Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/358

 350 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS July clerks of the council, have not been ascertained. 1 One Nedham is so described in 1538, 2 and Sir Henry Ellis gives that designation to Thomas Wriothesley, afterwards lord chancellor. But the address of the letter which Ellis prints 3 is to Wriothesley as one of the clerks of the signet, and there is no evidence that he was ever clerk of the council, though the facts that clerks of the council were regularly recruited from the clerks of the signet and that the latter were often detailed to do the work of the former naturally caused confusion. Thomas Derby's career affords some clue to the history of the evolution of a definite clerkship of a privy council. The story is told by himself in an undated letter assigned by Gairdner to June 1532. 4 For sixteen years he had written dispatches dealing with all sorts of matters, foreign and domestic, secret and public, for seven as clerk to Sir Brian Tuke, and for nine as clerk of the signet, in which office he succeeded Tuke in 1523 on Tuke's promotion to be French secretary in place of John Meautis. 5 Tuke, he complains, took pay for four clerks, while Derby did nearly all the work and received but twenty nobles a year, though ' with all possible economy he could not live on less than 40Z.' In 1528 he says he was appointed to succeed Uvedale as clerk of the council in the north and expended considerable sums in preparation, but Uvedale was continued in that office and Derby got no compensation. He was defrauded of other rewards. Wolsey obtained for him the custom on 200 sacks of wool for five years, but Tuke on his own authority altered the 200 to 100. 6 Derby does not mention his Calais clerkship in this letter of complaint, but it seems to have produced some effect on Crom- well, for on 28 January 1533 Derby was appointed clerk of the council with 20 a year on the terms on which Richard Eden and Belhouse had held the office. 7 He continued to be clerk of the signet, however, and is so generally described until, in the king's payments for March 1538, 8 we suddenly find him called ' clerk of the privy council ', receiving his quarter's salary of 5. In March 1539 he received his whole year's salary of 20 as clerk of the privy council in advance, and in June another advance of 10 from next year's salary. 9 The second advance was perhaps due to the fact that he had already in spite of his 1 Letters and Papers, viii. 858. Bedell is also styled clerk of the council in 1533 (ibid. vi. 733 ; cf. Ellis, in. iii. 104). 2 Letters and Papers, xm. i. 696. 3 Original Letters, n. ii. 38-40. 4 Letters and Papers, v. 1068. & Ibid. iii. 2894. Papers, iv. 5624 [21]) where the editors describe the 100 as ' corrected from 200 '. 7 The reference is to the junior clerkship Eden held before becoming clerk of the council in the star chamber at 26 13s. 4d. Belhouse never held the latter office. 8 Letters and Papers, xm. ii, p. 528. . " Ibid. xiv. ii, pp. 306, 311.
 * This detail is corroborated by the extant signed bill of 21 May 1529 (Letters and