London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City

by Stephen Alford

  Author’s Note

  Dates are given according to the Old Style Julian calendar. Though Elizabethans exchanged New Year gifts on 1 January each year, the calendar year began in Europe on the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Lady Day (i.e. 25 March). Throughout the book I have adjusted all dates to a calendar year that begins, as ours does, on 1 January.

  Money is given in its pre-decimal form in use until 1971. There are 12 pence in a shilling (modern 5p or US 6 cents) and 20 shillings in a pound (£1 or US$ 1.30). Given the effects of inflation, currency devaluations and so on, modern equivalents for sums of money in the sixteenth century are practically impossible to calculate. A very rough estimate may be obtained by multiplying all the numbers by a thousand.

  For a sense of the relative values of amounts of money, readers might like to bear in mind some of the following prices and wages in Tudor and Jacobean London. In 1506 a quart (two pints) of red wine cost 3 pence and a kilderkin (a cask containing between 16 and 18 gallons) of high quality ale 2 shillings. In the 1550s the price of a boat ride across the Thames between Westminster and Lambeth was a penny; a gentleman’s haircut 8 pence; a loin of veal 1 shilling; a dozen rabbits for the table 4 shillings and 4 pence; and a hogshead (63 gallons) of claret 40 shillings. By 1610 a London ‘ordinary’ (a fixed price meal) cost 12 pence, for which the diner could eat goose, woodcock, stewed mutton and a dessert of fruit and cheese. The day wage of a London labourer in 1563 was 9 pence (or 5 pence if he was also given food and drink) and the same in 1588. In those years a carpenter employed by one of the city companies earned 4 shillings a week, a brewer likewise employed £10 a year and a shoemaker and a fletcher £4 a year.

  Act, scene or line references to drama and poetry are taken from the following editions: The dramatic works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1953–61); The Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge, 2012); Thomas Middleton: the collected works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford, 2007); and The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, MA, 1974). Reference to other works, literary and otherwise, will be found in the Notes at the end of the book.

  The map illustrations in the book are taken from Edward Wright’s world map of 1599 (sometimes known as the Wright-Molyneux or Hakluyt-Molyneux map) in the first volume of the second edition of Richard Hakluyt, Principal navigations, voiages, traffiques and discoveries of the English nation, 3 vols (London, 1598–1600) in the Special Collections of the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden (shelf-mark (KL) 1370 C 10): ‘Thou hast here (gentle reader) a true hydrographical description of so much of the world as hath beene hitherto discovered, and is comme to our knowledge.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Merchant’s World

  In about 1533 the artist Hans Holbein the Younger made two imposing decorative murals for the hall of the London base of the German Hanse merchants. Their headquarters on the River Thames was known as the Steelyard, a rectangle of real estate west of London Bridge in the parish of All Hallows the Great, a small portion of the City of London in the preciously guarded jurisdiction of its lord mayor and aldermen, where the Hanse merchants were old and privileged guests. The Stahlhof was a working base, with a great half-timber-framed warehouse on the waterfront and a crane on Easterlings quay used to load and unload boats. An imposing tower crowned by a blue cupola looked out over the neighbouring wharves and jetties of Queenhithe, Three Cranes and Coldharbour. Like so much else in London, the Steelyard was an unapologetic statement of mercantile power and money.

  Holbein, a fellow German, knew some of the Hanse merchants very well. He painted their portraits – young men held for us vividly in a moment of time: alert, confident and self-assured in their chambers and counting houses, expensively dressed and well used to good food and wine. In the murals he made for the Great Hall, by contrast, Holbein’s technique and purpose were very different. Large and striking, the murals were painted on fine linen cloth with a blue background heightened with gold. They were allegorical – big, bold and morally challenging. One had Poverty personified as a woman raggedly dressed sitting in a rickety cart, leading a rabble of artisans, labourers and vagabonds. The second showed Plutus, the Roman god of riches, elderly and stooped, enthroned in a chariot piled high with treasure.

  At first glance Plutus’s procession looked like a great celebration of wealth and material comfort. It was instead a cheerless march of the doomed, for trudging beside Plutus, burdened by their riches, were the unhappy figures of Cleopatra, Croesus, Midas and Tantalus, with Fortune, her eyes bandaged, blindly throwing out gold pieces. Hovering above was Nemesis the avenger, ready to chastise those whose hubris offended the gods. Holbein presented for his merchant clients a hopeless scene, as stark in its way as those medieval carvings of devils swallowing down into Hell unrepentant sinners. Behind this ambitious allegory was the uncompromising judgement of God. Riches, it was clear, were as much a way to Hell as they were to worldly success. Like the priest and the preacher, Holbein knew that the sin always catches up with the sinner.

  The murals had inscriptions. One read: ‘Gold is the father of blandishment and the author of sorrow/Whoever lacks it dies, whoever keeps it, fears it.’ The other: ‘He who is rich . . . fears hourly that the inconstant wheel of fortune may turn.’

  Holbein’s allegory had a double title. The first was The Triumph of Poverty, the second The Triumph of Riches.1

  * * *

  We begin not very far away from the Steelyard, a little way north of the wharves and landing steps of the River Thames and across the close tangle of the city’s streets, in the parish church of St Antholin, with a man who knew it all so well and was buried there in the early months of the year 1500. Both are markers: St Antholin’s of a pre-Reformation London proud of its churches and monasteries, a modest city in European terms; and our parishioner as a sort of merchant Everyman, typical of his kind in a city on the eve of a new century. In this book such markers are important – for London, and for the lives of the people who lived there, changed in the following twelve decades almost beyond recognition.

  St Antholin’s was a church like so many others in the city, neat and small, with a compact tower and some striking stained glass, sitting humbly yet solidly in its plot on Budge Row. Founded in the twelfth century, a generous lord mayor paid for it to be rebuilt in about 1400, and over the generations dozens of other rich benefactors and parishioners had shaped the church, repaired its fabric, added new chapels, beautified it with glass, and filled it with their tombs and memorial brasses. Somehow only an old church can capture in the present moment that deep sense of time past.

  On a day early in 1500 the corpse of a London merchant of middle age was lowered into a grave in the church’s chapel of St Anne. There was nothing unusual about this; the same kind of burial took place every week across the city, as it had in the decades that, by the compound interest of time, had accumulated into centuries. And there was nothing so unusual about the merchant, for there were hundreds just like him in London. Successful and respected, well up the rungs of the ladder of city responsibility, his name was Thomas Wyndout.

  Death was not a surprise for Wyndout. He had prepared for eternity much as he operated his business trading in fine textiles – with care and thought. He had made his will in good time, in July 1499, the fourteenth year of the reign of the Tudor king Henry VII, when John Percyvale was London’s mayor and Stephen Jenyns and Thomas Bradbury were its sheriffs. Wyndout made all the provisions he felt were necessary for the well-being of his family and posterity and for his kinsmen and friends. As a pious Catholic, he made a solemn reckoning with God, recommending himself to Our Lady St Mary and all the holy company of heaven in the hope and expectation of eternal life.2

  Wyndout was a freeman of the Mercers’ Company and a citizen of London. The London citizenry in the sixteenth century was an exclusive club. Only a fraction of the city’s inhabitants belonged t
o it, and those who did – the privileged few – had a voice in the government of their city that was denied to so many other Londoners. The route to citizenship was freedom of a city livery company, which brought both seniority and respectability. These livery companies were the bodies that organized and supervised the various trades of London, companies like the clothworkers, drapers, goldsmiths, skinners, tallow chandlers, vintners, butchers and so on. Each had a clear hierarchy, with wardens, masters and other officers, a governing court that regulated the activities of members and disciplined those who broke a company’s rules and laws, a hall for common feasting (the social life of any company was hugely important) and often a chapel for worship. Livery companies built almshouses and handed out charity, and sometimes they built and founded schools. They formed the tough sinews of London’s body politic: they stood for money and power. Company and city government fused together, as London’s sheriffs, aldermen and lord mayors were all senior company men, and there was no other route to city influence. Power in Tudor England rested for the most part in the hands of a landed elite of Crown, nobility, gentry and Church, but in London the key to influence and high office was mercantile success.

  Wyndout enjoyed the prestige of belonging to the Mercers’ Company. With its origins in the twelfth century, out of all the London companies it was pre-eminent, a fact that becomes clear when we look at the profile of London’s top job. Twenty-two mayors held office between 1480 and 1500. One was a senior man in the Fishmongers’ Company, one was a haberdasher, one a skinner, one a merchant taylor, two were goldsmiths, two were grocers, and three were drapers. Eight were mercers, and one of those mayors, Henry Colet (a man Thomas Wyndout knew very well), served twice.3

  Wyndout ran his business from Cheapside, the greatest mercantile thoroughfare of London, the showcase and window display of a vibrant trading city. Lying in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, Cheapside bustled with the shops and stalls of haberdashers selling their caps, hats, threads, tapes and ribbons, and mercers their cloths and luxury fabrics just in from Antwerp. Close by was the headquarters of the Mercers’ Company in the hospital of St Thomas of Acon (or Acre). Centuries earlier, this had been the base of the Knights of St Thomas of Acre, a semi-religious military order similar to the Knights Templar (hence the word ‘hospital’, from ‘hospitaller’, a monk under military discipline fighting for Christianity). St Thomas of Acon was further imprinted with special spiritual significance, for on the same site in 1120 Thomas Becket had been born, the martyr archbishop and saint, known for centuries as ‘lux Londoniarum’, ‘the light of the Londoners’.4

  St Antholin’s church and St Thomas of Acon were two places in London of enormous significance for Thomas Wyndout. In the first he took the Christian sacraments, in the second he ate and drank with his fellow mercers, and sat too in the company’s court. Faith and business were hard at times to tell apart, something true also of Thomas’s responsibilities as a citizen. Here a third site in London, not far away from Cheapside, stood out in Wyndout’s life. This was the Guildhall, which for Thomas was a familiar walk from St Antholin’s to St Laurence Lane and Catte Street, where the gate to Guildhall Close was tucked in tight against the eastern wall of the church of St Lawrence Jewry.

  The whole of London was governed from Guildhall. Decisions that affected every aspect of life in the city were made in a great pile of fifteenth-century Gothic architecture built self-consciously and deliberately as a statement of both London’s wealth and its chartered rights to independent self-government. Guildhall was a splendid maze of halls, courtrooms, undercrofts, a chapel and a library. Throngs of people walked through its beautifully carved porch to attend courts whose sometimes mysterious names spoke of London’s long and rich history: the court of the mayor, the court of the aldermen, the court of husting, the court of orphans, the court of the sheriffs, the courts of hallmoot and wardmoot, and the court of requests, also known as the court of conscience. This was very much Thomas Wyndout’s world, for he was one of the two city sheriffs (for the year 1497–8) and in the last months of his life alderman for Cripplegate, one of London’s twenty-six electoral wards. As alderman he would have worn a striking gown of scarlet.

  * * *

  Like so many of the Tudor city’s merchants, Thomas Wyndout was a Londoner by adoption, not by birth: he was a native of Hertfordshire. His parents were buried in the small village of Buntingford on Ermine Street, the old Roman road that years before had taken their son south to London.

  Sixteenth-century London was a city of immigrants: some lucky, some, as we shall see, much less fortunate. The lucky ones were boys who had the stamina to serve out the better part of a decade in a demanding apprenticeship before settling themselves in their own businesses. Young Thomas was lucky that his master was the mercer Henry Colet, an influential man in the company and later a lord mayor.

  A merchant’s career went through a number of typical phases. First there was apprenticeship, the success of which rested on the relationship between apprentice and master. An apprentice, usually a teenager, was a member of his master’s household – really a member of his extended family – and Colet’s family was a very large one. We have to assume, given his later success, that Thomas’s years with Colet gave him a superb entrée to city life.

  A second phase was freedom of the company. This was probably as challenging as apprenticeship. The young merchant needed the right kind of sponsorship and advice (here again there was no better master than Colet), as well as enough money to start trading. Any merchant, as a pragmatic man of the world, was on the lookout for a wife, ideally the daughter of a rich mercantile family, who would bring to the marriage a large dowry, or maybe a widow whose former husband’s fortune (though not straightforwardly hers) could be used imaginatively by a new spouse. Sometime after 1480 Thomas Wyndout married Katherine, the daughter of Thomas Norlande, a London grocer, an alderman and a former sheriff. With Henry Colet’s support, the connections of Katherine’s family and a growing constituency of influential friends in the tiny world of the London mercery trade, Thomas Wyndout was set up for life.

  But that was not how it had looked in January 1480, when Wyndout’s career had hung in the balance, and he was brought before the court of the Mercers’ Company accused of a business agreement that looked to outsiders highly suspicious and even criminal in nature. More than this, the accusation even suggested that Thomas, then still single, had designs on a woman already married to a senior mercer. Disciplined by his betters, Thomas Wyndout learned a hard lesson.

  Thanks to the official paperwork of the Mercers’ Company, the story of Wyndout’s indiscretion was put on record. Whether it was fully told is not clear: there is just a sense that some of the awkward details were fudged for the archive. What we know, however, is this. In 1478 Wyndout owed a large sum of money to a fellow London mercer called John Llewelyn for some cloth that he had bought. In Antwerp in September the two men had drawn up a contract for the repayment to Llewelyn of the 540 Flemish pounds borrowed. Here was the odd twist of the agreement: Wyndout would pay the money back ‘at the time that I, the said Thomas Wyndout, mercer, be wedded unto the wife of Thomas Shelley, mercer of London’. When they were married, Wyndout bound himself and all his goods to pay to Llewelyn the sum in full.5

  It was a deeply peculiar contract. It was worrying, too, for it had the whiff of a conspiracy. How, after all, would Wyndout be able to marry Mistress Shelley without getting her husband out of the way first? Probably through Master Shelley’s information, the government of King Edward IV got wind of the agreement. Over a year later, in December 1479, the Mercers’ Company received a stiff letter from the king. This looked like a murder plot: the bargain could not be kept ‘but upon assurance’ of Thomas Shelley’s demise, ‘Whereby it may appear evidently that the said bargainers fully conspired and imagined his said death’. Thanks to the intervention of Shelley himself, the king allowed the Mercers’ Company to examine the matter and punish the offenders. But royal o
fficials let the company know that if it did not act in ‘an offence right pernicious’ royal justice most certainly would.6

  The mercers’ court heard the case in February 1480, determining the facts of the ‘divers controversies, stirs, debates and demands of late had and sprung’ between Shelley and Wyndout. Llewelyn seems to have played no part in the hearing: at contention was Shelley against Wyndout. Wyndout was very lucky. The court decided that the bargain had been made out of great ‘simpleness’. It was a word that the senior officers of the company had chosen with great care: it suggested naivety, not malice. For Thomas it must have been an excruciating experience. One of the presiding mercers was his former master Henry Colet, another was Thomas Shelley himself. Wyndout was ordered by the court to go down on his knees before Master and Mistress Shelley to ask their forgiveness, and he was fined the then huge sum of £40, £30 of which went in damages to Shelley and the remaining £10 to the company’s coffers. Here was decisive disciplinary action – and no wonder, given the seriousness of the allegation.7

  Following this thoroughly sobering episode, Thomas Wyndout’s counting house must have been emptier than it had been before the court’s judgment, though probably worse must have been having a private indiscretion made the public business of his company. In mercantile London tongues wagged freely and easily.

  So far as we can tell, Thomas Wyndout never again put a foot wrong. He and Katherine had a son, Bartholomew, and a daughter, Joan. In the 1480s and 1490s his business grew and diversified. He traded in luxury fabrics, even supplying the royal household with textiles; seven yards of Wyndout’s black velvet were used to make a short gown for Henry VII. He exported fleeces and wool into the Mediterranean and imported wine from France. He was ambitious for office and government. Friends and partners in business sponsored his election as alderman, just as during his year as sheriff Wyndout had supported them.8 In this tiny world of money and influence, merchants knew as much about cooperation as they did competition.