Back in Public Life

Freedom without restoration

Neville left the Tower in April 1603, but freedom did not restore his former place at court. He returned to Parliament for Berkshire in 1604 and resumed local office. Central employment remained out of reach. Writing to Ralph Winwood on 16 February 1604, he explained why he would not remain at court simply to seek advancement:

But withal I think it may satisfy any man’s conscience, that he shuns not service imposed; and I hold no man bound to seek employments. Those of honour I know are too high for me; and if I did not know it, yet others do. To the same I have had, or meaner in that kind, I know you would not advise me: yet those I have not refused. To live in court, where non proficere is deficere, without any office, business or regard, were the next degree to idleness: what remains for me to do then, but which I do? That is, to attend the care of my private state and family, wherewith I only stand charged, and to leave the care of public affairs, unto those to whom they are committed.¹

At court, non proficere was deficere: not to advance was to fall back. The phrase recalls an older Christian maxim about spiritual progress; Neville used it to describe the humiliations of seeking preferment.² His withdrawal also had an immediate domestic cause. Earlier in the same letter he described leaving Shellingford for his other house, only for a servant to die of plague and two more to fall sick. He had been forced to disperse his household and avoid company, especially the court.¹

Disgrace had not silenced his literary friends. Their printed praise offered a public account of his worth alongside the story of his fall. In 1603 George Carleton’s Heroici characteres and John Davies of Hereford’s Microcosmos appeared at Oxford, both praising Neville. Davies called him “discreet”; Carleton, who had served as vicar of Mayfield, addressed him in the opening poem. Chapters 46–47 examine these tributes; Chapter 46 also discusses Neville’s request to move Carleton’s verses away from the opening.³⁴

Neville continued to share scholarly responsibilities with Savile. John Chamber’s will of July 1604 named them executors and instructed them to print whatever remained unpublished of six works on astrology, the sphere, cosmography, geography and music. It also asked them to publish George Carleton’s Arraignment of Astrology alongside Chamber’s work on the same subject.⁵ Oxford created Neville Master of Arts on 30 August 1605.⁶

Parliament and the Union

Neville’s absence from central office did not prevent substantial public work. He received twenty-six committee appointments in the Commons in 1604 and forty-two in the January–May 1606 session. His business included religion, trade, wardship, purveyance and the proposed Union of England and Scotland.⁷

The Union required more than a shared monarch. On 1 November 1604, writing from bed at the Star Chamber with gout, Neville asked Winwood how the provinces of the Low Countries had joined under a common ruler. What bound their assemblies together? What customs did Netherlanders pay in Spain, and Spaniards in the Netherlands? He wanted precedents the English commissioners could use.⁸

By 8 December he could report the agreed articles. Hostile and special border laws were to disappear; trade and naturalization required more careful distinctions. Those born before James’s accession were to be excluded from certain political and judicial privileges even after naturalization. Neville identified eligibility for Parliament and Crown office as the most contentious issue. The negotiations touched the interests of powerful people as well as ordinary questions of customs, shipping and trade.⁹

Copies of the agreement were forbidden until Parliament met, so he sent Winwood its substance in a “short and imperfect kind.”¹⁰ The exchange shows him gathering comparative evidence and explaining a difficult settlement.

“My husbandry in the country”

On 21 June 1605, after discussing policy toward Catholic recusants, Neville again announced his retreat:

But I am out of my proper orb when I enter into state matters; I will therefore leave these considerations to those to whom they appertain, and think of my husbandry in the country, which puts me often in mind of that beatitude which Horace so much commends.¹¹

Horace’s Beatus ille offered an image of the man happy on his ancestral fields, away from the forum and the doors of the powerful. Neville immediately asked Winwood to keep sending news.

By 1604 he was again a Berkshire justice of the peace and keeper of the county’s records. His duties also included Sonning’s stewardship and responsibilities in Windsor Forest.⁷

On 30 October 1605, Neville and Sir Francis Knollys reported from Reading on their inspection of Berkshire’s trained bands, both horse and foot. They found deficiencies in men and equipment, especially a shortage of armour. Since the last inspection, men had died or moved away, and others’ circumstances had changed. They allowed one month to make good the deficiencies, but explained that they could not certify the results until the men assembled again. Unless the Council ordered otherwise, that would have to wait until the days grew longer.¹²

A quarrel between a widow and her son at Twyford shows the work at a human scale. In October 1606 William Wollascott reported the widow’s dissatisfaction with Neville’s order settling their affairs. The widow remained liable under a mill lease and needed security that her son would maintain the mills. In January 1607 Wollascott pressed her case again, stressing her weakness and want and asking Neville to weigh it in the “balance of justice and equity.” The letters leave the outcome unresolved.¹³¹⁴

Neville could be equally determined in defending his own rights. In July 1609 Richard Staverton complained about a deer killed by a keeper named Beard. Neville was willing to believe Beard dishonest: the man had stolen from him too. But he challenged Staverton’s seizure of the keeper’s bow and his authority to try an offence on land Neville claimed as his free chase. He proposed dealing with Beard in his own court, demanded evidence against his other keeper, and still offered a reasonable settlement with his neighbour.¹⁵¹⁶

His children

Neville’s son followed him into continental education. A September 1607 licence permitted father and son to travel with William Symondson, a fellow of Merton.¹⁷ In a letter from Paris assigned to November 1608, the tutor, signing himself William Simondes, reported on the younger man’s spending and conduct. Paris offered “many dangerous provocations” and “much corrupt company.” He asked Neville to keep “many eyes upon him” and to support the tutor’s control of expenditure. They lodged near the English ambassador, whose advice he hoped would reinforce the father’s commands.¹⁸

On Good Friday 1609, shortly after returning to England and receiving a knighthood, the younger Henry was violently arrested in London. A French merchant, Peter Gaundon, accused him of piracy off the Irish coast the previous year. Henry demonstrated that he had been in Saumur when the pirates struck and was released on £1,000 bail. When Gaundon failed to pursue his Admiralty suit, he was imprisoned in the Fleet; Henry then brought proceedings against him in Star Chamber. The merchant claimed he could not afford counsel and refused to answer the complaint.¹⁹

The dispute continued beyond the arrest. In August Francis Bacon reported to Salisbury that a Frenchman had failed to attend as instructed and that Sir Henry Neville had sent a solicitor to pursue the cause. This appears to concern the same case. The accusation had drawn the younger Neville into a prolonged effort to defend his name, just as he was beginning married life.²⁰

Neville’s daughter Elizabeth had married Henry Berkeley in 1608. Henry’s brother Sir Maurice Berkeley was also one of Neville’s estate trustees.²¹

Land and overseas ventures

In 1608 Sir Julius Caesar, Chancellor of the Exchequer, entrusted Neville with negotiations over Sonning’s Crown tenancies, judging that “no man is fitter than you.” Neville used the survey but exercised his own judgment of values.²²²³ That December Robert Wright told him that the manor might be sold and that he might secure first refusal; Neville’s draft reply offered his service as the king’s steward. He later heard that Sonning was to remain among the king’s best lands.²⁴²⁵

The woods also connected his landed interests with overseas trade. In August 1609 Sir Thomas Smythe thanked him for delivering one hundred loads of timber to the East India Company and asked for another hundred to finish its ships. The Company had mislaid the agreement, but accepted that Neville had fulfilled it. Smythe thanked both Neville and Anne for their hospitality.²⁶

Neville’s involvement in Virginia was more formal. Named to the enlarged royal council for the colonies in March 1607, he appeared in the Second Charter of May 1609 among the adventurers and on the Company’s council resident in England. Southampton, Pembroke, Dudley Digges and Christopher Brooke served on the same body. Its responsibilities included appointing colonial officers and directing government.²⁷²⁸

This placed Neville within an organization that generated and received information about Virginia, a connection important to the later discussion of The Tempest. It does not establish that any particular account reached his hands.

Answering the king

Neville’s county responsibilities continued to meet parliamentary business. In 1610 he served on committees concerning game and hawking, and in July joined Sir Maurice Berkeley in proposing that all members should be allowed to attend the committee considering the king’s paper on defects in the commonwealth.²⁹

The year’s negotiations had centred on the Great Contract: a proposed permanent annual payment to the Crown in return for surrendering revenues and rights including wardship and purveyance. By the autumn the bargain was breaking down.³⁰

That November, James summoned thirty members to Whitehall and asked whether they thought him short of money. Francis Bacon began answering in a manner that displeased him. The king turned to Neville and ordered him to answer according to his conscience. Neville agreed that James was in want. Did his subjects have a duty to relieve him? Neville answered:

Where your Majesty’s expense groweth by the commonwealth we are bound to maintain it, otherwise not.³¹

He reminded James that this Parliament had already granted four subsidies and seven fifteenths, both forms of taxation, yet its grievances remained unrelieved. The king demanded to hear them. Neville began with the administration of justice; when he reached the jurisdiction of the Welsh Marches, Sir Herbert Croft “took the word out of his mouth.” Otherwise, according to John More’s report to Winwood, Neville was thought ready to give his judgment on everything.³¹

The country gentleman who had declared himself outside his proper sphere in state matters was answering the king directly. His insistence that financial support and redress of grievances belonged together would become the basis of his proposed settlement with James—and of his renewed hopes for office.