As the inheritor of an iron works producing ordnance, Neville was almost bound to come into some sort of conflict with the establishment. Unlike other armaments manufacturers of the day, he was not willing to tolerate the ‘usual’ corrupt practices. For instance, he refused to pay Ambrose Dudley, the then Earl of Warwick, what amounted to bribes. Dudley reported to the Queen on matters concerned with the export of ordnance, and Sir Henry’s refusal to pay Dudley in order to ensure that he kept the Queen on Henry’s side, automatically put Neville on a collision course with Queen Elizabeth. However, it was a course he had not personally sought out, so it must have seemed unjust to him to find the Queen was prone to take the word of those near to her favourite - the Earl of Leicester - whose brother Ambrose was.
Henry was not therefore overjoyed when the Queen named him for a post which took him and his large family away from England. He was a rather a reluctant Ambassador in France. While serving the Queen while in that office, there is little doubt that Sir Henry was, like Brutus in Julius Caesar, also keeping in mind the possibility of joining his friends for the good of the state, if he ultimately found the Queen's rule impossible to comply with. He had always admired the Earl of Essex - as his letters to Robert Cecil enquiring of the Earl's progress in Ireland - betray. It should not have come as a complete surprise, then, to everyone to discover that Neville had been involved in that Earl's uprising. Nevertheless, such was Henry's personal integrity and respectability, that it appears to have amazed even those closest to him. And he certainly seemed to have taken Essex's side through a perception of 'common good to all', like Brutus, not simply in his own interests, though he was at the same time resisting the Queen's orders for him to return to France and complete his term of Ambassadorship there. Such was the harshness of the times, however, that every man of honour was bound to have mixed motives for his decisions and actions.
But Sir Henry was a strong, capable and intelligent man, so he felt he was morally right in his actions. During Elizabeth’s reign, he felt he had done his best to avoid open conflict with the Queen. He had manufactured cannons which defended her country during the Spanish Armadas. But when the worst of the threats retreated, he eventually sold most of his interest in the iron works he had inherited. He clearly did not like the business itself, so sold it off once he had done his duty by using it in defence of Queen and country. Armed with new clothes and an impressive appearance (but no longer armed with cannons) he was able to get himself noticed at Court. He desperately wanted to rise in English political circles but, perhaps because the Queen found his quiet, commanding yet defiant presence somewhat intimidating, she insisted he take up the office of Ambassador to France.
Until this moment, one aspect of Sir Henry’s personality had definitely been that of the genial yet wiley country gentleman. (He owned the large estate of Billingbear in Berkshire and was also a keeper of a large part of Windsor Forest.) He even had true feelings for the poor on his estate – a quality lacking in the vast majority of landowners at the time – as witnessed by the fact that he kept a letter from the poor petitioning him for his help. Robert Cecil – his kinsman as well as his friend – remarked on what a ‘merry company’ Neville and his family were when they were together. From the Earl of Southampton’s wife he and earned the nickname of ‘Falstaff’. It is easy to see why, when one notes that Neville’s French butcher was the first person he wished to be paid off after he had returned from France, and that Henry once failed to turn up for an appointment because he had been taken up with hunting a large deer. His increasing lameness from obesity and gout also added to this once so handsome yet now outwardly Falstaffian appearance.
But it would be wrong to conclude that Falstaff was a complete alter-ego of the complex Sir Henry Neville. Neville was primarily an intellectual, and respected as such among his peers. His tutor at Oxford, the serious-minded Sir Henry Savile, chose him as his favourite student, and Savile and Neville toured the continent together looking for ancient Greek texts and visiting European philosophers. One of these philosophers corresponded with Neville afterwards in Latin, and told Savile how impressed he was with the then teenager. Sir Philip Sidney also wrote that Neville was considered ‘virtuous’, and Neville became the friend of renowned writers and thinkers of the day. The beautiful and linguistically creative style Neville used in his private letters and diplomatic dispatches indeed attest to the intellectual and poetic ability he possessed.
Later, under James I, Henry appeared to his fellow Parliamentarians to be the most open opposer of the King’s monetary policy. Yet he was at the same time leading the ‘Undertakers’ who were a group of men relaying to the King exactly what had happened in private Parliamentary sessions. Machiavellian indeed - on the surface, at least! Yet all the time there is no doubt that Sir Henry considered his actions to be once again in the interests of the State. He knew how injurious an absolute monarchy could be, but he wished to avoid Civil War. He thought that the only way of preventing this was to get the King and Parliament to negotiate - to remain on speaking terms with each other, when communications certainly were breaking down at the time. In many ways, therefore, his ‘Merchant’ business experience, plus his brief entry into the rebel Essex’s camp, had taught him that the best basis for the whole of public life was to keep open every door of negotiation rather than to come into open conflict.
Yet Neville only truly asserted his strong personality within a political context. He opposed monarchs, but never did what he did ‘in envy of great Caesar. He only, in general honest thought, and common good to all,’ made one of the Essex conspirators. But Essex and the other intellectuals he assembled together recognised Neville’s true worth and wished him to become their Secretary of State, had their rebellion succeeded. However, Neville decided, for the many reasons given in The Truth Will Out (plus extra reasons which I reveal in Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code) to publish his works under a pseudonym. The encrypted Greek inscription on the side of his life-size portrait at Audley End House in Essex reads ‘Everywhere Without Visible Signs.’ Sir Henry, as Ben Jonson says of him, was ‘the same in root thou art in height’. But that root was intended to be well hidden by a man who wished the influence of his Works to benefit the people, even though circumstances had prevented him from instituting all the practical policies he had in mind to benefit the nation, if he had ever succeeded in gaining high political office. In his later years, Neville was seriously worried about how posterity would view him. Without the knowledge that he had written the great Plays, Neville’s complex ideas seemed ‘impossible dreams’ to many of his contemporaries, especially to the prosaic Sir Francis Bacon.
Neville had shown himself to be a man seemingly full of contradictions. Though a staunch Protestant, Sir Henry had nevertheless numbered Catholics among his best friends. Though progressive in business and politics, he had nevertheless treasured the best of the old feudal chivalric ideals and ceremonies. The Earls of Southampton and Pembroke were known as his champions. So, as John Chamberlain, Court gossip and letter-writer once said of him, ‘Sir Henry Neville reconciles all.’ And as Ben Jonson again says in a wonderful epigram dedicated to Sir Henry, his friend, ‘Thy deeds unto thy name will prove new wombs,/While others seek for titles to their Tombs.’
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