Charles Neville 6th earl of Westmorland

Charles Neville Westmorland, 6th earl of , 1543-1601, English nobleman. A Roman Catholic by birth and connected with the powerful Howard family by marriage, he joined the rebellion (1569) led by Thomas Percy, earl of Northumberland against Queen Elizabeth I. The rebels captured Durham but failed in their attempt to rescue Mary Queen of Scots from prison. Westmorland fled, to live in exile on the Continent; he was attainted by Parliament in 1571.

Westmorland, Charles Neville, 6th earl of (1542–1601). Westmorland, a catholic, succeeded his father in the title and great estates in Durham in 1564. Five years later he joined his neighbours Lord Dacre and the 7th earl of Northumberland in the rising of the northern earls to release Mary, queen of Scots, from captivity and restore the old religion. After initial success, occupying Durham and Ripon and saying mass in the cathedrals, he fled before Lord Sussex and went into exile, never to return. He survived as a pensioner of Spain, implicated in many plots against Elizabeth's life. This was the last baronial rising in England and, significantly, in the northern counties where personal loyalties remained. Raby castle and the Neville estates were taken into crown hands and sold in the 1630s to Sir Henry Vane, father of the parliamentarian, and ancestor of the earls of Darlington, dukes of Cleveland.

J. A. Cannon