ABSTRACT
Sir Thomas Lawrence of Chelsea, England, gained appointment as royal secretary of Maryland in 1692, a post he would hold for most of the period until his death in 1714. He was a controversial placeman, but like most of the contemporary imperial bureaucracy, he remains largely an unknown figure. He nursed a legitimate grievance over his brusque treatment, but like Edward Randolph and other royal placemen, he found his reception very contingent on the governor’s signals. He surely a weary man, continued to roam the corridors of Whitehall and to petition regularly to the Lords of Trade. Like a growing number of lesser English gentry, he hoped to increase his modest fortunes through the expanding imperial bureaucracy. Yet individually and collectively, the burgeoning bureaucracy exerted an extraordinary influence greater than the impact of many more famous figures in England or America.
