Location of the letters

The majority of the letters written, copied, signed by or addressed to Herle, or which mention Herle, are located in London in the British Library and The National Archives. Herle's letters in the British Library are primarily found in the Lansdowne papers (having passed through the family of Sir Michael Hickes, secretary to Lord Burghley) and the Cotton papers, where documents and letters relating to Elizabethan history were collected by the historian Sir Robert Cotton. The letters in the National Archives are in the archives of the secretaries of state, having been kept in official custody. They cover diverse aspects of Herle's service as client to his ministerial patrons, including records of examinations of prisoners, letters of diplomatic intelligence, and petitions. There are also smaller collections in the Bodleian Library, Magdalene College Old Library, Longleat House and Hatfield House, suggesting that Herle's letters underwent a degree of dispersal, possibly at the time of sending. Although no detailed study of the survival rate of letters has been made, there are distinct patterns of correspondence which occur throughout the corpus and relate to certain periods of Herle's intense epistolary activity, i.e. during his incarceration in the Marshalsea Prison, his legation to Antwerp, and a disagreement with Burghley. Likewise, there are gaps in the chronological sequence which suggest either the loss or destruction of letters from these periods or epistolary inactivity. This online project brings together for the first time all of Herle's letters which are scattered across Britain.