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Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early Modern England Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early Modern England
Laura Kolb
CUNY Bernard M Baruch College
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CHAPTER 12
Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early
Modern England
Laura Kolb
12.1 Introduction
The prefatory letter to the 1618 epistolary manual Conceyted Letters,
Newly Layde Open extols the vir tues of ‘writings … which passe from
man to man’, by means of which kings manage kingdoms, merchants
conduct business, and ‘all sorts of people speake at a farre distance’.
1
It
urges readers to ‘imitate it so farre as to thy private benefite’.
2
The claims
embedded here—that skill in letter-writing benefits people of all stations
1
Nicholas Breton, Conceyted Letters, Newly Layde Open (London, 1618), sig. A3r–v. On
the pamphlet’s authorship, see Gary R. Grund, ‘From Formulary to Fiction: The Epistle
and the English Anti-Ciceronian Movement’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language
17, no. 2 (1975): 379–395, 394.
2
Breton, Conceyted,sig.A3v.
L. Kolb (
B
)
Baruch College CUNY, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: laura.kolb@baruch.cuny.edu
© The Author(s) 2020
L. Kolb and G. Oppitz-Trotman (eds.), Early Modern Debts,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59769-6_12
303
304 L. KOLB
in life and that epistolary manuals contain useful models for imitation—
are standard in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
3
They appear in
texts as disparate as Erasmus’ De conscribendis epistolis, a cornerstone of
humanist education, and John Browne’s The Marchants Avizo, a guide
for Bristol merchants in Iberia.
Conceyted Letters opens with very particular kind of imitable model: a
letter concerned with borrowing and lending within the context of friend-
ship. The collection’s first epistle, titled ‘A letter to a friend, to Borowe
Money’, reads:
If borowing of Money be not a breach of Friend-ship, let me intreat your
patience to open your Purse, a present occasion puts me to the adventure
of your kindenesse, the matter is not much, yet will at this time pleasure
me as much as so much may doo: the sum five pounds, the time three
moneths, my credit the Assurance, and heartie thankes the Interest. Thus
without troubling the Broker, or charging of the Scrivener, hoping my
letter shall be of suf ficient power to prevaile with your love; Intreating
your present answer, in the affection of an honest heart, I commit you to
the Almightie. Yours, or not his owne D.M.
4
The letter performs intimacy.
5
By turns respectful and presumptuous, it
recruits its reader as one already favourably inclined. Rhetorical devices
like parallel syntax (‘the sum five pounds, the time three moneths’),
alliteration (patience, purse) and irony (the expressed desire not to ‘trou-
ble’ a broker)—as well as a playful gesture towards the terms of a legal
bond—simultaneously downplay the request’s possible importunity and
potentially charm the addressed friend. Marked by ‘studied carelessness’,
this little note is a highly crafted verbal artefact, designed to delight
3
Alan Stewar t and Heather Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Seattle:
distributed by the University of Washington Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library,
2004), 21–24; Claudio Guillén, ‘Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’,
in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer
Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986), 70–101, 73.
4
Breton, Conceyted,sig.A4r.
5
Erasmus defines a letter as ‘a mutual conversation between absent friends’. Decon-
scribendis epistolis (On the Writing of Letters ), trans. Charles Fantazzi, Collected Works of
Erasmus, vol. 25, Literary and Educational Writings 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1985), 20. On Erasmus’ influence on the rhetoric of intimacy in early modern
letters, see Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 73–95.
12 DEBT LETTERS 305
as well as—and indeed in order to—elicit cash.
6
The letter also does
another, longer-term kind of work. Alluding at several points to friend-
ship, it locates the writer’s ‘present occasion’, within a relationship that
has a history, a future and a form. In so doing, it invokes a Senecan
logic whereby the circulation of material benefits increases the ‘love’ and
‘affection’ between friends.
7
The letter implicitly claims that a loan will
work like a gift, resulting in affective profit for both parties and strength-
ening a bond rather than causing a ‘breach’.
8
Conceyted Letters opens
with a useful sample missive indeed: the letter mobilises a classical model
of friendship’s material practices for use within early modern England’s
‘culture of credit’.
9
Amicable ‘debt letters’ like this one offer insight the crucial role that
rhetoric played in credit relations in early modern England. In his impor-
tant study of early modern England’s culture of credit, Craig Muldrew
notes that credit was ‘based on words’, grounded both on ‘unstable
language’ and interpretations of that language.
10
Reputations are rhetor-
ical artefacts, and in a s ociety where financial credit and good name
intertwined, ‘linguistic evaluation, argument, and description … had an
effect on people’s access to material goods’.
11
Elsewhere in this volume,
Andrew Zurcher has argued that the central paradox of debt culture—
that a debtor has power over his creditor—produces particular rhetorical
6
Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, 21. Erasmus notes a letter’s style should be graceful
but not ‘artificial’ (20) and warns against ‘infelicitous striving after effect’ (Deconscribendis,
22).
7
On the reception of Seneca’s de Beneficiis in early modern England, see Wendy Trevor
‘“Receyving of Freendshipe”: Seneca’s de Beneficiis and Early Modern Amicable Relations’,
Literature and History 20, no. 1 (2011): 59–74; Coppélia Kahn, ‘“Magic of Bounty”:
Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patr onage, and Maternal Power’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38,
no. l (1987): 34–57; Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Idol and Gift in Volpone’, English Literary
Renaissance 35, no. 3 (2005): 429–453; John M. Wallace, ‘Timon of Athens and the Three
Graces: Shakespeare’s Senecan Study’, Modern Philology 83, no. 4 (1986): 349–363.
8
The claim that loans strengthen local affective bonds is r elated to Craig Muldrew’s
argument that debt relations operated as social glue in early modern England. The Economy
of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). On debts recast as gifts, see Sebastian Kühn’s essay in
this volume.
9
Muldrew, Economy, passim.
10
Muldrew, Economy, 157 and 154.
11
Muldrew, Economy, 150.
306 L. KOLB
effects in poetic and dramatic representations of indebtedness.
12
Yet the
rhetoric of credit relations—and, in particular, the language with which
borrowing and lending were negotiated—remains largely unexplored.
Letter-writing manuals offer a rich site for understanding the language
with which early modern people negotiated credit relations. Because many
of these manuals foreground letters between friends, they offer particular
insight into the pressur es debt relations put on amicable relations. Lynne
Magnusson has demonstrated the extent to which language of friendship
came to inflect merchant correspondence in the sixteenth century—
that is, the extent to which business relationships relied on amicable
rhetoric.
13
Here, I trace a related phenomenon, but one inflected with a
different relational emphasis: the ways in which epistolary rhetoric created
space within amicable relationships for discussion of economic matters:
borrowing, lending, repayment and forbearance.
Formularies are always also fictions, and seventeenth-century English
formularies in particular offer literary pleasures: abundance, variety,
psychological and situational particularity, ‘idiosyncratic detail’, and narra-
tive ‘vignettes’.
14
Nevertheless, their letters on debt and friendship speak
to historical economic conditions, and the various rhetorical strategies
they model would have been of use within real-life circumstances. In early
modern England, friendship involved ‘economic dependency as well as an
affective bond’.
15
Friendships increased one’s credit, in the general sense
of socially circulating reputation. In times of need, calling on friends was
a normal step towards recovery from specific debts and, in some cases at
least, an opportunity to deepen friendship.
16
Credit flowed along chan-
nels of kinship, alliance and affinity.
17
Epistolary manuals’ sample letters
on debts between friends constitute an important body of evidence for
how verbal negotiation worked within these channels. Though highly
12
For more on this paradox, see the chapters by Alexander Douglas and Benjamin D.
VanWagoner in this volume.
13
Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and
Elizabethan Letters (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 114–140.
14
Grund, ‘From Formulary to Fiction’, 393.
15
Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in
Sixteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3.
16
See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2013), 5–97.
17
Muldrew, Economy,3.
12 DEBT LETTERS 307
artificial—crafted, as all letters are to some degree, but with an added
fictional remove—formulary letters are nevertheless examples of what
Magnusson identifies as ‘social dialogue’: the ‘verbal exchanges’ and ‘rela-
tional scripts’ through which individuals enact ‘personal relationships’.
18
They model the ability to offer pleasing verbal artifice as a kind of pre-
emptive payment for financial help or as partial recompense for monies
not offered. Such verbal tokens were vital to the intertwined affective
and monetary exchanges that structured amicable relations within credit
culture. They enabled letter-writers to request, extend or deny loans
within specific situations, while maintaining credit—in the broader sense
of ongoing trust, confidence and goodwill—with their friends.
Conceyted Letters is a relatively late entry to a cluster of epistolary
manuals that appeared in print in the first two decades of the seven-
teenth century, the best known of which are the first and second parts
of Nicholas Breton’s A Poste with a Madde Packet of Letters (1602;
the second part was published in 1606 as A Poste with a Packet of
Madde Letters ) and Gervase Markham’s Hobsons Horse-Load of Letters
(1613, re-issued with significant additions in 1617). Breton’s work in
particular inspired imitations, including Thomas Gainsford’s 1616 The
Secretaries Studie and the anonymous 1612 The Prompters Packet of
Private and Familiar Letters.
19
All of these manuals contain examples
of letters like the one quoted above: notes from one friend to another
asking for money, calling in over due loans, proffering aid or denying it,
or lamenting cracked credit. Yet these texts have generally been over-
looked in studies of early modern letter-writing on the grounds that
they are not, on the whole, useful. This cluster of manuals is generally
thought to be ‘more tailor ed to entertainment than practical training’,
as Heather Wolfe and Alan Stewar t put it; poised between the ‘episto-
lary fiction’ of the eighteenth century and the ‘epistolary formulary’ of
the sixteenth, as Gary Grund notes.
20
The manuals themselves advertise
their own ‘entertainment value’.
21
The title page of Conceyted Letters,for
instance, announces the book as ‘A most excellent bundle of new wit’
18
Magnusson, Shakespeare,1.
19
Similar volumes continued to be published for several decades. See Grund, ‘From
Formulary to Fiction’, 394.
20
Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, 56; Grund, ‘From Formulary to Fiction’, 381.
21
Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, 79.
308 L. KOLB
before it mentions lessons in the ‘arte of Episteling’—and in significantly
larger type. Moreover, the bundled ‘wit’ these books contain is highly
eclectic, with jumbled letters exhibiting a wide r ange of genres and styles:
each contains love letters, comic letters and letters sparkling with situ-
ational, social and psychological detail. Each of these manuals exhibits
diverse points-of-view, offering an array of invented ‘writers’: women,
students, apprentices, courtiers, doctors, country-dwellers, city-dwellers,
lovers, parents, children, ‘a playne Country-man’, ‘a ritch widdowe’, ‘a
kinde of Diogines’.
22
Each includes pairs and occasional strings of letters,
a feature that marks them as pr ecursors to the epistolary novel as well as
inheritors of the Erasmian tradition.
23
Unlike the rest of these volumes’ contents, their letters on borrowing
and lending have been recognised as ‘potentially useful’ if also ‘stiflingly
boring’.
24
This characterisation implicitly claims that letters’ entertain-
ment value is inversely proportionate to their value as imitable models.
It also flattens and homogenises the letters on borrowing and lending
themselves, which showcase narrative and psychological detail often char-
acterised as ‘entertaining’ and proto-novelistic, as well as the supple
‘gracefulness of expression’ Erasmus claims should characterise a letter
to a friend.
25
Attention to these ‘debt letters’ dismantles the distinction
between utility and entertainment: their usefulness is, in fact, a function of
their verbal craft and abundant wit. While it is true that they often contain
narrative detail and situational specificity that might make them hard to
absorb, appropriate and reuse wholesale, their dense particularity makes
them useful in another way. A s Lawrence Green writes, seventeenth-
century manuals ar e ‘driven by a lively engagement with the events of this
world—love, courtship, commerce, and the like’.
26
In their very particu-
larity—what Green identifies as attention to ‘this world’—these manuals
22
Markham, Hobsons Horse-Load of Letters (London, 1613), sig. F2v; Nicholas Breton,
A Poste with a Packet of Madde Letters. The Second Part (London, 1606), sig. C1r;
Breton, Conceyted, sig. B4v. In these notes, I distinguish the two editions of Hobson’s
Horse-load and the two par ts of Breton’s Poste by date.
Markham, Hobsons (1617), sig. M1r.
23
Grund, ‘From Formulary to Fiction’, 381.
24
Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, 79.
25
Erasmus, Deconscribendis, 20.
26
Lawrence D. Green, ‘French Letters and English Anxiety in the Seventeenth
Century’, Huntington Library Quarterly 66, nos. 3–4 (2003): 263–274, 265.
12 DEBT LETTERS 309
offer the lesson that the amicable debt letter, as a type, can be repurposed
for a range of variable situations and adapted to the needs of individual
writers, enmeshed in their own idiosyncratic amicable bonds.
In what follows, I situate formulary debt letters within the longer
history of epistolary instruction in English, looking in particular at two
groups of manuals. The first includes William Fulwood’s The Enimie of
Idlenesse (1568), Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586) and John
Browne’s The Marchants Avizo (1589). Published in the second half
of the sixteenth century, these manuals emphasise stylistic and social
decorum. While they contain no letters specifically addressing the issue
of amicable borrowing and lending, they offer examples of the two letter
genres the seventeenth-century manuals would draw on and combine:
business letters circulating within merchant communities and familiar
letters circulating among kin and friends. The second group consists of
the early seventeenth-century manuals by Breton, Markham and their
followers. Published between 1602 and 1618, these manuals all contain
‘debt letters’ invoking a model of friendship as a set of recipr ocal mate-
rial practices—a model drawn from classical accounts of friendship, but
brought to the fore within England’s credit culture, where money and
love, affection and debt, circulated together.
27
In the final pages of this
essay, I will turn to examples of historical letters. Practice, in letter-writing,
is notoriously far from theory.
28
Yet these real-world letters show the
central lesson of formulary debt letters at work in the world: that indi-
vidual, lived iterations of a common dynamic—the overlapping bonds of
friendship and of debt—must be managed in language that addresses both
the needs of the moment, and the long-term structure of friendship itself.
27
I have also written on this cluster of letter-writing manuals, with special emphasis
on Thomas Gainsford’s work, in the second chapter of Fictions of Credit in The Age of
Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021).
28
Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 14; Stewart and
Wolfe, Letterwriting, 21.
310 L. KOLB
12.2 Business Letters and Familiar Letters
The first letter-writing manual in English, William Fulwood’s 1568 The
Enimie of Idlenesse is dedicated to ‘Maister, Wardens, and Company of the
Marchant Tayllors of London’.
29
The Enimie of Idlenesse is largely a trans-
lation from the French Le stile et maniere de composer, dicter et escrire
toutes sortes d’epistres (Paris, 1560), with the exception of some prefa-
tory material and a selection of love letters. Yet the book’s popularity
in England—Fulwood’s translation went through at least eight s ubse-
quent editions—suggests that English readers found much here that was
useful, amusing, or both.
30
The book is explicitly addressed to people
of the middling sort; early on, Fulwood distinguishes between letters
addressed to superiors (‘Emperors, kings, princes &c’) to inferiors (‘ser-
vants, laborers, &c’), and ‘to our equals as to Marchants, Burgesses,
Citizens &c’.
31
Many of the letters it contains addr ess the family lives
of merchants and tradespeople. In private letters of news, consolation
and admonition, fathers write to sons, sisters to brothers, daughters to
mothers. Monetary concerns inflect a number of these letters, as when a
father excuses himself for tardy payment of his son’s allowance at school,
having entered debt to pay his daughter’s dowry. Alongside such ‘homely,
familiar letters’ we find letters of business: exchanges between merchants,
between a merchant and his factor, and between a pair of ‘cashyers’.
32
In
one letter, a merchant recalls his factor from Barcelona, ‘where wee have
but smal gaines’; the factor responds: ‘I will incontinentely come unto
you, and will bryng with me all my bookes of accomptes’.
33
The factor’s
promise to come straightaway, accounts in hand, is accompanied by news
‘to quiet your minde’ in the interim: a quick sketch of the whereabouts
of his master’s absent money, some of which has been lent out and s ome
used to meet ‘sundry expenses for your affaires’.
34
29
William Fulwood, TheEnimieofIdlenesse(London, 1568), sig. A2r.
30
Katherine Gee Hornbeak, The Complete Letter-Writer in English 1568–1800
(Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 1934), 7; Green,
‘French Letters’, 263–264.
31
Fulwood, Enimie,sig.A7v.
32
Hornbeak, Complete , 10; Fulwood, Enimie, sig. Q7r–v.
33
Fulwood, Enimie, sigs. Q5v–Q6v.
34
Fulwood, Enimie, sig. Q6v.
12 DEBT LETTERS 311
Some letters combine the familial and the financial, as when a father
chastises his son for scandalously mishandling the family business:
Verily my Sonne, thou wilt be the occasion through thy evill behavior, to
haste me sooner than I thought unto my grave: for one of these dayes in
this Towne of Lyons, many gentlemen and marchants affirmed unto me,
that al the clothes of Scarlet which thou didst cary with thee are lost. Also
I am advertised by my trusty frendes, that sundry dames in Lyons, go
sumptuously arayed with our clothes of Silke, and thou of them hast none
other payment, but that thou takest accompt secretly in ye night.
35
In a letter of response, the son protests against his father’s accusations: ‘I
consume not your goods, but I sell them aswel unto women as unto men.
I send you by your Factour two thousand pounds for clothes of Scarlet, &
six hundreth poundes for clothes of silke’.
36
Even in non-familial business
letters, though, the Enimie’s letters address a world in which managing
personal relationships and managing money go hand in hand. Business is
conducted in the language of excuse and admonishment, of chastisement
and defence, that we find in letters from parents to children, and children
to parents.
The Enimie of Idlenesse contains a handful of letters addressing inter-
personal debt relations and relations of amicable (rather than primarily
business-related) financial obligations. In the first of these, ‘To ayde thy
frende being in prison for dette’, the writer addresses a lord, asking for
financial relief on behalf of his own ‘perfect frende’, whose family suffers
while he languishes in prison. This missive locates the present request
within a long-standing but clearly vertical relationship, in which the lord
grants favours and the letter-writer responds with ongoing gratitude—
and ongoing requests. The letter opens, ‘I Thank God, for that I never
requested any thing of your Lordship, which you graunted me not’, and,
after laying out the friend’s plight, it concludes: ‘And thus having sundry
tymes received benefits from your honour, I presently am bold by to great
presumption, to have recourse unto you, tenderly beseching you that you
wold vouchsafe to deliver him out of prison’. The letter-writer asks for
35
Fulwood, Enimie, sig. P3r. On the genre of the admonitory letter from father to
son, see Richar d Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976), 16–43.
36
Fulwood, Enimie,sig.P4r.
312 L. KOLB
a favour on behalf of another. Though relieving a stranger from debt
might be construed as charity, here it is cast as a benefit. The r elation-
ship nourished by this benefit will be that between the letter-writer and
his patron-addressee, but, for this to be true, a very particular concep-
tion of the other r elationship in the letter—between the writer and his
‘perfect’ friend—must be in play: a model of amity in which friends
are so close, and shar e so much, that they may draw on one another’s
external bonds. Two subsequent letters also employ a similar logic of
friendship as a merging of resources, relationships and interests. Titled,
‘To put thy fr end in remembrance of thy businesse’ and ‘To require ayde
at thy frendes hand’, they imply horizontal bonds structured by mate-
rial exchange, in which aid and the gratitude aid produces together shore
up, or even constitute, amity. The first of these begins with the writer
declaring himself ‘assured’ that his friend has never, and will never, neglect
his affairs, ‘which through your humanitie you have always reputed to
be your owne’.
37
The letter strategically invokes the classical ideal of
friendship as sharing all: in friendship, what’s mine is yours, including
‘businesse’.
The Enimie’s friendship letters are not strictly about debt in the sense
of a specific financial obligation; one is an urgent but vague reminder of
previously agreed-to aid, the other a request for ‘succor’. They are never-
theless clear precursors of seventeenth-century sample letters mingling
the concerns of debt with those of friendship.
38
As such, they raise an
important question: What do we owe to our friends?
39
‘[A]ll that we
have’, runs one period answer.
40
Proverbially, ‘friends hold all things in
common’, a saying that many period writers applied to the material prac-
tices of friendship, especially the proffering aid in times of need.
41
Perhaps
with this adage in mind, Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens,
discovering his catastrophic debts, reassures his steward and himself that ‘I
37
Fulwood, Enimie, sig. R6r.
38
For Fulwood’s influence on Breton and his followers more generally, see Thomas
O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999),
32–33.
39
See Maus, Being, 77.
40
Anonymous, The Triall of True Friendship (London, 1596), sigs. B1v and B2r.
41
On the saying’s history and circulation, see Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in
Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven: Yale
UP, 2001). On its relation to the material practices of friendship, see Trevor, ‘Receyving’.
12 DEBT LETTERS 313
am wealthy in my friends’ (4.179).
42
Yet Timon is famously wrong: the
unquantified, informal debts incurred by his generosity towar ds friends
go unrepaid, even as his debtors’ servants inundate him with paper
records of formal, legal bonds. Within early modern England’s culture of
credit (which Timon of Athens addresses in profoundly pessimistic terms)
friends, kindred, and allies were an important source of financial stability.
For better or worse, credit was considered a shared resource.
43
Yet, at
times, it had to be (or simply was) withheld. As we will see in the next
section, debt letters frequently address a tension between the affective
and economic demands of friendship, and between the desir e to share
with one’s friends and to protect one’s own finances and good name.
Here, it is worth noting that Fulwood’s letters capture a related tension:
between the urgent demands of the moment and the ongoing goodwill
and affection within a friendship. As rhetorical artefacts, Fulwood’s letters
communicate the former in a style that consistently signals and seeks to
enact the latter.
Printed in 1589, John Browne’s Marchants Avizo addresses itself to
merchants’ ‘sonnes and servants’ working in Spain, Portugal and ‘other
contreyes’.
44
Though it includes other useful material—thrifty precepts;
information on weights, measures and currencies—it is in large part a
formulary, containing sample bills, bonds and letters. The first of the
Avizo’s epistles, ‘A generall remembrance for a servant at his first going to
sea’, is the only one from master to servant. It urges the recipient to send
letters home frequently, to ‘deale closely & secretly in all [his] affaires
and busynes’ and to ‘shew [himself] lowly, curteous, and serviceable unto
every person’.
45
There follow a number of letters from servant to master,
and finally a group of three letters from a young merchant abroad to
correspondents in different ports. Two of these are identified as letters
‘to a friend’, and both of these ask for substantial favours. As Magnusson
notes, these letters employ a ‘rhetoric of reciprocity’ at once defer ential
and ‘highly personal and presumptuous’.
46
So, for example, one letter
42
William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Timon of Athens, ed. John Jowett
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008).
43
See Hutson, Usurer’s, 138.
44
John Browne, The Marchants Avizo (London, 1589), t.p.
45
Browne, Marchants,sig.B2r.
46
Magnusson, Shakespeare, 130.
314 L. KOLB
asks the recipient to receive a load of lead from a ship called the Gabriel,
to sell that lead, to use the pr ofits to buy ‘8. Buts of very good Secke the
best that possible can be gotten’, to load those butts of sack back onto
the Gabriel and to pass the remaining moneys on to the letter-writer.
47
All
this labour will be repaid with goodwill and future favours; that is, with
credit in its least specifiable form: ‘I doe assure you that you shall finde
me to the uttermost of my power, both gratefull and mindfull to pleasure
you againe in the like and much greater if I can be able’.
48
Though these
are clearly business letters, their designation—‘to a friend’—along with
their rhetoric of reciprocal favours draw on the logic of amicable aid.
Calling business relationships friendships, and employing a language of
mutuality, Browne’s letters remind us that merchants depended on each
other’s goodwill, resources and connections. They borrow the tropes of
familiar letters because business relationships were in a very real sense
‘familiar’: sociable, as well as monetary; mutual, as well as self-interested.
Like friendships, merchants’ bonds depended on a double temporal struc-
ture: meeting the urgent needs of the moment and perpetuating mutually
beneficial relationships through time.
49
Dedicated to the Earl of Oxford and aimed at an audience of ‘cour-
teous’ readers, Angel Day’s 1586 The English Secretorie was the most
popular and important letter-writing manual in English in the sixteenth
century, reprinted numerous times. Largely unconcerned with the world
of business, The English Secretorie avoids discussion of financial dealings
in any detail.
50
Nevertheless, examples of ‘Letters petitorie’ and ‘let-
ters r emunerative’ offer models that could be adapted for asking for
monetary help and offering thanks. Day notes that ‘craving, borrowing,
importuning, charging, [and] vehement troubling’ call for a careful atten-
tion to ‘stile and order & deliverie’.
51
Epistolary style was of particular
concern to Renaissance humanists, who rediscovered in classical texts a
‘rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy’.
52
Ver nacular English formula-
ries like The English Secretorie offer a flexible, pragmatic version of the
47
Browne, Marchants,sig.D1r.
48
Browne, Marchants,sig.D1r.
49
See Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 170–172.
50
Angel Day, The English Secretorie (London, 1586), sig. ?4v.
51
Day, English Secretorie,sig.M1v.
52
Eden, Renaissance, 121.
12 DEBT LETTERS 315
humanist concern with style.
53
Day’s claim that ‘stile and order & deliv-
erie’ matter profoundly in letters related to favours and obligations is
related to his concern with social and stylistic decorum more generally.
He writes that, ‘In one kinde wee frame our letters to olde men, in an
other sorte to young, one way to sad and grave persons, an other to
light or yong fellowes … to our betters evermore with submission, to our
equalles friendly, to straungers courteously, to our acquaintance familiarly,
to our inferiours beningly and favourably’.
54
Fulwood, similarly, tells us,
‘Yf we speake or write of or to our superiors, we must do it with all
honour, humilitie & reverence’, and ‘Yf we speake to our inferior, we
must use a certayne kynde of modest and civill authoritie’.
55
Situational
decorum matters as well. Day writes: ‘A matter of gravity [is to be] deliv-
ered with weight, a matter of sorrow reported with griefe, a matter of
pastime discoursed with pleasure’.
56
In these sixteenth-century manuals, the general lesson of matching
style to discursive context comes short of addressing the specific question
of how we write to our friends when we need access to their money.
57
Day
says only we must write to our friends ‘lovingly’, and Fulwood grants us
extraordinary freedom when it comes to amicable correspondence: ‘we
may make our Epistle or letter, long or short, as we shall thinck best, and
as it shall be most delectable: For a frende taketh all things agreeably and
in good part, and excuseth every thing that he may reasonably excuse’.
58
There is, here, frustratingly little guidance for a writer with a specific and
53
See Magnusson, Shakespeare, 64, 116.
54
Day, English Secretorie,sig.B3v.
55
Fulwood, Enimie,sig.A7vandsig.B2r.
56
Day, English Secretorie, sig. B4r–v.
57
Erasmus, it is worth noting, does offer advice for this situation: ‘If one is going
to ask for a loan of money, right at the beginning of his letter he should give some
news about someone that the reader will be most eager to hear because of his fondness,
particular enmity, or bitter hatred of that person; or if you should be recounting an
anecdote dressed up in a very charming style’ (Deconscribendis, 75). Only after a riveting
opening, unrelated to the loan, should the letter-writer, ‘suddenly slip in a word about
borrowing’. In contrast to Erasmus’ prescribed ruse of an ‘irrelevant beginning’, the
English amicable debt letters discussed below tend to get right to the point. One notable
exception, however, is William Trew’s letter to his brother-in-law (discussed below), which
uses a strategy similar to the one Erasmus promotes.
58
Day, English Secretorie, sig. A1v; Fulwood, Enimie,sig.B3v.Ontheimportanceof
letter-writing to Renaissance friendship, more generally, see James Daybell and Andrew
316 L. KOLB
potentially importunate request. It would fall to the next generation of
formulary writers to model what attention to ‘stile, order & deliverie’
might look like in letters to friends about debt.
12.3 Entertainment and Utility
Amicable debt letters begin to appear in concentration in early
seventeenth-century formularies, collections that have often been assumed
by later scholars to have little pedagogical value.
59
These manuals tend to
have shorter prefaces, and less instructional material overall; the emphasis
falls on the letters themselves. Title pages and prefaces flag the eclec-
ticism of these volumes’ contents, often signalling a kind of giddy,
topsy-turvy abundance: comic copia. Markham promises a horse-load of
epistles; Breton a madde packet dropped willy-nilly by the over-hasty
post.
60
Their anthologies represent fictional, physical bundles of letters,
jumbled, scattered and re-gathered. Prefatory notes emphasise the letters’
delightful variety. ‘My intente was to pleasure manie’, writes Breton.
61
These letters are ‘as various as mens pallates’, claims Markham.
62
Thomas
Gainsford’s 1616 The Secretaries Studie explicitly claims a link to Day’s
English Secretorie with its title—a title that, at first glance, seems to
emphasise intention over accident, and writerly activity over readerly plea-
sure. ‘Studie’ invokes both the site of letter-writing and the learning that
goes into epistolary skill; etymologically, it also suggests enthusiasm and
commitment. Despite this opening gesture towards tradition and utility,
The Secretaries Studie perhaps even more than the others offers—and
advertises—the pleasures of abundance and variety. Its table of contents
gives every letter a title, many of which hint tantalisingly at narrative
contents: ‘The lover cannot endure a rivall’, ‘A request to forbeare a
dangerous Ladyes company’, ‘Excuse for taking shelter in a shower of
raine, with a strange gentleman’ and ‘A request for money’. Gainsford’s
Gordon, ‘Introduction. The Early Modern Letter Opener’, in Cultures of Correspon-
dence in Early Modern Britain, ed. Daybell and Gordon (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1–26, 11–12.
59
See Grund, ‘From Formulary to F iction’, 393 and Stewart a nd Wolfe, Letterwriting,
56 and 79.
60
See Breton, Poste (1602), sig. A2r.
61
Breton, Poste (1606), sig. A2r.
62
Markham, Hobsons (1613), sig. A3r.
12 DEBT LETTERS 317
table visually imposes order on his book’s varied contents and offers ease
of navigation to readers seeking to find situationally appropriate letters
for their own lives. At the same time, though, it promises readers a lively
proliferation of epistles, scenarios and voices.
Fulfilling the prefatory material’s promises of myriad delights, the
letters in this group of manuals offer readers the decidedly literary plea-
sure of imagining specific lives, relationships and circumstances. They
showcase social variety—ther e are letters from kings, courtiers, captains,
merchants, petty chapmen, and both elite and lower-class lovers—and
a range of discursive modes, including advice, rebuke, compliment,
complaint, challenge and news-giving. Occasional pairings or even strings
of letters provide striking details and imply busy worlds populated with
highly individual, if briefly sketched, characters. To give just one example:
Markham includes a pair of letters between female friends who live far
apart: one in the country, one in the city. The lady in the country-
side describes herself as sewing, taking solitary walks, reading Sidney’s
Arcadia and ‘retiring my selfe many times into my selfe, to call to minde
our being together’.
63
Her city-dwelling friend responds that she has
‘nothing but houses to looke on’, adding, ‘I have been pittifully trou-
bled, since your departure, with a raging in my teeth, and am beholding
to thy memory for much ease’.
64
Such intimate detail—concerning not
only noteworthy events and situations, but mundane private activities
and finely grained emotions and bodily sensations—is generally lacking in
the sixteenth-century manuals’ sample letters (Browne’s Avizo sometimes
eschews detail altogether, including the bracketed instruction, ‘Here write
your newes’).
65
While undoubtedly providing ‘entertainment value’, these books’
specificity and eclecticism were also key to their usefulness. Indeed, detail
and variety always contribute both to a letter-writing manual’s pleasurable
appeal and to its instructional utility. As we have seen, to write letters
is to adapt style to situation, and even to take on varying personae as
specific discursive situations demand—that is to write in the appropriate
manner, ‘be the person to whom thou writest never so princely, never
so learned, never so worthy, never so noble, never so friendly, never so
63
Markham, Hobsons (1617), sig. M1r.
64
Markham, Hobsons (1617), sig. M1v.
65
Browne, sig. B4v.
318 L. KOLB
forwarde, never so gentle, never so angrie, never so vertuous, never so
wicked, never so prudent, never so witlesse, never so heavie, never so
joyfull’.
66
Sixteenth-century manuals emphasised selecting a style appro-
priate to the relative social positions of writer and addressee. The densely
detailed eclecticism of the seventeenth-century manuals may be seen as
an extension and intensification of this earlier interest in decorum: style,
here, alters situationally, according to the myriad shifting circumstances
of life. Styles of writing are as infinite as potential interlocutors, relation-
ships and cir cumstances; reading varied, abundant, detailed letters is a
help to writing them. Indeed, though Breton’s Poste does not gloss its
own variety in terms of utility, its many followers do in fact flag their
contents as models for other, as-yet-unwritten epistles. Conceyted Letters
invites r eaderly imitation for ‘private benefit’, and the Prompters Packet
advertises itself as useful for those ‘not given a spirit inventive enough for
their occasions’.
67
The Secretaries Studie describes itself as ‘Directions,
for the formall, orderly, and judicious inditing of Letters’.
68
Though
there may be a gap between these books’ most useful letters and their
most entertaining ones, there is no contradiction between the twin g oals
of providing both instruction and delight. The very features that made
these books’ letters attractive models for later fiction-writers made them
useful to seventeenth-century letter-writers. Their detail, particularity, and
attention to inward as well as outward states model ways of addressing
a wide variety of everyday scenarios: asking for money, for news, for
love; or simply staying in touch. The letters address typical situations,
while implying highly specific persons and relationships. As a whole, each
volume suggests a world that is socially and situationally varied, and that
can be organised into—though not reduced to—social and situational
types. There are r ecurring relationships between writer and addr essee,
and recurring occasions for letter-writing. At the same time, the letters
refuse to flatten themselves into pure examples, forms, types. Exemplarity
and particularity mingle, at times skimming close together, and at others
straining apart.
66
Abraham Fleming, A Panoplie of Epistles, or, a Looking Glasse for the Vnlearned
(London, 1576), sig. ¶5v.
67
Anonymous, The Prompters Packet of Private and Familar Letters (London, 1612),
sig. A2r.
68
Thomas Gainsford, The Secretaries Studie (London, 1616), t.p.
12 DEBT LETTERS 319
These volumes model the interplay of the typical situations with
idiosyncratic interlocutors and relationships most clearly, perhaps, in their
debt letters. These letters locate standard situations—asking for money,
granting or refusing loans—within a familiar r elational framework: friend-
ship conceived in terms of material obligations that flow from and nourish
an affective bond. Yet they also hint at enormous variety and speci-
ficity. Early modern English people borrowed money within various kinds
of relationships and from many kinds of people: strangers as well as
kin; professional moneylenders and tradespeople with access to ready
cash as well as neighbours; patrons; spouses; servants.
69
To at least
some degree, each of these relationships mingled sociable with finan-
cial concerns. Friendship might be said to represent the quintessential
site of this mingling: a relationship by definition involving both affective
and economic bonds, at times overlapping, at times in tension. Amicable
debt letters therefor e had the potential to be extraord inarily useful. They
offered not only verbal templates for obtaining money (or extending or
denying it); they also gave letter-writers models for how language can be
used to perform what Magnusson terms the ‘rituals of maintenance and
repair’ on important relationships in times of particular stress and strain.
70
Some letters, like the one with which this essay began, are uncompli-
cated requests. Yet even the most straightforward balance the demands of
the moment alongside a long-term relational structure. Take this example:
Sir, as nothing more trieth a friend then calamitie, so is there nothing more
grievous then to bee beholding: In kindnes t herefore, if I maye become
your debtor for five pounds, it is not much yet will it pleasure me more
then a little: your appointed day I will not breake with you, and wher ein I
may thankfully require you, you shall find no forgetfulnes of your kindnes:
but time is precious, and therefore entreating your speedie answere, in
hope of no deniall, I rest, Your assured friend to command,T.W.
71
The response is not favourable:
I Would be as glad to pleasure you as any man, but truth cannot be
blamed: for more then for my necessary use, that I cannot spare, I am
69
Muldrew, Economy, 97.
70
Magnusson, Shakespeare, 13.
71
Breton, Poste (1606), sig. E3r.
320 L. KOLB
not presently furnished: I praye you therefore take not a deniall unkindly:
for if my credit will pleasure you, I will not faile my best to doe you good:
if otherwise you would urge mee, it will be to little purpose: and there-
fore sory that I am not in tune to satisfie your expectation, I must leave
patience to your kind discretion, which as you know me, shall commaund
me: for I am, and will bee to the uttermost of my power, Your assured
friend, D.S.
72
Each of these letters represents potential damage to a friendship. One is
an importunate request; the other a refusal. Each minimises that poten-
tial damage by invoking the typical codes and practices of friendship: both
writers declare themselves to be at the addressee’s command; both gesture
towards a future in which amends will be made for the present discom-
modity. No exchange takes place. But the language of the letters works to
keep open the channels through which future exchanges—monetary and
epistolary—might flow. Though the specific, hoped-for, quantified loan
does not materialise, the friends maintain credit with one another in a
broader sense, through letters expressing trust, love and goodwill.
Creditors, too, had to balance long- and short-term concerns. In ‘A
kinde Letter of a Creditor for mony’, the letter-writer recalls an overdue
loan from a friend. He assures him that he would not be so importunate,
were he not confident of the friend’s ability to repay: ‘[M]y mony is not
much, and you well able to discharge it’.
73
Though he notes that the
agreed-upon day of payment is past, the letter’s emphasis is on his own
need rather than his friend’s negligence. Moreover, he presents that need
as an imposition: ‘[L]osses by sea, and ill Creditors by land make me strain
curtesse with my friends, for their good helpe in an extremitie’.
74
While
the writer may be referring to other friends here, the phrasing strongly
suggests that he is straining ‘curtesse’ by asking for what is rightfully his
own. The letter closes with further apology: ‘I take my leave further at
this time to trouble you, but will rest in what I shall be able ever to
pleasure you, to make you know how much I love you’.
75
Redescribing
overdue repayment as a favour, and his own request for it troublesome,
the letter-writer models a strategy: he offers his friend an image of himself
72
Breton, Poste (1606), sig. E3v.
73
Breton, Poste (1602), sig. E3r.
74
Breton, Poste (1602), sig. E3r.
75
Breton, Poste (1602), sig. E3r.
12 DEBT LETTERS 321
as generous and helpful, rather than derelict and worthy of reproach.
Writing a begging l etter rather than a rebuke, the creditor performs weak-
ness, and offers his indebted friend a position of strength. In the letter
of reply, that friend performs exactly the persona imputed to him. He
writes without apology, employing a tone of condescending graciousness
more befitting a gift-giver than a debtor: ‘[F]or a gr eater matter then
your demand, if my purse were not in tune, I would strain my credit very
farre for you’.
76
Luckily, his purse is in tune: ‘Your money I have sent
you, and as much mor e for so long time, I will lend you’.
77
Considered
as narrative, this pair of letters gives debt relations a comic resolution: not
only is the debt repaid, it is repaid in excess. The original debtor sends
along twice what he owed. Considered as imitable models, each displays
a different, situationally useful strategy. Treating repayment as a favour,
the original letter recruits the friend as generous, encouraging generous
behaviour. Avoiding apology and extending an unasked-for loan, the reply
claims power within the friendship.
Other letters address more drastic situations. Markham includes a letter
from the point of view of one imprisoned for debt. Though designated
‘to a friend’, this missive casts the relationship in terms of vertically given
charity rather than horizontally extended benefit, suggesting that the
terms normally reserved for writing to ‘superiors’ might be fitting and
necessary in extreme situations, where inequality of resources creates a
radical divide between friends. What is really remarkable about this letter,
though, is its style. It unfolds as a breathless pile-up of clauses:
Amongst all the helpefull offices of vertuous and generous men, none is
more excellent then that ayde which they afforde the distressed in time of
their captivity and affliction, and being perswaded there is as much will as
power in you to doe good (my love having never beene a stranger to your
familiaritie) I am incouraged to pray your favourable & friendly furtherance
by such good course and meanes as you will be pleased to vouchsafe me
concerning my releefe, the nature and quantity whereof, I wish, may onely
be proportioned by your ver tue & bountie, whose love will take up into
your consideration my present dispayre of all comfort, being a man full of
the disasters of imprisonment, as povertie, hunger, ill and most infectious
ayre, bad lodging, and to be briefe, idlenesse and sloth, my hands and
76
Breton, Poste (1602), sig. E3v.
77
Breton, Poste (1602), sig. E3v.
322 L. KOLB
industry shut up from all kinde of courses that may give reliefe, I am onely
comforted with hope of your love, which will with a charitable eye behold
my wants, wherein you shall not onely binde me to you as a resfresher
of my dejected body and minde, but as the meanes of mine inlargement
and liberty, which a small summe of money will effect, for which great
benefit besides my thankefull acknowledgement of your so speciall favour
and friendship, I will strive by my best indeauours to become some way
actually deserving. So wishing you all happinesse and contentment, I take
leave, and rest to be commanded at your occasion.
78
This style is simultaneously plain—each clause is relatively straightforward
in itself—and ornate: the clauses, in aggregate, elaborate and interweave
both the writer’s suffering and the friend’s potential generosity. After
the stately, aphoristic opening, the letter tumbles into a performance
of anxiety and hope. Despite its syntactical complexity, it signals a lack
of artifice or connivance, and suggests that it was written in a state of
heightened emotion—a useful message to know how to send.
On the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Breton includes a delight-
fully blunt letter requesting forty pounds for six months: ‘[F]eede mee
not with delays nor excuse’, his letter-writer orders, ‘for I knowe you
have it, and you know I will pay it’.
79
Knowing when to employ an
ornate style, and when to be direct, is an important lesson. The sixteenth-
century manuals surveyed above taught readers how to adapt style to
status. Seventeenth-century debt letters add further nuance, modelling
how one might handle particular relationships that all fit the general cate-
gory of friendship: those in which feeling requires rhetorical kindling, and
those in which, as one of Gainsford’s letters puts it, ‘quaint tearmes, and
rhetoricall Phrases’ might be viewed suspiciously as ‘some bad inclination,
or secret cunning’.
80
Gainsford’s Secretaries Studie contains several letters in which the
tension between short-term economic need and long-term amicable bond
reaches a breaking point. In ‘Friendship is broken through denyall of
trifles’, the writer bitterly laments his loss of credit in the broader commu-
nity, having been publicly refused by the addressee. In letters like ‘Excuse
for not beeing Surety for a Friend’ and ‘Excuse for not lending money’,
78
Markham, Hobsons (1613), sig. G2r–v.
79
Breton, Poste (1606), sig. D1r.
80
Gainsford, Secretaries,sig.L3v.
12 DEBT LETTERS 323
writers apologetically detail their own financial situations, seeking to avoid
similarly ‘broken’ bonds. Addressed ‘To his best Friend’, ‘Excuse for not
lending money’ begins:
Good Sir, I would not have you stagger in your opinion of me, considering
I have alwaies with an upright hand held up the beame of our friendship:
& would never give my heart leave to entertaine a thought of politicke
misdoubt, either of your abilitie or honesty. For the very name of a friend
shal command my person, much more my goods: but such a man as your
selfe hath interest in my life & spirit.
81
Gainsford’s letters of excuse often contain elaborated definitions of friend-
ship; here, we learn that for the imagined writer, all friendship involves
intermingling of ‘goods’; best friendship of ‘life & spirit’. And yet,
the letter goes on, the writer can offer his best friend nothing. He
explains that he is ‘destitute of mony’, having both pawned ‘utensels’
to furnish a brother’s needs and lost the favour of ‘my rich neighbor’.
82
He can neither extend a loan from his own funds nor ask this neighbour
(evidently a source of favours in the past) for help: ‘[M]y hopes [are]
abortive concerning my interest in him: & to speake the truth, I am so
fearefull of a deniall, that I had rather sit still with some ease, then rise
and fall with utter dispaire’.
83
The particularity of the letter’s exculpatory detail stretches it beyond
standard epistolary formulae (though it is in keeping with Gainsford’s
manual, whose letters exceed Breton’s and rival Markham’s for narra-
tive particularity). Still, if this is not a template to be closely copied, it
is nevertheless a model to be imitated. It reveals how letters that deviate
from the formulaic may be—or must be—invented to match scenarios
in life. These may be both typical—a friend wants to borrow money—
and idiosyncratic—a friend wants to borrow money from man whose
obligations extend in various dir ections, and whose own financial and
social disappointments stymie his professed desire to help. Gainsford’s
manual illuminates a feature of credit culture often suppressed or only
dimly hinted at in other debt letters. Throughout, The Secretaries Studie
portrays each intimate friendship as one relationship entangled with many
81
Gainsford, Secretaries, sigs. I2v-I3r.
82
Gainsford, Secretaries,sig.I3r.
83
Gainsford, Secretaries,sig.I3r.
324 L. KOLB
others. In practice, friends do not lend or borrow or even give in a
vacuum. Every bond hooks into other bonds; every debt forms a link in a
vast chain of debts.
84
Myriad considerations—of self-protective thrift, of
family needs, of credit within the larger community, of avoiding indebted-
ness oneself—go into any decision about lending, even to a ‘best friend’.
Gainsford does not offer readers solutions to the m any problems raised by
overlapping affective and financial bonds, or by the competing demands
of caution and generosity, thrift and amity. But he o ffers examples of how
one might at least begin to manage those problems, by putting them into
words.
12.4 Conclusion: Beyond Manuals
In closing, I want to look at three historical letters. It is notoriously
difficult to deter mine the relationship between letter-writing theory and
practice.
85
It is, moreover, not always advisable to attend to individual
letters without also attending to the contexts that produced them, and the
means by which they have survived.
86
It is beyond this essay’s scope to
reconstruct the norms and idiosyncrasies of debt letters circulating within
specific communities of correspondence, in different strata of society and
among persons of different ages, genders and professions—though that
work is worth doing, and to my knowledge has largely yet to be done.
Nevertheless, looking briefly at a few examples of debt letters between
real people has two benefits here. First, it lets us see clearly that the work
modelled by sample letters in seventeenth-century manuals was work that
real letter-writers were also doing (though not always in the same ways).
Second, it allows us to test the thesis that epistolary exchange, in matters
of debt and credit, addr essed both the urgent needs of the moment,
and the continuation of the bond between writer and addressee through
time. Where economic need might strain a bond, artful amicable language
sought to stabilise it.
84
Muldrew, Economy,3.
85
Stewart and Wolfe, Letterwriting, 56; Daybell and Gordon, ‘Introduction’, 8.
86
Daybell and Gordon, ‘Introduction’, 10. For an outstanding model of how to attend
to letters’ original contexts and correspondence communities, see Lynne Magnusson,
‘Mixed Messages and Cicero Effects in the Herrick Family Letters of the Sixteenth
Century’, Cultures of Correspondence, 131–155.
12 DEBT LETTERS 325
In 1602, Margaret Clifford wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, asking him
to help arrange a bond on her behalf with some gentlemen who are
‘contented to enter bond for this 900 l. odd money, being part of my
allowances of 400 l., which is in a ewugnes [hugeness] behind’.
87
She
outlines a complex financial arrangement, involving herself, her husband,
the men to be bound, and two others who will act as middlemen. Though
not asking for money, she casts herself as Cecil’s debtor, calling herself
‘one of the beggarly ladies’. This humble self-description inflects the
earnestness of her request with a hint of play—Margaret was a great lady,
not a beggarly one—a dynamic that colours the letter as a whole. She
writes:
I entreat your favour to excuse these cumbers of mine, enforced by
constraint, that rather ought to be lines of confessing your nobleness in
what you have done and promised to continue it till you have made a
perfect work, than to entreat further.
The ‘cumbers’ or inconveniences that she asks Cecil to pardon are, first
and foremost, the financial arrangements the busy statesman is to make
on her behalf. In context, the word also r efers to the ‘lines’ of the letter:
because it is entreaty rather than praise, the letter becomes a cumber.
But it also refers to Margaret Clifford herself, Countess of Cumberland.
This wordplay adds a kind of hyperbolic self-deprecation to her apology—
she herself is all cumbers, nothing but cumbers!—and suggests a writer
perhaps more confident of her addressee’s regard, than anxious about
damaging it.
88
William Trew wrote to his brother-in-law sometime around 1598, in
a letter notable for its chatty informality.
89
Trew recounts being startled
‘upon mondaye at night’ by a missive announcing the imminent arrival of
‘the ladyes’ and staying up late preparing the house.
90
He includes news
87
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most
Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire (London:
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1883–1973), XII:542.
88
See also Clifford’s letter to Cecil of January 1602 in the same volume, 625.
89
On Trew’s entry into the Bagot family by clandestine marriage, see Courtney
Thomas, If I Lose Mine Honour, I Lose Myself: Honour Among the Early Modern English
Elite (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 89–90.
90
Letter from William Trew to Walter Bagot, ca. 1598, Folger MS L.a.911.
326 L. KOLB
about several horses. He tells Bagot he has sent for a firkin of salmon, of
which Bagot shall have as much as he pleases. In the middle of all this,
he writes, ‘Let me entreat yow to lend me what monye yow can spare,
for all is gone’. Unlike the sample letters surveyed above, Trew’s chatty,
jumbled missive appears to be neither crafted nor strategic (though its
artless frankness may indeed involve strategy). Its subscription, however,
demonstrates clear attention to the double short- and long-term goals
of debt letters, and to the way language can knit up the gap between
them.Heends,‘Yours ever thoughe troublesome’. Standard formulae
for subscriptions in letters among friends include ‘yours indissoluble’, ‘not
living without you’, or ‘yours, or not my owne’.
91
These gesture towards
the ideal in which friends and all they possess belong to one another.
Trew’s closing tweaks the convention. Like Margaret Clifford, he under-
scores (rather than downplaying) his status as an importunate person. ‘I
am troublesome, and I admit it’, the letter declares, ‘And yet I am yours—
still yours’. The subscription affirms the resilience of his bond with Bagot,
over and above his troublesomeness.
In the early seventeenth century, William Strachey wrote to Peter
Ferryman:
Good Mr Ferryman, I am hartely sorrie, that out of my present estate, I
can not tender the true act of my love, which bothe your fortune requires,
& my deere accompt of you should lead me to. But be Iudge your olde
frend Mr Royden, whether I stand not in muche daunger to come to the
place of dead men, to that Golgatha, for want of present money my self
… Onlie beleve I have not ready one quarter of so muche money yf it
would purchase your delyverie. F or which I am sorrie: for I wolde have
you perswaded I love you and make muche of your knowledge.
92
He signs the letter, ‘Your true unfayned friend’. Mingling protestations
of goodwill with explanations of incapacity, Strachey’s letter is a model of
its kind: it forcefully states his short-term plight (the inability to lend due
to catastrophic lack of funds) and locates it within the desire to maintain
a bond with Ferryman over the long-term.
91
These subscriptions appear in Gainsford, Secretaries, sigs. B4r and B4v and Breton,
Conceyted,sig.A4v.
92
Folger MS V.a.321, f.31v. Reprinted in A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book: A
Facsimile Edition of Folger MS. V.a.321, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1983), 176–177.
12 DEBT LETTERS 327
In its balancing of long- and short-term goals, Strachey’s note resem-
bles the formulary debt letters surveyed above. Moreover, it survives in
a context that formally resembles an epistolary manual: a manuscript
letter-book compiled early in the seventeenth century. This miscella-
neous collection includes letters on politics, family affairs and business;
it contains missives by well-known literary figures and statesmen, as well
as more obscure persons. Strachey’s authorship might explain this partic-
ular letter’s inclusion; so might its addressee’s identity (it is likely that
Peter Ferryman was the letter-book’s compiler).
93
It may be here, too,
because it is a strong example of a type: a letter not only to be recorded
and reread, but also to be repurposed, reinvented and reused. In other
words: its interest might lie in the specific relationship between Strachey
and Ferryman, but it might also lie in its status as exemplary of a common
dynamic within credit culture: the intermingling of debt and friendship,
and the careful management, through language, of the potential conflict
between immediate need and long-term bond.
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