King James establishes the King's Men: warrant under privy seal

Although James VI of Scotland was proclaimed king of England on March 24, 1603, it took him over a month to arrive in London. Within ten days of his arrival there, and despite the fact that the theaters were closed due to plague, he gave instructions for turning the Lord Chamberlain's Men, of which Shakespeare was a member, into the King's Men.

This Privy Seal warrant is the second of three surviving administrative documents that eventually led to the issuing of Letters Patent that formally created the King's Men, although they do not explicitly refer to the players as the King’s Men. It was issued on May 18, 1603, the day after the Signet Office produced a formal warrant known as a Signet Bill that both instructed the Privy Seal Office to draw up a further warrant, and provided the text for the formal Letters Patent. This warrant under the Privy Seal instructs the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England to further issue the Letters Patent under the Great Seal.

Accordingly, the next day, May 19, 1603, this document was presented to the Rolls Office in Chancery Lane, where it was enrolled in the current Patent Roll. Three signs of its enrollment are the note of receipt at the bottom of the document, the memorandum at the top of the document, and the tree-like symbol at the top-left corner, a conventional design meaning “irrotulatur” or, in English, “enrolled.”

If you look at the parchment document closely, you will see three pairs of slits, cut through the fifth-to-last line of text. When the warrant was folded into a square, these three pairs become a single slit, which would have held the parchment tag to which the privy seal was attached. The off-setting of the impression of the wax seal is visible in two places on the back of the document, where it was tucked between the folds for protection. The seal itself is gone, as are all the other seals in this file of privy seal warrants, and it is not known when they were removed. The string emerging from the hole in the upper-left-hand corner of the document indicates that the warrant is “filed,” or strung together with, a series of other warrants for letters patent issued in the month of May 1603. It is the seventy-eighth warrant in this file. The diagonal swatch of parchment cut from the bottom-left-hand corner was used to make a tag to wrap around the folded and closed warrant.

From the moment of enrollment, Shakespeare and the other players listed -- Lawrence Fletcher, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillipps, John Hemings, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armyn, Richard Cowley, "and the rest of their associates" -- were under the patronage of the king. According to the warrants and letters patent, after "the infection of the plague shall decrease," the players were free to perform at the Globe and throughout the country "for the recreation of our loving Subjects," as well as for the king's "solace and pleasure when we shall thinke good to see them." The Lord Chamberlain’s book, a roughly contemporary source, demonstrates that Shakespeare’s company was one of three companies patronized by the Crown: the King’s Men, the Queen’s Men, and the Prince’s Men, patronized by King James, Queen Anne of Denmark, and Prince Henry respectively.

Privy Seal records sent to the Lord Keeper or Lord Chancellor, including this warrant, were kept in Chancery from the time of their creation until 1884, when all such records were removed to the Public Record Office (now The National Archives).