Catalogue description HENRY VIII. to the EARL OF SURREY.

It is right displeasant to us to hear of your grievous disease and sickness. As we require your services in greater matters, and as you suppose that your abode there in that contagious air will increase your infirmity, we are agreeable to your return to this realm, if a substantial and active personage can be found to supply your place.

We and our Council, considering "the marvelous great charges which we yearly sustain by entertainment of you, our Lieutenant, with the retinue under you there, as also the little effect that succeedeth thereof," have determined that to employ such sums of money upon any English Lieutenant with like retinue as you have now, would be consumption of treasure in vain, which, being saved, "might stand in good stead for the advancement of other higher enterprizes that may percase be set forthward within few years hereafter." Therefore, "if any substantial gentleman of the English Irishry might be found to take upon him that room," with such entertainment as the Earl of Kildare received, it would be most expedient. We have thought of Sir Piers Butteler, pretending to be Earl of Ormond, who, as we are informed, is now reputed for the best amongst our obeisant subjects of that land; and desire you, as of yourself, to search whether he be meet and able to take the said room, and to "feel his mind whether he could be agreeable to be our Lieutenant there." If you could thus "convey the said room to him," we will appoint him thereto, and license you to return to this realm with the retinue under your leading. This matter should be so closely handled that neither Butteler nor any other of the Council there may take suspicion; otherwise they will "so extremely stick to their advantages, that hard shall it be to bring them to any reasonable ways.

Draft in Ruthal's hand.

State Papers II. 88 (note).

Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts preserved in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth, ed. J. S. Brewer & W. Bullen (6 vols., 1867-73), vol. I, document 18.