The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (2): The “Tower Notebook”

[Second in a multi-part series on Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out, which posits that Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. Part 1 was the first of three discussing James & Rubinstein’s claim that “concrete documentation” supports their theory.]

The “documentary evidence” that supposedly goes furthest to prove Neville’s authorship is an anonymous 196-page manuscript bearing the title, “Serieantiez of sundrie kindes, Namely, Personall Services appertaining to the thronne and kings of this Realme as well in tymes of warre as of peace and pastime, Especially at there Coronation, Copyed and collected out of the Recordes in the tower Anno 1602”. James & Rubinstein deal with only one page of this document, describing posts of honor claimed by various personages at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. This, they declare, “contains many parallels with the coronation scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, although Henry VIII was not written or performed until 1613, more than ten years later” [p. 44].

Act IV, Scene 1 of that play shows Anne and her attendants in procession to the ceremony. The elaborate stage directions, captioned “The Order of the Coronation”, draw heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicle (1587), the source for much else in the play. The playwright subtracted a little (omitting the Earl of Oxford in his office of Great Lord Chamberlain, for instance) and altered a couple of names (e. g., the Earl of Arundel for the Earl of Surrey) but neither added nor rearranged anything. By and large, he simply copied. (For a detailed comparison, vide W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared, pp. 484-5 (1896).)

The “Tower Notebook”, as J&R call it, has just two points of overlap with “The Order of the Coronation” (all quotations from J&R’s transcription on pp. 45-6 of their book; bracketed inserts are theirs):

1. Notebook: “maior of London to serve the k[ing] in p[er]son in the halle and his chamb[e]r with a cup gold, & that his fee to cary awaye”

Henry VIII: “Maior of London, bearing the Mace.” (Cf. Holinshed: “then after them went the maior of London with his mace”.)

2. Notebook: “Barons 5 ports claym to cary the canapie on 4 Lances gylt sylver. 4 men at a lance.”

Henry VIII: “A Canopy borne by foure of the Cinque-Ports; under it, the Queene in her Robe; in her haire richly adorned with Pearle, Crowned.” (Cf. Holinshed: “Then proceeded foorth the queene in a circot and robe of purple velvet furred with ermine, in hir here, coiffe, and circlet as she had saturdaie; and over hir was borne the canopie by foure of the five ports”.)

That’s it. Fourteen persons or groups, not counting Anne herself, make up the procession in Henry VIII. All are listed in Holinshed. Only the two shown above appear in the Notebook, the rest of whose material has no reflection in the play.

Is there any reason to believe, on the strength of these feeble parallels, that the author of Henry VIII made use of, much less personally compiled, the document to which J&R attach such significance? None is visible.

Nor is there much reason to credit J&R’s assertion that the manuscript “is unquestionably from Sir Henry Neville” [p. 47]. Their proof rests on a handful of weak or spurious arguments.

1. Neville was living in the Tower of London in 1602, the date on the cover page, condemned for misprision of treason (for having failed to disclose to the authorities his advance knowledge of the Earl of Essex’s planned coup d’etat of February 1601). He could have broken the monotony of his imprisonment by hiring a scribe to comb through the Tower archives, and J&R fancifully elaborate on how he hoped to win back Queen Elizabeth’s favor by writing a play featuring her parents, for which the cited page in the Notebook furnished background material. Why, though, should we think that more likely than the straightforward hypothesis that a royal scrivener compiled the data to assist in resolving the disputes about precedence and protocol that were endemic to the Court?

2. The Notebook first came to light, J&R tell us, in 1954, when its owner donated it to the Lincolnshire Record Office. That owner was a collateral descendant of Henry Neville. Moreover, the document was “bundled together with other works also annotated by Neville, and with a letter on a subject about which he had been in correspondence” [p. 227]. The letter is never mentioned again, so we can’t judge whether it bears on the question. (J&R’s uncharacteristically tentative phrasing suggests that it doesn’t.) The works allegedly “annotated by Neville” are two manuscript copies of the famous diatribe Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584), which have marginal notes in an unknown hand. J&R think that Neville wrote them but offer only the thinnest of support. The principal points are (i) “the name ‘Neville’ is emboldened and/or commented on every time it appears” and (ii) Neville was “together in Scotland in 1583” with Charles Paget, a Roman Catholic exile who may have had a hand in writing Commonwealth. The former means little without information about comments and “emboldenings” elsewhere in the text, which J&R do not supply. The latter is almost certainly wrong. J&R present no evidence that Neville and Paget met in 1583, and Paget probably wasn’t in Scotland at all that year. He normally resided in Paris or Rouen. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he visited England in 1583, apparently in furtherance of an abortive Catholic conspiracy, but went no farther north than Sussex. Other supposed indications of Neville’s responsibility for the Leicester’s Commonwealth annotations are less cogent than these. Even if they were his, of course, that would scarcely prove that he also put together the Tower Notebook. From the fact that two books were at one time part of the same library, it does not follow that the same man wrote them!

3. J&R think it significant that “The role of the Cinque Port Barons is stressed [sic – a bit of an exaggeration] both in the Notebook and in the play of Henry VIII” [p. 220]. Neville, they inform us, was himself a baron of the Cinque Ports [p. 47]. From that “fact”, they spin out a tale about how he may have expected to be one of King James’ canopy bearers and suggest that the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 125 express his disappointment at being passed over. Unfortunately for their argument, Henry Neville was not a baron of the Cinque Ports. That honorific then belonged to the Members of Parliament for the boroughs that comprised the Confederation of the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, Sandwich, Winchelsea, Rye and Seaford). Neville never sat for any of those places, nor was he a member of Parliament at all in 1602. Owing to his imprisonment, he had not been able to stand in the election of 1601. Before then, he had successively represented the borough of New Windsor, the county of Sussex and the borough of Liskeard in Cornwall; none of them belongs to the Cinque Ports. Where J&R got their odd notion, I can’t imagine, but this error vitiates not just their discussion of the Tower Notebook but also their repeated invocations of Sonnet 125’s canopy-carrying line as some kind of pro-Neville evidence.

4. One of the persons mentioned in the Notebook is “Jon Lo[rd] Latimer” (John Neville, Third Baron Latimer (1493–1543)), who served as “sewer” (banquet supervisor) at the Boleyn coronation. That reference sets J&R off on a flight of fancy: “[A] Neville . . . is foregrounded here, making it even more likely that these annotations were written by [Henry] Neville, and that he had originally chosen this member of the Neville ‘clan’ to feature in this play” [p. 223]. They then must concoct a labyrinthine explanation of why Latimer does not in fact appear. The only Neville on stage is Lord Abergavenny (George Neville, third Baron Bergavenny (c.1469–1535)), a minor character whom J&R confuse with Henry Neville’s grandfather, Sir Edward Neville (c.1482–1538).

Like the marginalia discussed in Part 1, the Tower Notebook lacks any discernible link to either Shakespeare’s works or Henry Neville. What’s more, J&R’s incessant errors of reasoning and fact suggest that they either lack competence in handling their material or are so caught up in their thesis that they have lost the ability to check their work for accuracy. One wonders again whether The Truth Will Out can really be the work product of its nominal authors.

Part 3: Filching from the Baconians