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

LETTERS OF JAMES IV
XXVll
proper formulae to be used in addressing popes and
cardinals, kings and senates, displaying, too, models of
correct and elegant Latin to be imitated by future secre¬
taries and their clerks and deputies.
But the argument from the absence of dates may be
pushed too far ; an undated copy may, after all, mean
an undated original, a preliminary draft in which the
date had not been inserted.1 We may hazard the guess
that Paniter’s successor, Laurence Telfer, about the time
of Albany’s final departure from Scotland in 1524, ordered
his assistant clerks to collect, arrange, and copy out the
great mass of memoranda, preliminary drafts, and final
drafts of letters sent to foreign courts that had accumulated
since Paniter’s appointment as Secretary in 1505, and that
the clerks, ‘ nihil mutare ami,’ copied them out as they
found them, complete or incomplete, rough draft or final
draft. Telfer may have been moved simply by the col¬
lector’s instinct, or by a disinterested interest in recent
diplomatic history, to make permanent what otherwise
would be dispersed and destroyed ; he may have thought
that the collection would be of immediate practical value,
that by making it he was equipping himself with the tools
of a King’s Secretary’s trade.
This hypothesis leaves unexplained the wide divergence
between N.L. and the four other manuscripts. How did
it come about that the transcriber of N.L. copied out a
hundred letters which the transcriber of B.M. either did
not see or deliberately excluded ? Where did the tran¬
scriber of B.M. find those letters that the transcriber of
N.L. omitted ? Why should the transcriber of N.L. often
produce a dated, and the transcriber of B.M. an undated
version of the same letter ? These are problems that can¬
not be solved by the simple assumption that the existing
manuscripts are copies of other manuscript collections that
have now disappeared. One thing is certain—whatever
1 An examination of the two Franco-Scottish Treaties of 1512 (Nos. 450
and 482) preserved in the Register House, shows that each had been written
out in full except for the date, for which a space was left, into which it
was inserted in another hand.