THE DOCUMENTS the Papers Which Appear in This Volume Are Selected from the Con- Tents of the Wyatt Commonplace Book

INTRODUCTION

1. THE DOCUMENTS THE papers which appear in this volume are selected from the contents of the Wyatt commonplace book. This book consists of 41 separate manuscripts,1 varying in date from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, bound together and backed with vellum. It measures 13^ inches by 8f, although several of the individual manuscripts are smaller. The present format, the numbering of the documents, and the descriptive catalogue are the work of Richard Wyatt, and date from the year 1727. The book now forms part of the Wyatt MSS, which are the property of the Earl of Romney, and are deposited in the British Museum as Loan Collection 15. The remainder of the collection consists of deeds relating to Wyatt properties in Kent; wills of the family, mainly of the eighteenth century; h ousehold and estate accounts of Francis and Richard Wyatt, 1746-53; rentals of Boxley; business correspondence of Francis and Richard with Edward, Conquest, and William Wiatt of Virginia; and a large volume of London merchant's accounts for the years 1713-19. In- cluded among the family correspondence is the eighteenth-century transcript of the valor of Boxley Manor, taken upon the attainder of Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger in 1554, which appears here as Appendix III. With the exception of this last document, the miscellaneous collection lies outside the scope of this volume, and has remained unnoticed by historians, save for a brief note in the British Museum Quarterly for 1935.2 The commonplace book itself has been known of for a century and a half, and with it the name of George Wyatt as a historian of sixteenth-century England. His 'Life of ... Anne Boleigne' (MS 7) was published privately in 1817, and re-printed as an appendix to Singer's edition of Cavendish's Life of Wolsey in 1827.3 Marks in the margin of the MS correspond to the unacknow- ledged omissions made by the original editor. Since then a number of scholars have dipped and published small extracts according to their particular interests. In 1850 John Bruce published in the Gentleman's Magazine parts of MSS 18 and 29, under the title 'Unpublished 1 See Appendix I. 2 R. Flower, 'The Wyatts of Allington Castle', British Museum Quarterly, IX (1934-5), 117-19. 3 George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. S. W. Singer, London, 1827. 1

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 09:52:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500000210 2 THE PAPERS OF GEORGE WYATT anecdotes of Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, and other members of the family'.1 These anecdotes were then reproduced in Cave-Browne's History of Boxley Parish? and in the articles on the Sir Thomas Wyatts, elder and younger, in the DNB, where reference was also made to the original book. In 1925 Miss Agnes Conway printed in the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research a brief, selective, and not uniformly accurate account of the volume and its contents, which catalogued 19 of the constituent MSS.3 As a direct result of this, an anonymous trans- criber reproduced MSS 3 and 20 in the William and Mary College Quarterly in 1926 and 1927.* In 1932 Miss Conway also published MS 13 as an appendix to her work on Henry VIFs relations with Scotland and Ireland.5 The note already mentioned, by Robin Flower, in BMQ for 1935 added little to Miss Conway's previous account, except to notice that the majority of the documents trans- cribed in MS 20 had been catalogued from the originals in the Library of Congress and elsewhere in S. M. Kingsbury's The Records of the Virginia Company of London.6 More recently Professor Kenneth Muir made some use of the unpublished documents in his Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt,,7 as I did myself in Two Tudor Con- spiracies? the work which first aroused my interest in the collection. Richard Wyatt, the compiler of the volume, was the last of the male line, and when he died in 1753, at the age of about 80, he bequeathed his property to Robert Marsham, 2nd Baron Romney, the grandson of his cousin Margaret Bosvile and Sir Robert Mar- sham.9 Presumably the commonplace book was included in the bequest, but it passed into other hands, and by 1850 was in the possession of the Rev. Bradford D. Hawkins. A note on the inside cover tells the remainder of the story: This book of Wyatt MSS, compiled by Richard Wyatt in 1727, belonged formerly to the Revd. Bradford Denne Hawkins, Rector

1 235^1. 2 Maidstone, 1892, 134 et seq. 31 (1923-5), 73-6. 4 Second series, VI, 114-21; VII, 42-7,125-31,204-14,246-54. Neither Flower nor Kingsbury seem to have been aware that these documents had been printed. 5 Henry VIVs relations with Scotland and Ireland, C.U.P., 1932, App. XLV, 236-9. 6 Library of Congress, 1906-35. The documents catalogued in Vol. I (1906), which Flower had seen, were printed in full and some others added in Vols III (1933) and IV (1935). 7 Liverpool University Press, 1963. 8 C.U.P., 1965. 9 Richard's will is among the uncatalogued miscellaneous papers.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 09:52:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500000210 THE PAPERS OF GEORGE WYATT 3 of Rivenhall in Essex, then to Lionel Oliver, Esq. of Heacham, King's Lynn, & was given by him on 22nd. February 1872 to Charles, 3rd. Earl of Romney. Richard was not, however, the originator of the collection to which his name has become attached. That role belonged to his great- grandfather, George Wyatt, the son of Sir Thomas the younger, who, between about 1590 and his death in 1624, devoted most of his energies to study and writing. His interests embraced theology, the military sciences, and history; particularly the history of the English reformation in which his father and grandfather had played such important and hazardous parts. His main project appears to have been a eulogistic biography of Anne Boleyn, embracing a detailed justification of the great changes in which her career had involved her. The published Life is only the tip of this iceberg, which consists in the main of fragmentary drafts, notes, and extracts from other works. According to Sir Roger Twisden his 'Uncle Wyatt','. . . being yonge had gathered many notes touching this lady, not without an intent to have opposed Saunders'.1 The papers put together for this purpose form the core of the collection.2 George's secondary interests, military and theological, are also well represented; mainly by his own writings, but also by the fragmentary remains of his father's militia treatise, prepared for the Council of Protector Somerset.3 There are also a number of smaller items, poems and epitaphs on members of the family, from the same period. Some of these are in George's own hand, others from the pen of his friend George Case, Vicar of Boxley from 1589 to 1632. It appears that George retained a lively, if some- what academic interest in affairs to the time of his death. He corres- ponded at considerable length with his son, Sir Francis, while the latter was governor of Virginia, although only one of his letters has survived.4 It is also probable that the account of the joint committee of the two Houses of Parliament which heard Charles and Bucking- ham explain the failure of the Spanish marriage was sent to him by a friend in the Commons about six months before his death.5 George's collection may originally have been far greater, for it

1 This note is quoted by Flower from G. F. Nott, Poems of Wyatt and Surrey, Vol. II, App. II, which is identical with MS 15. Since the note does not appear on MS 15, however, it must be supposed that Twisden had his own copy of this extract—perhaps derived from George's. The implication in DNB that part of this collection passed into Twisden's possession seems to be based upon a mis- understanding. 8 MSS 7, 10 (i), 15, 18, 19, 21, 24, 32, (i), (iv). » MS 23. 4 MS 5. 6 MS 4. See p. 207.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 29 Sep 2021 at 09:52:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068690500000210 4 THE PAPERS OF GEORGE WYATT appears that disaster struck the Wyatt archives in the middle of the seventeenth century. In the words of Richard Henry Wiatt, son of Sir Francis, who married Jane of the family of the Dukes, gott as heere to Sir Francis all the writings into his hands, which Jane his wife then made away with upon his death.1 These writings included the evidences of entitlement to the manor and Abbey of Boxley, which had passed on Henry's death to his daughter and heir Frances, the wife of Sir Thomas Selyard. Edwin Wyatt, Henry's younger brother, disputed Lady Selyard's title to the estate, and recovered Boxley Manor for the Wyatts; the Abbey remained to the Selyards.2 He also recovered some, at least, of the papers, but added only two small contributions of his own. These vicissitudes probably explain the thinness of the collection between 1624 and Richard's own lifetime, when it again came into the hands of a historian and collector. Apart from the catalogue, Richard's contributions consist mainly of notes taken out of such works as Harriss's History of Kent and the Athenae Oxonienses. He also ex- tracted references to the family from the Boxley parish register,3 and made a copy of a MS in the possession of Sir William Twisden, entitled 'Passages taken out of a Manuscript wrote by Thomas Scott of Egreston in Godmersham Esquire concerning the family of Wyatt of Alington'. This Thomas Scott was George Wyatt's nephew, but the original document was clearly not all of his composition, since it included a story derived from Fuller's Church History which was published in 1655.4 These papers, interesting as some of them are, are valuable mainly as guides to the older material, and the dominant personality of the collection is undoubtedly that of George. The sheer quantity of his writings is forbidding, and several of them, particularly those con- cerned with polemical theology, do not merit publication. In making this selection, I have been guided by a variety of considerations. Firstly, the intrinsic historical interest of the documents; second, the personality and interests of George himself; and third, the incursions made into the collection by previous editors. Other things being equal, I have preferred complete to incomplete works, and historical to literary interest. The lesser papers have been drawn upon freely for illustration and reference, and two of them, which do not fit into the general scheme, appear as appendices.

1 MS 38. Henry married Jane, daughter of Sir Edward Duke of Cossington. 2 Edward Hasted, A History and Topographical survey of the county of Kent, Canterbury, 1778-99, II, 125. 3 MS 37. 4 MS 29 (also 41).