The Audley End Tacitus and Henry Neville

The copy of Tacitus at Audley End has literally hundreds of annotations by Henry Neville and his tutor Henry Savile. It's very fun to explore this book and see all the interesting connections.

In this letter to Robert Cecil from 1599, Henry Neville quotes Tacitus (beneficia eo usque laeta sunt dum videntur exolvi posse: ubi multum antevenere pro gratia odium redditur, Annals, Book IV, Chapter 18):

The exact same passage is underlined and bracketed in the Audley End Tacitus:

When Henry Neville signed his name, he used a looped underline under it. The exact same type of looped underline appears in the Audley End Tacitus:

Here is the signature:

Compare them directly:

The word "Julius" appears in two annotations. Henry Neville wrote the same word in italic in addressing letters to Sir Julius Caesar. The handwriting it absolutely identical:

Henry Neville varied his handwriting a great deal. Here you can see four capital R examples from the Tacitus annotations: two type A, one type B,  and one type C. The exact same variation occurs in Henry Neville's handwriting:

Most of Henry Neville's lower case Ds and the ones in the Tacitus are fully formed. But both the Tacitus and Henry Neville's handwriting sometimes have these that look like a reverse 6. Here is Tacitus:

Here's Henry Neville:

In the image below, the top three examples are Henry Neville's handwriting; the rest are from the Audley End Tacitus.

Here we have the same word in Henry Neville's handwriting (top) and the Audley End Tacitus (bottom). Clearly the same person's handwriting:

Here in the Audley End Tacitus the word "maiestatis" is abbreviated. Henry Neville used the exact same form of abbreviation for "majestie" in his letters in English (and one in French):

Compare the double-S on the left from the Tacitus with the right, Henry Neville; perfect match:

Top is Henry Neville, bottom two are Tacitus: