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

by Stephen Alford

  For all this, Anthony Jenkinson was not a kind of excluded outsider whose petition for the voyage to Cathay, if the queen had granted it, would have made London’s greater fortune in the empire of the Great Khan. His project for Cathay was as flawed as Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s: both would have encountered seas of impassable ice. And Jenkinson was a Muscovy Company man, as well as the queen’s also. In the 1570s he would serve as a successful ambassador to the court of Ivan the Terrible. In an arrangement that suited Elizabeth I very well, the company paid for royal embassies whose job, after all, was to keep Anglo-Russian trade afloat. Throughout his career he was part a diplomat, part a merchant – and as skilled as he had been on those first journeys into Russia and Asia.

  In January 1568 Jenkinson married into the elite set of family and business interests that made up the sinews of London’s body mercantile. His wife was Judith, the daughter of John and Alice Marshe. Judith’s maternal grandfather was William Gresham, a cousin of Sir Thomas Gresham. John Marshe was a mercer, six times a governor of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company and one of the founding members of the Muscovy Company. Anthony and Judith married in the church of St Michael on Wood Street, close to Cheapside and the company halls of the haberdashers, wax chandlers, embroiderers and goldsmiths. It was a London church like so many others, packed with the memorial stones and brasses of two centuries’ worth of city merchants and craftsmen. In such a setting, the range and breadth of Anthony Jenkinson’s experiences stood out. He knew with some confidence that he had seen more of the world than anyone in that church, living or dead, could have imagined.

  A year later, Jenkinson was granted a coat of arms. He was a man who knew the significance of documents, and so the royal heralds read for themselves the portfolio of papers from his travels that Richard Hakluyt the younger later printed in his magnificent Principal navigations. The letters of recommendation from Ivan the Terrible to the Shah of Persia and other potentates, a safe conduct from Suleiman the Magnificent, papers from Hadjim Khan, testimonials of Jenkinson’s being in Jerusalem – all were, in the eyes of the heralds, ‘evident tokens of his virtue, honesty and wisdom’. But they were proof above all of the journeys on which he had travelled beyond Europe to Asia, risking his life and putting his body under strain. The heralds captured the drama of it all:

  Northwards [he] hath also sailed on the frozen seas many days within the Arctic Circle, and travelled throughout the ample dominions of the emperor of Russia and Muscovia and the confines of Norway and Lappia over to the Caspian Sea, and into divers countries thereabouts, to the old cosmographers utterly unknown.

  Jenkinson’s new coat of arms was highly appropriate for a sea captain and adventurer: waves of sea in blue and silver and three golden stars, with the crest of a sea horse.22

  His impressive public reputation was as tenacious as the man himself, and more so with the publication in 1589 of Hakluyt’s Principal navigations and its second edition at the end of the century. Man of adventure, a fearless traveller, merchant and a diplomat, servant of queen and country, Jenkinson was also celebrated in 1596 in a verse history of England:

  Yet longer . . . let us dwell

  Of Jenkinson. But where shall we begin his lauds to tell?

  In Europe, Asia, Affrick? For these all he saw, in all

  Employed for England’s common good.23

  But above all Anthony Jenkinson was the man who pushed the Muscovy merchants’ interests out into Asia. Convinced still by Cathay, he took London’s name to parts of the world that earlier generations would have considered fantastically remote. And it was there that Elizabethans wanted to go and London’s merchants needed to trade – into countries utterly unknown.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Flourishing Lands

  In the same year that Anthony Jenkinson married Judith Marshe, a teenage schoolboy made his way across London to the chambers of his cousin, a lawyer, in the Middle Temple. His school – Westminster – was a short boat ride down the Thames to the Temple stairs, or a walk of half an hour or so past the queen’s palace of Whitehall, up to the Charing Cross and then along the Strand to Temple Bar and into the privileged warren of lawyers’ London. But this visit was different to any other he had made before or would make again. It was (as he remembered it thirty years later) a dramatic moment of realization and revelation, the instantaneous understanding and unfolding of a life’s purpose: to make sense of countries and peoples as yet undiscovered – an ambition that from the very beginning was fuelled by the energy of mercantile London. The career and especially the writings of Richard Hakluyt will run as a connecting thread through everything that follows: Hakluyt is a name to remember.

  Both the lawyer and the young man shared the name of Richard Hakluyt. The younger Richard was the son of a London citizen and freeman of the Skinners’ Company who had died in March 1557, a month after Osip Nepea had paraded through the city. Young Richard Hakluyt was then about five years old. Soon afterwards he and his brothers lost their mother, and they were left in the care of the lawyer, to whom the boys’ father (the lawyer’s uncle) had on his deathbed entrusted his whole family.1 Richard was a bright boy, and he was clever enough to be chosen as one of the queen’s scholars at Westminster School. There, from 1564, he and forty other boys lived in the precincts of the ancient abbey, following the rigorous daily routine of boarding school life and receiving in return a robust education in the Greek and Roman classics.

  The elder Richard had been admitted to the Middle Temple back in 1555. Over the following decade he did well for himself as a London lawyer. He would have known Giles Isham, a fellow Temple barrister, who was elder brother to John and Gregory, the merchants and moneylenders. Richard Hakluyt’s chambers were near the lane that led down from the Temple Bar on Fleet Street, somewhere just to the north-west of the Temple church, famous for its funeral monuments of medieval knights templar. Hakluyt shared an upper chamber with another lawyer, Fabian Phillips, but below that was another for which Richard alone paid a yearly rent of six shillings and eight pence.2

  As a successful barrister, Richard Hakluyt’s chambers must have overflowed with law papers and files. But his passion was the science Elizabethans called cosmography, and we can be pretty certain that he owned a substantial collection of books about geography, navigation and astronomy. It was these, not the lawyer’s papers, that gripped the younger Richard, who remembered entering his cousin’s chamber to find ‘certain books of cosmography’ lying open on a table, as well as a map of the world. The elder Hakluyt pounced straight away on his cousin’s interest and, using the map, gave him an impromptu tutorial on the physical and political geography of the world. Hakluyt pointed out for Richard all the known seas, gulfs, bays, straits, capes, rivers, empires, kingdoms, dukedoms and territories. He talked, too, about the world’s various resources and how they were traded: those ‘special commodities, and particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic, and intercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied’.

  Probably Hakluyt loved the captive audience of one, while he pointed with his wand to what was probably a pretty large map. Which map it was is hard to know for certain, though one possibility is that it was Sebastian Cabot’s world map of 1544–8, engraved in London in 1549. The world Cabot showed was one broadly familiar to us, a projection centred on the Atlantic Ocean, and around and beyond it the familiar shapes of Africa, South America, Europe and India. Cabot exaggerated the size of the Caribbean at the expense of a rather flattened North America, while furthest Asia was wrapped around the map’s edges – literally the Far East becoming also the far west. Australia had no existence at all. The continents are shown full of rivers and mountains and peoples, and ships sail all the seas and oceans. This was a world all at once bustling with life, activity and adventure, a world that extended far beyond the chambers of the Middle Temple in London – exotic and distant, but somehow from the map real and tangible.3

  The elder Richard Hakluyt shared with his young cousin his deep s
ense of God’s providence, explaining to the boy that when people set out to explore the world they did so from divine impulse. Discovery and navigation represented the unfolding of God’s purpose for the world. Hakluyt took young Richard to a copy of the Bible and, in a moment full of significance, they read the twenty-third and twenty-fourth verses of Psalm 107 in the Old Testament: ‘that they which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep’. The younger Richard Hakluyt later wrote that he resolved there and then that he would ‘by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature, the doors whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me’.

  Two years later he went off to study at Christ Church, Oxford, and there he read everything he could on discoveries and voyages around the world. A talented and voracious linguist, he gathered up all sorts of works written in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English, and, when at last he began to teach, introduced his students to the latest maps, globes, spheres and navigational instruments. Never a man troubled by modesty, he later wrote how much his pupils had loved his teaching. Over time he got to know the men who actually went out to see the world, ‘the chiefest captains at sea, the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation’. To collect together and make sense of everything the travellers encountered became for Richard Hakluyt the life’s work that stretched his intellect.4

  But this is to jump too far ahead. In London in 1568 – in that chamber of the Middle Temple, a stone’s throw from the Thames, close to the merchants’ halls and houses, the quays and wharves of the river – Richard Hakluyt the younger achieved a moment of understanding. In those Old Testament verses he felt an act of God’s providence. He became, in a sense, the recording angel of English discovery across the globe.

  Certainly it was at the very least lucky happenstance that a boy brilliantly attuned to cosmography was able to learn from his cousin and to read his books. We can guess that it was the size of the elder Richard Hakluyt’s library that explains why he rented a second chamber in the Middle Temple. On any cosmographer’s shelves was a magpie collection of works on geography, cartography, history, anthropology, navigation, mathematics and astronomy, insofar as those separate disciplines existed then as they do today. Some of the great cosmographical authorities, like the Greek scholar Ptolemy, were very old. Others, like Sebastian Münster or Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, were more or less contemporary. What united them all was the scholarly discipline John Dee called the ‘peculiar art’, one that, by studying the heavens and the earth, sought to come to ‘the description of the whole and universal frame of the world’.5 Cosmography was the great explanatory science and art of its day, able to reveal the operations of the whole planet. Its exponents delighted in showing how important it was. There was no one ‘so mean witted’, one Elizabethan cosmographer wrote, ‘but will confess her [cosmography’s] ample use, nor yet so simply learned but must acknowledge her manifold benefit’.6

  The elder Richard Hakluyt loved maps, but thought that most of them were far too big and unwieldy to be of real use. At about the time of the visit of his cousin to the Middle Temple, Hakluyt wrote to Abraham Ortelius with a description of what he believed the ideal map would look like. In size it would be twelve by three or four feet set up on revolving rods. The cartography would, of course, have to be exact. Hakluyt’s description of what the map would show gives us a sense of his eye for detail, as well as the breadth of his geographical knowledge that so gripped young Richard:

  In the middle is to be placed the meridian line or first degree of longitude running from north to south . . . so that eastwards on the six feet of the map to the right of this line will be found Europe, Africa, and Asia as far as the river Ganges . . . And just where you stop in East India or the kingdom of Cathay you will start again at the edge of the six feet to the left of the meridian . . . and continue the degrees of longitude, inserting Cathay, America, Florida and Baccalaos . . . Now let there be placed on either side of the equinoctial line the two Tropics, the Arctic and Antarctic Circles.7

  The elder Hakluyt was one of a European network of like-minded cosmographical enthusiasts, familiar enough with Ortelius to be able to write to him such a robustly self-confident and knowledgeable letter. In fact it is quite possible that Hakluyt knew Ortelius’s sister Elisabeth, for she and her husband Jacob Cool came from Antwerp to live as strangers in London some time in the middle 1560s.8

  Like most English cosmographers of his time, the elder Richard Hakluyt exercised his brain by trying to discern a navigable sea route to Asia. It was on his mind when he wrote to Abraham Ortelius, and we can guess with a very high degree of certainty that it formed part of the extempore lesson for his cousin. Sebastian Cabot, Richard Chancellor, John Dee, Anthony Jenkinson, the grandees of the Muscovy Company, Sir Humphrey Gilbert: each and every one of these men believed that there was some way to sail to the empire of Cathay, even if they disagreed on precisely how to get there – by going north-east or by going north-west. Hakluyt was at the very least indirectly involved in what at times became a heated debate at court: when Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote a treatise in 1566 in support of his ambitious Cathay project, some of the evidence he deployed came probably from Hakluyt’s own researches.9

  The two Richard Hakluyts knew what was at stake by the middle 1560s: England’s trade, investors’ money, riches, mercantile ambition, political patronage, reputation and ego. Here were merchants, courtiers and adventurers who wanted to explore the world and make their fortunes. Coming into focus already were some insistent themes of the younger Richard Hakluyt’s life’s work: the essential need for England to trade globally; the patriotic and providential impulse of the kingdom to put its stamp on the world; and the great task of collecting and understanding every possible piece of written material on exploration and navigation.

  The Hakluyts were specialists: self-taught men who, through their own efforts, knew the leading cosmographical minds of their day. The elder Hakluyt would have been used to that from his years as a young barrister in London, learning the law in the Middle Temple, not from a syllabus or curriculum – there was none – but from those who practised it. His cousin did the same, at Oxford and in London. They were practitioners as well as theorists; they rolled up their sleeves and got on with the job of making themselves experts. They read books and absorbed the work of fellow specialists. Surely sitting on the shelves of Hakluyt’s chambers were Richard Eden’s English translations of Münster’s Cosmographia (Universal Cosmography, 1553) and The decades of the newe worlde . . . by Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (1555), the Milanese scholar who had chronicled the voyages of Christopher Columbus. These were books printed in London when the younger Richard was a baby and toddler.

  And of course the Hakluyts lived in the city, on the doorstep of news and discovery. The elder Richard arrived in the Middle Temple in the year of the Muscovy Company’s royal charter. In London, a short, triumphant account was printed of Richard Chancellor’s discovery of Russia, complete, in elegant Latin, with a great speech by Chancellor in the style of high Roman oratory (sixteenth-century humanists generally preferred to write what should have been said rather than what was said by the speaker). Hakluyt could not have missed Robert Recorde’s dedication of his books to the grandees of the Muscovy Company, and we can imagine how he devoured every detail of Anthony Jenkinson’s map of Russia and Asia.

  The latest news came in from the wharves and quays on the Thames. It is easy today to forget the uncertainty of life and exploration in the Hakluyts’ lifetimes. Navigators and merchants like Chancellor and Jenkinson sailed off to far distant places. They were often gone for two or three years at a time. Getting a letter successfully back to London was in itself a minor miracle. The probability was always of failure; it was no wonder that crews and companies put their trust in providence. But when these voyages did succeed, the reports they brought home with them must have had London bu
zzing with news and speculation. Step by step new discoveries were made, and every year small fragments of the great puzzle of the globe gradually assimilated into the bigger picture: step by step all kinds of Londoners began to make sense of lands hundreds and thousands of miles away.

  * * *

  One of the secrets of the younger Richard Hakluyt’s later brilliance as a compiler of accounts of exploration and discovery was his skill as an editor. Though always in charge of the travel accounts he printed, he was able to slip far enough into the background to allow the accounts to speak for themselves – for the narratives to be fresh and arresting. He believed that the old cosmographers had done little more than stitch together ancient authorities that had been endlessly retold and reprinted – stories that, when they were put to the test, simply did not tell the truth. Hakluyt valued veracity above everything else. His gold standard was the eyewitness account. This was why he and Anthony Jenkinson were later able to collaborate so beautifully, for what suited Hakluyt in Principal navigations was Jenkinson’s keen eye, the unaffected precision of his writing and the supreme balance of his temperament and judgement.