The Lisle Papers are the correspondence received in Calais between 1533 and 1540 by Arthur Plantagenet, 1st Viscount Lisle (c.1480-1542), Lord Deputy of Calais, an illegitimate son of King Edward IV and an uncle of King Henry VIII, and by his wife, Honor Plantagenet, Viscountess Lisle (born Honor Grenville and formerly the wife of Sir John Bassett (d.1529) of Umberleigh in Devon), from several servants, courtiers, royal officials, friends, children and other relatives.
The entire collection, now housed within the State Papers of the United Kingdom at the National Archives at Kew, comprises about 3,000 documents, ranging in date from 1 January 1533 to 31 December 1540.
[1] Following Lisle's arrest for alleged treason in 1540, as was usual in such cases, all his papers in the Staple Inn in Calais, his official residence, were confiscated and placed in the Tower of London.
[2] A few further documents from the correspondence of the Lisles survived outside the collection originally deposited in the Tower and are contained in the Cotton, Harleian and Royal Manuscripts in the British Library.
In the early 1930s, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, then a young student of Tudor England, started an exhaustive study of the approximately 3,000 original documents then at the Public Record Office comprising the Lisle Papers.