Viscount Lisle at Calais
G.R. Elton, 16 July 1981
In the reign of Henry VIII, when a man was arrested for treason (an arrest which, among the eminent, tended to be equal to a conviction, with the usual consequences), his papers were confiscated and disappeared into the royal archives in the Tower. Considering the number of people who suffered this fate, the amount of surviving material is distressingly small. What happened to Cardinal Wolsey’s unquestionably massive, and unquestionably confiscated, correspondence, a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his arrest. Of course, there are scattered items from his and other people’s correspondence which have accidentally survived here and there, but – apart from Thomas, Lord Darcy’s small collection – only two private archives now exist among the Henrician state papers at the Public Record Office: those of Henry VIII’s Lord Privy Seal and Viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, and those of his lord deputy at Calais, Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle.