A New Manuscript of John Peyton's A Relation of the State of Polonia (1598-1619)

Abstract

Long thought to have been written either by George Carew (c.1556–1612) or William Bruce (c.1560–after 1613), the anonymous but important late sixteenth-century English account of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, A Relation of the State of Polonia and the Provinces United with that Crowne, Anno 1598, has only been known to have survived in a single manuscript, British Library, MS Royal 18 B I. Having recently established that the text was composed by John Peyton (1579–1635), son of Sir John Peyton (1544–1630), Lieutenant of the Tower, I have been able to demonstrate that a lost complete copy of the text, named A Relation of the Kingdome of Polonia and the Provinces United with that Crowne, must have existed between 1751 and 1898. This copy surfaced in May 2013 and is now held by St Andrews University Library as ms38902. This article discusses the provenance, history, and date of the St Andrews manuscript, as well as its relationship with the British Library copy.