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Erasmus (1985) privileges the genre of the familiar letter, downgrading epistolary practice that, continuing the tradition of the ars dictaminis, was geared to register the relative social positions of writer and addressee. Vernacular epistolographies, however, take on the whole a different view and make the marking o f status a key theme. Fabri

he is simply doing his duty by passing on to Cecil what he thinks ought to be made known to someone in authority.)

This is disingenuous, o f course. As Gorges says he will continue to do Cecil service, there is, whatever Gorges pretends, condiderable pressure on Cecil to keep his side o f the client-patron bargain and reward Gorges.

(1969) and Fulwood (1571)^^ organise their texts around concepts of social hierarchy. Letters are classified in terms of the class of writer and addressee: they may be written from a superior to an inferior, from an inferior to a superior or from an equal to an equal. Day’s English Secretorie is generally described inaccurately as a close paraphrase of Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis (Hombeak 1934, 17-29; Robertson 1942, 19-20). In fact, its consistent stress on the demarcation of social hierarchies makes it highly unlikely that Erasmus is its main source.^"^ It is easy to read these mles as responding to a need, in the face of increasing social mobility, to shore up class boundaries. Thus Frank Whigham argues that ‘The clamor and desperation and oiliness o f [Elizabethan clients’] letters reveal social conditions o f pressure and anxiety’ (866).^^ Whigham locates the anxiety in an awareness of the fragility of social hierarchies, at a time when ‘Many old, stale devices for registering status were being replaced by a more dynamic system of conspicuous expenditure, itself inherently anxiety-producing’ and concludes that, faced with this situation, courtiers used their letters as an

inexpensive means for signaling identity, status and integration...Each utterance o f ‘my lord’ or ‘dame’ or ‘sir’ ratified not only the place o f the superior but that o f the speaker as enfranchised witness in a coherent social universe’ (1981, 867).

Letters were written on bifolia ‘closed, sealed and packed up after the finest fashion’ (Fulwood 1571, ASv). The first element of a letter to come to an addressee’s attention was the seal at the back—a key to the identity of the sender—and the ‘superscription’ or ‘direction’ written on the outside of the letter containing the name and address of the recipient. Wording delineated the sender’s relationship to the recipient and had to be

Fulwood’s text ultimately derives from Fabri (Guedet 1984).

Day was probably working from a vernacular adaptation o f De conscribendis epistolis yet to be identified.

calculated carefully as, unlike the actual text of the letter, the superscription was vulnerable to the censure of ‘prying and critical eyes’ (Vives 1989, 73).^^ Fulwood says that the superscription should contain

the name o f [the recipient’s] dignitie, Lordship, Office, Nobilitie, Science, or parentage: And if we write mo than one, the chiefest and permanent dignities must be written first, then the consanguinitie: and afterwarde the mutable dignitie, as for example: To my Lord o f such a place, my cousin, Maister o f the Requestes o f our soueraigne Lord the King. (1571, A8v)

Gorges’s practice is in harmony with Fulwood’s stipulations. His standard form for the superscription to his letters to Robert Cecil is ‘To the Honorable Sir Robert Cecyll knight of hyr Ma/e5tis. preuy Councell’ (e.g. Hatfield CP 27.49; 31.66), a simple conjunction of permanent and mutable dignities, the former (‘knight’) coming first, as Fulwood recommends.

Gorges’s subscriptions, most o f which melt imperceptibly into the closing section (peroratio) of the letter in which they occur, clearly register Gorges’s attempt to maintain a balance between friendliness and submissiveness in his relationship with Cecil. Nearly all the subscriptions combine, in some shape or form, ‘affection’ with ‘duty’ (e.g. ‘Yowr Honors in all dutye and affection’ (69.1); 'Your Honors in all dutye most affectionate’ (55.54)), several of them adding new formulae to heighten the effect o f friendship and/or submissiveness (e.g. 'Your honors dutifiill and affectionate poore Kynsman to commaund’ (32.83)). Opening addresses attempting a similar balance o f attitudes towards the patron are few and far between (e.g. ‘Moste honorable and deare Sir’ (55.54)).^^ On

In section 4 a different explanation is given for this phenomenon.

For anecdotal evidence illustrating the importance o f the wording o f superscriptions see Collins 1746, 2.175.

The anxiety behind such formulations comes to the surface in a letter written by John Harington in 1603, which opens with the address ‘Right honorable and, I hope [my italics], still my speciall good Lord’ (Harington 1930, 105). In one letter (67.101), Gorges distinguishes Cecil the friend from Cecil the forbidding public servant. Gorges says he is sending the letter because he does not want ‘to omitt a fytt

the whole, Gorges sticks to the standard ‘Most honored S/r’ (e.g. 5554) and its variants, switching to an address of the form ‘Moste honored and my singuler good Lord’ on Cecil’s elevation to the peerage.

Another way in which renaissance letters registered the social relationship between a

4

letter’s writer and its recipient was by m ean^the positioning of the words on the page (Braimmuller 1993; Gibson 1997). The more space that was left between various elements of the letter the higher the social status of the recipient. Throughout Gorges’s correspondence significant space is used (wherever paper-size allows) to register submissiveness to Cecil. Significance attaches to the gap between text and subscription, the left/right placing of the subscription and signature (placing in the extreme right-hand comer signifies the greatest respect) and the gap between the opening address to the recipient and text. Subscriptions and signatures in letters to correspondents closer than Cecil in social status to Gorges—Thomas Harlot (BL MS Additional 6789, ff.538r-538v); William Trumbull (BL MS Trumbull X, f.l2r-12v); George Carew (Hatfield CP 19.130)— are placed relatively centrally.^*

A significant element in renaissance letters was the choice o f handwriting. A holograph letter, a step nearer the presence of its sender than a scribal letter, was interpreted as a mark of respect, goodwill and privacy (Vives 1989, 4-9). Letters copied by professional scribes, particularly when in italic script, were used when an effect of

oportunetye to doo seruyce to so good and noble a frende as Master Secretarye; Though to ye Master o f the wardes I be made a straunger, by destyne butt not by deserte’. The letter was written in 1599, during the negotiations between Cecil and Lincoln over the sale o f Chelsea to Lincoln, In the context o f these negotiations, Gorges got on well with Cecil. However, they coincided with a difficult spell in Gorges’s wrangle with the Queen over the wardship o f Ambrosia.

The most radical deployment o f significant space o f which I am aware comes in a letter written by Ralegh to Anne o f Denmark in 1611 or 1612 (PRO SP14/67/126). Ralegh’s signature is as tiny as can be.

formality was wanted. Gorges used scribal italic when composing his most elaborately structured petitionary letters at key crisis-points in his career (e.g. Hatfield CP 46.59; 75.53; 77.45; 85.160; 87.37; 87.38; 105.146; 108.98; 182.47; 188.12; 251.73). Most of Gorges’s other letters are in holograph, some simply because they were written off the cuff (e.g. 31.67; 33.58; 59.86; 121.56),^^ the rest as a token o f his goodwill toward Cecil and his personal investment in serving him and as a guarantee of the privacy o f the letter.

Occasionally, Gorges apologises for using a scribe instead of writing himself. The reason is always illness (e.g. 78.61), with one significant exception, a letter written to Cecil in 1602/3 (97.48). In this lengthy holograph text. Gorges apologises effusively for sending Cecil a New Year’s gift o f furnishing material. Cecil had been offended not just by the gift itself, with its overtones of bribery, but by the late hour of its delivery and by the fact that the letter accompanying it (91.20) was in the hand o f Gorges’s secretary. In seeking to exculpate himself. Gorges refers back to the original letter’s protestation that the gift was not designed to win favour from Cecil:

I dyd ... presume to vse my mans hande in wrytinge my letter, because owr seruinge creatures (whoe are apte to be tatlinge in all theyr Ma^/eres matters) should ye better know how harshe and vnpleasinge it is to y o w humor to be thought pleased wrt/j presents

Gorges claims that he had been given the present by someone else, that it was unsuitable for his house, and that all he was trying to do was to get rid of The letter is vivid testimony to the potentially perilous nature of the balance between friendship and clientage Gorges continually tried to maintain in his letters to Cecil.

jammed tightly into the bottom right-hand comer— vividly dramatising not just Ralegh’s servility to Arme but also his containment in England (the letter’s aim is to win favour for an expedition to Guiana).

In these letters, Gorges generally apologises to Cecil for his ‘hasty scryblinge’ (Hatfield CP 31.67). Gorges also mentions a hanging decorated with Cecil’s arms and suggests that Cecil barter for it with him to avoid incurring a debt o f gratitude.