Series 3 > Letters of James the Fourth, 1505-1513

LETTERS OF JAMES IV xxiii
by one—No. 150 in the Calendar—dated January 1, 1508.
Though Gairdner exaggerates when he declares that the
letters are ‘ absolutely in no order whatsoever,’ though
most of them are arranged roughly in chronological order,
there are exasperating exceptions, and the mere position
of an undated letter in the collection is no reliable indication
of its date. Many letters, however, that have been left
undated in the other MSS., are in N.L. supplied with both
date and place of origin. A comparison of the copies in
N.L. and B.M. of the Danish correspondence with the
original letters, preserved in the Danish Archives and
printed in Wegener, shows of N.L. comes closer than B.M. to
the text of the letters that were actually sent to Denmark.
These MS. collections were first utilised by Thomas
Ruddiman, who got the whole of the material for the first
volume of his Epistolae Jacobi Quarti, Jacobi Quinti, et
Mariae, Regum Scotorum (Edinburgh, 1722) from N.L. A and
N.L. D. One manuscript, apparently N.L. D, he described
in his preface as seeming to be almost contemporary with
the original; the other, with its frequent corrections and
marginal notes, he judged to be a little later. Of the 326
letters contained in these two copies he printed 206, of
which 115 belonged to the last eight years of the reign of
James IV, and the remainder to the period between the
accession of James V and the departure of the Regent
Albany for France in 1521.
Of the 67 letters which James Gairdner printed in full
in his Letters and Papers of Richard III and Henry VII,
Volume II, pp. 185-279 (London, 1863) he took 44 from
B.M., which he considered to be the original of the two
National Library MSS. used by Ruddiman. He was the
first to discover the value of N.L., for the neglect of which
he found it difficult to excuse Ruddiman, and to recognise
that it contained a large number of letters, especially for
the period 1505-9, that were not in the other MSS.
Unfortunately for the student of Scottish History, Gairdner
decided to print only those which he considered the most
important, including all that had any reference to England,
but excluding ‘ the large number that relate only to Scotch