The Tin letters

Trying to get to grips with the Cornish stannaries

Oxford was not an accomplished manager of his own finances. As a ward, his estate was plundered by aristocrats who imagined they had claims on the frozen assets then subjected to high fiscal demand from the Queen. Despite everything, however, although left with a considerable estate, the Earl was a poor judge of investments and wastefully extravagant with his personal finances. A £1000 annuity from the Crown was necessary to keep the wolves from the door of the occupant of the Earldom ranked second in the country. These letters are his attempt to acquire a lucrative tin monopoly without getting to grips with the either the math or the peculiar constitution granted to the Cornish tin industry by Edward II.

You might call it an obsession. The letters come to over 10,000 words; the pursuit to five years, 1594-1599. In that span, the actual Shakespeare had other concerns: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Henriad, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and perhaps the first inklings of Hamlet. Not a bad run.

Not one allusion to tin-mines in any of these plays. In fact, the word “tin” appears nowhere in the canon.

Strikingly, despite his impassioned interest in tin-mines, Oxford spells “stannary” (a common word for them) as “stammerye.” He doesn’t seem to get the derivation from the Latin stannum.* This isn’t the only such error Oxford makes: he spells “impudent” (from pudens ashamed, modest) as “impotent” (from potens powerful). He’s deaf to language, both its sound and its sense. And if you don’t know etymology and grammar as a musician knows scales — instinctively, by practice — then you can’t play with language, you can’t make old words new: a game at which Shakespeare was rather good.

Title	Description
Letter 01	Written 20 March 1595, Oxford opens his campaign for the tin preemption by outlining to Burghley a scheme to farm the Queen’s tin customs for £3,000 a year — far above the £1,000 marks previously offered by rival suitors. He proposes that merchants would provide the working capital, costing the Queen nothing, while he would take a nominal fifth share whose proceeds would in fact return to the Crown. He also offers Burghley £500 a year personally towards his daughter’s marriage portion in exchange for support.
Letter 02	Written 23 March 1595, Oxford offers a brief technical rebuttal of the competing proposal circulating in Burghley’s office, arguing that his rival’s figures for tin volume are understated, that the proposed loan rates to the tinners are illusory since they already borrow more cheaply, and that his own scheme requires the Queen to lay out only £8,000 against a first-year return he calculates at over £10,000.
Letter 03	Written 25 March 1595, Oxford asks to meet Burghley in person to deliver his knowledge of tin quantities by mouth rather than in writing, while restating his objections to the Lord Buckhurst’s rival offer and urging Burghley not to allow the matter to be concluded before he has had the chance to present his full case.
Letter 04	Written 28 March 1595, Oxford apologises for failing to raise certain points at his meeting with Burghley that morning, and explains how he came to be involved in the suit: it was the informer Carmarden who first alerted him to the scale of customs evasion in the tin trade and encouraged him to approach the Queen. He reports progress in securing merchant underwriters and asks only for a little more time to finalise the agreements.
Letter 05	Written 28 March 1595 to Burghley’s secretary Michael Hicks, Oxford explains he cannot attend Burghley at court in person due to illness and asks Hicks to arrange a meeting at his daughter Derby’s house or his own. He claims to have verified that 4,050 blocks of tin are produced annually from the mines, amounting to 1,800,000 pounds weight, sufficient to underwrite the revenue figures he has promised.
Letter 06	Written 1 April 1595, Oxford commits to raising the Queen’s tin customs to £10,000 a year and names the merchant underwriters he has assembled — Roberts, Taylor, Somes, Smith of Exeter, Stapers, Catcher, Mood, Glover and others — urging Burghley to obtain the Queen’s resolution quickly so that the next coinage, the best of the year, is not lost.
Letter 07	Written 9 April 1595, Oxford reports that his merchant underwriters have withdrawn after being quietly dissuaded by unknown parties, and that the Turkey Company appears to have organised against the scheme. He concedes Buckhurst may be trying the same merchants with similar results, and falls back on asking Burghley to support the lesser suit for a licence to export tin and lead, which would still raise the Queen an additional £1,000 a year.
Letter 08	Written 13 April 1595, Oxford analyses why the tin merchants are holding back from both himself and Buckhurst: they calculate that if they wait until the farm is granted they can dictate terms, whereas if they commit beforehand they lose leverage. He also warns that a pending suit by the Pewterers’ Company for a second melting monopoly would cost any preemption farmer £3,000-4,000 a year, making the promised rent to the Queen impossible to sustain.
Letter 09	Written 17 April 1595, Oxford defends Alderman Catcher against the charge that he showed Buckhurst a letter of Burghley’s promising Oxford priority in the suit, and exposes Carmarden as having played a double game — encouraging Oxford’s suit while privately working to obstruct it, partly because the scheme threatened his own income from the existing customs arrangements.
Letter 10	Written 7 June 1595, Oxford attacks Carmarden’s testimony before the Queen directly, accusing him of deliberate misrepresentation of the size of tin blocks and the scale of customs evasion. He argues that the fraudulent under-recording of tin shipments under cover of household allowances is the heart of the problem, and calls on Burghley to order a physical survey of blocks currently in London warehouses to settle the disputed quantities.
Letter 11	Written 13 June 1595, a brief note asking Burghley to issue Alderman Catcher with a warrant to join the royal agent Middleton in the West Country survey, expressing confidence in Catcher’s honesty and diligence despite criticism of him from other quarters.
Letter 12	Written 14 June 1595, Oxford argues that Middleton’s mission to survey tin quantities is largely beside the point: the fraud lies not in production figures but in the underrating of blocks at the point of export. He presses again for a royal letter staying all tin sales until St James’s tide, insisting this would preserve the benefit of the current year’s coinage and give time for the preemption to be properly established.
Letter 13	Written 15 June 1595, Oxford reiterates the case for a stay of tin sales and sets out simplified arithmetic to show that buying tin from the tinners at £25-26 per thousand weight and selling it at £40-42 per thousand would yield the Queen a profit of around £20,000 on a year’s output. Nelson notes that Burghley did attempt to move the Queen on this date but was rebuked.
Letter 14	Written 7 August 1595 from Byfleet, Oxford responds to Middleton’s survey report, arguing it confirms rather than undermines his own figures since this year’s tin output is unusually high. He exposes a direct attempt by Buckhurst to bribe Alderman Catcher with a thousand pounds’ worth of tin at below-market rates to abandon Oxford’s consortium. He also raises, in a postscript, the ongoing failure of the Earl of Derby to settle his daughter’s allowance.
Letter 15	Written 14 March 1596, Oxford writes briefly to acknowledge that Burghley has outstanding questions about his tin preemption notes, asks to be told what they are so he can answer them, and thanks Burghley for a favourable message via Hicks — expressing hope that this renewed encouragement will finally bring his long suit to a fruitful conclusion.
Letter 16	Written June 1599 to Cecil, Oxford reports urgently that the Queen had commissioned him through Sir John Foscue and the Lord Chief Justice to secure merchant funding for a tin preemption, that he had assembled willing lenders ready to advance £10,000 a year interest-free, but that a Lord Mayor’s order has now been issued telling the merchants to stand down. He urges Cecil to intervene with the Queen to countermand this order before the opportunity is lost for the entire year.
Letter 17	Written June 1599 directly to the Queen, Oxford protests that after assembling merchant lenders willing to advance £10,000 a year at no cost to the Crown, a sudden royal countermand has disbanded them on the false representation that the Queen has no money for the purpose. He insists the merchants remain ready and asks the Queen not to allow herself to be abused by those who stand to profit from the scheme’s failure.
Letter 18	An undated letter to Lord Keeper Egerton, written two or three years after Oxford’s initial tin suit. Oxford recounts how rival suitors had nearly obtained the farm for a thousand marks a year when his own competing offer of £3,000 caused the Queen to pause, and how his higher figures were dismissed by the rivals as a clerical error. He describes the two forms of suit in play — the Pewterers’ lesser suit and the main preemption — and reports that the rivals have now revived the matter using his own arguments, having obtained the Queen’s signature before he could intervene. He asks Egerton to ensure the matter is not passed without proper consideration.