The 197 volumes of the Yelverton manuscripts in the British Library, Additional MSS 48000-48196, are a major source for Tudor history. This catalogue provides full descriptions and indexes to the whole collection.

Among family collections of records, the 197 volumes of the Yelverton manuscripts in the British Library, Additional MSS 48000-48196, stand second only to the Cecil papers at Hatfield House as source for Tudor history. The core of the collection consists of the papers of Robert Beale, an Elizabethan public servant who was a protege of Walsingham, often employed on important diplomatic business, and an active and immensely learned polemicist for the Puritan cause. He was made Clerk of the Council in 1572 and acted as Secretary of State during Walsingham's absences. Between 1581 and 1586 he was employed on the best known and most dramatic of his missions, his negotiations with Mary Queen of Scots, which ended with the task of carrying her death warrant to Fotheringhay and reading it before her execution, which he witnessed. Beale's papers passed to his daughter and thence became intermingled with the substantial collections of the Yelverton family, finally being acquired by the British Museum in 1953. This catalogue provides full descriptions and indexes to the whole collection.