Newcastle was a royalist exile in continental Europe in the latter part of the First English Civil War and the Interregnum. He then returned to England and lived to 1676. His life shows many instances of cultural and intellectual patronage.

Relationship with Hobbes[edit]

Hobbes was employed by another branch of the Cavendish family (the Devonshire Cavendishes, who owned Chatsworth House). His association with Welbeck started at a date that is not completely clear. It was certainly by 1631, when he was tutor to a different Earl of the same name, William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire.^[18] But possibly Hobbes had met Mansfield (as he then was) by 1627, on a tour of the Peak District, according to surviving poems (his own and by Richard Andrews), as related by Noel Malcolm.^[19] Hobbes himself claimed he had been in discussion with the Cavendish brothers by 1630; by 1636 he was engaging in a scientific correspondence with Newcastle.^[20] A manuscript work from the Cavendish group of this period, the so-called Short Tract on First Principles, is considered by Malcolm to be by Payne though very much influenced by the issues Hobbes was addressing at the time, and his approach. But the work has also been attributed to Hobbes himself, by scholars from Ferdinand Tönnies (who christened it) onwards.^[21]