Pulled by the cloak
In August 1599, Neville reported a violent encounter at the French court. The Prince de Joinville and Monsieur le Grand had accompanied Henri IV to his lodging. The rest of the party had already entered le Grand’s coach when Joinville stopped him:
Joinville pulled le Grand by the cloak, and required to speak with him, who thereupon drawing himself aside from the company […] 1
The private word became an accusation. Joinville believed that le Grand had turned the king against him with a report about his attentions to Mademoiselle d’Entragues. He drew his sword and wounded the unarmed man. Neville sent the account to Robert Cecil from Paris on 7 August.
In Julius Caesar, a tug at a cloak likewise draws a man out of a departing company to speak. After Caesar leaves the stage, Casca turns to Brutus:
CASCA You pulled me by the cloak. Would you speak
with me?
— Julius Caesar, 1.22
Casca then tells Brutus and Cassius about Antony’s offer of a crown to Caesar. In both passages, the man who pulls the cloak seeks the conversation. Neville reports Joinville’s demand; Shakespeare gives the question to the man who has been stopped. The same sequence of gesture and speech appears in the diplomatic narrative and the dramatic dialogue. The combination is more distinctive than the act of pulling a cloak alone.
A search of EarlyPrint texts published before 1650 for the linked wording—pull, by the cloak, speak with, allowing intervening words—returned one text: the 1623 First Folio.3 Neville’s dispatch also falls close to the play’s earliest recorded performance. Thomas Platter saw a Julius Caesar in London in September 1599, generally identified as Shakespeare’s play at the newly built Globe. The letter precedes that performance by about five weeks.4
Neville’s use of both English and French Plutarch in his Advice to James is examined in Chapter 9, “Counsel, Ambition and the Last Years.” His engagement with the work provides a further connection with the principal narrative source of Julius Caesar.
Dudith and the death of princes
On the morning of Caesar’s murder, Calphurnia begs him to stay at home. He answers that the predictions concern everyone:
CAESAR
[…]
Yet Caesar shall go forth, for these predictions
Are to the world in general as to Caesar.
— Julius Caesar, 2.25
Calphurnia insists on the distinction between ordinary people and rulers:
CALPHURNIA
When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of
princes.
— Julius Caesar, 2.25
Andreas Dudith, the humanist whom Neville knew during his travels with his tutor Henry Savile, had challenged that distinction. In his 1579 treatise on the significance of comets, he asked:
Quaeso cur Reges magis eripiat cometa, quam de plebe quemvis?
Tell me, why should a comet carry off kings rather than anyone from the common people?6
Dudith presses the question through the physical likeness of royal and ordinary bodies. Are kings made from different elements? Do they breathe different air, or have a different sun and stars? Earlier in the treatise he discusses the comet associated with Julius Caesar’s death, quoting Virgil as evidence brought forward by others. Caesar’s death and the supposed celestial privilege of rulers thus belong to the very argument he is examining.6
North reports a comet seen after Caesar’s death. Shakespeare places the discussion before the murder and makes it a dispute about whether princes receive special celestial warnings.7 Caesar resists the claim that the predictions single him out; Calphurnia asserts that the heavens distinguish princes from beggars. Dudith’s question about a comet carrying off kings concerns its supposed power to cause death, while Calphurnia speaks of its power to announce it. Both turn on whether the heavens treat rulers differently from everyone else.
Neville’s connection with Dudith was personal and scholarly. In a letter to Hájek of 1 February 1581, printed in Hájek’s book on comets that year, Dudith praised the learning and character of Neville and Robert Sidney. On 7 August he wrote directly to Neville about books Neville had left with him and work requested from Savile on ancient mathematics and Copernicus.89 The exchange places Neville within the scholarly circle of a writer who had made the question underlying Caesar and Calphurnia’s disagreement explicit.
The oath and the limits of conspiracy
Before the murder, Cassius asks the conspirators to bind themselves by oath. Brutus refuses:
CASSIUS
And let us swear our resolution.BRUTUS
No, not an oath. If not the face of men,
The sufferance of our souls, the time’s abuse–
If these be motives weak, break off betimes,
And every man hence to his idle bed.
[…]
What need we any spur but our own cause
To prick us to redress? What other bond
Than secret Romans that have spoke the word
And will not palter? And what other oath
Than honesty to honesty engaged
That this shall be or we will fall for it?
— Julius Caesar, 2.110
North already says that the conspirators took no oaths. As John D. Cox observes, Shakespeare makes that shared practice into a disagreement between Cassius and Brutus.11 Brutus’s refusal becomes an assertion of character: their cause and their honour should bind them more securely than any vow. Later in the same meeting, he insists that Antony be spared. North supplies that decision too; Shakespeare brings the questions of trust and restraint together in the conspirators’ deliberations.
Neville confronted both questions when the Essex circle discussed armed intervention at Elizabeth’s court. In his declaration of 2 March 1601, he recalled telling Henry Cuffe:
I could not nor would not give any approbation to any such enterprise, unless the undertakers did all take a solemn oath not to attempt anything against the Queen’s person or her estate, as they had done in the enterprise of Amboise, a precedent whereof was to be seen in the story.12
The plan involved seizing the court gate and guard chamber to gain access to Elizabeth. Neville demanded a limit on what its participants could do once they had entered. For that safeguard he turned to French history. In the enterprise of Amboise in 1560, the confederates swore to protect the king while proceeding against the Guises. An English account published in 1598 describes both the oath and an undertaking to warn the king if the enterprise turned against his person.13
Neville’s declaration belongs to 1601, after the play’s recorded performance. It shows him using a historical precedent to address the practical problem Shakespeare had staged: how men entering a conspiracy could bind one another and set limits to their violence. Brutus trusts “honesty to honesty engaged.” Neville makes an oath limiting the enterprise the condition of his approval.
Notes and sources
Henry Neville to Robert Cecil, Paris, 7 August 1599 O.S., in Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, ed. Edmund Sawyer, vol. I (London, 1725), heading p. 84, passage p. 86. Heading; passage and complete altercation. Spelling and capitalization are modernized; the excerpt ends before the accusation.↩︎
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2, Folger Shakespeare Library text. Folger’s line break after “speak” is preserved; bold type marks the wording being compared.↩︎
EarlyPrint, public Library text search, checked 9 September 2026. The lemma query allowed zero to three tokens between pull and by the cloak, and zero to eight between cloak and speak with. Restricting the results by publication year to before 1650 gives one hit in one text, the 1623 First Folio, TCP A11954, Julius Caesar 1.2. The only other result was the same passage in a 1684 edition, outside this date range. This is a corpus- and query-bounded result; transcription and tagging errors can suppress matches. Winwood’s 1725 volume is outside the date range.↩︎
Thomas Platter’s account, German transcription and English translation reproduced by the New Variorum Julius Caesar project, citing Gustav Binz, “Londoner Theater und Schauspiele im Jahr 1599,” Anglia 22 (1899), p. 458, and Ernest Schanzer’s translation. The entry gives 21 September in New Style; the equivalent English date is 11 September. John D. Cox, Julius Caesar: Introduction, paragraphs 3–5, explains the identification with Shakespeare’s play. It is a performance record, not a composition date or proof of the first performance.↩︎
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2.2, Folger Shakespeare Library text. Folger’s line break before “princes” is preserved. Bold type marks the conceptual comparison. Caesar challenges the distinction that Calphurnia asserts; Dudith’s question challenges it too.↩︎
Andreas Dudith, De cometarum significatione commentariolus (Basel, 1579), p. 46, the question about kings and common people and the ensuing comparison of their bodies; p. 19, sig. C2r, the discussion of Julius Caesar and the verses from Virgil, Georgics 1.487–488. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, bsb10198859. Latin spelling and typography normalized; English translation supplied here. Dudith introduces the Caesar example as evidence adduced by others, not as his own endorsement.↩︎
Plutarch, “Julius Caesar,” in Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1579), concluding account of the signs following Caesar’s death, TCP A09802. North places the bright comet after the death and describes its appearance on seven nights.↩︎
Dudith to Tadeáš Hájek, Breslau, 1 February 1581, printed in the preliminaries to Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hayck, Apodixis physica et mathematica de cometis (Görlitz: Ambrosius Fritsch, 1581), closing greeting, digitized volume. Also Andreas Dudithius, Epistulae, Pars VII: 1581–1589, ed. Nicolaus Szymański and Ida Radziejowska, commentary Lechus Szczucki and Nicolaus Szymański (Budapest: Reciti, 2019), no. 1040, pp. 37–39, greeting on p. 39. The letter separately praises Savile’s learning; its closing greeting calls Sidney and Neville young men distinguished in learning and character (“doctrina ac moribus praestantes”).↩︎
Dudith to Henry Neville, Breslau, 7 August 1581, in Dudithius, Epistulae, VII, no. 1072, pp. 87–88. The opening answers Neville’s letter; p. 88 contains the requests concerning Savile, Copernicus and Neville’s books. The edition records an autograph draft at Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Depot Breslau, R 253, no. 19, f. 10r; the dispatched letter is unknown. The books are not identified. Breslau is Dudith’s dateline.↩︎
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2.1, Folger text, Cassius’s proposal and excerpts from Brutus’s reply; line breaks preserved.↩︎
Plutarch, “Marcus Brutus,” trans. Thomas North, in Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. W. W. Skeat (London: Macmillan, 1875), p. 114, printed page. This is Skeat’s edited North witness. The 1579 TCP A09802 text, encoded p. 1060, transcribes “othes” twice as “others,” obscuring the oath passage in word searches: TCP text. The no-oath fact is already available in North’s translation of Plutarch; it is not Shakespeare’s independent invention. Compare Cox, Introduction, paragraph 25, on Shakespeare’s dramatization of the disagreement.↩︎
Henry Neville’s declaration, 2 March 1601, The National Archives, SP 12/279, fol. 15. Transcription by John O’Donnell; spelling, capitalization and punctuation modernized. Neville writes “solemne oath” and “a president whereof was to be seene in the storie.” For a supplementary calendar account, see Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1601–1603 (London, 1870), pp. 5–8, especially p. 7 and p. 8.↩︎
Jean de Serres, An Historical Collection, of the Most Memorable Accidents, and Tragicall Massacres of France (London: Thomas Creede, 1598), pp. 63–64, the Nantes assembly and “The solemne protestation of the confederates,” TCP A01160, public text. The account is paraphrased here. It establishes that the Amboise oath was available in English before the play; Neville does not name this book as the history he used.↩︎