Secretary

In his 1592 ‘Discourse touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate’, Nicholas Faunt drew on his seventeen years of experience as Sir Francis Walsingham's personal secretary to remark on the wide range of matters and tasks that secretaries dealt with. They were subjected to much ‘cumber and variableness’, he complained, that impeded an office that should be defined by a ‘special method and order’. ¹ Like other bureaucratic figures with different titles but similar functions, secretaries acted as the overseers of early modern institutions and their complex administrative machineries, such as royal governments, merchant companies, universities, or religious bodies. The word originally derived from the Latin secretarius, a notary or scribe – individuals who served emperors and government officials and were often part of the apparatus of state expansion and imperial administration. ² Most early modern treatises on secretaryship described secretaries as facilitators of communication and as cultivated servants who used their humanist education and mastery of rhetoric to guide their masters in their correspondence with others. Their function, as the Italian secretary Vincenzo Gramigna observed in Il segretario dialogo (1620), was to be the ‘pen-speaker’ (dicitor di penna) and an ‘executor of the will of others’. ³ Thomas Dekker expressed a similar sense of the word when he wrote that the ‘Gunner of Gehanna’ (Satan), by ‘the Artillerie of his Secretaries penne, hath shaken the walls of his kingdome’. ⁴