The Letters of Paul de Foix: French Ambassador at the Court of Elizabeth I, 1562-1566

Abstract

Scholarly editing of manuscript sources is vital to historical research, particularly when those sources are collated from disparate and distant locations. In his fourth contribution and third full volume for the Camden Series, David Potter has demonstrated the scholarly acumen for which he is known and his service to the profession for generations to come. The collection here includes correspondence to and from the French ambassador, Paul de Foix, as well as multiple discourses and memoranda by and for others during the mid-1560s; the volume is Potter’s latest instalment in a series of works examining Anglo-French political and diplomatic relations. As in the case of Potter’s edition of the correspondence of de Foix’s predecessor, Michel de Seure, the reader here can enjoy the fruits of impressive archival sleuthing. Potter has worked through the fragmentary remains of the French archives for this period, finding more than previous scholars and bringing into one volume materials that would take (did take?) a scholarly lifetime to locate across archives in France, the UK and the USA. Such work can be difficult, but, then again, as noted in the preface, ‘[p]art of the passion behind the present volume was fuelled by the thrill of the chase in pursuing items of the correspondence of de Foix which had “escaped” into other collections during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. In short, Potter has attempted to reassemble the papers of the secretary for English affairs during the 1560s, Claude de L’Aubespine.