The Weckherlin Papers
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THE WECKHERLIN PAPERS LEONARD FORSTER THE Weckherlin Papers are part of the vast archive of the Trumbull family, which passed through the female line to the Marquesses of Downshire. It was kept at Easthampstead Park in Berkshire until it was deposited on loan with the Berkshire County Record Office at Reading in 1954. A large section of it came on the market at Sotheby's in December 1989 and was acquired en bloc by the British Library. In 1839 Caroline, Lady Downshire, caused the major part of the archive to be bound in olive morocco in a series of 132 folio and quarto volumes. It is not known who was responsible for the gigantic task of ordering these papers. Let it be said at once that the more one has to do with them the greater one's respect is for this Victorian archivist. He arranged the papers in two groups: the Alphabetical Series according to writer and within that chronologically; and the Chronological or Miscellaneous Series; the order is in practice often irregular and inconsistent. It seems that the original plan was only imperfectly carried out, for many papers remained unbound; there are some 150 items and bundles contained in over twenty archive boxes. When the collection went to the Berkshire County Record Office it came under the care of a distinguished archivist, Peter Walne. He caused the unbound papers and unsorted bundles to be listed and thus made accessible for the first time. The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts took on the task of calendaring the Trumbull Papers some time before 1924. There have been five H.M.C. reports on the manuscripts; a sixth and final one is in the press. These only cover a fraction of the total material, which runs from the 1540s to the 1770s. The best survey of the whole is the catalogue of the Trumbull Papers prepared by Sotheby's for the sale in 1989. Their cataloguer has done a splendid professional job starting from scratch, apparently without any knowledge of the work that had been done on the Weckherlin papers on the German side during the last fifty years, most of it by me. His work is now an indispensable guide to the whole material. William Trumbull the elder was from 1609 to 1625 English Resident at Brussels. In 1626 he became M.P. for Downton, Clerk of the Privy Council and Muster-Master- General. Charles I granted him the estate of Easthampstead Park in Berkshire in 1628. He died in 1635. His son William was Clerk to the Signet and kept a low profile in the troublous times of the 1640s and 1650s; he died in 1678. In 1638 he married Elizabeth Weckherlin, daughter of Georg Rodolf Weckherlin. Their son William (later Sir 133 William) was born in 1639 and eventually became Secretary of State and a friend of Alexander Pope. Weckherlin was a diplomat in the service of the Dukes of Wiirttemberg and was deeply committed to their protestant politics and their alliance with the Elector Palatine. The Elector Frederick V had married Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England, and England was seen as an important support of the protestant interest in the years preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Weckherlin had been on diplomatic missions to England and in 1616 married Elizabeth Ra worth, the daughter of the mayor of Dover. After the fall of Heidelberg in 1622 the future of the protestant cause looked bleak, and it was about this time that the Weckherlin family finally moved to England, where he seems to have had some uncertain employment in Canterbury and Dover, apparently connected with Palatinate diplomacy. In 1625 he entered the service of the English crown, serving as secretary to all successive Secretaries of State until the Civil War. In 1644 under the Commonwealth he became Secretary for Foreign Tongues, in which office he was followed by John Milton in 1649. He died in 1653, without ever having returned to Germany, though he remained in close touch with things German. He occupies an important position in the development of German lyric poetry; there is little in these papers concerned with that side of his life, but what there is is extremely valuable. I based my dissertation, G. R. Weckherlin: zur Kenntnis seines Lebens in England (Basel, 1944), on it and have worked on the papers ever since. The miscellaneous series contains two volumes of' Weckerli(ng) Papers' (so lettered on the spine), one of letters and one containing a diary. The letters are in the main family letters from Weckherlin to his wife and children, written during the various progresses of the Court from palace to palace. After his daughter Elizabeth married William Trumbull the younger most of the letters are addressed to them; they present a charming picture of family life outside the orbit of the Court where Weckherlin had perforce to spend most of his time. They take their place beside the many collections of English family correspondence of the period (for example, the Verney Papers). But they are also the largest body of personal correspondence of a German poet in the seventeenth century and in that respect they are unique, not least in their immediacy and unaffectedness, qualities rare in German baroque letter-writing. Part of the reason for this is the circumstance that they are written in English. These letters are addressed to Easthampstead Park and very properly remained there; they form a perfectly self-contained group, supplemented by a volume of letters from William Trumbull the younger, first to his father and later to his wife, including two to his father-in-law Weckherlin, with whom he was on good terms. Other letters to and from Weckherlin are scattered through other volumes of state and official papers, and the diary too belongs with them, for it mainly records details of official letters sent and received. In the seventeenth century there was no Public Record Office, and statesmen out of office normally took their state and official papers with them into retirement. This accounts for the rich collections of documents in country houses all over England. So it 134 Fig. I. Georg Rodolph Weckherlin; engraving by W. Faithorne after D. Mytens. Reproduced from G. Konnecke, Bilderatlas (1887), p. 114. 1765.b.26 was natural for the elder William Trumbull to bring all his papers over from Brussels and deposit them at Easthampstead Park, to be looked after by his son William, Weckherlin's son-in-law. When Weckherlin himself died his state and official papers would naturally pass to his heirs; this would normally have meant his son, but in the event they went to his daughter. Weckherlin had held office under Cromwell and died in 1653 during the Commonwealth. His son was a Royalist who spent the Commonwealth years abroad. So it is that not only Weckherlin's family letters but also his official and semi-official papers landed up at Easthampstead Park, where his daughter and son-in- law lived a quiet and unobtrusive life with their numerous children. In this way all Weckherlin's papers were taken up into the already very extensive Trumbull family archive. His state and official papers received the same treatment as the Trumbull Papers properly so-called; that is, they were dispersed among the rest, except for the one coherent volume of family correspondence and the diary. The result of this is that though I have tracked down a very large number of letters from him or addressed to him, there may be others lurking in volumes which I have not been able to examine. The discovery of poems by him among unsorted bundles of old bills makes this quite likely. There is, of course, a large body of Weckherlin's official correspondence preserved in other collections, notably in the Public Record Office and elsewhere in the British Library, 135 and in archives up and down the country. I am not concerned with them here; they do not differ in kind from those preserved among the Trumbull Papers. As English Resident in Brussels William Trumbull the elder occupied a key position in the English intelligence network. He was in easy contact with correspondents in France, Holland and the various German states, and the fact that the Southern Netherlands were subject to Spain meant that he could maintain good relations there too. So he was well informed about events in western and central Europe; the Mediterranean and Baltic areas were covered by others. He employed a large number of persons in various places who were paid to report to him at regular intervals; this was normal practice. It was through his connections with the various protestant German states that he first made contact with Weckherlin in his capacity as a diplomat in the service of Wurttemberg. Weckherlin's chief on at least one of the missions on which he was engaged was Benjamin von Buwinckhausen, who regularly supplied Trumbull with news; there is a whole volume of reports from him among the Trumbull Papers, and there are plenty of parallel cases. Trumbull clearly tried to maintain contacts with people in important places who would report to him regularly, and he built up a network of them. How reliable the information was which they supplied obviously varied very much, but it is noticeable how often they were learned men, scholars, professors, parsons, besides officials and diplomats like Weckherlin himself They had their own network of learned correspondence, the celebrated 'commercium epistolicum', and it was a matter of some prestige to be in contact with noted scholars like Heinsius or Grotius, both of whom were also active in diplomacy.