Old St. Paul's Cathedral, where Chamberlain gathered his news (via Wikimedia Commons).
John Chamberlain wrote letters for forty years. From a room near St. Paul's Cathedral, he kept his friends informed of everything — court appointments, foreign wars, marriages, funerals, literary quarrels. The letters he sent to Dudley Carleton between 1597 and 1625 are among the most vivid records we have of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
This site is a digital scholarly edition of that correspondence, encoded in TEI-XML and supplemented with a linked personography of the people Chamberlain mentions. Each letter is annotated with notes adapted from Norman Egbert McClure's standard print edition (1939).
Notable Letters
The Gunpowder Plot
Two days after Fawkes's arrest, Chamberlain writes his first account of the Plot — the vault beneath Parliament, thirty-five barrels of powder, a blind lantern at midnight, and Thomas Percy already fled.
Read letter →Pocahontas in England
Sir Thomas Dale arrives from Virginia with the "most remarquable person" among the colonists — Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, married to John Rolfe — while Bacon is sworn to the council and Virginia exports only sassafras and tobacco.
Read letter →Death at Gravesend
The Virginian woman, "whose picture I sent you," died last week at Gravesend as she was returning homeward. Lord Chancellor Egerton dies the same day Chamberlain writes. Raleigh goes toward Dover for his last voyage.
Read letter →The Execution of Raleigh
Raleigh was beheaded Thursday morning in the old palace at Westminster. Chamberlain reports the scaffold speech, the jest about the axe's edge, and the crowd's verdict: "we had not such another head to cut of."
Read letter →