Add MS 72449-72451

3. Correspondence and papers from the Office of the Secretary of State.

TRUMBULL PAPERS. Vols. CCVIII-CCX. Miscellaneous correspondence, papers and tracts deriving from the Office of the Secretary of State, particularly relating to the business of the Signet Office; 1562-circa 1688. Partly drafts, copies and printed. Partly Latin, French, Italian and Portuguese. These papers include miscellaneous items relating to the business of the office, mostly during the Secretaryships of Sir William Morrice (1660-1668) and Henry Coventry (1672-1680). Many of the papers can be associated, on the evidence of the handwriting of drafts and endorsements, with John Cooke (d. 1691), the Under Secretary who acted as Secretary for the Latin Tongue and whose letters show him to have been a close associate of the Trumbulls. Sir William Trumbull followed his father (who petitioned for the reversion in 1635: above Add. 72444, f. 134) as one of the four Clerks of the Signet, an office under the general authority of the Secretary of State, from 1683 until his death in 1716. John Cooke's son William, who was granted the Clerkship in reversion in May 1678, may have acted as Sir William's deputy from 1685 to 1687, and thus have been the medium through which this group of state papers came into the Downshire collection. During re-arrangement for binding in 1829 the documents became widely scattered among volumes and bundles of miscellaneous state papers. See J. C. Sainty, Officials of the Secretaries of State 1660-1782 (1973), esp. p. 21, and the Cookes' letters, esp. that of 28 Aug. 1685. From Misc. XXII, XXXVII, XXXIX, XL, XLI-XLIII and Add. 4, 7, 11, 13-16, 19, 30, 37, 38, 40-42, 90, 95.

Three volumes.