Henry Neville and The Isle of Pines

Henry Neville (1620–1694), the ambassador’s grandson, was a republican politician, satirist and translator of Machiavelli. The Isle of Pines appeared in 1668 without his name, first anonymously and then as the report of an invented Dutch voyager. The book tells of an English family founded after a shipwreck in Elizabeth’s reign and of a grandfather’s history preserved by descendants.¹

A book published under another name

The combined edition carries the invented voyager’s name on its title page:

The Isle of Pines,
or,
A late Discovery of a fourth Island near
Terra Australis, Incognita
By
Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten.²

Van Sloetten is the supposed discoverer and narrator of the tale, not its author. The title page also promises an account written by the original castaway and delivered to the Dutch by his grandchild. The assumed name and the story of the manuscript’s transmission work together to make an invented island sound like a reported discovery.

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In the book, the founder, George Pine, survives a shipwreck with four women, including an enslaved African woman. Their descendants become the island’s population. When Dutch visitors arrive, George’s grandson William explains how the family has preserved its history:

What after passed (said he) during my Grandfathers life, I shall show you in a Relation thereof written by his own hand, which he delivered to my Father being his eldest Son, charging him to have a special care thereof …³

William brings out two sheets, reads them aloud and gives the visitors a copy. George’s own account ends with instructions to preserve the history and let strangers copy it, “that our name be not lost from off the earth.”⁴ A grandson thus brings his grandfather’s writing to a new audience. For a book written by the ambassador’s grandson, this is a suggestive choice of plot: family descent becomes the means of literary survival.

The Tempest on the Restoration stage

The timing makes The Tempest a particularly relevant comparison. London’s theatres reopened with the Restoration in 1660, after the parliamentary closure of 1642. On 7 November 1667, Pepys attended the first performance of Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation, The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, at the Duke’s theatre. He recorded a packed house and the presence of the king and court. The Isle of Pines followed the next summer: its first part was licensed on 27 June 1668, and the combined edition on 27 July.⁵

The adaptation supplies a closer comparison than the general theme of a shipwreck. Hippolito, a young man brought up without seeing women, discovers sexual desire and refuses the idea that he must love only one:

HIPPOLITO
I will have all of that kind, if there be a hundred of ’em.⁶

George Pine’s island turns such unlimited desire into a founding history. In the play’s expanded sailors’ scenes, the survivors also attempt to establish a government, dispute who may rule, and bargain for offices. Neville’s fiction likewise turns isolation into an experiment in sexual and political order. After George’s death, his descendants need laws, punishment and eventually Dutch armed assistance. Natural plenty has not produced lasting innocence.⁷

Shakespeare’s original already sets Gonzalo’s ideal of abundance without labour against the ambitions and violence of the other castaways. Neville develops a comparable tension across generations. The 1667 adaptation brings sexual appetite and improvised island government into still sharper focus, immediately before the publication of The Isle of Pines. This gives the comparison a precise contemporary setting, although no evidence cited here places Neville at a performance. The adaptation was printed in 1670; its performance in 1667, rather than that later publication, supplies the relevant chronology.⁸

The sonnet at Audley End

Famed Neville researcher John Casson discovered an unsigned English sonnet on the final blank page of a 1607 volume of Las Comedias del Famoso Poeta Lope de Vega Carpio at Audley End. It matches the younger Henry Neville’s distinctive handwriting.⁹ In Casson’s modernized transcription it begins:

At length into your fingers I am come
Wherein so close restraint I am to die,
That you to me my sighs and tears deny,
The only easers of my martyrdom.

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The poem is an English version of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Sonnet II. Its sequence follows the Spanish poem from captivity in the beloved’s hands, through the sword and fruitless tears, to a final appeal for death. This identifies the literary source; whether Neville translated it himself remains a separate question.¹⁰

The volume connects his writing with the surviving family collection, but its place in the earlier library needs care: no matching entry has yet been identified in the 1780 Billingbear catalogue.¹¹ The important object is the surviving book itself—Spanish plays carrying an English sonnet in the hand of the author of The Isle of Pines.