Marriage and a learned household
On 22 December 1584 Neville married Anne Killigrew, daughter of the diplomat Sir Henry Killigrew and Katherine Cooke. Anne’s father came from the Killigrews of Arwenack in Cornwall, giving Neville a connection by marriage to an established Cornish family.1
In the Cooke family, classical learning, translation and political correspondence were practised by women as well as men. Katherine and her sisters were the daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, who was probably one of Edward VI’s readers. Their education included both Latin and Greek.2
Katherine Cooke’s sister Anne married Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Their sons were Anthony and Francis Bacon. Sister Mildred Cooke married William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief minister; Robert Cecil was their son. Neville’s wife was thus first cousin to Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and Robert Cecil.2
The sisters’ learning produced work that circulated beyond the household. Anne Bacon translated John Jewel’s Latin Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae into English in 1564. Archbishop Matthew Parker’s prefatory letter explained that both he and Jewel had compared her translation with the original and approved it without alteration. Mildred Cecil corresponded in learned languages and gave books to St John’s College, Cambridge, including a polyglot Bible. Elizabeth Cooke, who married Thomas Hoby and later John Russell, belonged to the same educated circle. Katherine’s surviving correspondence includes a Latin appeal to Mildred as well as English letters from the Protestant preacher Edward Dering.3
Chapter 19 prints Katherine’s Latin poem to Mildred and compares its wit and learned family setting with The Taming of the Shrew.
Anne’s own surviving letters continued this family practice: during Neville’s imprisonment she quoted Seneca in Latin and made further Latin phrases carry her appeal for his release.4
Katherine died on 27 December 1583, almost a year before her daughter’s marriage. The Cooke connection continued through Anne and her surviving aunts.2
Anne’s father remained an active connection to diplomacy and the court. The marriage also established a large household of their own: Henry and Anne had at least five sons and six daughters. Her place in the story becomes particularly visible in the letters she wrote and the arrangements she managed during her husband’s disgrace and imprisonment (Chapters 6–7).
Anne’s uncle William Killigrew, a groom of Elizabeth’s privy chamber, provided another connection at court.5 His house in Lothbury was used by Anne’s father and became a recurring London base for Neville, who wrote from there during Anne’s illness in 1598 and while preparing for his embassy in 1599.67
In 1584 Neville entered Parliament for New Windsor; he represented Sussex in 1589.8
Music also belonged to Neville’s wider family circle. In 1591 John Baldwin completed the keyboard manuscript known as My Ladye Nevells Booke, containing music by William Byrd. The Lady Nevell was Elizabeth Bacon, Neville’s stepmother. John Harley’s 2005 study establishes her identity through the family and heraldic evidence.9
Elizabeth, by then Lady Periam, also received Thomas Morley’s 1595 dedication of his two-part canzonets. Morley’s wife had formerly served her; five years later he published the song ‘It was a lover and his lass,’ sung in As You Like It.10
The Mayfield inheritance
Mayfield itself belonged to the family’s Gresham inheritance. Sir Thomas Gresham’s land will of 1575 devised Mayfield and Wadhurst to Neville’s father and the male issue of his late wife Elizabeth Gresham, Henry’s mother and Sir Thomas’s niece. Parliament confirmed the estate to the father and his son Henry in 1581, releasing them from the wider charges attached to the original devise.11
Christopher Fetherstone dedicated his 1587 translation of A Christian and wholsom admonition directed to the Frenchmen to “M. Henry Nevill Esquier, and Maistresse Anne Nevill his wife,” his “singular good friends.” He dated the dedication at Mayfield on 24 June 1587.12
On 5 May 1591 the Privy Council asked the lord chancellor to add “Henrie Nevel, of Mafeld, esquier” to the county’s deputy lieutenants.13 Its reason was practical: too few deputies were available, and the absences of those remaining could prevent the service from being performed. Mayfield identifies the younger Neville’s residence; esquire distinguishes him from his already knighted father.
Making cannon
Mayfield’s manor and park included a gunfounding furnace.14 Its operation depended on supplies of ore and charcoal, water power, skilled labour, heavy transport and money. Studies of other Wealden works show the coordination such an enterprise required.15
In a petition to Burghley assigned to 1590, Neville described the restrictions imposed on Sussex gunfounders. They were to accept production quotas, stamp their pieces through the ordnance office and sell only in London to merchants chosen by the Earl of Warwick or his deputy. Neville accepted the other conditions but objected to the compulsory buyer. He offered to report each purchaser so that security could be taken against unauthorized export; alternatively, he would sell his guns himself on Tower Hill and enter the required bonds. The second proposal was initially accepted, then withdrawn the next day.
He asked Burghley to consider whether this restriction served “some private benefit” rather than “the public good.” If the state wanted no ordnance made, he would make none; if manufacture was permitted, he wanted the same opportunity as the other founders.16
Late-sixteenth-century cast-iron fireback bearing HN and the Neville crossed-staples badge, possibly made at Mayfield. Victoria and Albert Museum, 11.1900. Image: Jeremy Hodgkinson, British Fireback Survey, no. 742. Catalogue and image.
The export privileges
Exporting guns required royal permission. Andrew Thrush records a twenty-one-year monopoly granted in April 1591 with Robert Sackville as his partner.14 According to its catalogue description, a separately dated grant of November 1592 licensed Henry Nevile, esquire, and two merchant strangers, Ludolfe Englested and Giles Devisher, to export minions and falcons for twenty years through Tower Wharf in London, Rochester, Newhaven, Hull and Bristol. The designation “esquire” points to the younger Neville, whose father was already knighted. Its terms regulated the guns as well as their routes to market.17
The relationship between these grants and a later proposal involving Neville and Sackville remains unresolved. They show the commercial importance of export privileges without supplying a single, fully reconciled history of the partnership.18 Chapter 4 follows the inspections, deliveries and bonds behind the trade; its map locates Mayfield and the southern English settings of Neville’s work.
Savile’s Tacitus and Essex
Neville’s former tutor Henry Savile published his English Tacitus at Oxford in 1591. Its connection with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, rests most memorably on Ben Jonson’s attribution of the anonymous preface, “A.B. To the Reader.” William Drummond recorded Jonson’s statement in 1618–19:
Essex wrote that Epistle or preface before the translation of the last part of Tacitus, which is A. B.19
Jonson’s testimony concerns the preface, not Savile’s separate dedication to Elizabeth. It is an important attribution, although the authorship remains disputed.
The volume combined Savile’s account of Nero’s fall and Galba’s rise with translations of four books of Tacitus’s Histories and the Life of Agricola, supported by historical and military commentary. It offered a practical education in power: succession, civil war, the influence of advisers, and the dangers facing an able servant under a jealous ruler.20
Savile’s dedication presented history as a guide to action. The anonymous preface likewise invited readers to learn from Rome’s political disasters, but ended by praising England’s peace and Elizabeth’s government. The volume’s outward stance was loyal to the Queen, even while its subject matter exposed the hazards of court service.20
Those hazards gave the book a particular resonance for Essex. In his Apologie, circulated in 1600, he named Savile as a witness to his love of learning. Alexandra Gajda connects Essex’s presentation of himself as a scholarly soldier undermined by court enemies with the Agricola, whose successful general falls under an emperor’s suspicion.21
Oxford in 1592
Savile’s scholarly world was increasingly entangled with Essex’s politics. During Elizabeth’s Oxford visit in September 1592, Henry Cuffe, a Merton scholar and Regius Professor of Greek, addressed the Queen at Carfax. Henry Savile delivered an oration on whether military studies and philosophy could flourish together. At Merton, with Thomas Savile moderating, Cuffe disputed whether civil dissensions could benefit the commonwealth; Thomas praised Essex’s campaigns. A panegyric possibly delivered by George Carleton, vicar of Mayfield, likewise celebrated Essex. Carleton later dedicated its printed appearance, with the opening book of his Essex epic, to Neville in 1603. Neville’s presence at the visit is not documented, but these were men whose learning and loyalties would remain important in his life.22
Notes and sources
Thomas Finlayson Henderson, “Killigrew, Henry (d.1603),” Dictionary of National Biography, identifies Sir Henry as the fourth son of John Killigrew of Arwenack and Elizabeth Trewenard, and describes the Killigrews as an old Cornish family. Henderson cites the pedigree in J. L. Vivian’s Visitations of Cornwall, pp. 268–269.↩︎
Gemma Allen, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2013), introduction, for the family relationships and Katherine’s death on 27 December 1583. Nicola Clark’s review (2014) reports Allen’s qualification of Anthony’s educational role. For Anne Bacon’s Hebrew characters, see Allen, ed., The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon (2014), letter 146, pp. 236–238, especially p. 238 n. 984. Marion Colthorpe, Elizabethan Court Day by Day: 1584, p. 46, reports the marriage at St Margaret Lothbury on 22 December, distinct from the licence of 4 December recorded by Andrew Thrush’s History of Parliament biography. Thrush supports the child count. The cousin relationships follow the three sisters’ marriages and their named children.↩︎
Gemma Allen, ed., The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon, Camden Fifth Series 44 (2014), especially the early correspondence and Matthew Parker’s letter prefixed to the translation of Jewel, pp. 59–61, doi:10.1017/S0960116313000225. The edition discusses Mildred Cecil’s gift to St John’s and cites British Library, Lansdowne MS 104, fol. 158r. For Katherine’s correspondence and its transmission, and the sisters’ learning more generally, see Allen, Cooke Sisters (2013). The Latin appeal survives through a later printed transmission, rather than as a surviving autograph asserted here. The specific reference for Mildred’s polyglot Bible gift is Allen, Letters, p. 56 n. 23. For the six Latin lines printed by Harington with the Cooke-family allusion, see Orlando Furioso (1591), commentary to book 37, p. 314.↩︎
Anne Neville to Robert Cecil, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 93/72, endorsed 23 May 1602. Latin read from the manuscript; the abbreviated calendar omits it: HMC, Salisbury, XII (1910), p. 164. Seneca, Phaedra 607. The manuscript uses loquuntur; the Latin Library has the spelling locuntur.↩︎
Marion Colthorpe, Elizabethan Court Day by Day, ‘Prominent Elizabethans,’ p. 103, entry for William Killigrew: younger brother of Sir Henry, groom of the privy chamber by 1575, and royal visits to Hanworth in 1590, 1592, 1600 and 1601. Folger edition.↩︎
Edwin Freshfield, ed., The Vestry Minute Book of the Parish of St. Margaret, Lothbury, in the City of London, 1571–1677 (London, 1887), p. 15, entry for 14 February 1582/3, recording William Killigrew’s house, garden and request for passage through the churchyard; printed edition. Sir Henry Killigrew to Robert Cecil, 14 August 1596, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, VI (1895), p. 335, item 43.89; printed letter. Spelling modernized.↩︎
Henry Neville to Robert Cecil, 6 May 1598, Cecil Papers, Hatfield House; see also Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, VIII (1899), p. 158. Henry Neville to Thomas Windebank, 19 February 1598/9, research reference. Both letters bear Lothbury datelines. The letters establish his presence there on these dates; the identification of the house follows the Killigrew family records cited above. For the latter letter, see Green, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1598–1601, pp. 163–164, vol. CCLXX, no. 42, calendar entry.↩︎
Andrew Thrush,“NEVILLE, Sir Henry I (1564–1615), of Billingbear”, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (2010), family, constituency and office lists, and biography. Subsequent chapters give the particular records behind the offices, embassy and parliamentary career.↩︎
John Harley, “‘My Ladye Nevell’ Revealed,” Music & Letters 86, no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–15, especially pp. 3–5, article. Harley places the marriage probably around May 1578 and identifies Elizabeth as the ambassador’s father’s third wife. She was Francis Bacon’s half-sister, not his full sister. Harley explicitly credits Christopher Foley’s identification, developed from findings prepared in 2003 and College of Arms research.↩︎
Thomas Morley, The First Booke of Canzonets to Two Voyces (London: Thomas Este, 1595), dedication to Lady Periam, dated 17 November 1595, Library of Congress page image. John Harley, ‘My Ladye Nevell Revealed’, Music & Letters 86.1 (2005), 1–15, identifies her as Elizabeth Bacon, formerly Lady Nevell, and connects Morley’s dedication and his wife’s service to her. Morley does not name the place where his wife served. Spelling in the short quotation is modernized. Thomas Morley, The First Booke of Ayres (London: H. Ballard for William Barley, 1600), sigs. B4v–C1r, STC 18115.5; Folger Shakespeare Library, printed song and commentary. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 5.3. The song appeared in print before the play, which was first published in the 1623 Folio.↩︎
John Gough Nichols and John Bruce, eds., Wills from Doctors’ Commons (Camden Society, 1863), pp. 57–68, especially pp. 66–67, land will dated 5 July 1575; John Ward, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740), Appendix VI, pp. 16–27, especially pp. 19–20, Act of 23 Elizabeth. The Act names Edward as the alternative if his brother Henry were dead, reserves rents and services due to the chief lords, and provides for protection against the Gresham estate’s wider charges. Elizabeth supplied the family relationship; the devise and Act supplied the legal route. Public editions: Wills from Doctors’ Commons, Ward.↩︎
Léonard Constant, A Christian and wholsom admonition directed to the Frenchmen, trans. Christopher Fetherstone (London: John Wolfe, 1587), STC 5154, dedication, sigs. A5r–A6r: A5r, A6r. The author is attributed to Constant and the year supplied as [1587] by STC; neither is treated as an unambiguous literal title-page statement. Folger catalogue. Fetherstone recalls the couple’s many courtesies since their acquaintance began, offers the first fruits of his knowledge of French, and asks them to patronize this Protestant religious translation. He praises their zeal for God’s glory. The “first fruits” are the translator’s; the dedication records an existing friendship and household kindness, not a specified financial commission.↩︎
Acts of the Privy Council of England, new series, XXI, 1591, entry for 5 May, p.90, letter to the lord chancellor; Gale calendar record MC4316300024, identifying PC 2/18 f.252. Quoted from the published calendar. The entry requests addition and a new commission; it does not itself document an inspection of troops.↩︎
Andrew Thrush, “Neville, Sir Henry I (1564–1615), of Billingbear,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629 (2010), biography, describes the Mayfield furnace and reports the April 1591 twenty-one-year monopoly with Robert Sackville. For the earlier furnace, Christopher Baker’s declaration, catalogued 15 February 1574, TNA SP 12/95 f.48r, names Gresham’s Mayfield furnace among those making ordnance: manuscript. The April 1591 grant is reported here on Thrush’s authority; its original instrument has not been reconciled with the separate twenty-year grant of 8 November 1592, TNA LR 15/301, discussed below. The grantee’s identification in that later transcript remains provisional.↩︎
D. W. Crossley, “The Management of a Sixteenth-Century Ironworks,” Economic History Review, new series, 19, no. 2 (1966), pp. 273–288, especially pp. 273–274, 278–280 and 285–288, JSTOR. The study concerns the Sidney works at Robertsbridge and Panningridge, chiefly 1541–1573. It supplies industrial context rather than evidence of Neville’s personal activities. For coppice, regrowth and the cost of transporting charcoal, see G. Hammersley, “The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540–1750,” Economic History Review 26, no. 4 (1973), pp. 593–613, especially pp. 603–610, JSTOR. Hammersley challenges a general exhaustion explanation while recognizing local pressure on accessible supplies; his estimates depend on approximate capacities, variable measures and woodland yields.↩︎
Henry Neville to Lord Burghley, [1590], British Library, Lansdowne MS 65/22; manuscript images published by Ken Feinstein. See also Owen Lowe Duncan, Jr., The Political Career of Sir Henry Neville: An Elizabethan Gentleman at the Court of James I (Ohio State University PhD dissertation, 1974), pp.69–71, especially p.71, OhioLINK. Spelling modernized. Duncan cites Lansdowne 65, no.22, f.70; his preceding note70 prints no.27 with the same folio. His longer transcription has textual differences, including a repeated “rather,” not reproduced here. The year is assigned; no day or month is claimed.↩︎
The National Archives, LR 15/301, English paper transcript, eight folios, catalogued 8 November 1592. Details here follow the catalogue description, rather than the full transcript. The catalogue does not explicitly name the weight unit, so the figures below are not labelled as pounds. Its under-weight and shorter-length allowances must not be converted into rigid minimum sizes. The precise scope of the length provision remains uncertain. The catalogue specifies weight figures of 1,400–1,700 for minions and 800–1,100 for falcons, allowing lower weights, and lengths of seven to eight feet or less. Permitted outlets were Tower Wharf, Rochester, Newhaven, Hull and Bristol. The National Archives, STAC 5/N5/31, Neville v Katerense, bill only, 36 Elizabeth I (17 November 1593–16 November 1594). Catalogue plaintiffs: Henry Nevill, Ludolphe Englestede and Giles de Visthorne. Their correspondence to the grant’s names is an identification from the combination of names, not a statement of the suit’s unknown subject. A related proposal describing a twenty-one-year term with six years elapsed remains unreconciled with the 1592 record and is not silently substituted for it.↩︎
The National Archives, SP 12/255 f.96, anonymous saltpetre, gunpowder and ordnance proposal, catalogued 1595, State Papers Online MC4304480624; Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1595–1597 (1869), vol. CCLV, entry 63, p. 153 (calendared under 1595?). Proposed Crown revenue is £6 per exported ton and twenty shillings per domestic ton; proposed patentee revenue is forty and twenty shillings respectively. The separate surrender compensation for Sackville must not be added as a simultaneous third charge. No acceptance or payment is established. The reverse has later dating annotations, not a clear original dateline. The document is not treated as Neville’s writing or as the 1592 grant itself.↩︎
Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden. January, M.DC.XIX, ed. David Laing (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842), p. 25, scan; “befor” modernized to “before.” The attribution concerns “A.B. To the Reader,” not the separate dedication to Elizabeth signed Henry Savile. Edmund Bolton also records the Essex attribution in Hypercritica: see Alexandra Gajda, “Henry Savile and the Elizabethan Court,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 6 (2021), pp. 32–60, especially p. 51 and n. 77, article. Jonson’s report is evidence of the attribution, not conclusive proof of authorship; Mordechai Feingold, “Scholarship and Politics: Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Essex Connection,” Review of English Studies 67 (2016), pp. 855–874, at 859, questions its reliability and the independence of Bolton’s testimony, article. Laing’s preface, pp. xx–xxiii, explains that Drummond’s notes reach his edition through Sir Robert Sibbald’s later transcript, rather than an autograph then known to him.↩︎
Cornelius Tacitus, The ende of Nero and beginning of Galba. Fower bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. The life of Agricola, trans. and ed. Henry Savile (Oxford: Joseph Barnes for Richard Wright, 1591), dedication, sigs. ¶2r–v, and “A.B. To the Reader,” ¶3r–v, with the contents of the volume; STC 23642, ESTC S117595, facsimile, TCP A13331. Brief quotations from this printed edition preserve its spelling. The A.B. preface closes by contrasting Roman miseries with Elizabeth’s peace and government.↩︎
Savile, Life of Agricola, p. 263, and annotations on the Agricola, pp. 46–47 (separately paginated); Gajda, “Henry Savile,” pp. 49, 55–57. The analysis concerns Savile’s published text and its political reception.↩︎
Gajda, “Henry Savile,” pp. 45–47 and nn. 57–58. Cuffe’s question was An dissentiones Civium sint reipublicae utiles? The possible association of Carleton’s panegyric with this visit is retained as a qualified dating, following Gajda’s discussion of Sarah Knight’s work.↩︎
