The Herberts, the Digges Brothers and the First Folio

The First Folio of 1623 names the patrons and poets who helped present Shakespeare’s collected plays to the world. Those names align remarkably closely with Neville’s documented relationships. William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, worked alongside him in political affairs. Leonard Digges contributed a Folio poem; his brother Dudley publicly defended Neville in Parliament and wrote a proposed source for Coriolanus. Hugh Holland connects the Folio to the Mitre company. This chapter follows those relationships, then explains the family ties that link Neville to the Digges brothers and to Thomas Russell, an overseer of Shakespeare’s will.

Pembroke: patronage and political trust

The Folio’s dedicatees belonged to the Sidney family Neville had known since his youth. William and Philip Herbert were the sons of Mary Sidney Herbert, sister of both the poet Philip Sidney and Neville’s travelling companion Robert Sidney. Their grandfather, Sir Henry Sidney, had been a friend of Neville’s father (Chapter 2).

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, was supporting Neville’s secretary John Packer as early as 1605. On 25 February 1604/5, John Packer wrote to Sir Thomas Lake about his suit, for which the Earl of Pembroke had written on his behalf.¹

On 17 November 1612, Robert Naunton reported to Winwood that Neville had brought Pembroke and Rochester together. He called it Neville’s “noble and Christian intermise” and expressly added that Neville had been present at their meeting.²

In an undated letter to Winwood, provisionally placed in April 1613 by HMC, Neville described his reconciliation of Pembroke with the peer whom the editor tentatively identifies as Rochester:

Yet I have prevailed so much, as I have made a full reconciliation between my Lord and my Lord of Pembroke: who hath showed himself a noble, wise and worthy gentleman; not only in clearing himself from all the imputations our side had laid upon him without any just ground, but in remitting [the] injuries done him upon that false surmise, unto the public, [and pr]omising to join henceforth closely with my Lord in all things he shall undertake for religion and the state.

I write you the rather of this, because I would wish you not to neglect him, out of any mistaking of his worth, but rather to bestow a letter upon him, which I will deliver with mine own hands.³⁴

On the evening of 21 April 1613, after Sir Thomas Overbury had been sent to the Tower, Pembroke and Neville jointly advised Rochester. John Packer’s letter to Winwood, written the following day, places Pembroke first in the king’s service and then alongside Neville advising Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, the king’s favourite and Overbury’s patron:

Yesterday about six of the clock my Lord Chancellor and my Lord of Pembroke were employed by the king to speak with Sir Thomas Overbury, and to make him an offer of an ambassage into the Low Countries or France, which he would.

Overbury refused. Packer reported that he pleaded “want of language” and ill health, and declared that “he would not leave his country for any preferment in the world.” When the refusal was reported to James, the king summoned his councillors and ordered them to send Overbury to the Tower. Packer then turned to Rochester:

Now for my Lord of Rochester, who had but newly begun to leave his chamber, he knew nothing till all was done and he gone, which your Lordship may imagine did much perplex him. But that evening my Lord of Pembroke and Sir Henry Neville were with him, and so were again this morning; who have given him so good advice, that if he follows it, as I hope he will, all will be well with him, and no hurt to his friend.⁵

The secret letters sent by Thomas Overbury from the Tower to Carr supply a second view of the relationship. Overbury assigned Neville the name Similis and Pembroke Niger. His instructions put the two men to work together: “Do you and Similis set Niger upon this.” Neville was an intermediary in the factional negotiations surrounding Neville’s bid for the secretaryship, with Pembroke and Southampton among the important participants. The last-years chapter explains his dependence on Overbury’s influence with Carr; Appendix B distinguishes Thomas’s “Similis” letter from the later recollections of his father, Sir Nicholas Overbury.⁶

Pembroke also sat with Neville on the Virginia Company’s resident council in England, created by the charter of 1609. The same council included Dudley Digges and Christopher Brooke. Philip Herbert’s company connection belongs to the wider membership, rather than that council list.⁷

The Herbert connection outlived Neville and his son. Pembroke received the benefit of the wardship of the ambassador’s grandson Richard in 1629; his secretary John Thorowgood later married the younger Neville’s widow and acquired the wardship. Chapter 52 follows those arrangements and the later inheritance of books.⁸

Pembroke remembered in the Neville family

William Herbert also appears in the jestbook compiled by Sir Nicholas L’Estrange, who married Neville’s granddaughter Anne Lewknor. Jest 69 is attributed to “Mr Wil: Nevill,” identified by the editor as the ambassador’s son William. Its subject is “Sir William Herbert,” whom Lippincott identifies as William Herbert of Wilton, third Earl of Pembroke.⁹

Herbert is playing dice with another gentleman when they dispute a cast. The other man insists that it was five and four; Herbert says it was six and five. His opponent swears repeatedly that he is right. Herbert calls him perjured and makes a challenge: give him sixpence, and if there is a four on the dice he will give the other man a thousand. The explanation turns the accusation back upon its speaker: the dice were false and had no four on them. Herbert knows that his opponent is lying because he knows that the dice cannot produce the number claimed.

The story ends, in L’Estrange’s wording:

for give me but 6d, and if there be e’re a 4 in the Dice, I’le give thee 1000

The narrator then explains that the dice were false, “without a 4.” Both men are caught by the ending: one swears to an impossible throw, while the other reveals his knowledge of the crooked dice. The offer is conditional; the story does not describe Herbert paying over the disputed money.⁹

This is a specifically Neville-attributed story about a Herbert, preserved by the husband of Neville’s granddaughter. It gives the political relationship described above a place in the family’s remembered conversation. The anecdote supplies neither a date nor proof of the underlying gambling incident, but its source label records the route by which the story reached the compiler. Its “Sir William Herbert” also lacks the earl’s title: the identification with Pembroke follows Lippincott’s person index, rather than an independent identification supplied by the anecdote. Chapter 54 provides the genealogy and the wider family contributions.

Dudley defends Neville in Parliament

Dudley Digges’s connection with Neville included public support in Parliament. On 14 May 1614, when the Commons debated Neville’s advice to the king and the charge of “undertaking,” Digges defended his right to offer that counsel:

a private man might go and move the King for the good of the country, uncalled¹⁰

He invoked his father Thomas’s precedent: unsolicited proposals to Elizabeth I had not prevented him from serving in Parliament. This is a recorded act of political support for Neville by the brother of a First Folio poet. Leonard wrote the Folio tribute; Dudley defended Neville before the Commons. Chapter 9 places the intervention in the parliamentary dispute.

Dudley’s Coriolanus source, Leonard’s Folio poem

Dudley Digges knew Neville directly. In his examination during the Overbury investigation in November 1615, he recalled an earlier conversation in which he had told Neville of his fear that Rochester wanted to be rid of Overbury. Neville and Sir Thomas Mansell had replied with information from Overbury himself. Dudley also wrote the last two discourses in Foure Paradoxes (1604), proposed by Kenneth Muir and discussed by Andrew Hadfield as a source for Coriolanus (Chapter 34). His fourth discourse explicitly treats Coriolanus and Rome’s conflict between people and nobility. The connection therefore extends across both brothers: Dudley, who knew Neville, wrote a proposed source for the play; Leonard later wrote a First Folio tribute to Shakespeare.¹¹

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Dudley Digges’s signed examination, 6 November 1615, recalling conversations with Neville about Rochester and Overbury. The National Archives, SP 14/83, f.12. Blue annotations are modern. Image and transcription; manuscript record.

Dudley’s brother Leonard was a translator and a contributor to the First Folio. A note he signed around 1613 compared Lope de Vega’s reputation with that of “our Will Shakespeare.” In 1622 his translation of Gerardo the Unfortunate Spaniard appeared through Edward Blount, dedicated to Pembroke and Montgomery. The following year, Leonard’s signed poem, Blount’s name in the imprint and the same two dedicatees appeared together in the First Folio.¹²

The brothers connect Neville’s political world to people engaged in Shakespeare’s publication. The family ties examined below add a second connection; no surviving letter describes a transfer of literary manuscripts along that route. Leonard’s own dedication also calls him a stranger when approaching the Herberts, so its appearance in print should not be expanded into an undocumented intimate friendship.

Hugh Holland and the Mitre company

Hugh Holland supplies another connection between the Folio and a named literary company. His signed tribute appears in its preliminaries; the Convivium Philosophicum, probably dating from 1611, had named him alongside Donne, Hoskyns, Brooke, Jones and a Sir Henry Neville. Zachary Lesser identifies him as Neville of Billingbear; Chapter 44 examines that identification and the alternative claim for his Abergavenny cousin. Holland’s place in both documents is certain, and his earlier verses for Jonson’s Sejanus and Coryate’s Crudities show him already engaged in introducing other writers’ books.¹³

The connection through Neville’s daughter

Sir Henry Berkeley (c.1579–1667), Maurice Berkeley’s younger brother, was Neville’s son-in-law. He married Neville’s daughter Elizabeth; their postnuptial settlement survives in a copy, and the published pedigree dates the settlement 12 February 1608/9 (1609 in modern year reckoning). Sir Maurice Berkeley (c.1577–1617) was also connected to Neville through his own marriage: his wife Elizabeth Killigrew, daughter of William Killigrew, and Neville’s wife Anne, daughter of William’s brother Henry Killigrew, were first cousins.¹⁴

Neville entrusted Maurice with family property. An estate abstract dated 30 April 1615 records “Bury Farm with the appurtenances” as conveyed to “Sir Maurice Berkeley”, Robert Killigrew, William Barlas, Henry Savile and Edward Neville by an indenture of 20 May 1609. Maurice thus appears among the men holding property under Neville’s estate arrangements.¹⁵

His support for Neville’s political advancement is explicit. On 12 November 1612, Maurice wrote to Sir Robert Phelips, a fellow parliamentarian whose father had been Speaker of the Commons:

I like well of your purpose of treating with Sir H[enry] N[eville] and I do assure myself it will be grateful to him to see such as you are so well affected.¹⁶

Thomas Russell: half-brother and stepfather

The Berkeley brothers had a maternal half-brother, Thomas Russell (1570–1634), whom Shakespeare appointed an overseer of his will in 1616. Their mother, Margaret Lygon, had married first Sir Thomas Russell of Strensham, who died in 1574, and then Sir Henry Berkeley of Bruton, who died in 1601. Thomas Russell belonged to her first marriage; Maurice and Henry Berkeley to her second.¹⁷

Russell was also stepfather to Dudley Digges (1583–1639) and Leonard Digges (1588–1635). Their mother, Anne St Leger (1555–1636), married Russell after the death of their father, the mathematician Thomas Digges (c.1546–1595). The overseer of Shakespeare’s will was therefore both the Digges brothers’ stepfather and the half-brother of Neville’s son-in-law.¹⁸

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The Digges brothers’ Neville ancestry

The Digges brothers also had Neville ancestry of their own. Their maternal grandmother, Ursula Neville, was a daughter of George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, whose brother Sir Edward Neville was the ambassador’s grandfather. Anne St Leger and the ambassador were second cousins; her sons Dudley and Leonard were his second cousins once removed.¹⁹

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The connections extend from the Folio’s patrons to its poets and into Shakespeare’s own household arrangements. Pembroke dealt directly with Neville. Dudley Digges defended him in Parliament and wrote a proposed source for Coriolanus; Leonard contributed to the Folio and had already dedicated a book published by Blount to the Herbert brothers. Through Neville’s daughter, the family route reaches Thomas Russell, Shakespeare’s will overseer and the Digges brothers’ stepfather. Holland adds the Mitre company, with the identification of its Sir Henry Neville discussed in Chapter 44. These are specific relationships between Neville and people named in the records of Shakespeare’s works and their publication.