ABSTRACT

The moral of this tale is either that one should never sign a receipt until one has received the money, or that one should not try to cheat a government department until one knows how it works. Though, as is so often the trouble with these stories, the full rights of the case and the ultimate outcome cannot be established, one can here get pretty close to them. The people involved are not obscure. In the late autumn of 1537, Cornelius Hayes, the king’s goldsmith,* charged the clerks of the treasurer of the Chamber with doing him out of £100. That treasurer-Sir Brian Tuke, a civil servant whose career began some twentyeight years earlier when he became clerk of the signet1-was still one of the chief financial officers of the crown, even though the reforms of Thomas Cromwell had already deprived him of the dominant position in which Henry VII had established the office.2 Trouble in that quarter could be serious: if either the treasurer was dishonest or his clerks had no difficulty in pulling the wool over his eyes, the financial organization of the state was in bad health. Hayes’ accusations caused a rumpus in government circles, and a good deal of evidence survives from which one may reconstruct both his complaint and the accused men’s defence, as well as something of the office routine of that distant bureaucracy.3