ABSTRACT
There are few collections so vast and varied that manuscript ‘placards’, vilifying Mary Queen of Scots’ involvement in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley, in 1567, jostle with news reports of hundreds of apprentices attacking a brothel in Worcester a century later, but such is the scale and depth of the State Papers, housed in The National Archives in London. 1 The State Papers are those documents, principally papers of successive Principal Secretaries to the monarch, that were collected together in the State Paper Office from the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. They comprise 107 separate classes, divided into Domestic, Scotland, Ireland and Foreign series (the latter divided by country from 1577) stretching over 13,000 volumes, bundles and cases, and totalling millions of documents and many maps. 2 The collection largely covers the period from 1509 to 1780, but contains manuscripts dating as early as 1231 and as late as 1888. A separate set of State Papers – State Papers Colonial, comprising the State Papers themselves, as well as the records of the Privy Council and Board of Trade relating to the American colonies and the West Indies, from 1574 to 1782 – are gathered in a separate collection: the Colonial Office.
