Contracting Out: Administrative Privatisation in the Reign of James I

A critic, and not necessarily a captious one, might argue that this title is in that no-man’s-land in which paradox verges on contradiction. The concept of private property was so deep in Tudor and Stuart concepts of office that the auditor’s tenure, like the parson’s freehold, was regularly seen and treated as his property. He treated his office, within certain very broadly defined limits, as his own to do what he would with. When the first Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer of England, died in 1598, almost the first thing that happened was that, hard upon the Queen’s condolences to his relations, a series of carts arrived at his house to take away the government records he had had at home.