Henri IV was arranging a marriage to Marie de’ Medici, the Princess of Florence, while trying to recover a written promise to marry his mistress, Henriette d’Entragues. Henry Neville reported both matters to Robert Cecil in the same dispatch of 24 April 1600. The king had promised:
in writing under his hand unto Mademoiselle d’Entragues, to marry her if she proved with child within six months after he enjoyed her.1
D’Entragues wanted to keep the paper as proof that she had accepted the king as a promised husband. Neville explained that she retained it:
for the justification of her honour; that it might appear, she yielded not to him upon any base or dishonest consideration, but upon such a direct promise of marriage.1
A letter from Henri himself to d’Entragues survives in a manuscript copy, published in his collected correspondence. Dated 21 April 1600, it corroborates Neville’s report: Henri demands the return of his written promise of marriage and warns her against forcing him to recover it by other means. He also demands the return of a ring and requires an answer that night.2
A written condition connecting marriage and pregnancy also drives All’s Well That Ends Well. Bertram has married Helen at the French king’s command, then left her to serve in Florence. Helen reads the terms he has sent her (All’s Well That Ends Well, 3.2):
HELEN
Look on his letter, madam; here’s my passport.
[She reads.] When thou canst get the ring upon
my finger, which never shall come off, and show me
a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then
call me husband. But in such a “then” I write a
“never.”3
Henri’s promise offered marriage; Bertram’s letter tries to escape a marriage already contracted. Both men put a condition concerning offspring in writing. Bertram intends his conditions to be impossible. Helen treats them as instructions she can fulfil.
From a spoken answer to a letter
The play’s story comes from the Giletta tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, also available in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. The King of France, the cure, the reluctant marriage, the journey to Florence, the ring, the pregnancy and the substitution of the wife for the desired woman are already there.4
In both tales, Giletta sends two knights to her husband. He gives them his answer, and they return to report it. Shakespeare keeps the two messengers but gives them a letter to carry. The conditions now exist in the husband’s own writing, ready to be brought back to confront him.34
He also changes the setting of the resolution. Where the source tales end at the count’s feast, All’s Well That Ends Well makes the dispute public before the King of France: in 5.3, the king questions Bertram and Diana, orders arrests, hears conflicting accounts of the rings, and witnesses Helen’s production of the letter.45
Helen’s arrival brings the written conditions into that examination. The final scene makes the paper visible alongside the ring (All’s Well That Ends Well, 5.3):
HELEN
O, my good lord, when I was like this maid,
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring,
And, look you, here’s your letter. [She takes out a
paper.] This it says:
When from my finger you can get this ring
And are by me with child, etc. This is done.
Will you be mine now you are doubly won?5
There is a further change. In both source tales, Giletta presents her born sons. Helen instead produces evidence of pregnancy: her final reading changes “show me a child” to “are by me with child.” That wording comes closer to Neville’s report of Henri’s promise, “if she proved with child.” The full royal promise also required the birth of a son; Neville’s summary, like Helen’s final claim, centres on pregnancy.145
Henri recovered his paper: Neville reports that d’Entragues surrendered it in exchange for financial provision.1 Bertram’s paper travels the other way. Written to keep his wife away, it comes back before the king in her hand. The inherited story has become a contest over a man’s written undertaking—the kind of dispute Neville had reported from the French court.
Marseilles and the journey to Lyons
The marriage arrangements also explain another detail in Neville’s April dispatch: Marie de’ Medici was expected to travel from Italy through Marseilles on her way to join Henri. Shakespeare adds Marseilles to the story too. In All’s Well 4.4, Helen learns that the King of France is there and sets out to find him. Neither Boccaccio nor Painter names the city. It is a new location in Shakespeare’s play and a place Neville had reported in connection with the French royal marriage.67
Neville’s June dispatch describes a different royal journey. Henri was heading towards Lyons because the Duke of Savoy refused to surrender the disputed Marquisate of Saluzzo or provide territory in exchange. The king was preparing for a possible war and had ordered troops to be raised. Neville wrote on 25 June 1600 that “he determined to set forward on his journey thitherwards in post.”8
The same dispatch returns to the marriage question. Henri had left d’Entragues reluctantly, and Neville reported doubts about whether he would proceed with the Florentine marriage. Marie had offered to come to him at Lyons. The journey arose from the Savoy dispute; the competing claims of mistress and prospective bride followed the king south.8
Shakespeare uses the same directional word when two gentlemen report Bertram’s departure for military service in Florence (All’s Well That Ends Well, 3.2):
SECOND GENTLEMAN
Madam, he’s gone to serve the Duke of Florence.
We met him thitherward, for thence we came,
And, after some dispatch in hand at court,
Thither we bend again.3
All’s Well supplies the only occurrence of this word before 1616 in the 527-play corpus searched, although it was well established in other kinds of writing.8 The correspondence is in the language of the journeys: Bertram is going to Florence, while Henri is going to Lyons.
Neville’s access to Boccaccio
Neville had access to Boccaccio’s original Italian collection. On the reverse of Italian newsletter material from 1591, he wrote “Alibech Alibech & Rustico”—the lovers in the tale immediately after Giletta’s in the Decameron. His family’s 1780 library catalogue also records a 1555 Venetian edition, still surviving at Audley End with Sir Thomas Hoby’s signature.9
The play’s departures from the source story also seem to align with Neville’s experience as ambassador. The husband’s spoken conditions become a written letter, the wife produces it before the king, and pregnancy becomes the stated fulfilment of its terms. These changes bring the story closer to the dispute Neville reported at the French court: a woman holding a man to his written promise of marriage, conditional on her becoming pregnant.
Notes and sources
Henry Neville to Robert Cecil, Paris, 24 April 1600, in Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, ed. Edmund Sawyer, vol. I (London, 1725), p.176. Printed report. Winwood quotations have modernized spelling and capitalization. The complete paragraph continues through the surrender of the writing, pensions and payment, and resumed meetings. Neville closes by calling these “petty matters” a response to the postscript of Cecil’s letter. The fuller promise is printed in Jules Berger de Xivrey, ed., Recueil des lettres missives de Henri IV, V (Paris, 1850), p.226, editorial note: printed text. The six-month limit applies to becoming pregnant; the promise also requires the birth of a son.↩︎
Henri IV to Mademoiselle d’Entragues, Fontainebleau, 21 April 1600, in Jules Berger de Xivrey, ed., Recueil des lettres missives de Henri IV, vol. V (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1850), p.224. The complete letter is paraphrased from the printed page. Its date follows the French calendar (11 April in the English calendar). The edition identifies its witness as a copy in the Bibliothèque nationale, Fonds Du Puy, MS407, f.36r; the reference is reproduced as given in that edition. The ring corroborates the circumstances of the royal dispute; the play’s ring is already in its narrative sources.↩︎
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, 3.2, Folger Shakespeare Library text. The play quotation preserves Folger’s lineation. Bold type marks the corresponding document, pregnancy and marital claim; this is a structural comparison, not a claim of identical phrasing.↩︎
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, III.9, particularly paragraphs 30–31 and 58–60, Brown University, Decameron Web, Italian text; William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, first tome (1566), novel 38, “Giletta of Narbonne,” in the edition reproduced by Project Gutenberg, pp.171–179 of that edition.↩︎
Shakespeare, All’s Well, 5.3, Folger text, Helen’s return and production of the letter. Bertram’s following reply remains conditional upon a clear explanation.↩︎
Same dispatch, heading and preceding news, p.175. Neville reports uncertainty over the Princess of Florence’s arrival, the intended passage through Marseilles and her dowry. This is the context of his d’Entragues report; the play’s French and Florentine locations are also inherited from its narrative sources.↩︎
Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, 4.4. Marseilles is absent from the complete Giletta tales in Boccaccio III.9 and Painter novel 38. The play’s king and Neville’s prospective royal bride make different journeys.↩︎
Henry Neville to Robert Cecil, Boulogne, 25 June 1600, The National Archives, SP 78/44, f.194, transcription by John O’Donnell; spelling modernized. The opening links the journey to the Duke of Savoy’s refusal to surrender the marquisate or offer an exchange, and reports orders to raise troops. Later in the same letter Neville discusses d’Entragues and the Princess of Florence’s offer to join the king at Lyons. Compare Henri IV’s letters of 1 and 2 July 1600, Recueil des lettres missives, V, p.245, concerning his impending arrival at Lyons and the duke’s failure to fulfil his undertaking. In a search conducted on 29 September 2026, the three matching play records contain the actual word “thitherward,” not merely a lemma: All’s Well That Ends Well (assigned date 1603), Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio and Brome’s The Queen and Concubine (both assigned 1635). The dates are those assigned in the 527-play index. In the public EarlyPrint search, original-spelling CQL
[word="(?i)thitherwards?"]returned 1,553 hits in 896 document records across the full collection; all hits were retrieved. Filtering the returned metadata to unambiguous four-digit publication years before 1600 gives 202 hits in 92 records. These are document/edition counts, not independent authors. Lemma and standardized-spelling searches also retrieve older forms such as “thyderwarde” and “thetherward”; the result is not created by lemmatization. For contemporary examples of the word in travel writing, see Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1599), TCP A02495. The dramatic distribution should not be mistaken for rarity throughout English print.↩︎The National Archives, PRO 30/50/70/2, reverse of Italian newsletter material, 1591; published manuscript images. The paired names refer to Boccaccio, Decameron, III.10; they document familiarity with that tale, rather than an annotation of III.9. Billingbear library catalogue, 1780, Boccaccio entry, Venice, Valgrisi, 1555; catalogue images and discussion. Dunstan Roberts, “Books Owned by Sir Thomas Hoby (1530–1566)”, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 17, no. 1 (2020), pp.53–66, especially pp.53, 55–56; Audley End inventory 81035044. Roberts identifies Hoby’s signature and traces the 1555 edition through the Billingbear catalogue of 1780 and the Audley End catalogues of 1834 and 1877. He considers the route through Billingbear probable; the date of transfer into the Neville family’s library is not established.↩︎