Add MS 78264-78271

SIR EDWARD NICHOLAS

78264-78271. EVELYN PAPERS. Vols. XCVII-CIV. Papers of Sir Edward Nicholas (1593-1669) and other members of the Nicholas family; 1560-1706, n.d. Partly drafts, copies and cipher. Partly Latin and French. The greater part relates to the work of Sir Edward Nicholas as Secretary of State, 1641-1662, and consists of letters and papers of, and relating to Charles I and II. Included are some official papers of his son Edward Nicholas, M.P. (1662-1726). The Nicholas Papers did not form part of the archive formed or inherited by Evelyn the diarist, but derive ultimately from the archive which descended in the Nicholas family at their seat at West Horsley, co. Surrey, close to Wotton. The complicated dispersal of this is described in detail in The Nicholas Papers, ed. Sir George F. Warner, Camden Society, 1886, I, pp. i-iv, and in the catalogues of the Nicholas Papers (G52, G85 and 1287) now at Surrey History Centre, Woking. A schedule of the whole contents of the archive (Egerton MS 2562) was drawn up in 1720-1723 by Sir Edward Nicholas’s second son, Edward, whose son William allowed a large portion to be transferred to Sir John Evelyn, 1^st Bart. (d. 1763), at nearby Wotton. In December 1750 Thomas Birch made a calendar and extracts (now Add. MS 4180) of the material there. Thereafter, according to Warner, ‘it is probable that Sir John Evelyn, after selecting what he considered most valuable, subsequently returned the bulk of the papers to their original home’ (Nicholas Papers, I , pp. i-ii). A further portion was apparently transferred to William Man Godschall of Albury, who sent Sir Edward Hyde’s letters to Edward Nicholas to the editor of the Clarendon State Papers in 1782. Other items in Godschall’s possession were transferred to Wotton by William Bray in the 1820s, in the belief that they belonged there; others were apparently returned to West Horsley and sold from there. A large portion of the latter is now Add. MSS 37816-37823 (registers of Nicholas’s official letters) and Egerton MSS 2533-2562 (correspondence and papers, from which The Nicholas Papers were printed). Nicholas’ Privy Council minutes, 1661-1662, are Bodleian MS Eng. Hist. c. 311, but other important items, as Warner noted, appear to be still unaccounted for, notably Nicholas’s three volumes of letterbooks, seen by Thomas Birch (see Nicholas Papers, I, p. iii). It was from the present collection that William Bray printed the correspondence of Nicholas with Charles I and II, etc., in editions of The Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn. Some items were removed by William Upcott; e.g. Add. MS 15856, copies in the hand of John Nicholas of diplomatic instruments.

Eight volumes.