The Herberts and Neville’s Descendants: Office, Wardship and Books

In 1628 Philip Herbert, then Earl of Montgomery, intervened to help Henry Neville’s son obtain a place at court. Andrew Thrush attributes the appointment to Herbert’s support. The act begins a sequence of relations between the Folio dedicatees and later Neville generations, followed here through wardship, remarriage and books.¹²³

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The court appointment concerns the ambassador’s son; the wardship concerns Richard, his heir; the books were bequeathed to Richard’s younger brother Henry, the writer.¹²³⁴

William Herbert and the family’s remembered conversation

Chapter 48 follows William Herbert’s dealings with Neville during the ambassador’s lifetime. It also examines the dice story in L’Estrange’s jestbook, where “Sir William Herbert” appears in a tale attributed to “Mr Wil: Nevill.” Lippincott identifies the two men as the third Earl of Pembroke and the ambassador’s son William. The family’s connection with the Herberts had a conversational afterlife as well as a political one.⁵

The documentary sequence is more specific. In November 1621 a Sir Henry Neville was returned for Wilton on Pembroke’s interest. Andrew Thrush identifies the member as probably the ambassador’s son, rather than another Sir Henry Neville, partly because the subsequent Herbert relationships fit that identification. The parliamentary return alone does not settle the shared name. What follows in the younger Neville’s career is clearer.¹

The sons as patrons and readers

The younger Henry’s association with printed books extended beyond A King and No King. In 1628 Anthony White dedicated Truth and Error Discovered, two Oxford sermons, to “Sir Henry Nevill of Pillingbere in Berks,” his “much honoured Patron.” White submitted the work to Neville’s judgment and to those readers to whom he might choose to show it. A play and a theological work thus both publicly addressed the ambassador’s son as a patron.⁶

His younger brother Edward was remembered for literary accomplishment. The Latin epitaph at Shellingford, erected by his wife Alice after his death in 1632 and recorded by Elias Ashmole, praises his learning among the fellows of King’s College, Cambridge. Ashmole’s English rendering calls him “versed in Poetry, and all the Liberal Sciences.” The inscription explicitly identifies his father as Elizabeth’s ambassador to Henri IV.⁷

The son and the East India Company

In May 1618 Sir Henry Neville and George Thorpe each received permission to invest £300; in August 1619 the Company ordered £100 paid to Sir Henry for timber. The 1618 investment belongs with the son’s career. The 1619 timber order may also concern him, but the entry alone does not establish the payee’s identity.⁸

Philip Herbert’s appointment of the younger Neville

In December 1628 Philip Herbert, then Earl of Montgomery, appointed Sir Henry Neville the younger a gentleman of the privy chamber in extraordinary. Thrush records the appointment in the History of Parliament biography and lists the office as held from 1628 until Neville’s death. The biography’s office reference points to the Lord Chamberlain’s records, The National Archives, LC 5/132, p. 67.⁹

Philip’s office explains the institutional setting. On 3 August 1626 William had left the lord chamberlainship to become Lord Steward, and Philip had succeeded him as Lord Chamberlain. Thus Philip held the household office relevant to Neville’s appointment, while the later wardship grant correctly styles William Lord Steward.¹⁰

The father and son must be kept distinct. This Sir Henry was the ambassador’s eldest son, born in 1588, who had entered Merton as a boy and succeeded to Billingbear in 1615. He was also the younger Neville whom Thomas Walkley addressed in the printed A King and No King, discussed in Chapter 51. Philip’s intervention therefore concerns the same generation that appears in the family’s documented dealings with the publication of a play.

The date gives the connection its particular weight. The First Folio had appeared in 1623 with its dedication to William and Philip. Five years later Philip was exercising patronage for Neville’s son. His appointment does not explain how the Folio was assembled, but it establishes that the family relationship with one of its dedicatees was still active. The connection is expressed through an office, rather than inferred from a dedication or an association of names.

It also belongs to a longer effort to maintain the son’s position after a difficult inheritance. As Chapter 49 shows, the forest offices did not all pass smoothly from father to son. The younger Neville had some successes and some losses. The court appointment of 1628 should be placed against that history of dependence on influential friends and patrons, not described as an automatic inheritance from the ambassador.¹

William Herbert and Richard’s wardship

The younger Sir Henry died on 29 June 1629. His heir Richard was still a minor. On 3 November the Crown granted William Herbert the benefit of Richard’s wardship. The domestic state-paper calendar records:

Grant to William Earl of Pembroke, Lord Steward, of the benefit of the wardship of Rich. Neville, son and heir of Sir Henry Neville, deceased.²

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The wording fixes the identities. William, not Philip, received this grant. Richard, not the younger literary Henry Neville, was the ward. The deceased Sir Henry was the ambassador’s son. The entry concerns an interest in wardship, an arrangement with legal and financial consequences; it should not be casually paraphrased as Richard moving into Pembroke’s home.

This dated record supplies an important continuation of the earlier relationship. Pembroke’s connection to Neville’s family was no longer simply a matter of supporting an adult associate. It extended to the position of an under-age heir after a second death in the family. The calendar’s underlying reference is to the royal sign-manual material. Its concise entry is independent documentary support for the wardship event summarized in the parliamentary biography.²

Pembroke’s secretary enters the household

John Thorowgood had served William Herbert as secretary from about 1621 until the earl’s death in 1630. Through that service he obtained parliamentary seats and acted in his employer’s affairs. After Sir Henry Neville the younger’s death he married the widow, Elizabeth Smythe Neville, and settled in Berkshire. The parliamentary biographies also record his acquisition of Richard’s wardship. A member of Pembroke’s own household thus became part of the Neville family.³

The later family record supplies a firm endpoint. Hull History Centre’s catalogue describes a draft quitclaim from Sir John Thorowgood of Pillingbeere to Richard Neville, son and heir of the deceased Sir Henry. It concerns Richard’s wardship and marriage and bears an annotation recording that it was sealed on 25 June 1637. The document’s description connects Thorowgood directly with the same ward and the rights arising from his minority. “Pillingbeere” is Billingbear, the household from which Packer had written in 1604/5 (Chapter 48).¹¹

The sequence deserves to be kept intact: the father’s death in June 1629; the Crown’s grant to Pembroke in November; Thorowgood’s marriage to the widow and acquisition of the wardship; and the 1637 quitclaim. The marriage has no precise date in the cited account, so its exact position relative to the November grant and the acquisition of wardship rights should remain open. The exact terms by which the wardship passed to Thorowgood would require the underlying instruments. The published evidence already establishes the people, the direction of the relationship and two dated legal events.

A proposed place in the Revels office

Pembroke’s patronage had earlier extended to an attempt to obtain a place for Thorowgood in theatrical administration. On 28 February 1622/3 (1623 in modern year reckoning) Secretary Conway wrote to Lord Chamberlain Pembroke about a bill sent for signature that would give Thorowgood the reversion of the Mastership of the Revels. The state-paper calendar preserves the proposal. John P. Ferris’s parliamentary biography explains that the office ultimately went to another member of Pembroke’s circle, Sir Henry Herbert.¹²

This episode precedes Thorowgood’s Neville marriage. It gives his later entrance into the family an additional institutional context: he had been the beneficiary of an actual effort to secure a future position in theatrical government through Pembroke. A proposed reversion is not the same as occupation of the office. The interest lies in the patronage transaction and the people involved, rather than in assigning him duties he is not known to have performed.

The year is also the year of the First Folio. That concurrence is worth recording without supplying an undocumented causal link. Pembroke’s household was engaged in literary patronage and the distribution of offices connected with performance, while the same household would later provide a husband for Neville’s daughter-in-law and a custodian of the grandson’s wardship.

French and Italian books for Henry Neville

Thorowgood’s will, made on 20 January 1657, carries the story into a further literary generation. Ferris records that he left his stepson Henry Neville all his French and Italian books, together with a brass figure of a Roman fencer. This Henry was the political writer associated with The Isle of Pines, whose writing and place in the family’s literary afterlife are examined in Chapter 55. The bequest names a Neville descendant as the recipient of Pembroke’s former secretary’s French and Italian books.⁴

It is an unusually concrete bequest. The books are grouped by language, and the accompanying classical figure gives a glimpse of the objects among which their owner lived. We do not have a title-by-title list in the biography’s account. Thorowgood designated these books for a member of the household who subsequently published works of his own.

The two grandsons have different roles in this history. Richard is the heir whose wardship brought Pembroke and Thorowgood into legal relations with the estate. Henry is the stepson to whom the books were bequeathed. Conflating them would obscure the most valuable feature of the evidence: patronage, guardianship and literary inheritance operated through several members of the family, over more than a quarter of a century.

The papers in the study

A later dispute reminds us that preservation within a household could be imperfect. In a Chancery bill of 8 June 1670, Richard Neville alleged that he had entrusted deeds to Sir John Thorowgood for safekeeping and that, after Thorowgood’s death, they had passed to William Thorowgood. The catalogue reports his complaint that papers in the study at Billingbear had been left “much disorderly & tumbled” and that a document needed to establish the terms of a property transaction was missing.¹³

This is Richard’s allegation in litigation, not a neutral inspection of the study. It concerns property deeds, not literary manuscripts. Its relevance is practical: the same family arrangements that carried books and legal rights across generations also affected the custody of papers. Family continuity did not guarantee orderly survival.

The Herbert relationship after Neville’s death is therefore recoverable in several distinct forms. Philip’s court appointment supported the son. William’s wardship grant concerned the grandson. Thorowgood’s marriage joined the households, his quitclaim records a later stage of the wardship, and his will bequeathed books. Together these records give the family’s posthumous literary setting a documented social and material history.