Abstract
By the end of the sixteenth century, the network of British foreign relations stretched from the European states to the Near East, and the foreign correspondents of Queen Elizabeth I ranged from the princes of the German states to the Sultans of Morocco and of the Ottoman Empire. Copies, drafts and minutes of these epistolary exchanges are preserved in many modern archives, so that anyone wishing to study the surviving evidence of Queen Elizabeth I’s diplomatic exchanges is confronted with a vast and dispersed body of sources.
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Notes
On Elizabethan administration and on the structure and composition of the secretariat see Geoffrey R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963);
Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). On the office of the Secretary of State, see
Florence M. Greir Evans, The Principal Secretary of State: A Survey of the Office from1558 to 1660 (Manchester; University Press / London and New York: Longmans, 1923). An important source for the context behind the production of diplomatic letters is
F. J. Platt, “The Elizabethan ‘Foreign Office’”, The Historian 56 (1994): 725–40. Rayne Allinson’s recent A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) includes an authoritative account of the composition of the queen’s letters and on the involvement of the different departments (esp. 17–36).
In particular, Lambeth Palace, London; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; and The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. One batch of papers, inherited by John Evelyn and lent to Samuel Pepys is now to be found in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge (Felix Pryor, Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters [Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003], 9). A. N. L. Munby reports that Alfred Morrison’s collection—dispersed in four auction sales at Sotheby’s between 1917 and 1919—was exceptionally rich in English letters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including, among others, whole volumes of letters of Queen Elizabeth I (The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England [London: The Athlone Press, 1962], 79).
Sir Thomas Wilson is stated to have been the first custodian of the Papers, from 1578, by Samuel R. Scargill-Bird in A Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents preserved in the Public Record Office (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896), xxxvi and by
Felix Pryor in Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters (Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 8. Other scholars disagree: according to F. Jeffrey Platt, John James succeeded Wilson in 1578 as custodian of the Papers (“James, John (c.1550–1601),” ODNB, while Susan Doran and Jonathan Woolfson point out that “about 1578 there was an appointment as clerk of the papers of state by letters patent, although the recipient is unknown” (“Wilson, Thomas (1523/4–1581),” ODNB). Further, it should be noted that although 1578 has generally been accepted as the earliest date for the office of Keeper of the State Papers, this has never been proved. I am grateful to the Early Modern Records Specialist at The National Archives, Dr. Katy Mair, for pointing this out to me.
James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), 23.
The manuscript collation of Elizabeth I’s holograph drafts and final versions of Italian letters does indicate the existence of intermediate, now lost, versions, as Bajetta’s essay in this volume shows, see p. 135. The function of intermediate versions in the production of holograph letters would, however, have differed from that of our conjectural intermediate version: while the latter can be assumed to have functioned as a copytext for a scribe, the former—whether scribal or by the queen—might have also been used to ease authorial revision: as Woudhuysen observes: “a fresh scribal copy saved the author from having to recopy his own work. His drafts might include additions, deletions, and revisions which a scribe would tidy up in a fair copy” (H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 103).
Alongside the copies of English letters the Guildhall letter-book also includes copies of the French correspondence analyzed by Guillaume Coatalen in “‘Ma plume vous pourra exprimer’: Elizabeth’s French Correspondence,” in Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi, eds., Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 83–104. The significance of letter-books for the investigation of the afterlives of letters has recently been explored by Daybell, The Material Letter, 175–216; on the evidence of letter-books in the study of the queen’s letters see also Carlo Bajetta, “Elizabeth I, Chiappino Vitelli and Federico Zuccaro: Two Unpublished Letters,” Notes and Queries 60, no. 3 (2013): 386–91.
Heather Wolfe, “‘Neatly Sealed, With Silk, and Spanish Wax or Otherwise’: The Practice of Letter-Locking with Silk Floss in Early Modern Eng land,” in S. P. Cerasano and Steven W. May, eds., “In Prayse of Writing.” Early Modern Manuscript Studies in Honour of Peter Beal (London: British Library, 2012), 169–89. In spite of convincing textual evidence connecting both Lake’s messages to the letter to Queen Anne, it should be pointed out that the archives preserve another letter to another “Madame” dated January 28, 1595/6, copies of which survive in the SP France and the Guildhall MS (to the French King’s sister, SP 78/37, fol. 47; Guildhall MS, pp. 98–99).
J. F. Preston and Laetitia Yeandle, English Handwriting 1400–1650. An Introductory Manual (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 76, 80.
“Neatly sealed,” 179, 183. In Wolfe’s description, these letters were closed “through a series of accordion folds or else folded in half horizontally three or four times, with the resulting narrow strip of folded paper then folded in half vertically, forming a narrow, rectangular packet or a ‘small plight’ … The letters [were] then sealed with two small personal seals on either side of the packet, applied over silk, which has been tightly wrapped around the letter to secure it,” ibid. 170. On the significance of holograph letters by the queen see Woudhuysen, “The Queen’s Own Hand. A Preliminary Account,” in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, eds., Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: The British Library, 2007): 1–27, 25 and May, Queen Elizabeth I, xlii.
For example, CP 33/68, the text of a letter to the English Generals Drake and Hawkins, emended by Cecil; SP 97/2, fol. 41, to the Dragoman at the Porte Bartolomeo Brutti; SP 89/2, fol. 216, to Don Antonio, the exiled claimant to the throne of Portugal. On the last two letters, in Italian, see Carlo M. Bajetta, “Editing Elizabeth I’s Italian letters,” Journal of Early Modern Studies, 3 (2014): 41–68. See also Monica Santini’s essay in this volume, p. 238.
Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology1450–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 128.
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© 2014 Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, and Jonathan Gibson
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Andreani, A. (2014). Manuscripts, Secretaries, and Scribes: The Production of Diplomatic Letters at Court. In: Bajetta, C.M., Coatalen, G., Gibson, J. (eds) Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448415_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448415_1
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