Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/521

 1920 513 Emoluments of the Principal Secretaries of State in the Seventeenth Century THE formal salary of any state official in the seventeenth century was merely regarded as a peg on which to hang a fortune. Fees, allowances, and perquisites supplemented the small regular wage.^ This was peculiarly the case in such an office as that of principal secretary to the Crown, which developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into an important office of state, but was originally a purely household office and never en- tirely lost this character. The principal secretaries were in theory the king's private servants. They were still members of the king's chamber at the end of the seventeenth century,^ and the nominal salary they received was in keeping with this character. This salary remained throughout £100 per annum, but even at the beginning of the seventeenth century the annual value of the office was already computed to be about two thousand pounds.^ Various manuscript lists of officers of state and their fees are extant for the reigns of Elizabeth and James I,* and though ' I have to thank Mr. Godfrey Davies for help in the preparation of this article, and in particular for drawing my attention to the documents printed below, and allowing me the use of his transcripts. '^ A Collection of Ordinances for the Regulation and Government of the Royal House- hold, p. 407. ship in 1624, Dudley Carleton, junior, writes on 3 May to his uncle Sir Dudley Carleton that the latter could have the place for £6,000, and adds : ' It is but three years' • purchase, the place being worth £2,000 a year ' {Cal. of State Papers, Dom., 1623-5, p. 231). Chamberlayne,^«g'Kae^otitta,ii. 10 (1676), also states that the ' Secretaries' settled allowance from the King in Salary and Pension is little less than £2,000 sterling per annum to each of them '. He did not include fees in this computation. Manning- ham in 1601 gives the value of the office as little less than £3,000 a year {Diary, p. 19, Camden Soc). In his Political Index, 3rd ed., i. 399, published in 1806, Beatson gives its present worth as £8,000 to each secretary. about 1578 is published in Peck's ' Desidemto Curiosa', Part I, Liber II, and by the Society of Antiquaries in the CoUedionof Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, p. 260. A later list of 1607 or 1608 is printed by the Hist. MSS. Comm. from the MSB. of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (p. 57). Similar to this, though not identical, is the list included in the Sloane MSS. (no. 1520), temp. Jac. I, Two lists of about 1588 and 1590 are among the Elizabethan State Papers, Domestic, vol. 121 and vol. 235, no. 9. VOL. XXXV. — NO. CXL. L 1
 * When discussing the possible resignation of Sir Greorge Calvert from the secretary,
 * The great list of ' Queen Elizabeth's Annual Expense Civil and Military ' of date