524 EMOLUMENTS OF SECRETARIES OF October in settling the board wages of their household allowed to one principal secretary £730 per annum, and £292 to the other.* There is obviously room for further investigation of this question, the discrepancy in this last example being much larger than one would expect. The meaning and implication of the secretaries' double and single * messe ' in earlier times is also only vaguely and unsatisfactorily understood. Scattered indications are to be found of still other miscel- laneous sources of profit. One of these was from ofl&cial printing. Vernon in his letters to Shrewsbury mentions the attempts of Sir William Trumbull, the secretary of state for the northern department, to obtain possession of the treaty of Ryswick, which the lords justices had ordered to be printed in Latin and in English. Vernon adds : I believe all this tugging for the treaty is who shall have the advantage of printing it, which I never dreamt of till Mr. Yard tells me it will be worth 301. or 401.^ For treaties it might be necessary to struggle, but the London Gazette was a standing source of profit, though for the clerks in his office rather than for the secretary of state himself. The following extract from a letter of J. Cooke to Lord Middleton is sufficiently interesting to justify its quotation : When Mr. Coventry came to be secretary of state, he entitled himself to half the profits of the Gazettes, and bestowed [them] upon me in his office. I could never find they amounted to very much at that time, being but one clear moiety after defraying all charges of paper, printing, &c., the allowances made as well to the writers of the Gazette as to the French translator, the deductions for the Gazette in French which always turned to loss, and lastly what remained in the printer's hand upon every impression as waste paper, for so he reckons it as I remember . . . But since the war with the Tiurks people have been more greedy of news, which has made the impressions large and the profits consider- able.» Li the history of the office of the secretaries of state, these financial minutiae are perhaps the least attractive part, but they serve at least to illustrate the gradual increase of the business ^ Household Ordinances, p. 407. It is also interesting to note that the two principal secretaries are definitely placed among the officers of the chamber, as distinct from the household servants in the lord steward's department. The clerks of the signet are now allowed separate board wages of £120 yearly for the four. » Letters illustrative of the Reign of WiUiam III, i. 377-9.
- All Souls College MS., 204, ff. 81 b-c. Another paper in the same collection
(ibid. to. 81) gives the profits of the Gazette for the quarter ending at Christmas 1679 as £95 s. or £47 s. Qd. for each secretary, besides the profits from advertisements, which came to £6 a week.
