Abstract
“Who would not respect a king,” asked the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, “who dispatches a letter that he himself has written?”2 Prior to the late fifteenth century, most political commentators would have answered Erasmus’s question in the negative. Medieval rulers saw writing as an arduous and unnecessary form of manual labor best delegated to secretaries. Although the “word of the king” carried legal authority and numinous power, the “hand of the king” was not needed to apply ink to paper in order for a document to be “authored” by him. Yet over the centuries, as attitudes toward literacy shifted, administrative departments grew, and humanist scholars began to emphasize a new conceptual link between authorship and authority, letter writing came to be seen not only as a hallmark of courtly cultivation, but as a demonstration of a monarch’s active engagement in affairs of state. Although the extent of a ruler’s involvement in letter production varied according to temperament, by the mid-sixteenth century, letter writing had become an integral part of a monarch’s job description.
So it is that by cause wryttyng to me is su[m]what tedius and paynefull therfor the most part off thes bysynesses I have co[m]myttyd to our trusty co[n]seler thys berrar to be declaryd to yow by mowth.
— Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey, c. 15201
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Notes
Erasmus, “De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronunciatione” (1528), Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. J. K. Sowards (27 vols., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), VOL. xxvi, p. 391.
Erasmus, “De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronunciatione” (1528), Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. J. K. Sowards (27 vols., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), VOL. xxvi, p. 391.
M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell [1979], 1999), p. 308.
C. P. Wormald, “The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and Its Neighbours,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 27 (1977), pp. 95, 98–99.
Pierre Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (London; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–2.
Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, the Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (London; New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 142.
The earliest royal seal held in the British Museum is the signet impression of Offa, King of the Mercians, c. 790. William G. Birch, Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum (6 vols., London: Longmans and Co., 1887), vol. 1, p. 1.
Jean Friossart describes how the bishop of Lincoln presented letters to the French king Philip VI which were “written on parchment and fixed with a great seal that hung from them.” Quoted in G. P. Cuttino, English Diplomatic Administration, 1259–1339 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 129.
Sometimes certain seals were applied simply because they were most ready to hand. Chaplais, “The Seals and Original Charters of Henry I,” The English Historical Review, 75:295 (1960), pp. 260–275.
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 312. For more on the complex evolution of royal seals see G. R. Elton, England 1200–1640; The Sources of History: Studies in the Use of Historical Evidence (London: Sources of History Ltd, 1969), p. 35;
T. F. Tout, Chapters in the administrative history of mediaeval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seals (6 vols., Manchester: Longmans, 1920–33);
H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal of England (London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1926);
Alfred Wyon, Great Seals of England (London: Chiswick Press, 1887); Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 308–318.
Chaplais, “Private Letters of Edward I,” The English Historical Review, 77:302 (1962), pp. 79–80.
Iain Fenlon and John Milsom, “‘Ruled Paper Imprinted’: Music Paper and Patents in Sixteenth-Century England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37:1 (1984), p. 143;
Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1978), p. 115.
L. C. Hector, The Handwriting of English Documents (London: Edward Arnold, 1958), pp. 15–20.
S. Bentley, “Extracts from the Privy Purse expenses of King Henry the Seventh, 1491–1505,” in Excerpta Historica (London: Samuel Bentley, 1831), p. 94.
Tate also supplied the first English printers William Caxton and Wynken de Worde with material for their publications. Allan Stevenson, “Tudor Roses from John Tate,” Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), pp. 18–19, 33.
Although the “republic of letters” is a movement usually associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, some historians have traced its origins to the sixteenth century and beyond. See for example Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch (eds.), The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Gideon Burton, “From Ars dictaminis to Ars conscribiendi epistolis: Renaissance Letter-Writing Manuals in the Context of Humanism,” in Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell (eds.), Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), p. 88.
See also Judith Rice Henderson, “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 331–55.
Caroline Amelia Halsted, Life of Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of King Henry the Seventh (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1839), pp. 210–11.
David Starkey Henry VIII: Virtuous Prince (London: Harper Press, 2008), p. 218.
Sean Cunningham Henry VII (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), plate 4;
see also Steven Gunn, “Henry VII in European Perspective,” Historical Research, 82:217 (2009), p. 387.
Herbert C. Schulz, “The Teaching of Handwriting in Tudor and Stuart Times,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 6:4 (1943), p. 416.
T. A. Birrell English Monarchs and Their Books: From Henry VII to Charles II (London: British Library, 1987), p. 6.
David R. Carlson, “Royal Tutors in the Reign of Henry VII,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22:2 (1991), pp. 254, n. 4, 255.
A Birrell, English Monarchs and Their Books, pp. 7–12; James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives (London: British Library, 2004), p. 100.
Henry to Wolsey, c. July 1518, quoted in Florence M. Greir Evans, The Principal Secretary of State, a survey of the Office from 1558 to 1680 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1923), p. 25, n. 4.
Quoted in G. R. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 284.
Eric Ives, “Henry VIII’s Will: A Forensic Conundrum,” The Historical Journal, 35:4 (1992), pp. 782–83. Henry’s dry stamp can be distinguished from his own signature by the conspicuous boldness of the characters, showing how it had been traced: see for example his letter to “Master Bailiff our Controller,” 29 Oct 1536, BL Additional MS 19398, fol. 43r. A dry stamp was a carved facsimile of the person’s signature, which left an indent in the paper. A skilled pensman would then go over the indent with a pen to create a copy of the signature.
Juan Luis Vives, “Plan of Studies for Girls,” in Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, ed. and trans. Forster Watson (New York: Longmans, 1912), p. 141.
David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 42–43.
H.F.M. Prescott A Spanish Tudor: The Life of Bloody Mary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), p. 40.
A quire is two sheets of paper folded to make eight leaves. Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary, Daughter of King Henry the Eighth, afterwards Queen Mary, ed. Frederick Madden (London: William Pickering, 1831), pp. 144, 147.
Elizabeth to Mary, 27 October 1552, ACFLO, pp. 27–28. For more on Mary’s illness see David Loades, Mary Tudor: The Tragical History (London: National Archives, 2006), pp. 30, 38, 59, 61, 193;
Linda Porter, The First Queen of England: the Myth of “Bloody Mary” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007) p. 74;
Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 47.
Felix Pryor dismisses John Guy’s assertion that although Mary commissioned a dry stamp she did not use it. Pryor, Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 137;
cf. John Guy, The Tudor Monarchy (London; New York: Arnold, 1997), p. 228. It is tempting to imagine that Mary may have made use of some of the forty-four pairs of eyeglasses listed in the inventory of Henry VIII’s movable possessions in 1547.
V. Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), p. 130.
Cardinal Pole to Philip, 8 October 1555, The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, ed. Thomas F Mayer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), vol. ii, pp. 175–76; “Report of Giovanni Michiel,” CSPVen 6:2, no. 884, p. 1054–55. Many of Mary’s books in the Royal Library show signs of wear, suggesting that she carried them around with her. Birrell, English Monarchs and Their Books, pp. 21–22.
Fifty-five Latin and fifty Greek essays written by Edward survive. Diarmaid MacCullough, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (New York: Palgrave, 1999), pp. 20–21.
Quoted H. R. Woudhuysen, “The Queen’s Own Hand: A Preliminary Account,” in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds.), Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: British Library, 2007), p. 3.
Hugh Latimer, Sermons, ed. H. C. Beeching (London; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), p. 102.
John Strype, The life of the learned Sir John Cheke (London, 1705).
Gordon Kipling, “Belmaine, Jean (fl. 1546–1559),” ODNB; Frances Teague, “Princess Elizabeth’s Hand in The Glass of the Sinful Soul,” in English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, eds., Peter Beale and Margaret J. M. Ezell (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 33–48. p. 5;
David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), p. 36.
The circulation of Niccolo Machiavelli’s Il Principe heightened the self-consciousness of sixteenth-century writers, leading many to question the political and religious “ends” of rhetoric. See Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric from the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Elizabeth to Edward, 14 February 1547 (holograph, Latin), CW, p. 13. For original Latin transcription, see ACFLO, p. 12.
For discussion of the role of metaphor in English style manuals of the period, see Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 84–86.
Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004), p. 23; W Webster Newbold, “Letter Writing and Vernacular Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Instruction from Antiquity to the Present, pp. 127–140.
Gary M. Bell, “Elizabethan Diplomacy: The Subtle Revolution” in Politics, Religion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of De Lamar Jensen, eds., Malcolm R. Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), p. 278.
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© 2012 Rayne Allinson
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Allinson, R. (2012). Tedius and Paynefull: Letter Writing in English Royal Diplomacy. In: A Monarchy of Letters. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008367_1
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