The publication between 1887 and 1897 of these letters, which form part of the archive of the Dutch Church at Austin Friars in London, was a remarkable feat of bibliography. The archive had been deposited in 1866 with the Library Committee of the Corporation of London, and in 1884 Jan Hendrick Hessels began to prepare them for the press. The letters, written in Dutch, French, English, Italian and Latin between 1524 and 1723, throw light on the religious, intellectual and political ferment of the period. The third volume (now reissued in five parts) consists of documents from a further cache discovered in the church while the second volume was being prepared for press. These include documents relevant to the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, the dealings of Archbishop Laud with foreign churches in England, and the status of foreigners in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.