Few Letters of any age have proved so useful as those of Rowland Whyte in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth and the first of that of James I. From their first appearance in 1746 in the Letters and Memorials of State edited by Arthur Collins, no contemporary, unless it be John Chamberlain, has so often been quoted for succinct, apposite information regarding the personages and events of the era. Yet Whyte himself has been noticed only in brief footnotes: one by Collins, and a later and largely inaccurate one by Edmund Lodge.