NEILE, Sir Paul (1613-86), of Hutton Bonville, Birkby, Yorks. and Codnor Castle, Alfreton, Derbys.

Although Neile was the only son of a leading churchman, it was science rather than religion which proved to be the main driving force in his life – that, and his intense loyalty to Charles I and the Stuart family. Neile profited before the civil war from the high esteem in which the king held his father, who served as archbishop of York for much of Charles’s personal rule. He was knighted in 1633 – at the relatively young age of 20 – and two years later, in 1635, he was appointed a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber.30LC3/1, f. 25; LC5/134, p. 34; In 1636, he was granted a royal pardon for having killed a carter in a public altercation in London.31SO3/11, unfol. (entry for Jan. 1636). Neile had reportedly been ‘infinitely provoked’ by his victim, but it had probably not taken much for him to draw his sword, being, it seems, somewhat hot tempered.32Strafforde Letters, i. 504, 506; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 501. If this incident left a black mark against his name in the king’s eyes, he succeeded in redeeming himself during the first bishops’ war, in which he served as a gentleman volunteer in the troop of horse commanded by Sir Ralph Hopton*.33SP16/427/38, ff. 71, 73. After the Pacification of Berwick in June 1639, the king commanded Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke to return Archbishop Neile thanks for the ‘good service that his son Sir Paul Neile had done to the king at Berwick’.34Yorks. Diaries ed. C Jackson (Surt. Soc. lxv), 130. The nature of this ‘good service’ is not known.

As owners of the manor of Ripon, the archbishops of York had a strong proprietorial interest in the borough, which Archbishop Neile duly exercised on his son’s behalf. Having been made a freeman, at his own request, on 24 December 1639, Neile was returned by the burgage-holders of Ripon on 25 March 1640, together with the head of a local gentry family, William Malory.35Supra, ‘Ripon’; N. Yorks. RO, DC/RIC II, 1/1/2, p. 356. Neile received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. He showed a similar lack of interest in the proceedings of the ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry during the summer of 1640, signing none of their three petitions to the king for a reduction in the military burdens upon the county. However, he did support the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) in mid-September in his determination to have a clause, requesting that the king summon a new Parliament, removed from the third of these petitions.36Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 615. Defeat in the second bishops’ war had a calamitious impact on Neile’s interest at Ripon, for in the elections to the Long Parliament the town’s burgage-holders reportedly deserted him almost to man and returned William Malory’s son John in his place.37Supra, ‘Ripon’.

Neile was among the Yorkshire gentlemen whom Strafford summoned as defence witnesses at his trial in the spring of 1641. Giving evidence on 7 April, Neile testified that the majority of the gentlemen who had signed the third Yorkshire petition, of September 1640, had agreed to Strafford’s request for removing the clause for a new Parliament – a claim supported by Sir Edward Osborne*, Sir William Pennyman* and Sir William Savile*.38Procs. LP iii. 433, 438, 442-3, 449-50; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 600-1, 615-6. By May 1641, Neile and his family were living in his house in the cathedral close at Lincoln; and they were still there a year later, when he contributed £2 towards the relief of the distressed Protestants in Ireland.39E115/281/54; SP28/193, f. 48. Having attended the royal court at York in the spring of 1642, he signed a petition to Charles on 22 April from a group of Yorkshire royalists, requesting that the magazine at Hull remain there for the defence of the northern parts – a deliberate challenge to Parliament’s order that it be transported to London. On 25 April, the Commons voted that Neile and others associated with this petition be sent for as delinquents.40SP23/193, p. 346; CJ ii. 540b; LJ v. 15a, 86b; PJ ii. 213, 216, 380.

Neile was an active member of the royalist committee set up late in 1642 to maintain the earl of Newcastle’s northern royalist army, and in February 1643, he signed the so-called Yorkshire ‘engagement’, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the maintenance of the earl’s troops.41C10/55/96; CCAM 908. He himself lent £300 and signed bonds on the engagement for large sums of money.42Add. 15858, f. 237; SP19/12, p. 313; Bodl. Tanner 62, ff. 655-6; Doncaster Archives, DD/CROM/11/6. He appears to have been a close friend of the royalist governor of York, Sir William Savile, who bequeathed him a horse and £20.43Borthwick, Prerogative wills, will of Sir William Savile, Jan. 1644. With royalist control of Yorkshire threatened by the Fairfaxes and the Scots in the spring of 1644, Neile, Sir Edward Osborne, Sir Brian Palmes*, Sir Robert Stryckland* and other gentlemen wrote to Prince Rupert late in March, imploring him to come to the county’s defence.44Bodl. Firth c.7, f. 8; Add. 18981, ff. 121r-v.

At some point after the defeat at Marston Moor in July 1644, Neile made his way to Oxford, and he was there when the city surrendered in June 1646. He petitioned to compound in November 1646, claiming the benefit of the Oxford surrender articles, and was fined at one tenth of his estate. Initially, his fine was set at £2,430, but was then reduced to £1,810 and finally, in March 1647, to £802 – in part, because it emerged during composition proceedings that he enjoyed his manors of Hutton Bonville and Codnor in right of Chaloner Chute I* (who had married Neile’s mother-in-law) and William Sandys*, or their assigns, as trustees for Neile’s heirs.45SP23/193, pp. 337-8, 340-1, 349-52; CCC, 1559-60. Even so, he appears to have escaped very lightly, especially for one whose name featured repeatedly on parliamentary lists of ‘malignants’ deemed incapable of bearing public office in the event of a settlement.46CJ iii. 650b, 657b; LJ vii. 55b; x. 549a.

As a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber, Neile was allowed to attend Charles at Hampton Court in September 1647, when the king showed him a ‘perspective glass’ of a new design. Enthused by this and previous discussions with the king on such matters, and by his own evident interest in dioptrics, Neile embarked upon a ‘serious consideration and study of things optical’, resolving to ‘try what improvement might be made towards the perfection of perspective glasses and microscopes’. With the help of the leading London optical craftsmen John Reeve, whom he had met at Oxford in 1645, Neile spent most of the next ten years – and nearly £1,000 – conducting ‘trials and experiments’, and by the mid-1650s he was making considerable progress by using ‘divers convex spherical glasses in one tube’.47C6/160/184; SCA, Hartlib Pprs. 8/4A; 28/1/36B; 28/2/4A, 14A, 58A; 42/1/28B; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Paul Neile’. In 1658, he donated a 36-foot telescope (the longest and most powerful that had yet been constructed in England) to Gresham College in London – the venue for a series of scientific lectures during the late 1650s that Neile and other gentlemen scientists and natural philosophers attended.48H. Hartley, The Royal Soc.: its Origins and Founders, 18, 159, 163; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Paul Neile’. His spendthrift approach to science helped give rise to claims that he ‘dissipated a large fortune’ and that although he had been left a good estate he ‘ran it out so fast that he could not afford his father a monument’.49Surtees, Co. Dur. i. p. lxxxix; F. Drake, Eboracum (1736), 361. Neile was still sufficiently wealthy in January 1649 to lend his fellow Yorkshire royalist Sir Brian Palmes £2,000, although by May 1652 he himself was also borrowing money.50LC4/203, ff. 89, 192.

When he was not grappling with the intricacies of optical science, Neile had the Committee for Advance of Money to contend with. In March 1650, the Committee summoned him to show cause why he should not pay his proportion of the Yorkshire engagement (like all debts due to royalists, this was deemed payable to the state), and when he failed to appear before them, the sequestration commissioners seized his Yorkshire estate. Although required to pay half of his £300 fine, he may subsequently have been reimbursed after claiming the benefit of the Oxford surrender articles.51SP19/12, p. 313; SP19/121, ff. 51-3; CCAM, 926. In the mid-1650s, he was required to pay at least £50 for the decimation tax on his estate in Derbyshire.52J.T. Cliffe, ‘The Cromwellian decimation tax of 1655: the assessment lists’ (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, vii), 453. He was named for Yorkshire by the royalist exile Roger Whitley† on his 1658 list of potential leaders of a projected rebellion in England, but there is no evidence that Neile was involved in cavalier conspiracies during the 1650s.53Bodl. Eng. hist. e. 309, p. 51.

Neile came out of political retirement in the elections to the 1660 Convention, when he stood for Northallerton with the backing of his father’s old friend, John Cosin, who, as bishop of Durham, was lord of the manor. Cosin’s agents canvassed hard on Neile’s behalf, and he himself may have enjoyed a proprietorial interest in the borough, for his estate at Hutton Bonville lay just a few miles to the north of the town. But the boroughmen rejected both Neile and another of Cosin’s candidates, the Lancashire royalist Gilbert Gerard†, in favour of two prominent local men, the former parliamentarian and Rumper Francis Lascelles* and his brother Thomas.54Durham Univ. Lib. Mickleton and Spearman ms 31, f. 12; ms 46, ff. 135, 139, 151, 165; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Northallerton’. At the Restoration, Neile was rewarded for his loyalty to the Stuart cause by being appointed a gentleman, and then a gentleman usher, of Charles II’s privy chamber.55Eg. 2542, ff. 361-2.

His enthusiasm for science undiminished, Neile was one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society (as were several of those who had attended the Gresham College lectures) and was present at its inaugural meeting on 28 November 1660.56de Beer, ‘Earliest Fellows of the Royal Soc.’, 184. One of his most important contributions to the Society was to propose his ‘assured friend’, the philosopher John Locke, as a Fellow in 1668.57The Corresp. of John Locke ed. E. S. de Beer, i. 300; ii. 383-4; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 372; M. Hunter, The Royal Soc. and its Fellows 65, 160-1. Neile may also have been a friend or patron of Thomas Hobbes.58SP9/7/19. He was certainly on close terms with another celebrated Fellow, (Sir) Christopher Wren, who shared Neile’s passion for astronomy. It was whilst using Neile’s telescopes in the mid-1650s that Wren had arrived at his ‘hypothesis of Saturn’ – a theory to account for early observations of the planet’s rings, which Wren mistakenly assumed formed a corona attached to the planet at opposite points on its equator.59Hartley, Royal Soc. 159, 162-3. Despite Neile’s own work in the field of astronomy, his only paper to the Society was a ‘Discourse on Cider’.60Hartley, Royal Soc. 161 Neile’s eldest son, William, who showed considerable talent as a mathematician before his death in 1670, also became a Fellow.61Oxford DNB, ‘William Neile’.

In 1673, Neile and his business partner Henry Savile† were elected on the court interest for the newly-created parliamentary constituency of Newark, in Nottinghamshire. However, because the government had enfranchised the borough without parliamentary authority, their return met with stiff opposition in the Commons, and in 1677 the House declared the result invalid.62HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘Newark’.

Neile died early in 1686 and was buried at St Benet Fink, London, on 9 February, in accordance with his wish to be interred in the same church in which his mother had been buried in 1647.63St Benet Fink par. reg.; PROB11/382, f. 164v. In his will – in which he styled himself ‘of Codnor Castle’ – he made no reference to his landed estate, even though he had disinherited his only surviving son for escapades considered discreditable to the family’s good name. All Neile left him was a diamond ring that had been given to Archbishop Neile by the king of Denmark. He bequeathed the residue of his personal estate to his executrix, Margaret, countess dowager of Marlborough (the widow of William Ley, 4th earl of Marlborough), who was evidently a close friend of his (there is no evidence that they were related).64PROB11/382, f. 164; Surtees, Co. Dur. i. p. lxxxix; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Paul Neile’. Neile was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.