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

by Stephen Alford

  Naturally the Royal Exchange was deeply imprinted with associations of mercantile money, retail and display, while news and information were very important too. In the revised version of Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (c. 1610), reputations are made and lost at the Exchange. The merchant Kitely, fearing his ruin, says, ‘Lost i’ my fame for ever, talk for th’Exchange’, a position quite opposite to that of the real Clement Draper who, out of desperation, went publicly to the Exchange to recover his name and his liberty.21

  For dramatists, the Exchange offered a superlative vehicle for the scrutiny of riches and consumption. In Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) we encounter the heavily pregnant Mistress Allwit, who in the final stages of her pregnancy (longing for nothing but pickled cucumbers) is surrounded by all her trinkets. Her husband says:

  When she lies in,

  As now, she’s even upon the point of grunting,

  A lady lies not in like her; there’s her embossings,

  Embroid’rings, spanglings, and I know not what,

  As if she lay with all the gaudy-shops

  In Gresham’s Burse about her . . . (I. ii. 30–35)

  If this kind of consumption touches on the vulgar, there was the further vanity of public display in the city’s fashionable places. In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), Master Littlewit says of his promenading wife:

  I challenge all Cheapside, to show such another – Moorfields, Pimlico path, or the Exchange, in a summer evening with a lace to boot as this has. (I. ii. 5–6]

  And there was satire even sharper than this, exposing some of the tensions and contradictions of a society frankly ambivalent about the social and moral consequences of vast wealth. The Exchange existed for the purposes of making and spending money: no statement of the power and reach that came from material riches could be more obvious. Of two kinds of Londoner who worked in the Exchange – the first a merchant and moneylender, the second a boy who stole out of poverty – who, a poet asked, was the greater criminal?

  ’Mongst the monopolists on London’s burse,

  Priscus was ta’en for cutting a purse,

  And being reviled, made this bold question, ‘Why

  Are these monopolists excused, since I

  Did cut but one man’s purse, while they cut all?’

  But thus we see, the weakest goes to th’ wall.22

  The bold innovation of writers like Dekker, Haughton, Jonson and Middleton was to use in their drama the city they and their audiences knew. London was their stage: it was familiar and tangible; they saw it all around them in stone, brick, wood, plaster and slate. Layered upon this were the people and their manners. London, huge and still growing, was ripe for dramatic action, and somewhere like the Royal Exchange made it possible to explore the inevitable strains of a city where tens and then hundreds of thousands of people were living, working, playing and dying so closely together. Audiences in the theatres of Southwark must have loved the familiar types and stereotypes of London, for they wrestled constantly in their own lives with money, power, social rank and the pretensions and ostentatious display of the elite, as well as with poverty and crime. Types were easy to spot and, in the safety of the theatre, to laugh at. In Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Ben Jonson set out with sharp satirical wit the characters of his play. Fastidious Briske is the ‘neat, spruce, affecting courtier’, the fashionable dresser who practises his salutations in a mirror, and can ‘post himself into credit with his merchant only with the jingle of his spur and the jerk of his wand’. Deliro is that merchant, rich and dull, the ‘good doting citizen of London’. Macilente is ‘a sufficient scholar, and travelled’, embittered by the world’s reluctance to reward his talents, and Puntarvolo a ‘vainglorious knight’ with a talent for self-flattery. In the play Deliro reflects upon his financial hold over Briske. All of Briske’s lands are mortgaged and now forfeit to Deliro, who imagines Briske’s arrest for debt. But the courtier has a plan: Malicente tells Deliro that Briske has gone off to meet Puntarvolo at a notary’s office at the Royal Exchange (IV. i. 77–84).

  For the audience watching Every Man Out of His Humour, all of this was tangible and immediate. It was there in London, a boat ride or walk from the theatre – across London Bridge to New Fish Street and Gracechurch Street, left on Lombard Street and in at the southern door of the Exchange. Jonson’s audiences would have been familiar with all the social microclimates of London, of which the Exchange was one of the most intense. They would have known that merchants attracted specialists like notaries, whose job it was to draw up and witness legal documents. They would have seen for themselves the parading of glamorous gentlemen in slashed doublets and hose, shopping at the Pawn and dining at the Castle tavern. They would have recognized, too, that the real power lay with the merchants and moneylenders in their discreet but expensive black suits. Here was a world crammed with different kinds of people – noisy, raucous, polyglot and complex, always shifting and fluid – and shown for all to see on the stage of Sir Thomas Gresham’s Exchange.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Aliens and Strangers

  Elizabethans loved to poke fun at foreigners, and they had a taste for easy stereotypes. The boorish Dutch were heavy drinkers and the Italians conspiring Machiavels, while the over-courteous and amorous French looked down their noses at everyone else. The Muscovy trade helped to popularize the image of ordinary Russians as fat, drunk, slow-witted, servile and superstitious, and their rulers as cruel tyrants.

  Some of this was patriotic self-congratulation; at the best of times there was a feeling that odd and often bad things happened abroad. And who, after all, could offer a better measure of normality than the English and their ways? A strand of it was prejudice: the categories of ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ came easily to Elizabethans. But much was simply born of fear in a difficult and confusing century, when faith and religious identity got tangled up in all sorts of ways with old friendships and especially old rivalries with nations and peoples. Some foreigners shared the same faith; others were condemned as idolaters, persecutors and enemies. Who, in a far from straightforward world, was to be repulsed and who embraced? With France divided by civil war and the armies of King Philip II of Spain rumbling through the Netherlands, thousands of Protestant men, women and children from those countries sought refuge in England. Many, unsurprisingly, were drawn to London.

  Safety from religious persecution was a straightforward enough justification for migration. But what if there was a different reason? What if some of them wanted to come to London to work, with religion as a secondary consideration? Elizabethan Londoners found their loyalties and prejudices pulled in two opposite directions. For foreigners who came to London the challenge was as great. Very many émigrés must have asked themselves, were they wanted, and would they ever be welcomed?

  Tudor Londoners were long used to rich strangers who lived and worked in their city. Old family firms such as the Cavalcanti and the Bonvisi were deeply embedded in city trade and finance – without them Henry VIII would have been unable to raise his first Antwerp loan in the 1540s. Money bought privilege and political contacts. The fully Anglo-Italian Antonio Bonvisi (he was born in England) was in 1535 the fifth richest man in London, a great friend of Thomas More, and saluted by Sir Richard Gresham when he made his will in 1549: Bonvisi, along with practically the whole governing establishment of England, was bequeathed one of Sir Richard’s mourning rings. For merchant-bankers like Antonio Bonvisi and Antione Vivaldi (Vivaldi was in 1535 jointly the fourth wealthiest man in London), life was easy. They were diplomats of the banking houses, intermediaries and brokers of power.1

  Resident aliens living in London – or elsewhere in England – were called ‘strangers’. Many merchants were happy to live in London on these terms, just as London’s merchants had long lived and worked in Antwerp, yet remained subjects of the English Crown. But some aliens who came to London and wanted to stay permanently preferred to give up their status as aliens and
become naturalized. This could be done in one of two ways: the first was to secure a private Act of Parliament, the second to obtain a grant from the Crown. Both processes were cumbersome and expensive, and well beyond the means of those without money and time to spare or influential friends to call on. For the vast majority of aliens living in London – at least for those who worked in modest trades – to become naturalized citizens was impossible. They remained ‘strangers’, whether they liked it or not.

  The lives of most strangers in Elizabethan London were hugely different from merchant princes like the Bonvisi or Vivaldi. Without the cushioning of wealth or contacts, they were set apart from those with native rights. This meant that, for ordinary men and women working to earn a living, their lives were hedged in by restrictions. They could not own property or take a case to the law courts. A stranger paid a higher rate of tax and could not practise his trade in any parts of the city under the authority of the corporation of the lord mayor and aldermen: all over London was a patchwork of old precincts and liberties (many of them remnants of the old dissolved monastic houses) just out of reach of London’s elite. For outsiders, the path to citizenship was blocked: every citizen of London had to swear an oath that he would not employ as an apprentice a stranger’s son.2

  Thus strangers, native non-citizens and citizens occupied the same city, but lived parallel and exclusive lives. Status was everything: to have it meant possessing an identity and a voice; not to have it meant difference and marginalization.

  Especially prominent in London from the 1550s were émigrés from the Low Countries. Their reason for settlement in the city and elsewhere in England was clear enough: Dutch Protestants, persecuted and in danger, needed help. The first émigrés of the early 1550s were joined in the 1560s by many more. When Spanish forces took Antwerp in 1567, thousands of people fled the town, along with many others from Brabant, Dutch Flanders and the French-speaking Walloon provinces of the southern Netherlands. Given London’s historic trading connections with the Low Countries, the city was a natural refuge.3

  In 1549 King Edward VI gave the fledgling Dutch community a place in which to worship, founded as the ‘Temple of Jesus’ in London’s abandoned Augustinian priory near the city wall at Bishopsgate.4 This was the Austin Friars, where in the 1520s Thomas Cromwell had lived in a smart house at the priory’s gate. In its heyday Austin Friars was a great complex of beautiful buildings, with a spectacular church spire described by John Stow in his Survey of London: ‘a most fine spired steeple, small, high, and straight, I have not seen the like’.5 By Edward’s reign, however, that was the only reminder of the priory’s pre-Reformation grandeur. Gutted of everything valuable, the choir of the priory church was being used to store coal and corn, and the lead from the roof and even gravestones and monuments were sold off for cash. The Dutch community occupied the church’s old preaching nave, a plain building of rag-stone and chalk, decorated with flint – a nod, perhaps, to a cleansed Calvinist austerity. In 1553 the congregation stood at about a thousand strong.6

  The Dutch Church in London kept a close eye on members of its community living and working in the city. Like Calvinist congregations throughout Europe, church ministers and elders enforced strict moral discipline, and it is thanks to the records they kept that we have some insight into strangers’ lives in Elizabethan London. The ideal was quiet godliness, exemplified by the description of one émigré as ‘a good, honest, modest woman’, safely and properly married.7 But month after month and year after year, the church elders at Jesus Temple heard confessions for sexual indiscretions, drunkenness, fighting and what they called ‘irregular’ lives. There was, for example, the case of a woman called Corbeels who assaulted another woman near London Bridge because of a debt. Wouter Shoemans was disciplined for entertaining a married woman in his house overnight. The illicit relationship of Jan Bones and Naantgen Marten fell apart after Naantgen refused to marry him. Jan, it seems, was trouble from the start, imprisoned at least once in London ‘on account of his bad language and tumultuous conduct’. War back in the home country upset new lives being made. Mayken Vanden Wortele, all alone in the city, was told that her husband, Joos, had died in fighting near Haarlem. In London she had fallen in love with another man, Gillis Jacobs, and went to the consistory for permission to marry him. With no sure evidence of Joos Vanden Wortele’s death, the consistory refused, and the elders asked her to wait for firm news. But she and Gillis married anyway, ‘secretly, and outside the community’.8

  Only a small number of Dutch strangers were hauled before the consistory at Austin Friars, and of those a portion were repeat offenders. Most émigrés behaved themselves and simply got on with the business of putting food on the table, trying to fit in with their surroundings, living in small stranger households of husbands, wives, children and servants. Many of the men were skilled craftsmen and tradesmen, and a good number of them managed to build up thriving businesses.

  Most strangers of whatever nationality kept to the edges of London; but the fact that they so often lived and worked in liberties just beyond the reach of the city government was for the mayor and corporation as infuriating as it was threatening. These were the nooks and corners of the city: Southwark, East Smithfield, around the Tower of London, at St Martin’s and near the city ditch between Bishopsgate and Bedlam.

  Dutch, French and other strangers worked as button-makers, hat-makers, starchers and tailors, silk-spinners, silk-weavers, brewers, leatherworkers, joiners and glass-makers. A good number worked in the workshops of London’s printers. With many skilled typesetters and bookbinders coming from Antwerp, whose book trade had been large and highly sophisticated before the troubles, it was no surprise that the printers of the Elizabethan city readily used stranger workmen, even if it meant they had to circumvent the regulations of the printers’ and booksellers’ trade body, the Stationers’ Company. Some established and expert printers from Antwerp set themselves up in London. Wouter van Lin (anglicized to Walter Lynne) lived and worked in 1549 on Somar’s quay at Billingsgate and had a shop next door to St Paul’s School in Paul’s churchyard at the sign of the eagle.9 Another Antwerpian successful in London was Steven Mierdman, who sometimes printed books for Lynne to sell. Reyner Wolfe, born in Gelderland, was King Edward VI’s official typographer and bookseller of works in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.10 The technical virtuosity of men like these gave London a profile in European print culture that the city had never before enjoyed.

  How did Londoners feel about the strangers? And how did the strangers settle themselves into a city that so obviously discriminated against outsiders? The topic of immigration touched off all kinds of mixed responses and emotions – practically every point on the scale between tolerant humour and outright aggression. But two big themes emerge.

  The first is that most Londoners were just about able to contain their most violent impulses. And those impulses were powerful. Fear and dislike of strangers united poor and rich, though for different reasons: the poor, because they felt their charity being squeezed and their at best precarious existence in the city threatened, and the rich because they saw the hard-won privileges of citizens under attack.

  The second theme is just how deftly many strangers were able to work themselves into the fabric of London society, while keeping a sense of separateness and community. And the context of the city is important too. In spite of the restrictions on strangers’ lives, they were probably no worse off than the tens of thousands of unskilled English migrants who flooded into the city in the 1580s and 1590s. Most Londoners struggled to live and work, but the strangers had the advantage of their skills, their tenacity and their sense of group identity.

  Any outsider is likely to be the butt of jokes and humour, and that was certainly true of the Dutch in Elizabethan London. This verse was composed in the fifteenth century:

  Ye have herde that twoo Flemmynges togedere

  Wol undertake, or they goo ony whethere,

  Or they rise onys, to drinke a ba
relle fulle

  Of gode berkyne; so sore they hale and pulle,

  Undre the borde they pissen as they sitte.11

  There is nothing so resilient as a national stereotype, and lines like these would not have been out of place in Thomas Dekker’s comedy historical romance The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). Dekker gives us a good idea of how laughing at foreigners allowed Elizabethan Londoners both to mark them as outsiders and to tolerate their difference.

  In the play, a young man named Rowland Lacy, nephew to the Earl of Lincoln, falls in love with the daughter of the lord mayor of London. To drive the couple apart, the earl sends Lacy to France to fight in the wars. But Lacy deserts his commission and secretly returns to England. Using skills he has picked up on his travels, he disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker. A master shoemaker considers giving him a job. His journeyman is the mischievous Firk.

  Lacy makes his entrance onto the stage singing a ridiculous song about an intoxicated ‘bore van Gelderland’: ‘There was a boor from Gelderland, merry they be. He was so drunk he could not stand; pissed they all be.’ (I. iv. 39–44)12 Firk thinks the singing Dutchman looks like a shoemaker, and asks him ‘Are you of the gentle craft?’ ‘Yes, yes, I am a shoemaker’, Lacy replies:

  LACY: Yaw, yaw, ik bin den skomawker.

  FIRK: Den skomaker, quoth ’a! And hark you, skomaker, have you all your tools – a good rubbing-pin, a good stopper, a good dresser, your four sorts of awls, and your two balls of wax, your paring knife, your hand- and thumb-leathers, and good St Hugh’s Bones to smooth up your work?

  LACY: Yaw, yaw, be neit vorveard. Ik hab al de dingen voour mack skoes groot end klene. [Yes, yes, never fear. I have everything for making shoes large and small.]