Gregory Railton or Raylton (died 1561) was an English administrator and Clerk of the Signet. As a Protestant, Railton went into exile during the reign of Mary I of England.
Career
editGregory Railton was for many years Ralph Sadler's servant and "inward man".[1]
During the war known as the Rough Wooing, Railton was Treasurer of the Wars in the North (1549–1551).[2] Railton was the accountant and courier of large sums of money for the English garrisons in Scotland. In August 1549, he wrote to the Earl of Rutland that he was unable to cross the flooded Tweed at Wark with his tired horses to bring money to the camp at Stichill.[3]
In 1552, Railton requested a licence to eat meat on fast days as he was ill from a "sore ague" contracted at Chichester.[4] He attended the funeral of Edward VI with the other clerks including William Honnyng.[5]
Railton was a Marian exile in Frankfurt during Mary's reign.[6] He wrote from Basel to William Petre, Mary's secretary, on 19 November 1554, apologising for his absence due to illness which left him unable to travel.[7]
On his return to England, Railton was posted to Berwick-on-Tweed to work as Sadler's secretary. During the crisis of the Scottish Reformation, he deciphered coded letters,[8] and was a correspondent of John Knox. He was involved in negotiations with the Duke of Châtellerault, one of the Protestant leaders in Scotland.[9]
The English ambassador Nicholas Throckmorton in Paris and the diplomat Thomas Randolph organised the rescue and secret journey of Châtellerault's son, the Earl of Arran, from France to Scotland via Switzerland.[10] James Croft sent Railton to meet the Earl, who was travelling under the alias Monsieur Beaufort, at Alnwick.[11] Randolph, who used an alias Barnaby, wrote from Hamilton to Sadler at Berwick in cipher, with a pleasantry referring to their codework "desiring no less pleasure to Mr Railton in deciphering his own new invented orthography than I have in writing of it".[12] William Cecil asked Sadler to tell Railton to keep the ciphered letters short and "write no more than needeth" to save labour reading them.[13]
In the same month, October 1559, Knox wrote to Railton describing the inception of his The History of the Reformation in Scotland.[14] He also wrote to describe a silver gilt seal and a "trim staff" or sceptre sent to Scotland for Mary of Guise, Regent of Scotland.[15][16] It was engraved with disputed heraldry that asserted the claim of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the throne of England.[17] The heraldry was also displayed in various locations in France and observed by Throckmorton and his colleagues on their dinner plates during a royal banquet.[18] Michel de Seure, the French ambassador in London, wrote to Mary of Guise about the friction caused by the controversial heraldry.[19]
Gregory Railton died in 1561. Nicholas Throckmorton recommended John Somers for his position as Clerk of the Signet.[20]
References
edit- ^ Simon Adams, Ian Archer, George W. Bernard, "A Journall of Matters of State", Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Camden Society, 2003), p. 61 fn. 43: James Gairdner & R. H. Brodie, Letters & Papers, Henry VIII, 20:1 (London, 1905), p. 331 no. 631.
- ^ Howard Colvin, History of the King's Works, 4:2 (London: HMSO, 1982), p. 698.
- ^ HMC 12th Report Part 4: Manuscripts of the Earl of Rutland, 1 (London, 1888), pp. 42–43.
- ^ C. S. Knighton, Calendar State Papers Domestic, Edward VI, p. 251 no. 696.
- ^ Craved Ord, "Sir Edward Waldegrave's account of the burial of Edward VI", Archaeologia, 12 (London, 1796), p. 377.
- ^ Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 265–266.
- ^ William Barclay Turnbull, Calendar State Papers Foreign, Mary (London, 1861), p. 139 no. 294.
- ^ Joseph Stevenson, Calendar State Papers Foreign Elizabeth, 1559–1560, (London: Longman, 1865), p. 37 no. 76.
- ^ Jane Dawson, John Knox (Yale, 2016), pp. 184–188.
- ^ Robert K. Hannay, "The Earl of Arran and Queen Mary", The Scottish Historical Review, 18:72 (July 1921), pp. 258–276.
- ^ Joseph Stevenson, Calendar State Papers Foreign Elizabeth, 1559–1560, (London: Longman, 1863), p. 516 no. 1290
- ^ Arthur Clifford, Sadler State Papers, 1 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1809), pp. 500–501
- ^ Arthur Clifford, Sadler State Papers, 1 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1809), p. 482
- ^ Andrew Lang, "Knox as a Historian", Scottish Historical Review, 2:6 (Glasgow, 1905), p. 113.
- ^ Joseph Stevenson, Calendar State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1559–1560 (London: Longman, 1861), p. 51 no. 124.
- ^ Arthur Clifford, Sadler State Papers, 1 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1809), p. 680
- ^ John Parker Lawson, History of the Affairs of Church and State in Scotland by Robert Keith, 1 (Edinburgh: Spottiswoode Society, 1844), p. 395: Agnes Strickland, Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, 3 (London, 1843), pp. 254–256.
- ^ John Guy, The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Fourth Estate, 2009), p. 105: Patrick Forbes, A Full View of the Public Transactions of Queen Elizabeth, 1 (London, 1739), pp. 138, 206, 229
- ^ Estelle Paranque, Elizabeth I of England through Valois Eyes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 47: Joseph Stevenson, Calendar State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth 1559–1560, pp. 382–383 no. 742.
- ^ Joseph Stevenson, Calendar State Papers Foreign Elizabeth, 1561–1562 (London: Longmans, 1866), p. 303 no. 496: Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1560–1563, 2 (London: HMSO, 1948), p. 100