North's Plutarch and Henry Neville's Advice to King James

Topic: North's Plutarch and Henry Neville's Advice to King James

MPESE / Some Graces Cross-Link, 2026-06-23

• MPESE's A Collection of Some Graces (1614) witness should be consulted with this packet because it gives a separate Neville reform-program text near the Advice/Undertakers cluster.
• Keep the documents distinct: this packet controls the Advice/North's Plutarch anecdote; work_in_parliament.md now controls Some Graces; parliamentary_undertakers.md controls the Undertakers demotion.

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• The Neville letters corpus contains a document with the attributes:
• id="document_neville_advice"
• filename="Neville_Advice.txt"
• title="Neville Advice to the King"
• date_ns="1613-01-01"

• Paragraph 5 of that XML document contains an anecdote naming:
• Antigonus
• Demetrius

• Thomas North's 1579 Plutarch in the EEBO corpus is:
• TCP A09802
• The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes compared together

• In that North text, the life of Demetrius includes:
• Antigonus “geuing audience to certain ambassadors”
• Demetrius coming “from hunting”
• Demetrius sitting by his father with “his dartes in his hande”
• Antigonus making the ambassadors witness “how we liue one with an other”

• The local Work in Parliament packet preserves the parliamentary source trail for Henry Neville's Advice material. The directly checked Spedding witness is:
• James Spedding, ed., The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, vol. V, London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869.
• Internet Archive item worksoffrancisba12bacoiala, where IA metadata labels the larger set as The Works of Francis Bacon and volume 12, while the scanned volume itself is Letters and Life, vol. V.

• Spedding does not print the full text of Neville's Advice in vol. V. He identifies and contextualizes it in the Bacon / James / Undertakers parliamentary source trail.

• The full printed Advice text has now been located in Gardiner's first-edition two-volume history:
• Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Disgrace of Chief-Justice Coke: 1603-1616, vol. II, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863.
• Appendix V, pp. 389-394, prints An Advice [by Sir Henry Neville] Touching the Holding of a Parliament.
• The printed appendix gives the manuscript source as [State Papers, Domestic, lxxiv. 44.], matching the SP 14/74, no. 44 source lane.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• A Ken Feinstein tweet dated 20 Nov. 2020 states:

“Coincidentally, here is Henry Neville quoting Plutarch in 1612.”

• A Ken Feinstein tweet dated 1 Dec. 2020 states:

“By funny coincidence, Henry Neville also read Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. And coincidentally he references here Demetrius and Antigonus.”

• A Ken Feinstein tweet dated 14 Jan. 2021 states:

“Look how closely Henry Neville follows North's translation of Plutarch in 1612.”

• A Ken Feinstein tweet dated 28 Jan. 2021 states:

“The next few months you'll hear a lot about Shakespeare quoting Thomas North. Here is Henry Neville (1612) directly quoting Thomas North's Plutarch.”

• A Ken Feinstein tweet dated 30 May 2021 states:

“As I have said, it is a fact of history that Henry Neville read North's translation of Plutarch and quoted from it almost verbatim. Here is one of the manuscript copies of this "Advice" (not Neville's handwriting).”

3. Quoted Source Text

Neville Letters Corpus v8, document_neville_advice, paragraph 5

• “And to this purpose I remember a story of Antigonus, one of the immediate and mightiest successors of Alexander who, being solemnly set in great state to give audience to some other prince’s ambassadors ... his son Demetrius came in from hunting ...”
• “Antigonus called them again and willed them to report one thing more to their masters, namely, in what fashion they had seen him and his son converse together ...”
• “If this were true in that case between the father and the son how much more is it verified between the prince and the people.”

Gardiner printed edition, Appendix V, pp. 389-394

• Gardiner prints the full Advice under the title An Advice [by Sir Henry Neville] Touching the Holding of a Parliament.
• The opening frames the question as whether the King should relieve his wants by Parliament or by projects and devices for raising money.
• Printed p. 390 contains the same Antigonus/Demetrius passage used in the North's Plutarch comparison.
• Printed p. 392 contains the parliamentary-management phrase proposed betimes and followed close afterwards.
• A raw OCR extraction has been saved locally, but it should be proofread against the page images before being used as final quotation copy.

Thomas North's Plutarch, A09802

• “... one day as he came home from hunting he went vnto his father Antigonus, geuing audience to certain ambassadors ...”
• “... he sate downe by him euen as he came from hunting, hauing his dartes in his hande ...”
• “My lords, sayd he, you shall carie home this reporte of my sonne and me, be witnesses I pray you how we liue one with an other ...”

Comparison Notes

• Neville: “being solemnly set in great state to give audience to some other prince’s ambassadors”

North: “geuing audience to certain ambassadors”

• Neville: “his son Demetrius came in from hunting”

North: “one day as he came home from hunting”

• Neville: “with his darts in his hands”

North: “hauing his dartes in his hande”

• Neville: “report one thing more to their masters”

North: “you shall carie home this reporte”

• Neville: “how ... they had seen him and his son converse together”

North: “be witnesses ... how we liue one with an other”

• Neville: “confidence and concord”

North: “the agreement betwext the father and the sonne together”

Spedding, Letters and Life, vol. V

• Spedding opens the 1613-14 parliamentary chapter by identifying the King's pre-parliamentary communications with Sir Henry Neville and his party, later called the Undertakers.
• On printed p. 3, Spedding names Sir Henry Neville's Advice touching the holding of a Parliament and says the King had probably seen it some months before.
• On printed p. 13, Spedding labels the matter Proposition of the Undertakers, notes that the exact communications had not been discovered by him, and ties the proposition to learned-counsel review before 17 Feb. 1613/14.
• The Spedding images are therefore supporting source-context images for the Advice tradition, not a substitute for the full Advice witness in TNA SP 14/74, no. 44, Gardiner, or the local Neville Letters Corpus.

Ken Feinstein tweets

• “Coincidentally, here is Henry Neville quoting Plutarch in 1612.”
• “By funny coincidence, Henry Neville also read Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. And coincidentally he references here Demetrius and Antigonus.”
• “Look how closely Henry Neville follows North's translation of Plutarch in 1612. Coincidentally, William Shakespeare owned the same book and did the same thing in his late plays.”
• “The next few months you'll hear a lot about Shakespeare quoting Thomas North. Here is Henry Neville (1612) directly quoting Thomas North's Plutarch. This is not supposition. This an undeniable historical fact.”
• “As I have said, it is a fact of history that Henry Neville read North's translation of Plutarch and quoted from it almost verbatim. Here is one of the manuscript copies of this "Advice" (not Neville's handwriting). This is a fact.”

4. Citations

• Neville_Letters_Corpus_v8.xml, document_neville_advice, paragraph 5, local XML witness.
• North, Thomas, translator. The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea. 1579. TCP A09802. Local EEBO witness in local EarlyPrint database and local EarlyPrint FTS index.
• north_plutarch_antigonus_demetrius_A09802.txt, local extracted witness text for the Demetrius passage in A09802.
• work_in_parliament.md, existing packet preserving the source trail for the Advice dispute and the Bacon / 1614 parliamentary references.
• SOURCE_NOTES.md, local source-image notes for the North Plutarch scan, the Advice manuscript images, and the Spedding printed witness.
• Gardiner, Samuel Rawson. History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Disgrace of Chief-Justice Coke: 1603-1616. Vol. II. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863. Appendix V, pp. 389-394. Internet Archive item historyofengland02gard_0, https://archive.org/details/historyofengland02gard_0. Page images and raw OCR extraction preserved in SOURCE_NOTES.md.
• Neville_Advice_Review.txt, existing cleaner local working transcription generated from the local Neville Advice XML/text workflow; use as a working text, not as the public page-image witness.
• Feinstein, Ken. “Coincidentally, here is Henry Neville quoting Plutarch in 1612.” X, 20 Nov. 2020, https://twitter.com/user/status/1329662515802820608. Local archive trail: Books_Read.md.
• Feinstein, Ken. “By funny coincidence, Henry Neville also read Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. And coincidentally he references here Demetrius and Antigonus.” X, 1 Dec. 2020, https://twitter.com/user/status/1333834062499176449. Local archive trail: Books_Read.md.
• Feinstein, Ken. “Look how closely Henry Neville follows North's translation of Plutarch in 1612. Coincidentally, William Shakespeare owned the same book and did the same thing in his late plays.” X, 14 Jan. 2021, https://twitter.com/user/status/1349598533230346240. Local archive trail: Books_Read.md.
• Feinstein, Ken. “The next few months you'll hear a lot about Shakespeare quoting Thomas North. Here is Henry Neville (1612) directly quoting Thomas North's Plutarch. This is not supposition. This an undeniable historical fact.” X, 28 Jan. 2021, https://twitter.com/user/status/1354670049282334720. Local archive trail: Books_Read.md.
• Feinstein, Ken. “As I have said, it is a fact of history that Henry Neville read North's translation of Plutarch and quoted from it almost verbatim. Here is one of the manuscript copies of this "Advice" (not Neville's handwriting). This is a fact.” X, 30 May 2021, https://twitter.com/user/status/1398881439622467584. Local archive trail: Books_Read.md.
• “Work in Parliament.” Henry Neville Research Wiki, 11 Oct. 2019, http://nevilleresearch.com/index.php?title=Work_in_Parliament. Local preservation: wiki_parliament.md.
• Spedding, James, editor. The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon. Vol. V. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869. Internet Archive item worksoffrancisba12bacoiala, https://archive.org/details/worksoffrancisba12bacoiala. Local page images preserved in SOURCE_NOTES.md.
• Proceedings in Parliament, 1614 (House of Commons). Google Books path preserved in work_in_parliament.md.

5. Evidence Images

North's Plutarch image witness

Advice manuscript images from the local tweet archive

Gardiner full printed Advice text

Spedding printed-witness images

Prior tweet-image trail

6. Notes on Access

• This packet is now anchored to the direct XML witness for document_neville_advice in the Neville letters corpus.
• The packet now also preserves the direct EEBO/TCP witness path for North's 1579 Plutarch, A09802.
• The Ken Feinstein tweet/image trail remains useful because it preserves comparison images and the original local research trail that identified this match.
• The packet now includes a direct motif-by-motif comparison between the Neville Advice passage and the North excerpt.
• The packet now includes the full printed Advice text lane: Gardiner 1863, vol. II, Appendix V, pp. 389-394, with local page images and raw OCR. This upgrades the "full Advice text" source beyond tweet images while leaving direct TNA manuscript-image control open.
• The packet now includes Spedding page images for the printed parliamentary source trail: p. 1, p. 2, p. 3, p. 13, and the index entry on p. 415.
• Unlike several other source-book packets, this one is no longer only a tweet-led lead: the core comparison is now carried by the XML and EEBO witnesses themselves.

7. Fifth-Batch Fact-Source Update, 2026-06-24

• Archive.org item plutarchnorthlives now provides the public North image route; local EarlyPrint/TCP A09802 remains the text witness for the North comparison.
• The Archive.org variant sweep also found plutarchnorthlives2ed, a public image/text route for the 1595 second edition of North's Plutarch. This does not alter the core Advice comparison, which is controlled through the 1579 TCP A09802 witness, but it is useful for source-availability discussion and for checking whether later Shakespeare source-book arguments should distinguish the 1579 and 1595 printed witnesses.
• Gardiner 1863 remains the best public full printed Advice route in this workspace: Appendix V, pp. 389-394, gives the source as State Papers Domestic lxxiv. 44, matching the SP 14/74, no. 44 archival lane.
• Spedding remains a parliamentary source-trail witness, not the full Advice text. Use Spedding for context around Bacon, James, Neville, and the Undertakers; use Gardiner/TNA/local XML for the Advice text itself.
• This remains one of the strongest source-book-use packets: Neville demonstrably uses North/Plutarch. The book-safe inference is Neville's use of North, not Shakespeare authorship by itself.
• Open hardening step: obtain or identify the direct TNA image/copy source for SP 14/74, no. 44 and any relevant SP 14/74/44-46 variants.