Thomas Rymer

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Rymer published a sentence in 1681 that would come back to haunt him. Writing in a political tract, he warned readers: "You are not to expect truth from an historiographer royal." He seems not to have known that he would one day hold exactly that title. Within a decade, Rymer sat in the official post he had mocked. That post came with access to original documents held in the Tower of London. He spent the years that followed building something no English scholar had attempted before. Along the way, he handed the English language a phrase it still uses today. How did a Yorkshire-born son of a condemned man come to hold such an office? And why does his sharpest legacy come not from archival work but from a quarrel about the English stage?

• 2. A Father's Fate

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  Appleton Wiske is a small village near Northallerton in the North Riding of Yorkshire. That is where Thomas Rymer was born, around 1643. His father Ralph held the manor of Brafferton and was described by Clarendon as possessing a good estate. The family sent Thomas to Northallerton Grammar School, where he studied for eight years under Thomas Smelt, a noted Royalist. His classmate there was George Hickes. At 16, Rymer left for Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, matriculating on the 29th of April 1659.

  Cambridge did not produce a degree. Rymer was still at the university in 1662, contributing Latin verses to a collection marking the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza. His father had begun to suffer financial difficulties around that time. Then, on the 13th of October 1663, Ralph Rymer was arrested. He was executed the following year for his involvement in the Farnley Wood Plot, an intended uprising in Yorkshire against Charles II. Thomas's elder brother Ralph was also arrested and imprisoned. Thomas himself was not implicated.

  On the 2nd of May 1666, Rymer became a member of Gray's Inn. He was called to the bar on the 16th of June 1673. Law would remain a thread through his career even as translation and criticism consumed most of it.

• 3. Poetical Justice

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  René Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie appeared in English in 1674 as a translation Rymer had made himself. He added a preface defending the classical rules of unity in drama. He believed in those principles enough to try his hand at playwriting. The verse tragedy Edgar, or the English Monarch, was licensed on the 13th of September 1677. It failed. The play was printed in 1678, with a second edition in 1693.

  In 1678, Rymer published a printed letter addressed to Fleetwood Shepheard, a friend of Matthew Prior. The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd took up the play Rollo Duke of Normandy by John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman. In the course of that argument, Rymer coined the term "poetical justice." No other phrase he wrote has survived as long.

  Rymer contributed three pieces to Poems to the Memory of Edmund Waller in 1688. He also wrote the Latin inscription on all four sides of Waller's monument in Beaconsfield churchyard. He contributed the life of Nicias to the project that became Dryden's Plutarch, a five-volume work spanning 1683 to 1686. In 1693, A Short View of Tragedy brought his criticism of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson before a wider readership. John Dennis replied that same year with The Impartial Critick. Dryden, who had prefaced several collections that Rymer contributed to, also left an epigram on the critical controversy. The debate over Rymer's views on Shakespeare would outlast the century.

• 4. The Foedera

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  On the death of Thomas Shadwell in 1692, Rymer was appointed Historiographer Royal at a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. The following year brought a royal warrant giving him a task of unusual scope. He was to compile every treaty, league, alliance, and capitulation made between the English Crown and foreign powers. The collection took a Latin title, Foedera, meaning pacts or alliances. The documents he worked with stretched back to May 1101 and the reign of Henry I. They were presented in their original Latin throughout.

  One later description called it "an immense labour of research and transcription on which he spent the last twenty years of his life." Printing of the fifteenth volume finished on the 25th of August 1713. Four months later, on the 14th of December 1713, Rymer died. He was buried four days later at St Clement Danes' Church in the Strand in London, apparently without any immediate family surviving him.

  The fifteen volumes he had seen into print ran from May 1101 to July 1586. That carried the record from Henry I to the midpoint of Elizabeth I's reign. Robert Sanderson, who had assisted Rymer, completed the remaining material and published two final volumes by 1717. These brought the record forward to 1625, the year James I died. The full first edition of the Foedera stretched to 17 volumes. What happened to that record in later hands turned out to be its own complicated story.

• 5. An Imperfect Inheritance

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  Three volumes, numbered 18 through 20, appeared under Sanderson's name between 1731 and 1735. They were not sanctioned by a royal warrant. They shifted the collection's focus from foreign affairs toward domestic history. The later scholar Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy was blunt in his assessment. He concluded that only about a quarter of the articles in those three volumes deserved their place.

  George Holmes provided a more legitimate revision. Holmes was a clerk to Sir William Petyt, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London. Employed by the publisher Jacob Tonson, Holmes revised the original 17 volumes in a second edition published between 1727 and 1735. He also issued a single folio of corrections, called Amendations, in 1730.

  John Neaulme published a third edition in The Hague between 1737 and 1745, in ten closely printed folio volumes. The first nine reprinted Holmes's revision. The tenth combined French-language synopses of volumes 1 through 17, written by Jean Le Clerc and Paul de Rapin. Rapin's abridgements of volumes 2 through 19 had been translated into English in 1733.

  The Record Commission turned to the Foedera in 1800, initially proposing a supplement, then deciding in 1809 on a complete revision. The editing fell to Dr. Adam Clarke. Hardy printed a list of 50 errors he found at random in Clarke's edition. He spent ten pages cataloguing specific failures of inclusion and omission. He noted that Clarke had criticised Rymer and Holmes for faults that Clarke then committed himself. Six parts in three volumes appeared between 1816 and 1830, with a seventh in 1869. The project stalled at 1383 and was abandoned.

  Hardy's own three-volume Syllabus, published between 1869 and 1885, provided English-language summaries and indexing for the first, third, and fourth editions. Even Hardy, confronted by the full weight of accumulated material, could not complete his intended corrections. As of 2024, no complete and correct revision of the Foedera has ever been published. A work Rymer began under a royal warrant in 1693 remains open to its first definitive edition.