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FOR ACCESS TO ALL THE ITEMS AVAILABLE ON THIS WEBSITE, PLEASE CLICK : http://www.henryneville.com/index.php?option=com_mambomap&Itemid=30 Sir Henry Neville as Ambassador in France Sir Henry was Ambassador to France for only fifteen months (between 1599 and 1601). His original ‘contract’ had been meant to keep him there for a minimum of two years, but he so hated the job that he wrote to Robert Cecil and told him that if the Queen would not permit him to come home early, then he would return without her licence, live hermit in the ‘Forest’ and ‘contemplate my time as a bad ambassador’ (all of which strongly suggests the character of Jacques in As You Like It, set in the Forest of the Ardennes.)
Neville had not wanted to accept the post of Ambassador in the first place. John Chamberlain, court gossip and letter-writer, wrote that Neville had used every argument possible to try and dissuade the Queen from appointing him to the position. Ambassadors in those days were expected largely to fund themselves, and Neville argued that with eight children to support he certainly could not afford to do so. Besides, he had just paid for a lease on Sir Henry Unton’s estate. Unton, Neville’s friend and neighbour, had been impoverished and made ill by accepting diplomatic service in France, and Neville had helped him and his young wife by buying some of his property. Unton then died in France, the Queen having refused permission to let him return home when he was ill. Neville had no desire to follow in Unton’s footsteps and, too, he had political and other interests firmly based in England! Above all, he had had plenty of leisure to partake in ‘that Beatitude which Horace so much commends’ (as Neville himself puts it) which was to look after his country estate and write. Even being an M.P. in England (as Neville then was) did not keep him anywhere near as busy as a modern M.P. is today. Yet even nowadays M.P.s also find the time to write, and the 16th century afforded them even more opportunity in this respect. Public representatives were drawn exclusively from the ranks of men with riches, who could afford servants and scribes galore. After all, Sir Francis Bacon sat on Parliamentary committees, was much poorer than Neville, yet still found time to write his great works on Philosophy. Added to this, Parliament was more often prorogued than nowadays, and M.P.s were sent back to their country estates every time there was plague in London, which was not an infrequent occurrence. So it was hardly any wonder that Neville was reluctant to change his part-time public work in England for a full-time post abroad. Chamberlain ultimately wrote that it was only the Earl of Essex’s intervention that finally persuaded Neville to take on the French Ambassadorship. Essex’s personal representative in France wished to return to England, so Essex argued that Neville might become his (Essex’s) unofficial representative there at the same time as pursuing his official role. Essex must therefore always have commanded more respect from Neville than did the Queen; perhaps that Earl also promised Neville extra expenses, though we have no record of this. Yet now the balance was finally tipped towards France, Sir Henry tried to make the best of it. He completed much of Henry V while travelling there, especially, probably, during his three week sojourn at a Dover inn waiting for the wind to change direction. The finishing touches to the play may well have been added during Henry’s early days on French soil, as I explain in The Truth Will Out . Once in France, Neville tried first to establish exactly what the Queen wished him to do and how she thought he should do it. His insistence on obtaining every last letter of his instructions from the Queen or Cecil, in writing, could be construed as being a delaying tactic as well as an insurance against the Queen later claiming that Neville had in any way contravened her wishes. Whatever the case may be, however, the result was that Sir Henry spent the first days of his Ambassadorship chatting with King Henri IV (whom he appeared to know already) and looking round Fontainebleau. To be sure, this leisurely existence was occasionally punctuated by heated arguments with Henri’s representative, Villeroy, but one gathers the impression that Sir Henry doth protest too much about these. Neville writes copious letters back to Cecil telling him almost every word of the dialogues he has had with Villeroy and the King: it is as if he is used to writing in dialogue form and finds it rather easy! Eventually, even the meticulous Cecil stopped replying to Neville’s every letter, which caused Sir Henry some alarm, until Cecil finally wrote and told him the reason for his silence: the Queen was very concerned about how much Neville was costing regarding the bill for paper! Even the letters he wrote, though long, could not be said to be using superfluous paper, so for what was all the extra paper being used? It is tempting to think the paper may have been for his personal writing. And, later on, we are given a hint of Neville’s personal interest in play scripts when Neville’s secretary sends him the texts of plays (or early operas) he had seen in Italy, to which Neville replied that he would like him to send more as ‘such things please here.’ (Sir Henry was later sent texts by Beaumont and Fletcher whose writing he is recorded to have encouraged. It is also significant that Neville was a personal friend and promoter of Thomas Edmondes, friend of actors and frequenter of the Mermaid, whom Neville appointed as his Steward as soon as he knew he was definitely going to have to take the job in France.) Then Neville writes to Cecil that he is constantly spending up to four hours waiting round for various French noblemen to turn up for appointments they have made to see him, only to find that most of them never appear at all. Neville claims to take this as a snub. The French nobles never cease telling him that he ought to be an Earl to be deemed important enough to serve in their country; but the point is that their snubs certainly allowed Neville enough time for his writing. He is even reported to have kept putting off certain Englishmen in France who were craving an audience with him, however, perhaps again suggesting that Neville considered he had ‘better things to do’. One such Englishman (who wrote anonymously) claimed that Neville seemed ‘wholly Scottish’, spending his time with the Scots nobles then in Paris. Of course, Neville may well have felt this was part of his job too, since he had always felt compelled to watch that James VI of Scotland and his noblemen adhered to the Protestant cause. Mary Queen of Scots had stated in her will that if James did not become a Catholic, then the King of Spain should take over her realm after her death, and seek to rule England too. So Neville must have felt that one very important (though secret) mission he could carry out while in France was, on the one hand, to keep the Scots true to the Protestant cause while, on the other, also sowing disinformation (designed to reach the Spanish) that King James VI was a Catholic at heart. He would indeed have needed to know all the tactics of Machiavelli in order to pursue such a dual role, but Neville was certainly disguiser enough to be able to carry it through. (Neville self-confessedly attended the King of Spain’s funeral in disguise.) Thus, one way or another, Neville combined sticking to the minimum letter of the Queen’s commands with following his own political and private interests. And one of those private interests was looking up old friends. Despite his Protestant stance, one of Neville’s best friends while in France was Charles Paget, the moderate Catholic who had also worked for Walsingham’s spy service and, according to the then Venetian ambassador, had become an agent provocateur and sown the seeds of the Babington plot, which was designed to bring a charge of treason against Mary, the Scottish Queen. Paget is also often charged with having been the author of Leicester’s Commonwealth – two copies of which banned book are to be seen among Neville’s papers in the Lincolnshire Record Office. Paget was a personal friend of the Catholic Earl of Northumberland, and tutor to his children; it was among the Earl of Northumberland’s papers that the famous Northumberland Manuscript was discovered in 1867. At the head of this Manuscript is Neville’s name, with a Latin poem woven around Neville’s family motto written beneath it. In the centre of the Manuscript, Leicester’s Commonwealth is listed. At its foot, William Shakespeare’s signature is practiced over and over again. Neville, therefore, seems to have had a greater connection with Paget than he ever allowed to be documented. Next, Neville was sent to Boulogne to negotiate a peace treaty, wherein he also found he was less busy than he had expected to be. So bored and frustrated was he that he disappeared for a whole month, even ignoring desperate enquiries from his friend and secretary ... to be continued. copyright Brenda James |
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