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

by Stephen Alford

  Hakluyt became the pre-eminent editor and navigational expert of the 1580s and 1590s. Instinctively able, he learned his trade in London and Oxford. In London, when he was growing up, he would have read what other Londoners read also: tales of expeditions and voyages to remote and foreign places set out in lively English, in pamphlets and short books that sold in and around Paul’s Churchyard for only a few pennies. These, as the young Richard may have realized, were the future: vivid eyewitness accounts unlike the great clunking works of old cosmography whose authors got themselves tangled up in labyrinths of self-referencing scholarly debate. The booksellers who sold these new pamphlets saw that they had a readership, recognizing also that they had to compete in a busy marketplace dominated by the printing of cheap popular ballads, comedies, almanacs and prognostications, sensational accounts of murders or monstrous births, sermons, songs and sonnets. Weighty volumes of earnest scholarship were all very well, but what most Londoners in Paul’s Churchyard and the Royal Exchange wanted were lively and vivid books they could read, share and talk about.

  One bookseller who knew this instinctively was Thomas Hacket, with his shop at the sign of the green dragon in the Royal Exchange. Hacket was a canny publisher and a good translator. Before opening his shop at the Exchange, he had sold books in the 1560s from the sign of the key in Paul’s Churchyard, another on Lombard Street, right in the heart of the mercantile city. There is every reason to think that the two Richard Hakluyts browsed in Hacket’s shops, especially given the kinds of books he commissioned and sold. In the 1560s Hacket published two books on the mysterious continent of North America.

  The first, in 1563, was Hacket’s own translation of an expedition to America led by a French pilot called Jean Ribault. When the book appeared in Hacket’s London bookshops, the voyage was only months old and it seemed full of possibilities. Ribault and his crews had set out from France in February 1562. In April they had arrived off the east coast of the Florida peninsula and then sailed north, going ashore at a river Ribault called ‘May’ because it was discovered on the first day of that month. Sailing along the coast for two weeks, they found a place to establish a colony, at Port Royal in present-day South Carolina. Naming it Charlesfort, Ribault garrisoned the encampment with thirty men under the command of one Captain Nicholas Barré.10

  The colony came to nothing. Charlesfort was abandoned in the summer of 1563, by which time Ribault had set sail, first for France and then for England. Finding France convulsed by religious civil war, Ribault, a Protestant, travelled to England, where he arrived in March 1563. It says something for Hacket’s speed in picking up Ribault’s story that its English translation was printed, from Ribault’s French manuscript, in London only a few weeks later. As quick to spot an opportunity was a Devonshire soldier and adventurer called Thomas Stucley. By the summer of 1563 Stucley was proposing a joint expedition with Ribault out to ‘Terra Florida’ – ‘the flourishing land’. Stucley’s abilities were praised to the skies, and in a pamphlet recommending the forthcoming ‘adventurous voyage’ he was likened – improbably – to ‘A young Aeneas bold / With heart and courage stout’, though it seems most likely that this latter-day Aeneas was really intending to use the putative expedition as a cover for attacks on Spanish shipping.11

  Everything about Hacket’s account of Ribault’s expedition was meant to catch the eye and capture the imagination. Hacket understood the skill of selling a book by its title page: Terra Florida: Englished, the Flourishing Land, ‘the wonderful strange natures and manners of the people, with the marvellous commodities and treasures of the country’. For Ribault there had been both a sense of patriotic mission as well as a colonizing agenda:

  That France might one day through new discoveries have knowledge of strange countries and also thereof to receive (by means of continual traffic) rich and inestimable commodities, as other nations have done, by taking in hand such far navigations . . .12

  All a reader had to do was to substitute ‘England’ for ‘France’ and this might very well be Richard Eden writing about the great empire of Cathay – or indeed either of the Richard Hakluyts later writing about the northernmost parts of the American continent.

  Rich, visual and arresting, Hacket’s translation of Ribault evoked for Elizabethan Londoners a first encounter with places and people far beyond the reaches of their imagination. Away from the jostling bustle of Paul’s Churchyard, in the shadows of a huge Gothic cathedral, Hacket’s readers were transported off to the pristine forests of an as yet uncharted continent. Ribault and his men had wondered at the beauty of an immense coastline marked out by ‘an infinite number of fair and high trees’. Hacket’s translation stimulated his readers’ senses, recording ‘unspeakable pleasure’ at colour and smell.13 There was something here of the essence of human society as unspoiled as the continent itself: of the native people – naked, beautiful, gentle and courteous – and of earth unbroken by plough irons.14 Ribault gave a great catalogue of all kinds of trees, birds and animals they had seen.15 Significantly, he suggested possibilities for plantation and cultivation in a fruitful land. Terra Florida was about as different from London as it was possible to comprehend. With and for the natives of this flourishing land there was no hostility. Only their difference was noted: ‘They be of tawney colour, hawk-nosed and of a pleasant countenance.’16 But the hope was for religious conversion, giving the gift of civilization by bringing the true faith to ‘brutish people’ ignorant of Jesus Christ.17

  Hacket sold the book at no more than twopence a copy. He priced it to sell: in 1563 the daily wage of a London labourer was ninepence. But Hacket’s eye was also on London’s mercantile elite, and he produced a special edition of his translation, which he dedicated to Sir Martin Bowes, a leading city figure. Hacket’s address to Sir Martin began with all the familiar notions of a generation: the ‘forwardness in these late years of Englishmen’ in making great voyages and navigations, the propagation of Christianity and the enriching of kingdoms.18

  In bringing to life these flourishing lands of potential, Hacket wrote for all Londoners, the humble and the grand. He was able to introduce them to navigators like Ribault, and to leading European talents such as the French traveller and writer André Thevet. In 1563 it was Florida and South Carolina. Five years later, Hacket was selling in Paul’s Churchyard his translation of Thevet’s account of America, which he presented to Sir Henry Sidney, the same dedicatee back in 1562 of Anthony Jenkinson’s map of Russia. In choosing first Bowes and then Sidney (and later, for another book, Sir Thomas Gresham), Hacket knew exactly how to speak to the two constituencies that made possible the voyages, expeditions and mercantile ventures of Elizabeth’s reign: the merchants themselves and their powerful courtier investors. And he understood, too, how to capture the excitement of new and exotic places, something shown to perfection in his title for Thevet’s book on America: The new found worlde, or Antarctike, wherin is contained wonderful and strange things, as well of humaine creatures, as Beastes, Fishes, Foules, and Serpents, Trees, Plants, Mines of Golde and Silver: garnished with many learned authorities.19

  Striking in Thevet’s book is Hacket’s own sense of English mission – of the urge to discover and to shake up comfortable lives and attitudes, all with a sense of patriotic purpose: ‘How much are they to be praised, that for their country’s sake refuse no imminent peril . . . to abandon themselves and their sweetest lives to the favour of the boisterous seas . . . only to increase the same and good renown of their country.’ They worked both for God’s glory and the benefit of England.20 If this was Thomas Hacket writing in 1568, it might also have been Richard Eden fifteen years earlier, urging on Sebastian Cabot’s London expedition to Cathay. It was a powerful theme in this kind of Elizabethan writing: the insistent desire to emulate and then surpass the achievements of Spain and Portugal.

  Thomas Hacket wanted readers of Thevet to embrace the strangeness of the new world they would soon be reading about. Like Ribault, Thevet was fresh, vivi
d, odd and challenging, avoiding the mistakes and slips made by cosmographers who had merely pasted together second- or third-hand tales and descriptions:

  Also let it not seem to thee strange the setting forth of many strange trees, as palm trees and others, with beasts of the field and fowls of the air, the which are clean contrary to the setting forth of our cosmographers and ancient writers, who for because that they have not seen the places, and for the small experience and knowledge that they had, did greatly err.21

  Here was a fantastic possibility that must have struck at least some of the browsers and buyers in Paul’s Churchyard: that readers of books like Ribault’s or Thevet’s had at their fingertips descriptions more accurate than old scholarly cosmographies. So fresh and contemporary were Hacket’s translations that he asked his readers to excuse the rough edges of any rude or ill-placed words. Here was a kind of democratization of the globe – a discovery of far distant continents for the price of a meal in a London tavern.

  The younger Richard Hakluyt absorbed the method. Not satisfied with tired old sources, he wanted the kind of reports fresh from the pens of captains, merchants and sailors just off the ships that came into the port of London – accounts that had about them the sharp tang of the sea. Hakluyt and Hacket and others shared common aims: as well as wanting to sell their books, they sought to set out and to celebrate the voyages and expeditions of their day (especially if they were English), as well as to encourage others to push further into new worlds and flourishing lands.

  It was the impulse to discover: to find, to describe, to trade, to map, and eventually to dominate. And Elizabethans wanted to do all these things for a number of reasons: for riches, for the preaching of the true (Protestant) faith, for patriotic reputation, and later on for plantation and colonization. For Thomas Hacket, introducing his translation of André Thevet, it was almost a physical urge – the abandonment of self and home and wives and children for an even greater enterprise. It was a mission bigger than the city of London: it was for the whole kingdom. This was why it was so easy to think about investments in the Muscovy Company and later Elizabethan ventures as representing much more than profits for a few: London, England and indeed the whole world all began to blur together.

  By the time of young Richard Hakluyt’s visit to his cousin’s chamber in the Middle Temple, London’s mercantile interests were becoming ever more difficult to disentangle from the fractious politics of European diplomacy. The Muscovy Company’s breakthrough into Persia was a triumph, squeezing out all competition. As two senior company men wrote from Russia: ‘It is a great honour unto our country to have such a trade privately to ourselves, where no other nations hath any entrance.’ They recognized that merchants from the Baltic down to France and Italy had done their best to subvert the company’s business. Market dominance was national dominance, and this was why the company wanted the power of Elizabeth’s government four-square behind it.22

  More obvious diplomatically was Elizabethan England’s early frostiness with King Philip II of Spain. Here, in a further blurring of politics and mercantile adventure, Elizabeth’s government began early in the reign to turn a blind eye to privateering. The most effective exponent of this sort of licensed piracy was John Hawkins, a Plymouth sea captain who by the early 1560s had a house in Deptford and another in London in the parish of St Dunstan in the East, near to the first Muscovy House. Between 1562 and 1569 Hawkins and his crews sailed out into seas dominated by Spain. One purpose of Hawkins’s expeditions was to disrupt the Spanish silver fleets sailing between Spain and Mexico. The other was slaving, with Hawkins seizing Africans and selling them in the Caribbean, a trade in human beings in which Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers cheerfully invested. This was celebrated in the granting of a coat of arms to Hawkins in 1565, topped by a crest of an African, bound and captive.

  Just as Londoners in the 1560s could read Ribault and Thevet, so Hawkins’s voyages were brought to life for them in compact narratives full of action and adventure, where there were encounters with Spanish treasure fleets, great winds and storms. The most exciting moments were picked out by spare and pointed notes in the margins of these popular pamphlets: ‘North winds perilous’; ‘Sharp wars’; ‘A hard case’; ‘Fire’; ‘Small hope of life’; ‘Hard choice’; ‘Many miseries’.23 All of these things – the discipline of cosmography, the chance to discover new worlds, mercantile ambition, patriotism and policy – helped to shape the mind of the younger Richard Hakluyt. The ruling passion of his adult life was to explain how, with the blessings of God, the English had discovered the globe, searching (as Hakluyt said himself in 1589) ‘the most opposite corners and quarters of the world’.24 For him it all went back to that schoolboy day in his cousin’s chambers.

  Hakluyt’s talent was to turn what were often simply the fits and starts of exploration into a grand providential narrative. The reality, not surprisingly, was more complicated than this, beaten into shape by false starts and hopes, fantasies and illusions. Few understood this reality as personally and painfully as a merchant cosmographer Richard Hakluyt himself knew and admired. He was a man whose fortunes in the end were broken by commercial speculation and voyaging, and by the unforgiving power of the queen’s court and the city of London. His name was Michael Lok and, like so many others before him, he wanted to find Cathay.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Unknown Limits

  Nothing better illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of mercantile London than the Frobisher adventure of the later 1570s. The city’s strengths were formidable: great resources of money, mercantile energy, political will, ingenuity and bravery. Its limitations were all of those things left unchecked: greed, over-confidence, politicking and ignorance. Martin Frobisher’s venture was an extraordinary one: three voyages in three years out into the wild seas of the Canadian Arctic, at first in search of a north-west passage through to Cathay, but then devoted to what, with a huge fanfare, was believed to be the greatest discovery of the age – the supposedly vast reserves of gold in the islands of the Labrador Sea.

  It was the superlative mercantile failure of a generation: gold fever, a fantastic speculation in which thousands of pounds were invested by London’s merchants as well as by some of the most powerful families in the kingdom. Today it would register as a major corporate scandal, shaking the political class and the financial world. In Elizabethan London it was merely a hard lesson learned, and one best quickly forgotten. Frobisher later sailed into other waters; his investors looked to other ventures. The character who suffered most for it was Michael Lok, Frobisher’s strategist and money-raiser. In Lok’s career it is hard to miss elements of classical tragedy: vaunting ambition brought crashing down by human flaws and the intervention of fortune – we might think of Holbein’s Triumph of Riches and the hovering presence of the goddess Nemesis.

  The north-western seas explored by Martin Frobisher, 1576–8.

  Michael Lok’s failure was emphasized by the height from which he eventually fell. He was a son of one of the most successful families of the city establishment, the great-grandson of John Lok, a fifteenth-century sheriff. Michael’s father William was a mercer with a house and office on Cheapside at the sign of the padlock – a pun on the family name that doubtless worked as a kind of trademark, resonant of security and solidity. William Lok was well connected at the court of Henry VIII, able to negotiate for himself the exclusive licence to import silks and jewels for court revels. He was (like any sensible leading merchant with an eye on the bigger picture) a correspondent of Thomas Cromwell. He was also a man who was demonstrably loyal: in Dunkirk in 1533 Lok tore down from public display a copy of the papal bull excommunicating King Henry for his marriage to Anne Boleyn. As wealthy as they were politically astute, in middle Tudor London, families like the Loks and the Greshams were cut from identical cloth – and a very fine and textured cloth it was too.

  Michael was a son of William Lok’s second marriage, born in about 1532. His father ga
ve him a thorough apprenticeship in the business of being a London mercer. It was not to be for Michael Lok, as it had been for young Thomas Gresham, a taste of university life in Cambridge followed by carefully structured years in Antwerp – son as courtier-merchant protégé. After Michael’s education in grammar up to the age of thirteen, William Lok sent him to Flanders and France in order to ‘learn those languages and to know the world’. After that, probably suited to this type of life by temperament, he threw himself at mercantile Europe, in fifteen years ‘passing through almost all the countries of Christianity, namely out of England into Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Greece, both by land and by sea’. His last command was a ship sailing the Levant seas of the eastern Mediterranean.1 It was the kind of life – busy, adventurous and full of danger – that Anthony Jenkinson, only three years older than Lok, knew so well.

  Lok was a thinker as much as he was a mercantile adventurer. He pushed himself to learn languages and to discover foreign lands. His ambition (so he explained in middle age) was to extend England’s trade to its furthest limits.2 He became a scholar of cosmography and navigation, and built up for himself what would have been one of the largest libraries in and around London, full of books in Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Greek and even Arabic.3 The parallels with John Dee and the two Richard Hakluyts are insistent; Lok was very much of their world.

  So here was a London merchant a little out of the ordinary, though he probably seemed conventional enough. He was admitted to the freedom of the Mercers’ Company in 1562, continuing the family tradition and affiliation. By the 1570s he had a lucrative office as London agent of the Muscovy Company, with a stipend and benefits (rent-free housing, for example) valued at some £400 a year. For this huge executive salary, his job between 1571 and 1576 was to supervise all the company’s cargoes coming in and out of London.4