Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/355

 1922 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS 347 so described in the accounts of the funeral of Henry VII and coronation of Henry VIII. Rydon may have died before, or been too ill to attend, those ceremonies, but Meautis is distinctly appointed on 17 October 1509 as successor to Rydon and not to Belhouse, who on 9 April 1511 is described as ' one of the clerks of the council ' and then disappears. 1 Meautis, who had been Henry VII's secretary of the French tongue and apparently continued to hold this office in conjunction with his clerkship of the council, was succeeded in the latter on 14 June 1512 by Richard Eden, who was granted the office for life on the same salary and terms as Rydon and Meautis. 2 Probably he had already been serving as junior clerk at 20 a year, and this junior clerkship must not be identified with the clerkship of requests, which was similarly remunerated but was held at this time by Robert Sampson ; and apparently Eden was succeeded in this office by Richard Lee, who is occasionally referred to as one of the clerks of the council between 1516 and 1520. 3 In 1521-2 and 1523-4, however, Lee is called ' clerk of the star chamber ', 4 which implies Eden's dispossession ; but in an undated grant assigned by Brewer and Gairdner to 19 Henry VIII (1527-8) 5 the clerkship of the council, on the same terms as it was held by Baldeswell, Rydon, and Eden, was granted, on Eden's con- ditional surrender of his life patent, to (Sir) Thomas Elyot, the well-known author of The Boke of the Governour. Both the date and the validity of this grant are doubtful, and so, too, are the dates of two letters, one from Elyot himself, referring to the matter. 6 The second letter, from one John Knolles, after reporting that Elyot, who was clerk of the western assizes, had magnified some hunting affray near Woodstock into a riot and had almost undone the poor men of Woodstock by summoning them to London at their own cost, remarks ' my lord cardinal has made him clerk of the council '. Elyot states that Wolsey made him clerk ' as he supposed ' without any suit on his part, but that he could never obtain his patent nor his fee of forty 1 Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, new ed., I. i. 749 [18]. 2 Ibid. no. 1462 [26] ; the reference of ' the clerk of the king's council ' (ibid. p. 925) to Rydon in Mr. Brodie's index should be corrected to Eden. There are later references to Richard Eden as clerk of the council receiving only 20 a year (Letters and Papers, iii, pp. 409, 1535), but they are inconsistent with the original grant and other references to his salary, and I doubt the dating of some of these accounts. It is more probable that they refer to Eden's salary before he became chief clerk, since 20 was the regular salary of the junior clerk. 3 Ibid. ii. 1857, iii. 278 [28] ; Leadam, Star Chamber, ii. 106. 4 Letters and Papers, iv. 3380 [8, ii and 10, ii]. 5 Ibid, iv, p. 1865 b. 6 Elyot's letter, which is printed in full in Ellis, Original Letters, 1st ser., ii. 113- 18, and is calendared by Gairdner (Letters and Papers, v. 1617) is dated 7 December and assigned by Gairdner to 1532. The other letter (ibid., iv, App. No. 176) is dated 7 June and assigned to 1528. Elyot is, however, styled clerk of the council in an act of parliament, 21 Henry VIII, c. 16.