As the Merchant Adventurers grew richer it became necessary, according to the bad practice of the time, to bribe statesmen for a continuance of their privileges; they also increased the fees for admission. The troubles between Holland and England in the seventeenth century drove the Adventurers to Hamburg, where they remained, and were called the Hamburg Company.
The vast enlargement of trade and enterprise under Elizabeth was well begun under her father. In 1511 ships began to sail from the ports of London, Southampton, and Bristol to Sicily, Candia, Chio, Cyprus, and Tripoli; they took out woollen cloths and hides, and they brought back rhubarb, silk, corselets, malmsey, oil, cotton, carpets, and spices. An English merchant was appointed Consul at Candia; another merchant, a foreigner, was made Consul at Chio; in the year 1535 a ship took out from London a hundred persons who were settled by the English merchants as factors at the various centres of trade. Trade openings were made on the Coast of Guinea and with Morocco; ships sailed to Newfoundland and to Brazil. In the year 1583 was formed the first of the new Companies for trading purposes. This Company had an interesting but a disastrous beginning. It was started with a capital of £6000 in 240 shares of £25 each; its original idea was to find a north-east passage to China and to open trade with the Chinese. Three vessels were fitted out under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby. Would you know how the fleet started? Hakluyt tells the story:—
“It was thought best by the opinion of them all, that by the twentieth of May, the Captaines and Mariners should take shipping, and depart from Radcliffe, upon the ebbe, if it pleased God. They having saluted their acquiaintance, one his wife, another his children, another his kinsfolkes, and another his friends deerer then his kinsfolkes, were present and ready at the day appoynted; and having wayed ancre, they departed with the turning of the water, and sailing easily, came first to Greenewich. The greater shippes are towed downe with boates, and oares, and the mariners being all apparelled in Watchet or skie coloured cloth, rowed amaine, and made way with diligence. And being come neere to Greenewich (where the Court then lay) presently upon the newes thereof, the Courtiers came running out, and the common people flockt together, standing very thicke upon the shoare; the privie Counsel, they lookt out at the windowes of the Court, and the rest ranne up to the toppes of the towers; the shippes hereupon discharge their Ordinance, and shot off their pieces after the maner of warre, and of the sea, insomuch that the tops of the hilles sounded therewith, the valleys and waters gave an echo, and the Mariners they shouted in such sort, that the skie rang againe with the noyse thereof. One stoode in the poope of the ship, and by his gestures bid farewell to his friends in the best maner hee could. Another walkes upon the hatches, another climbes the shrowds, another stands upon the maine yard, and another in the top of the shippe. To be short, it was a very triumph (after a sort) in all respects to the beholders. But (alas) the good King Edward (in respect of whom principally all this was prepared) hee onely by reason of his sickenesse was absent from this shewe, and not long after the departure of these ships, the lamentable and most sorrowfull accident of his death followed.”
Other accounts of this incident represent the King as being carried out to see this gallant spectacle, the last he was to see upon earth.
The little fleet met with bad weather off the coast of Spitzbergen; two of them, including the captain’s ship, ran into a harbour of Lapland, where the whole company were frozen to death; the third got into the White Sea and so to Archangel; the captain, Richard Chancellor, procured sledges and travelled to Moscow, where he obtained from the Czar permission to trade on the northern coast of Russia. Thus was founded the Russia Company. A few years later one of the agents of the Russia Company was despatched as an Ambassador from the English Court to the Czar, who in his turn sent an Ambassador to Whitehall. On his voyage the Russian Ambassador was wrecked on the coast of Scotland. The Russia Company, hearing of the disaster, sent a deputation with a supply of everything that the Ambassador might want. On his approach to the City he was met by a company of eighty merchants on horseback, who escorted him to Highgate, where he lay that night, and on the next day was met by Lord Montague, representing the Queen, with 300 knights and esquires and 140 merchants of the Russia Company. Rooms were found for him in Gracechurch Street, where many costly gifts awaited him.
The history of this Company deserves to be written at length on account of the enterprise and intelligence of its agents. Indeed, justice has never been done to the agents and factors of the great London Companies. It was not the Directors, sitting at home at their long table, who created the Indian Empire; maintained and widened the English trade; carried the English flag over lands unknown and to peoples unheard of; it was not the Directors who opened up routes, stood before capricious despots, marked the resources of new countries and reported on their wants. These things were done by the factors and the agents, who encountered all risks, facing possibly prison, torture, disease, and sometimes a cruel death, for the enlargement of trade and the enrichment of their masters. They were the pioneers; sometimes they were the Forlorn Hope of the English trade and wealth. No Company, not even the East India Company, was better served by its agents than the Russia Company. They obtained from the Czar important privileges; they could trade in any part of Russia without safe conduct or licenses; they could not be arrested for debt; they could appoint their own officers and servants; and they had jurisdiction over all Englishmen resident in Russia. In other words, they had a monopoly of the Russian Trade.
The Company showed a clear comprehension of these advantages; they continued to attempt the north-east passage; they sent ships laden with merchandise to Archangel, whence their agents travelled over Russia; they even opened communications with Persia by means of their agent Anthony Jenkinson, who has already in his own words given us an account of his adventurous career. When he sailed from the Volga to Astrakhan, he passed over the Caspian to the town of Boghaz, where he found traders from the Far East. He sent home a map of Russia, the first published in England. This way of trade, however, proved too dangerous on account of Cossack pirates who infested the Caspian Sea and robbed the Company’s ships. However, the Company, anxious to secure these advantages, procured an Act of Parliament granting them the exclusive trade with the countries of Persia, Armenia, and Media, as well as Russia.
Internal troubles in Russia, such as the taking of Moscow by the Tartars, caused the Company a loss of 400,000 roubles. Pirates in the Baltic, and other misfortunes, greatly reduced the Company, but they persevered in their voyages of discovery, once more attempting the north-east passage, which was expected to do so much for them. They did not succeed, but they discovered the deep sea fisheries, and they brought home immense quantities of fish-oil and of dried salmon. They suffered from the Dutch, who followed in their wake; they obtained from the King of Denmark permission to put in at any of his seaports in Iceland or Norway; they lost their exclusive rights in Russia, but only for a time; they found themselves cut out by the Dutch, whose vessels carried more merchandise; with the authority of James the First, they sent armed vessels and seized on Spitzbergen in the King’s name, calling it King James’s Newland. They had to fight for their conquest, driving off Dutch, French, and Biscay sail with four English “interlopers.” The Dutch, however, would not admit the pretensions of Crown or Company, sending their ships protected by men-of-war to fish, despite the protests of the English. There was fighting in the high latitudes for some years, while even the English ports refused to recognise the exclusive right of the Company. Finally, the whales became so scarce about Spitzbergen that the trade ceased to be worth fighting about.
We will continue the history of the Company in brief, though it runs far beyond the limits of our period. In the year 1620 the route by the Caspian was reopened by Hobbs, an agent to the Company, who took that way from Moscow to Ispahan. In 1623 a new treaty was concluded between James the First and the Czar, in which privileges, but not exclusive rights, were conferred upon the Company. A deadly blow was inflicted on the Company by the execution of Charles, an event naturally viewed by all sovereigns with the deepest indignation. The English merchants, who were masters of the Russian trade, were driven out and supplanted by the Dutch; and it was not until the year 1669 that the Company was allowed to trade with Russia on the same footing as the Dutch.
The real importance of the Company was decaying when it admitted any one as a member on payment of a fine of £5. The conveyance of raw silk from Persia through Russia remained their privilege until troubles broke out in Persia in 1746, which stopped the trade; they still carried on their trade with Archangel, but when the Baltic became a peaceful highway, this shorter route to Russia destroyed the Archangel trade. The Russia Company did not, it is true, acquire for the British Empire any accession of territory; but its services in exploring new routes, opening up new lines of trade, putting Great Britain into communication with foreign powers previously strangers, can hardly be exaggerated, while it fostered and encouraged and developed that spirit of enterprise, adventure, and restlessness which, since the seventeenth century, has covered half the globe with one people and one religion.
A distinction must be drawn between “regulated companies” and Joint-Stock Companies. In the former, every man traded for himself, subject to the regulations of the Company, like a Guild. In the “Russia,” “Turkey,” and “Eastland” Companies no one but a member could carry on that kind of trade. In the Joint-Stock Companies shareholders need not be traders and could sell or transfer their shares.
The Eastland Company was first chartered in 1579. It was privileged to enjoy the sole trade over all those parts of the Baltic shore which did not belong to the Russia Company. Now there had been carried on, from time immemorial, a trade with the Baltic ports by private adventurers who wanted no charter. Many of these, no doubt, took up their membership with the new Company, but there were some who would not, or could not. These traders, driven away from their own markets, made loud complaints, in reply to which a proclamation was issued ordering that no one outside the Company was to export to these parts the merchandise in which the Eastland Company traded; provided always that the importation of corn and grain was left free. The provision looks like a compromise, but when we ask how corn and grain were to be imported except in ships, and that, if these ships were English, they would hardly go out in ballast, one fails to see that the enemies of the Eastlanders got much by their proclamation. In 1672 the whole of Scandinavia was thrown open to all comers; and the entrance-fee to the Company was reduced to £2. The opinion of Sir Josiah Child probably settled the fate of the Company. He said that the Eastland Company had only enabled the Dutch to get ten times as much trade in the Baltic as was carried on by the English.
In the year 1581 the Turkey Company received its Charter from Queen Elizabeth. It was a Charter for a limited time, seven years, and it could be revoked at a year’s notice. The Company began very well; they built large and strong ships to face the storms of the Bay, for which they received the thanks of the Council; they introduced eastern commodities at a much cheaper price; but they sometimes paid dearly for their cargoes when they had to fight the corsairs of Barbary and the galleys of Spain, and to face the fiercest animosity of the Venetians. In 1583 some of the agents of the Company, stationed at the Aleppo House, made their way with merchandise to Bagdad, to the Persian Gulf, and thence to India and the Far East. They obtained, therefore, a new Charter giving them power to trade over India as well as the Sultan’s dominions. The entrance-fee was fixed at £25 for persons under twenty-six years of age, at £50 for those over twenty-six, and at £1 for apprentices.
The Company now became extremely prosperous, carrying on a most extensive trade. This trade, by a later order under Charles II., was kept entirely in the hands of the City of London, no one, unless a resident and a freeman, being admitted into the Company. On the foundation of the East India Company there arose disputes as to the infringement of rights. This quarrel ended without any decision.
The trade of the Turkey Company declined during the seventeenth century from many causes, one of which was the rivalry of the French and their success in underselling the English goods. The Company finally closed its history in the year 1825.
The Levant Company was another trading Company established under Elizabeth. By opening up direct communication with the Levant, England procured all the productions of the East without the intervention of Venice. Only one more vessel was sent to London from Venice after the establishment of the Company, and this with a rich cargo and many passengers was wrecked and destroyed on the Isle of Wight.
For the repulse of the Spanish Armada, London contributed thirty-eight vessels, and the Society of Merchant Adventurers, ten. In 1591, or perhaps in 1589, the first voyage from London to the East Indies was undertaken. The expedition of 1591 consisted of three ships, of which one was never heard of again; and the other two lost many men from sickness. The expedition, however, led to the formation of the East India Company in a.d. 1600, with a capital of £72,000 in 1440 shares of £50 each. Their first fleet, consisting of five ships and 480 men, reached Sumatra and the Straits of Malacca, where they captured a Portuguese ship of 900 tons laden with calicoes. They settled a factory at Bantam and sailed homewards, returning to port in two years and seven months after starting.
The trade of the country was greatly advanced by the immigration of many Flemings, Dutch, Walloons, and French Huguenots, who brought over with them their own trades. They were judiciously distributed about the country, care being taken that they should neither interfere with the trade of the place nor crowd too much together. Thus at Sandwich alone there were 350 Flemish families in the year 1582; they carried on the manufactory of bags. In Norwich, Dutch and Walloons settled and made serges and silks and bombazines. Bone lace was taken to Honiton from Antwerp. In London the Flemings settled at Bermondsey, where they made felt hats and did joiners’ work; at Bow, where they had dye-works; at Wandsworth, where they worked in brass; at Mortlake and Fulham, where they made tapestry. In other places workers in steel and iron, window-glass painters, cloth fullers, cloth-makers, and many other craftsmen were planted and carried on profitable industries. Among other things, sail-making was introduced into England for the first time. The pawnbroker’s shop was also opened in this reign. It began with the establishment of seven banks in as many towns, to be known as “Banks for the relief of Common Necessity,” which should lend money on pledges. This Bank is alluded to by Shakespeare when Sir John Falstaff urges his hostess to pawn her cups and her hangings. “Glass,” he says, “glass is your only drinking: and for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the Prodigal or the Germans hunting in water work, is worth a thousand of these bed hangings and these fly-bitten tapestries.”
The monopoly system by which the Court rewarded favourites at the expense of trade and the people was regarded by Elizabeth with favour, as an easy way of bestowing favours costing herself nothing. Many of her monopolies she withdrew as manifestly injurious to trade, yet she left many which weighed heavily upon the enterprise of the country. These monopolies were multiplied in the next two reigns, and greatly assisted to bring about the unpopularity of Charles.
Cunningham is of opinion that the borrowing of money for trading purposes was not a common practice; he bases this opinion on the very high rate of interest demanded by the usurer. There can be no doubt that usury was strictly forbidden by the Church, by the Ordinances of the City of London, and by public opinion. Yet a case quoted by him (Growth of Trade, p. 325) shows that men not only wanted to borrow from time to time, but that Christians, not Jews, were willing to lend on interest. In that case the lender wanted interest for a loan of £10 for three months, which amounted to 80 per cent per annum. The usurer could not get his claim allowed. Yet it is difficult to understand how business could be carried on at all except in an elementary way, if there was neither credit nor borrowing. But was the rate of interest too high for trading on borrowed money? There is every reason to believe that the profits of trade were enormous. Malyns, in his Centre of the Circle of Commerce, gives a table showing the profits of the trade in spices, silk, indigo, etc., early in the seventeenth century. They range from 150 to 250 per cent, i.e. goods bought at £100 would sell for £250 up to £350. Of course there must be set off against this apparently huge profit, losses by wrecks and pirates and the expense of the shipping. Borrowing, Cunningham thinks, was necessary to meet taxation. Since taxes were not regular, but irregular; and could not be provided for because no one knew when a tallage would be imposed or how large a percentage would be demanded, the merchant or the landowner, though perfectly solvent, might not be able to lay his hand at once on the amount demanded. A person of to-day whose estate might be worth £120,000 would find it, very possibly, difficult to meet, within a few days, the King’s demand of one-fifteenth, that is £8000. If he could not realise in time he must borrow. If all the usury was confined to the lending of money to meet a sudden tax, or to a monastery for the building of a church, or for a baron to raise a force, what becomes of the popular hatred of the Jews, first as money-lenders, and of the Caursini and the Italians who were licensed by the Pope, next? And if there was no borrowing by the merchants, what was the meaning of that crowd which, after the massacre of the Jews in York Castle, rushed to the Cathedral, where they brought out the Jews’ bonds—their own bonds—and burned them all? Cunningham, in a note, enumerates the demands of certain Russians against the Jews of the present day. These demands express the popular belief concerning their practice, not the truth. One would most unwillingly accept prejudice for proof, especially in the case of the race which has endured so much prejudice for so many centuries. Cunningham says, very justly, that the real objection against the Jews was that they made their money by lending it on security, which left them no risks which could be foreseen. The common people, however, did not understand the objection; they saw that the Jews practised a trade which the Church and the State would not allow to Christians; they saw that the Jews grew rich rapidly; that they were protected by the King; that they waxed insolent and sometimes insulted the Christian religion; and if they lent a Christian money they demanded an enormous, a ruinous, interest for it. Deep, indeed, must have been the popular hatred of the Jews, since Shakespeare could stir the blood of his audience by the spectacle of a Jewish usurer, three hundred years after there had been Jews in the land.
The business of the daily life, as well as that of the mercantile life, cannot, in fact, be carried on without money-lending. Works cannot be undertaken; credit cannot be secured; cargoes cannot be bought; ships cannot be laden; unless money can be obtained by advance. The banishment of the Jews; the disappearance of the Italians; took away the usurers and money-lenders by profession. There were as yet no banks to make advances on security; and money-lending was still, as it remains to this day, an occupation held in the greatest loathing. The money-lender, therefore, disguised his calling. Thus Hall (Society in the Elizabethan Age) furnishes a sketch of the usurer of the period. His name was George Stoddart; by trade he was ostensibly a grocer, but really a money-lender. His bargains took the form of bets. Thus he sends J. Klynt his furred nightgown for 4s. 5d., to be paid on the day of Klynt’s marriage: he gives R. Leds a ring called a ryboys, which he values at £1:13:4, to be paid on the day of his marriage or else at his hour of death. For a rapier he charges 40d., to be paid at his day of marriage or else not. He gives a man £400 on the condition that during his lifetime the borrower shall pay him £80 a year. He lived for ten years, and so doubled that small capital of £400. It would be interesting to know what, if any, great City fortunes were made by this style of money-lending.
The increase of trade and of shipping in the Port of London is indicated by a passage in Camden, when he speaks of the multitudes of ships “as a very wood of trees, disbranched to make glades and to let in the light: so shaded is it with masts and sails.”
The watermen of London were those who lived by the river and the port. John Taylor, the water poet, says that 40,000 people lived by the labour of the oar and scull. In 1613 there was a petition from the Company of Watermen against the erection of a theatre on the London or Middlesex side of the river, because it drew away so many people who otherwise would have been carried across the river to the theatres on the south bank. John Taylor shows us that many of these watermen had been sailors:—
“I did briefly declare part of the services that watermen had done in Queen Elizabeth’s reign of famous memory, in the voyage to Portugal with the right honourable and never to be forgotten Earl of Essex; then after that, how it pleased God, in that great deliverance in the year 1588, to make watermen good serviceable instruments with their loss of lives and limbs to defend their prince and country. Moreover, many of them served with Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Martin Frobisher, and others. Besides, in Cadiz action, the Island Voyage, in Ireland, in the Low Countries, and in the narrow seas they have been, as in duty they were bound, at continual command, so that every summer 1500 or 2000 of them were employed to the places aforesaid....
Afterwards the players began to play on the Bankside, and to leave playing in London and Middlesex, for the most part, then there went such great concourse of people by water that the small number of watermen remaining at home were not able to carry them, by reason of the court, the terms, the players, and other employments, so that we were enforced and encouraged, hoping that this golden stirring world would have lasted ever, to take and entertain men and boys ... so that the number of watermen, and those that live and are maintained by them, and by the only labour of the oar and the scull, betwixt the bridge of Windsor and Gravesend, cannot be fewer than forty thousand; the cause of the greater half of which multitude, hath been the players playing on the bankside, for I have known three companies besides the bear-baiting at once there, to wit, the Globe, the Rose, and the Swan.”
Loud complaints being made by the artificers of London that foreign goods were underselling theirs, the King in 1461 prohibited the importation or sale of the following articles—the list of which shows some of the manufactures at that time established in London:—
“Any manner girdles, nor any harness wrought for girdles, points, laces of lether, purses, pouches, pins, gloves, knives, hangers, tailors’ shears, scissors, andirons, cobordis, tongs, fire forks, gridirons; stocks, locks, keyes, hinges and garnets, spurs; painted papers, painted focers, paynted images, painted clothes, any between gold or between silver, wrought in papers for painters; saddles, saddle-trees, horse harness, boocis, bits, stirrups, buckles, chains, laten nails with iron shanks, terrets, standing candlesticks, hanging candlesticks, holy water stoops, chafing dishes, hanging lavers, curtain rings, cards for wool, clasps for gloves, buckles for shoes, brooches, bells (except bells for hawks), spoons of tin and lead, chains of wire as well as of laten as of iron, gratis, horns and lantern horns, or any of these aforesaid wares, ready and wrought, pertaining to the said crafts above specified or any of them uppon payne of forfeture of all the wares.” (Capper’s Port and Trade of London.) We have seen (p. 13) how Henry VII. passed an Act forbidding any stranger, i.e. foreigner, to buy or sell merchandise in the City; in his reign also was passed an Act to compel the country people to resort to the City. For it was ordered that no citizen should carry goods to any market or fair out of the City. The people of the country represented to Parliament the great hardship of being obliged to travel all the way to London in order to procure things that could only be bought in London, viz. chalices, books, vestments, and other church ornaments, victuals for Lent, linen cloths, woollen cloths, brass, pewter, bedding, iron, flax, wax, and other things. The Parliament interfered and the order was removed.
Under Henry VII. commercial treaties were concluded with the Danes and with the Florentines. There was a quarrel with Burgundy and a cessation of commercial relations for three years. In 1497 (12 Hen. VII.) was passed an Act entitled “Every Englishman shall have free recourse to certain foreign marts, without exaction to be taken by any English fraternity.” The meaning of the Act was this: the Merchant Adventurers’ Company had arrogated to themselves the right of refusing the right of trade in any foreign port until a fine or fee of £40 should first be paid to themselves. The Act defined the extent of English foreign trade at the time. The Merchant Adventurers sent their vessels to Spain, Portugal, Brittany, Flanders, Holland, Ireland, Normandy, France, Venice, Dantzic, Eastland, Friesland, and other parts. The Parliament allowed the fine, but limited it to ten marks, or £6:13:4. We have seen the jealousy and hatred of foreigners shown by the envious outbreak of “Evil May Day” in 1517 (p. 24). The complaints or the justification of the rioters was that there were so many foreigners employed as craftsmen that the English could get no work; that foreign merchants brought in all silk, cloth of gold, wine, etc., and that no one, almost, bought of an Englishman; that the foreign merchants exported so much wool, tin, and lead, that English adventurers could not make a living; that they forestalled the market, buying up everything all round the City, so that nothing of value came to the City markets, while some of them imported all kinds of goods that were made in this country, such as nails, locks, baskets, cupboards, stools, tables, chests, girdles, saddles, and printed cloths.