Encomium of Richard III / “Hen. W.” / Henry Neville

Topic: Encomium of Richard III, “Hen. W.,” and Henry Neville

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• W. Gordon Zeeveld states:

“It appeared in print for the first time in 1616 and again in the next year as one of William Cornwallis's Essayes of certaine paradoxes”

• Zeeveld states:

“Only one of the manuscript drafts, however, shows any connection with Cornwallis.”

• Zeeveld states:

“The Devonshire manuscript is dedicated by him to John Donne.”

• Zeeveld states:

“On the other hand, the British Museum copy is dedicated to Sir Henry Neville by ‘Hen. W,’ and neither the Huntington nor the Folger copy bears any indication of authorship.”

• Zeeveld also states of the Devonshire manuscript:

“The Devonshire manuscript, entitled The Encomium of Richard ye third”

• Zeeveld states:

“the possibility that the phrase was added by Cornwallis must be kept in mind.”

• Michelle O’Callaghan states:

“The encomium of Richard III, originally written by Sir William Cornwallis the younger, was reworked in the late 1590s or early 1600 by members of Essex's circle as part of propaganda which preceded the Essex rebellion.”

• O’Callaghan states:

“This version is dedicated to Sir Henry Neville by a ‘Hen. W.’”

• O’Callaghan cites:

“The encomium of Richard III by William Cornwallis the younger, ed. A. N. Kincaid (London, 1977), pp. v-viii, 18-19.”

• Source-hardening check of the local O'Callaghan/Brooke PDF confirms that she connects this Neville-dedicated Encomium witness to the same Tacitean/Richard III political culture that informs Brooke's Ghost of Richard III. This strengthens the packet as a network/context witness, but it still does not identify Hen. W..
• The local 1616 print witness is:

“Essayes of certaine paradoxes”

• The local 1616 print witness also reads:

“At London, Printed for Th. Thorpe. 1616.”

• The local 1617 print witness is:

“The second Impression, inlarged.”

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• Ken Feinstein's Twitter layer identifies this as important because a manuscript version of the Encomium of Richard III is dedicated to Henry Neville and signed Hen. W., while the text was printed by Thomas Thorpe in 1616 shortly after Neville's death.
• Ken has suggested Henry Wotton as a possible Hen. W. candidate while noting that some others suggest Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. This packet does not treat either identification as verified.
• Ken also links the packet to Christopher Brooke's Ghost of Richard III and the broader Richard III / Essex-circle / Donne network.

3. Sourced Witness Structure

4. Quoted Source Text

Zeeveld

• “It appeared in print for the first time in 1616 and again in the next year as one of William Cornwallis's Essayes of certaine paradoxes”
• “Only one of the manuscript drafts, however, shows any connection with Cornwallis.”
• “The Devonshire manuscript is dedicated by him to John Donne.”
• “On the other hand, the British Museum copy is dedicated to Sir Henry Neville by ‘Hen. W,’ and neither the Huntington nor the Folger copy bears any indication of authorship.”
• “The Devonshire manuscript, entitled The Encomium of Richard ye third”

O’Callaghan

• “The encomium of Richard III, originally written by Sir William Cornwallis the younger, was reworked in the late 1590s or early 1600 by members of Essex's circle as part of propaganda which preceded the Essex rebellion.”
• “This version is dedicated to Sir Henry Neville by a ‘Hen. W.’”
• “Tacitus”

1616 / 1617 print witnesses

• “Essayes of certaine paradoxes”
• “At London, Printed for Th. Thorpe. 1616.”
• “The second Impression, inlarged.”

5. Citations

• Cornwallis, William. Essayes of Certaine Paradoxes. London, printed for Th. Thorpe, 1616.
• Cornwallis, William. Essayes of Certaine Paradoxes. 2nd ed., London, 1617.
• O’Callaghan, Michelle. “Politics, Patronage and Poetry in the 1590s: The Ghost of Richard the Third and the Essex Circle.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 31, 2001, pp. 31-49.
• Zeeveld, W. Gordon. “A Tudor Defense of Richard III.” PMLA, vol. 55, no. 4, 1940, pp. 946-957.
• Zeeveld, W. Gordon. “A Tudor Defense of Richard III.” PMLA, vol. 55, no. 4, 1940, pp. 946-957. Cambridge Core, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/tudor-defense-of-richard-iii/5780FC08B49E921FEEE42D76B2A64CE1.

6. Notes on Access

• The packet’s firmest source-level fact is the British Museum manuscript description quoted by Zeeveld: Sir Henry Neville is named there as dedicatee, and the signature form is Hen. W..
• This packet does not identify Hen. W. as Southampton or Wotton. Later scholarly suggestions about that identification are not treated as facts here.
• Two local root-level PDFs have now been added that contain British Library manuscript images of the Encomium witness:
• encomium_smaller.pdf
• encomium_smaller (1).pdf.pdf)
• These two files are byte-for-byte duplicates of the same PDF witness:
• SHA-1: 40d1ba83cc2d19dfd6fef6177abf2374c1e17673
• pages: 29
• producer: iOS Version 12.4.1 (Build 16G102) Quartz PDFContext
• These manuscript-image PDFs are important local access witnesses for the British Library copy and should be preserved even though this packet does not yet transcribe them directly.
• The local PDFs used for this packet are:
• Zeeveld_Tudor_Defense_Richard_III_1940.pdf
• OCallaghan_Ghost_Richard_III_Brooke_1614.pdf
• Cornwallis_Essayes_Paradoxes_Thorpe_1616.pdf
• Cornwallis_Essayes_Paradoxes_2nd_ed_1617.pdf
• O’Callaghan cites the modern edition:
• Kincaid, A. N., editor. The Encomium of Richard III by William Cornwallis the Younger. London, 1977.
• Source-hardening result, 2026-04-27: O'Callaghan should be used for contextual placement in Essex/Richard III/Tacitean political culture. Zeeveld remains the clearer source for the witness map and dedication facts, and direct manuscript-image transcription remains the next hardening step.
• The 1616 print witness preserves a separate bibliographic fact worth keeping:
• “At London, Printed for Th. Thorpe. 1616.”

This identifies Thomas Thorpe as the publisher of the 1616 print appearance, but the packet does not infer more from that fact.

• The next upgrade for this packet would be to obtain the Kincaid edition or direct manuscript-images/transcription so the dedication itself can be quoted rather than described through later scholarship.
• Local Twitter files with this lead include twitter_Richard_III.md, twitter_Parliament_and_Politics.md, and twitter_John_Donne.md.