Part 3: Documenting Henry Neville's Handwriting and the Northumberland Manuscript

In Part 1 and Part 2 I compared the Northumberland Manuscript flyleaf with Henry Neville's handwriting. I claim that Henry Neville could write in several different styles, including a formal and much more formal secretary hand.

There is a letter from 1590 which, I believe, demonstrates this clearly. I want to go into detail on this letter, explaining all of the circumstances surrounding it. This level of detail is necessary to establish the baseline for Henry Neville's handwriting. First we must establish clearly what Henry Neville wrote with his own hand, and then we can start comparing those samples to the Northumberland Manuscript flyleaf.

The Details of the 1590 Letter at the British Library

Here is the catalog entry from the British Library, you can access the entry via this permalink:

Title: Sir Henry Nevell's complaint to Lord Burghley, that he is rigidly used by Lord Warwick for casting iron ordnance, 1590.
Collection Area: Western Manuscripts
Reference: Lansdowne MS 65/22
Creation Date: 1590

This letter is available on State Papers Online, it is Document Number: MC4305085404. Here is a complete transcription of the letter done by John O'Donnell.

The British Library entry says "Sir Henry Nevell" because that is how the letter is signed. (Note, at that time, Neville's father was a "Sir" but he wasn't.) Here is the signature:

Note how he signs it "Neuell". This is the earliest letter we currently have from Henry Neville. His later signatures are identical in style but he write "Neuill" with an "i". His father spelled his name with an "e", but he consistently -- from at least 1594 on -- always spelled it with an "i".

The Folger Library has a letter from Henry Neville's father to Nathaniel Bacon. Neville's stepmother was Elizabeth Bacon, so this is a letter from Henry Neville's father to his brother-in-law at the time. Elizabeth and Nathaniel were older half-siblings to Francis Bacon. You can read the whole letter from Henry Neville's father at the Folger website. The signature is completely different:

So it is very clear this 1590 letter is from the son, not the father, even though it is signed "Nevell." In addition, the contents of the letter relate to Henry Neville, the son's, business casting iron ordnance. In 1590 he was running an ironworks in Sussex at Mayfield, which his family inherited from Thomas Gresham, his mother's uncle.

Style Variation Throughout the Letter

There are 31 lines total in the letter, but you can see how the writing gets spottily less formal as the letter progresses. The scribe also seems to be realizing that they are running out of space. The last 7 lines take up as much space as the first five:

However, it does not appear that there are two different people writing this letter. It appears to be the work of one individual who has a style that can vary. Here are examples of "that" and "That" taken from the letter. Note especially how line 1 and line 16 vary. The capital "T" is different and the "h" is different. But line 8 and line 26 and 28 are quite close matches.

As far as I can tell, Henry Neville had two ways of writing an "h". Example 1 above is his formal "h" and example 16 shows his informal "h".

Compare to this letter of 1594 where the capital "T" varies in the exact same word and the exact same way  as the capital "T" in examples 1 and 16 above:

Later, I will have more on this variation in the "T" and how it relates to Henry Neville's scribbles and the Northumberland Manuscript flyleaf. There is a great deal of consistency in variation across the documents.

Comparing "the"

Here are some examples of "the" that make this very clear. For almost the whole letter he  maintains a fancy "the" until line 26 and 28 where a less fancy version slips in with a different "h" and a different "e". At first one might think that a different scribe had started writing the letter at this point. But if you look at lines 26 and 28 you can see the writer maintains the fancy "that" in lines 26 and 28. It does not appear that there are two individuals here; rather there is one person who is able to vary their handwriting:

Here is a portion of the end of the letter. You can see how the "th" and "e" vary though it doesn't appear to be the handwriting of two individuals. It appears that one individual at the close of the letter is not maintaining the "fancy style" consistently:

Conclusion

it is very clear that the 1590 letter was written by only one person, and that person varied their handwriting in very specific ways. That matches Henry Neville's other letters as well as the Northumberland Manuscript flyleaf. I will provide more details on all of this later. But this is very important evidence to establish baseline samples for further comparisons.