Add MS 70938-70946

MARLBOROUGH PAPERS. Correspondence and papers chiefly of and relating to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and his secretary, Adam Cardonnel; 1697-1746. Partly French, Dutch and Italian. Partly printed. Consisting of letters to Sir Charles Hedges, Secretary of State, 1701-1706, William Blathwayt, Secretary at War, 1697-1704, the Dutch Field Deputies, Jacob Hop and Johan van den Bergh, 1706-1714, and others, with some drafts and copies of replies, and related letters and papers, including letters to Hedges from John, Baron Cutts, 1703, 1704, and a collection of battle plans relating to the War of the Spanish Succession. While the letters from Marlborough to Hedges between 1701 and 1703, when the latter was Secretary of State for the North, are autograph, most of those from 1704-1706 (when Hedges was Secretary of State for the South), and all those to Hop and van den Berg are in a clerk's hand and signed by Marlborough. Many of these have been printed from the copies in his letter-books in Letters and Dispatches of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, ed. Sir G. Murray (1845). Copies of many of the letters from Cardonnel to Blathwayt also appear in Cardonnel's letter-books, Add. 61394-61396. For the letters of Hedges, Blathwayt, Hop and van den Bergh to Marlborough in the Blenheim Papers, see Add. 61119-61122, 61133, ff. 1-100, and 61190, 61191. The first six of the present volumes (Add. 70938-70943), containing the Hedges, Blathwayt and van den Bergh correspondence, were arranged and bound in one chronological sequence in the 19th century, but the provenance of the three groups is separate. The Hedges letters were sold in 1816 by his descendants; having first been refused by the 4th Duke of Marlborough, 'probably on account of the price' (Add. 51658, f. 136: J. Wishaw to Lady Holland, 3 Aug. 1816), they were acquired by Sir Gregory Page Turner, 4th Bart., at whose sale by Christie's on 19 Oct. 1824 they passed to Sir Thomas Phillipps (A. N. L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, No. 3 [1954], p. 51). According to a pencilled note (by Phillipps?) on the flyleaf of the first volume (Add. 70938, f. i), the rest of the correspondence with Blathwayt (for dispersal of whose archive see G. A. Jacobsen, William Blathwayt [1932], p. 494) and van den Bergh, was acquired at Sotheby's from the 'Van Lehten Collection'. The whole collection (Phillipps MS 8564) was sold again at Sotheby's, 11 Nov. 1946, lot 59, and was purchased, together with lot 64 (Phillipps MS 11539: consisting of the battle plans and letters from Marlborough to Jacob Hop), by Sir Louis Sterling, who then presented both lots to Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill added a small group of miscellaneous Marlborough items to the collection (Add. 70945, 70946), which was kept first at Chartwell and afterwards, until 1989, at Churchill College, Cambridge. Purchased through Sotheby's, March 1992, with the aid of grants form the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Pilgrim Trust.

Mostly paper. Nine volumes. The first six volumes have uniform bindings of brown calf, blind and gilt-stamped, 19th cent. 355 x 255mm.