Custody and Use to the mid-twentieth century

The Chamber Books began their lives as the personal property of the king.   He did not write them – there were clerks to do that – although he might write in them.  The king appointed the treasurer of the Chamber by word of mouth and not by letters patent, and he was recompensed by payment from the chamber, or by the equivalent in grants of land or fees. The Exchequer might furnish funds to the Chamber: indeed might furnish rather a lot of funds – but it had no official oversight. Even at the most elementary level it was on occasion John Heron as clerk or treasurer who informed the Exchequer that monies had been paid into the Chamber – in order to establish an audit trail, and give some legal protection to the payee.  The Exchequer, on its part, would then raise an assignment: but did so retrospectively, reversing the customary procedures.  In short, documents can tell a tale.  But they can also lie.  Caveat emptor – to read is not necessarily to believe.

Certain questions then arise. Why are several books of the treasurer of the Chamber now in the National Archives, and classed as records of the King’s Remembrancer?  And why are other records of that same Chamber now classed as Records of the Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer?  The short answer to this is: a tale in progress.  And why, indeed, are some records of that same Chamber, of the same period, now in the British Library?  That, too, is a tale in progress.  But both revolve on a story of neglect, peculation, double standards, official inertia and abdication of official responsibility, antiquarian bibliomania, occasional philanthropy – and the expenditure of a great deal of public money.  It is not a pretty story, but it is one that has had consequences both for the survival of the archive and for the use by historians over time of the Chamber Books and related documents.

At the time, and for some years after their first creation, the books were both working documents and recent and still current archives.[66]  This was as true of the post 1509 books as of those of the years of Henry VII’s active intervention.  By c. 1500 the Chamber Books spawned, as well as being created from, working documents; accounts feeding into the books increased in number; and in the king’s last years written warrants proliferated, although they are unlikely to have completely edged out more the informal written and oral mandates of earlier years.  Henry VIII, and on occasion Thomas Wolsey as his alter ego, made much more use of written warrants, some of which survive and usefully augment the brief record entries of the books. 

Throughout the period of Thomas Lovell and John Heron’s tenure of the treasurership of the Chamber, it is likely that the original books (see Fig. 1) were in the custody of the king.  In 1507 a record room was furnished within the Tower to take the growing, and increasingly disparate but all-encompassing archive, although the room must have been vacated for that purpose well before 1542, when the shelves and cupboards were removed.[67]  Since the books were written incrementally custody was less clinically neat than such an arrangement might suggest; but the office copy was the duplicate book written out by the treasurer’s clerks, was not signed by the king, and was constantly available.[68]  It would have been kept in a place certain which, prior to 1512, was the Chamber office in the Jewel House at Westminster.[69] Unless it is an accidental duplicate entry, new blank ledgers for the King’s Books of Payments and of Receipts had been purchased by one of Heron’s clerks by the beginning of May 1509 and put to immediate use; which would mean that the second set, acquired by 10 June, was for the copy books which were to be written up and kept in the Office.[70] 

The palace fire of 1512 led to the provision of new quarters for Heron and the Chamber office within the Westminster complex.  Brian Tuke, treasurer 1528-1545, operated day to day out of his London house. He continued to use the Tower treasury as a place of deposit for excess receipts.[71]  He perused Heron’s books as he would an instruction manual, which suggests but does not prove that he had full access to the original books.[72]

The route taken to archival storage in the Exchequer at Westminster is guesswork, made more difficult by the removal of original covers and rebinding over the course of three centuries.  By mid-century the books were being audited, not by the king, but by the court of General Surveyors, and could have been caught up in that archive on the dissolution of the court; deposit might have been ordered, not least in the attempt to settle William Cavendish’s debts; or the books and archive could have become research material for one of the various Debt Commissions that combed through possible sources that might potentially raise money for the cash-strapped governments of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth: and so on to the similar schemes of Robert Cecil under James I.  There are several reasons why this last route might be the most likely explanation for the King’s Remembrancer’s custody of the original books, rather than the chaos theory of Exchequer custody, which is an entirely legitimate alternative. The King’s (Queen’s) Remembrancer bore much of the burden for process on debt owed to the Crown, other than arrears on Crown lands.  Cecil, and probably earlier commissioners, envisaged that sums due on undischarged debts and bonds could be extracted from the heirs of the original debtor. The archive of the various commissions is very incomplete, both in terms of survival and of modern cataloguing and access. But there is one pointer. All the original books of Payments, and one of the books of Receipts, include a name index to Obligations and to Recognisances, written in a hand of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.  The indexes were all compiled by just one scribe, who also foliated the relevant sections of the books in order to facilitate reference.[73]  So tedious an exercise is most likely to have had an administrative purpose. 

Unlike the Tower Record Office (Chancery) or the Chapter House, which was ultimately the responsibility of the Chamberlains of the Receipt of the Exchequer, the King’s Remembrancer had neither a dedicated record room nor a dedicated Keeper of the Records.  Certain records were well kept – but in general the custodial history of records of the king’s remembrancer in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was at best inglorious and at worst culpably abominable.  It is unsurprising therefore that, before the later eighteenth century, the books seem not to have had literary use.

The copy books, or at least the three books 1505-1521, and the clerks’ ‘blotting books’ – the rough accounts, followed a different route, into the Treasury of the Receipt.[74]  This has some internal logic if the connection with the Jewel House, or John Heron’s new counting house at Westminster, were maintained.  The route perhaps matters less in the scale of centuries than the fact that these books were delivered into an archive with long and, by the standards of the day, honourable tradition of custody, relatively secure storage, and periodically was under the charge of keeper/custodians who were genuinely interested in the records.  Physical conditions of storage were often less than ideal, as is evident from the decay of the Queen’s book and the clerks’ accounts.  But scholarly searches were possible, if not always welcome. They were also expensive – since the clerks demanded their fees.[75]  The two archival strands briefly came together at the end of the eighteenth century with the first known published use of the Henry VII Chamber Books, almost at the same time that the Record Commission first noted the existence of the manuscript originals and their place of storage.

In 1797 George Chalmers acknowledged the help of an Exchequer sworn clerk, Craven Ord, for supplying transcripts of historic payments for plays derived from entries found in the Chamber Books of Henry VII.[76]  Just two years later, the posthumously published final volume of Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain included a short list of payments drawn from those same books.[77]  The executors credited the learned antiquary Thomas Astle (Keeper of the Records in the Tower, and, in 1775, the editor of the text of Henry VII’s will).[78] Astle’s list is a mess, although it shows evidence of wider reading in the books.   It includes extracts 7-8 Henry VII (1491-1493), taken from a now lost book but with the earliest entries wrongly attributed to 9 Henry VII (1493-4); and a second list abstracted from the original book for 1497-1499, which is still extant.  The earlier list includes a very small number of items not found in Craven Ord’s book of extracts. The extracts for 1497-99 incorporate a mangled and misplaced reference to John Savernake, a musician first found in 1518 in the copy book E36/216, which at that time was in the Chapter House, and of whose existence Ord seems to have been unaware.[79]  Astle, if it was he, very clearly recorded that the earlier (and now lost book) was in the custody of the King’s Remembrancer.[80]  At this point, the story, according to Anonymous of the Temple, gets darker.[81]  For he says that Astle’s list was bound up with Ord’s notebook, which had been acquired by the British Museum – and that all reference to the custody of the King’s Remembrancer had been erased from the note, but that the writing could still just be made out. Anonymous went on to point to the sale by Ord of manuscripts earlier acknowledged to be in public custody.  His account of the fate of the original chamber books is actually muddled at this point, not least because of the brevity of the sale catalogues – but the moral of the tale of Astle’s extracts, if true, is that it suggests a deliberate attempt by Ord to cover his tracks.

Four of the original Chamber Books now in the British Library, of which three have been edited for the Winchester Project, came, although not directly, from Ord’s collection.  They do not include the 1491-1495 book. By the mid-1830s Ord was widely reputed to have helped himself from the records supposedly in his care.[82]  It would not have been difficult. The catalogue of Sir Thomas Phillips collection, with its extended descriptions, rather than the heavily abbreviated and generic entries in the auction catalogues of Ord’s Library, indicates just how many of Ord’s manuscripts were strays from official custody.  What the catalogues cannot show, however, is how many of those manuscripts were legitimately acquired, according to the mores of Ord’s day, by purchase or by exchange with fellow collectors – nor the number for which Ord was the first owner and, by association and opportunity, culpable.   Once escaped from public custody the authorities made no effort to reclaim documents: they had become private property.

Craven Ord followed family tradition by entering the Exchequer Office as a side clerk in 1770. Promotion was by strict order of seniority.  He became a sworn clerk in 1780 – that is, one of the more senior clerks in the office.  He was promoted as second secondary in 1820, which gave him official custody of certain of the Office’s ancient records – including two of Henry VII’s Books of Receipts, the second discovered some time after 1800. Ord succeeded David Burton Fowler as first secondary in 1828, by which time he was himself in poor health.[83]  His manuscript collection was dispersed 1829-30 over the course of three sales held before his death. 

Two of the Chamber Books from Ord’s collection, the hybrid copy of the books of payments for 1499-1505, and the original book for 1509-1518, were acquired by the British Museum in 1856 from the estate of Henry Belward Ray. [84] Both manuscripts have, unfortunately, been rebound in museum bindings.  Both include brief memoranda in the hands of Ord and Ray.  The narrative displayed of ownership prior to that of Ord has recently been challenged as a smokescreen to cover theft by Ord: but it would take forensic analysis beyond that of the naked eye to explore further the various signatures pasted scrapbook-wise inside the new covers of the book, having been recovered and removed from the boards of the antiquarian binding it replaced.[85]  In the second half of the twentieth century, at least, the Henry VII book was fairly heavily used, since it filled a gap in the Public Record Office series, whereas for the Henry VIII book there was both the office copy held by the Public Record Office (now the National Archives), and a readily available surrogate in the form of Letters and Papers, Henry VIII. Sir Thomas Phillips also acquired two Books of Payments as a result of Ord’s sales. Phillips’s preference towards the end of his life would have been to sell his entire manuscript collection to the British Museum: but negotiations failed.  After his death, the collection was slowly dispersed, and there was no public access to his Chamber Books for more than a century.  The two Ord/Phillips Chamber Books passed with the unsold residue of the library to the Robinson Trust by right of purchase and the brothers, although invariably courteous, in general refused permission for access.[86]  What is arguably the most important of the extant books of payment for Henry VII, and the much smaller book of payments and receipts for 1543-1544, were acquired from the Trust by the British Museum only in 1978.[87]  The books retain both their eighteenth century bindings and the library markings of Ord and of Phillips.  By the time the British Museum acquired the books, study of the reign of Henry VII, as well as that of the perennially attractive Henry VIII, had become far more active, and the books have been heavily used ever since their acquisition by a public institution.

But for almost a century and a half, Craven Ord had the last laugh.  As second secondary in the King’s Remembrancer’s Office, Ord had the totemic pleasure not only of the custody of the book of Receipts for 1502-1505 which had been declared to the Record Commissioners of 1800, but also of the rediscovered book for 1489-1495 identified by workmen working under the aegis of the Commission.[88] The British Museum purchased his two notebooks of extracts at the first of the sales.[89] It is those extracts, further selected and reduced in number and bloated with additional comments (for which Ord was not responsible) that were published by Samuel Bentley, and passed (under the title of Privy Purse accounts) for Henry VII’s Chamber Books for more than a century.  Even A. F. Pollard, in his three-volume edition of sources for Henry VII’s reign, cited Excerpta Historica rather than the manuscript originals in the Public Record Office, although he at least drew attention to their existence.[90] 

Students of the reign of Henry VIII fared better.  The multi-part first volume of the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII did not include the Chamber Books.[91]  But thereafter both the payments and the back matter were abstracted, and the years 1509-1514 were added retrospectively to volume 2 (1864) of the work.  The edition proceeded sufficiently slowly for the editors to be able to include, in due course, and in its correct chronological sequence, a volume of Brian Tuke’s accounts after it had been gifted to the Public Record Office by Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, along with several volumes of William Cavendish’s books and papers dating from his tenure of the office of treasurer. The down side of Letters and Papers is that a large number of names were deliberately omitted from the calendars, particularly in the lists of monthly payment of wages, although the omissions were flagged. The marginalia of payment and information management crucial to understanding the recognisances and obligations were similarly omitted. Even so, it was a huge achievement.  It opened the books up to any use, and did not require the user to contextualise the information back to the manuscript. The historian Henry Harrisse, for example, seized on the books’ one reference to Sebastian Cabot, and added the payment made to him for making a map of Gascony to his canon of Cabot documents.  His citation was to Letters and Papers, and not to the manuscript.[92]

Serious study of the Chamber as an institution begins with an article by A. P. Newton, published in 1917.  The fiscal survey of Frederick Dietz followed, heavy with calculated figures.  A generation later, W. C. Richardson produced a book length and breathy survey of the institutions of government, heavy with quotations and footnotes, and dedicated it to Newton.  All three are the foundation blocks of Chamber studies, worth re-reading, perhaps even required re-reading, but to be used with caution.[93]  They are light years away from the essays produced for the quincentenary of Henry VII’s death and published in 2009 as a themed issue of the journal Historical Research.[94] Agnes Conway’s survey of Anglo-Irish relations and Henry VII’s policy towards the Celtic fringes was an early model in integrating information derived from the Chamber accounts with a wider range of sources, with a surprisingly mature understanding of the Chamber material.