more than the shared word Parliament. The play asks how power acquires lawful authority, what a ruler owes the realm, and whose consent can make a political settlement hold. Neville’s work increasingly required him to negotiate those relationships between king and Commons. Gaunt’s ignored counsel, the crisis of 1601, and the parliamentary passage advertised in 1608 give this family history a continuing political relevance.