Lansdowne MS 258

folio.

A volume usually intitled "Cardinal Wolsey's Negotiations," being copies of letters and state papers written between the years 1516 and 1525; with a table of contents, and some explanatory notes in the margin by some former possessor of the manuscript. The contents of this collection, (which is not very uncommon in MS.) having already been detailed in the description of a duplicate copy in the Harleian library, No. 6260, it has not been thought necessary to repeat them here: but it may be useful to remark, that there is extant a larger and more valuable assemblage of these state papers, two copies of which will be found in the Harleian library, Nos. 6345 and 7185, the latter being very imperfect. The whole of the present collection is contained in the other; but the arrangement of the materials is not the same. By whom they were respectively made does not appear; but, so far as regards the hand-writing of the different manuscripts, they are comparatively modern, and by no means approaching to the period to which they relate. There is reason for supposing that the originals have been used by Lord Herbert in his Life of Henry VIII. and some of them have been printed at the end of Dr. Fiddes's Life of Cardinal Wolsey, from a manuscript corresponding with the present volume. Compare also with Harl. 297. Neither of these manuscript collections is to be confounded with a printed book likewise intitled "Negotiations of Cardinal Wolsey," which is no more than the first edition of Mr. Cavendish's wellknown, but dishonestly published, Life of the Cardinal.