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

by Stephen Alford

  2Kingsford, vol. I, p. 1.

  3Ralph Merrifield, ‘Roman London’, in The city of London from prehistoric times to c. 1520, ed. Mary D. Lobel (Oxford, 1991), p. 11; Kingsford, vol. I, p. 4.

  4‘The Ruin’, in A choice of Anglo-Saxon verse, ed. Richard Hamer (London, 1990), p. 27.

  5The Wonderfull yeare (1603), in Dekker, Plague, p. 33.

  6The panorama of London circa 1544 by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde, ed. Howard Colvin and Susan Foister (London Topographical Society, no. 151, London, 1996).

  7James Pilkington, The true report of the burnyng of the Steple and Churche of Poules in London (STC 19930, London, 1561), sig. A8.

  8Thomas Middleton, The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: or The Walke in Powles (STC 17781, London, 1604), sig. B3-v; Thomas Middleton: the collected works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford, 2007), pp. 183–5; Eleanor Lowe, ‘“My cloak’s a stranger; he was made but yesterday”: clothing, language, and the construction of theatre in Middleton’, in The Oxford handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford, 2012), p. 199.

  9Pierre Du Ploiche, A treatise in English and Frenche right necessary and proffitable for al young children (STC 7363, London, 1551), sig. H1.

  10Kingsford, vol. II, p. 2; City of London, ed. Lobel, p. 77.

  CHAPTER 4: IN ANTWERP’S SHADOW

  1Ian Blanchard, The international economy in the ‘age of discoveries’, 1470–1570 (Stuttgart, 2009); J. L. Bolton and Francesco Guidi Boscoli, ‘When did Antwerp replace Bruges as the commercial and financial centre of north-western Europe? The evidence of the Borromei ledger for 1438’, EcHR, 61 (2008), pp. 360–79; Alison Hanham, The Celys and their world: an English merchant family of the fifteenth century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 210–11; Herman van den Wee, The growth of the Antwerp market and the European economy (fourteenth–sixteenth centuries), 3 vols (The Hague, 1963), vol. II, pp. 113–42; Smithsonian Institution, Antwerp’s golden age: the metropolis of the west in the 16th and 17th centuries (Antwerp, 1973–5); Dan Ewing, ‘Marketing art in Antwerp, 1460–1560: Our Lady’s Pand’, Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), pp. 558–84.

  2Florence Edler, ‘Winchcombe kerseys in Antwerp (1538–44)’, EcHR, 7 (1936), pp. 58–9.

  3Richard Rowlands (Verstegan), The post for divers partes of the world (STC 21360, London, 1576), pp. 77–87.

  4The Book of Privileges of the Merchant Adventurers of England, 1296–1483, ed. Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs (Oxford, 2009), p. 211.

  5Anne F. Sutton, ‘The Merchant Adventurers of England: their origins and the Mercers’ Company of London’, Historical Research, 75 (2002), p. 45; Book of Privileges, ed. Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, pp. 294–305.

  6Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the age of Reformation: underground Protestantism in a commercial metropolis, trans. J. C. Grayson (Baltimore, 1996), p. 23.

  7Marnef, Antwerp in the age of Reformation, p. 24.

  8Kristine K. Forney, ‘Music, ritual and patronage at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp’, Early Music History, 7 (1987), p. 27.

  9Smithsonian Institution, Antwerp’s golden age, p. 23; Ewing, ‘Marketing art in Antwerp’, pp. 565–6.

  10Marnef, Antwerp in the age of Reformation, p. 37.

  11Marnef, Antwerp in the age of Reformation, p. 40.

  12The prognostication of maister Jasper Laet (STC 470.6, London?, 1520).

  13SP 1/197, fo. 37; W. C. Richardson, Stephen Vaughan: financial agent of Henry VIII; a study of financial relations with the Low Countries (Baton Rouge, 1953), p. 58.

  14Fugger-Zeitungen: ungedruckte Briefe an das Haus Fugger aus den Jahren 1568–1605, ed. Victor Klarwill (Vienna, 1923).

  15A collection of state papers, ed. Samuel Haynes (London, 1740), p. 153.

  16SP 1/78, fo. 34.

  17Ian Blanchard, ‘Gresham, Sir Richard (c. 1485–1549)’, ODNB; The chronicle and political papers of King Edward VI, ed. W. K. Jordan (Ithaca, NY, 1966), p. 111.

  18SP 1/21, fo. 112; SP 1/21, fo. 226.

  19SP 1/21, fo. 226.

  20BL, Cotton MS, Galba B.IX, fo. 13.

  21SP 1/104, fo. 211; John Foxe, The first volume of the ecclesiasticall history, contayning the actes [and] monumentes of thinges passed in every kinges time (STC 11224, London, 1576), p. 1173 (sig. KKK3).

  22SP 1/75, fo. 83; The life and times of Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. J. W. Burgon, 2 vols (London, 1839), vol. I, p. 23.

  23Anne F. Sutton, The mercery of London: trade, goods and people, 1130–1578 (Farnham, 2005), p. 398.

  24Stow, Chronicles, p. 127.

  25A chronicle of London, from 1089 to 1483, ed. H. N. Nicholas (London, 1827), p. 74; Caroline M. Barron, London in the later middle ages: government and people, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), p. 157.

  26The ordre of my Lord Mayor, the Aldermen & the Shiriffes, for their metings and wearynge of theyr apparell throughout the yeare (STC 16705.7, London, 1568), sigs. A7v–B1v.

  27SP 1/135, fo. 8; SP 1/135, fo. 105a; Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. Burgon, vol. I, p. 37.

  28Jean Imray, ‘The origins of the Royal Exchange’, in The Royal Exchange, ed. Ann Saunders (London Topographical Society, no. 152, London, 1997), pp. 20–35.

  CHAPTER 5: ‘LOVE, SERVE AND OBEY’

  1Kingsford, vol. I, p. 275; John Weever, Ancient funerall monuments within the united Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the Islands adjacent (STC 25223, London, 1631), pp. 398–9; John Guy, A daughter’s love (London, 2008), p. 21.

  2Biographical history of Gonville and Caius College, 1349–1897, ed. John Venn, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1897–1901), vol. I, p. 28.

  3SP 68/12, fo. 36-v.

  4SP 1/135, fo. 244; Ian Blanchard, ‘Sir Thomas Gresham c. 1518–1579’, in The Royal Exchange, ed. Ann Saunders (London Topographical Society, no. 152, London, 1997), pp. 11–12.

  5The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio divided into foure bookes, trans. Thomas Hoby (STC 4778, London, 1561), sig. Yy4v.

  6Ian Blanchard, ‘Gresham, Sir Thomas (c. 1518–1579)’, ODNB.

  7The life and times of Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. J. W. Burgon, 2 vols (London, 1839), vol. I, p. 115.

  8W. C. Richardson, Stephen Vaughan: financial agent of Henry VIII; a study of financial relations with the Low Countries (Baton Rouge, 1953), pp. 48–53, at p. 49; R. B. Outhwaite, ‘The trials of foreign borrowing: the English Crown and the Antwerp money market’, EcHR, 19 (1966), pp. 289–92.

  9John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), p. 192; Blanchard, ‘Sir Thomas Gresham’, pp. 15–16.

  10A Proclamation . . . for the prohibicion of the cariyng out of the realme of gold or silver, and of eschaunge and reeschaunge (STC 7839, London, 10 June 1551); A Proclamacion sette furth . . . lycencyng the Exchaunges and rechaunges of money (STC 7844.4, London, 23 March 1552); Raymond de Roover, Gresham on foreign exchange (Cambridge, MA, 1949), p. 183.

  11Richard Ehrenberg, Capital and finance in the age of the Renaissance: a study of the Fuggers and their connections, trans. H. M. Lucas (London, 1928), p. 254.

  12Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. Burgon, vol. I, p. 118.

  13Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. Burgon, vol. I, p. 92.

  14Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. Burgon, vol. I, p. 117; SP 70/3, fo. 8; H. Buckley, ‘Sir Thomas Gresham and the foreign exchanges’, Economic Journal, 34 (1924), p. 597.

  15Blanchard, ‘Sir Thomas Gresham’, p. 16.

  16SP 70/3, fo. 8.

  17SP 10/15, no. 13; The chronicle and political papers of King Edward VI, ed. W. K. Jordan (Ithaca, NY, 1966), pp. 146–7.

  18de Roover, Gresham on foreign exchange, p. 220.

  19PC 2/4, pp. 614–15.

  20PC 2/4, p. 618; see also SP 10/15, no. 13; and PC 2/4, p. 488.

  21Sir Thomas Gresham, ed. Burgon, vol. I, p. 119.

  22Ehrenberg, Capital and finance, pp. 180–81.

  23SP 69/2, fos. 50–51.

  24SP 69/2, fo. 65.

  25Jervis Wegg, Antwerp, 1477–1559 (London, 1916), pp. 97–8.

  26BL, Lansdowne MS 12, fo. 16v; Ehrenberg
, Capital and finance, p. 254.

  CHAPTER 6: SEARCHING FOR CATHAY

  1Sebastian Münster, A treatyse of the newe India, trans. Richard Eden (STC 18244, London, 1553), sig. F1; see also Richard Hakluyt, Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America (STC 12624, London, 1582), sigs. B1–3; PN1, pp. 250–51; and New American world: a documentary history of North America to 1612, ed. D. B. Quinn, 5 vols (New York, 1979), vol. I, p. 181.

  2Three outstanding studies of Sebastian Cabot are Robert K. Batchelor, London: the Selden Map and the making of a global city, 1549–1689 (Chicago, 2014), ch. 1; Alison Sandman and Eric H. Ash, ‘Trading expertise: Sebastian Cabot between Spain and England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 57 (2004), pp. 813–46; and Heather Dalton, Merchants and explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot, and networks of Atlantic exchange, 1500–1560 (Oxford, 2016), esp. pp. 34–9, 72–88, 179–85.

  3Wynkyn de Worde, Here bygynneth a lytell treatyse or booke named Johan Mandevyll knyght (STC 17247, Westminster, 1499), sig. N5-v.

  4Münster, Treatyse of the newe India, sigs. F1–F5v.

  5de Worde, Johan Mandevyll, sigs. N5–O5v; Münster, Treatyse of the newe India, sigs. F1–F5v.

  6B. G. Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier: sources for a historical ethnography of northeastern North America, 1497–1550 (Toronto, 1961), pp. 16–25; The Cabot voyages and Bristol discovery under Henry VII, ed. J. A. Williamson (Hakluyt Society, second series, no. 120, Cambridge, 1962), pp. 270–80, 282–91, 302–3; Sandman and Ash, ‘Trading expertise’, pp. 816–17.

  7Humphrey Gilbert, A discourse of a Discoverie for a new Passage to Cataia (STC 11881, London, 1576), sig. D3; Henry Harrisse, John Cabot the discoverer of North-America and Sebastian his son (London, 1896), p. 440.

  8Batchelor, London, p. 48.

  9PC 2/2, p. 236; Henry Harrisse, Jean et Sébastien Cabot, leur origine et leurs voyages (Paris, 1882), pp. 358–60; Harrisse, John Cabot, p. 451.

  10Harrisse, Jean et Sébastien Cabot, pp. 359–60.

  11Batchelor, London, pp. 32, 49; Dalton, Merchants and explorers, pp. 179–81. Dalton’s work is essential for a full understanding of Cabot in the context of his earlier voyage to South America with Roger Barlow.

  12Münster, Treatyse of the newe India, sig. aa4v.

  13The subtitle of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, The decades of the newe worlde or west India, trans. Richard Eden (STC 645–647, London, 1555).

  14Münster, Treatyse of the newe India, sigs. aa4, aa5.

  15BL, Lansdowne MS 118, fo. 27; T. S. Willan, The early history of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (Manchester, 1956), p. 41.

  16Münster, Treatyse of the newe India, sig. A1v.

  17PN1, pp. 265–6.

  18PN 1, p. 262.

  19PN 1, p. 262.

  20d’Anghiera, Decades of the newe worlde, pp. 306–9; PN1, pp. 263–5.

  21Batchelor, London, p. 32.

  22PN1, pp. 259–63.

  23PN1, pp. 268–9.

  24Marshall T. Poe, Foreign descriptions of Muscovy: an analytic bibliography of primary and secondary sources (University of Iowa, 2008), pp. 8–9, 41–54; Samuel H. Baron, ‘Herberstein and the English “discovery” of Muscovy’, Terrae Incognitae, 18 (1986), pp. 43–54, reprinted in his Explorations in Muscovite history (Aldershot, 1991); Marshall T. Poe, “A people born to slavery”: Russia in early modern European ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), ch. 1. On Eden’s understanding of Muscovy, see d’Anghiera, Decades of the newe worlde, pp. 278–306, printed in Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: a translation of the earliest account of that country, entitled ‘Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii’, ed. R. H. Major, 2 vols (Hakluyt Society, original series, London, 1851–2; repr. Cambridge, 2010), vol. II, pp. 177–256.

  25SP 11/5, no. 4 (PN1, pp. 304–9). On the founder investors in the company, see SP 11/7, no. 39; and T. S. Willan, The Muscovy merchants of 1555 (Manchester, 1953).

  26PN1, p. 284.

  27PN1, p. 296.

  28PN1, pp. 263–5.

  29‘Of the Russe Commonwealth’ by Giles Fletcher 1591: facsimile edition with variants, ed. R. Pipes and J. V. A. Fine (Cambridge, MA, 1966), fos. 9-v, 11v.

  30Robert Recorde, The whetstone of witte, whiche is the seconde parte of Arithmetike (STC 20820, London, 1557), sig. a3v.

  31PN1, p. 304.

  CHAPTER 7: A RUSSIAN EMBASSY

  1Henry Harrisse, John Cabot the discoverer of North-America and Sebastian his son (London, 1896), pp. 458–60; Jean Taisnier, A very necessarie and profitable Booke concerning Navigation, trans. Richard Eden (STC 23659, London, 1575), dedicatory epistle; Richard Hakluyt, Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America, and the Ilands adjacent unto the same (STC 12624, London, 1582), sig. A4; Heather Dalton, Merchants and explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot, and networks of Atlantic exchange, 1500–1560 (Oxford, 2016), p. 184.

  2Kingsford, vol. I, p. 131.

  3Acts of court of the Mercers’ Company, ed. Laetitia Lyell and Frank D. Watney (Cambridge, 1936), p. 694; T. S. Willan, The early history of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (Manchester, 1956), pp. 28–9; Anne F. Sutton, The mercery of London: trade, goods and people, 1130–1578 (Farnham, 2005), p. 538; Mercers’ Company, London, Acts of Court 1527–1560, fos. 44, 46-v.

  4Kingsford, vol. I, pp. 134, 136; Willan, Russia Company, pp. 28–9.

  5PN1, p. 299.

  6PN1, pp. 299–300.

  7PN1, pp. 293–5, 295–9, 299–300, 385–97.

  8The diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Society, first series, vol. 42, London, 1848), p. 127; Samuel H. Baron, Muscovite Russia: collected essays (London, 1980), essay III.

  9Baron, Muscovite Russia, essay III, pp. 48–9.

  10PN1, p. 322.

  11Baron, Muscovite Russia, essay III, p. 45; PN1, p. 322.

  12PC 2/7, p. 538; PN1, p. 322.

  13PN1, p. 322.

  14PN1, p. 322.

  15PN1, p. 323; Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols, p. 127.

  16PN1, p. 323.

  17Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols, p. 127.

  18‘Of the Russe Commonwealth’ by Giles Fletcher 1591: facsimile edition with variants, ed. R. Pipes and J. V. A. Fine (Cambridge, MA, 1966), fo. 113v.

  19Stow, Chronicles, p. 142.

  20PN1, p. 323.

  21Baron, Muscovite Russia, essay III, p. 51; Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols, p. 130; PN1, p. 324.

  22PN 1, p. 324.

  23SP 69/10, fos. 90–93v.

  24John Strype, Ecclesiastical memorials, relating chiefly to religion and the reformation of it, 3 vols (Oxford, 1822), vol. III, i, p. 522.

  25Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols, p. 130.

  26PN 1, p. 324.

  27A. H. Johnson, The history of the Worshipful Company of the Drapers of London, 2 vols (Oxford, 1914–15), vol. II, p. 185.

  28John Schofield, Medieval London houses (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003), p. 225.

  29PN 1, p. 324.

  30BL, Lansdowne MS 118, fo. 27.

  31Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I (New Haven, CT, and London, 2008), pp. 76–9.

  32PN1, pp. 325–6.

  33Willan, Russia Company, p. 41.

  34Robert Recorde, The whetstone of witte, whiche is the seconde parte of Arithmetike (STC 20820, London, 1557), sig. a3-v.

  CHAPTER 8: THE BROTHERS ISHAM

  1John Isham, mercer and merchant adventurer: two account books of a London merchant in the reign of Elizabeth I, ed. G. D. Ramsay (Northamptonshire Record Society, vol. 21, Gateshead, 1962), pp. lxv, 171–3.

  2Tarnya Cooper, Citizen portrait: portrait painting and the urban elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (New Haven, CT, and London, 2012), p. 74.

  3John Isham, ed. Ramsay, pp. xv, 170.

  4John Isham, ed. Ramsay, p. 169.

  5John Isham, ed. Ramsay, pp. xiv–xv.

  6John Isham, ed. Ramsay, p. xv.

  7John Isham, ed. Ramsay, pp. 170–71.

  8PROB 11/35/45.
<
br />   9John Isham, ed. Ramsay, p. xvi; T. S. Willan, The Muscovy merchants of 1555 (Manchester, 1953), p. 111.

  10Ian W. Archer, ‘Isham, John (1525–1596)’, ODNB.

  11PROB 11/41/322.

  12Anne F. Sutton, The mercery of London: trade, goods and people, 1130–1578 (Farnham, 2005), pp. 478–80.

  13John Isham, ed. Ramsay, pp. 155–65.

  14John Isham, ed. Ramsay, p. xvi; Kingsford, vol. I, pp. 242–3; PROB 11/41/322.

  15John Isham, ed. Ramsay, p. 158.

  16Hatfield House Library, Hertfordshire, Cecil Papers, Bills 1.

  17William Tyndale, The prophete Jonas (STC 2788, Antwerp, 1531?), sig. C5.

  18John Isham, ed. Ramsay, p. 160.

  19John Isham, ed. Ramsay, pp. 162–5.

  20Kingsford, vol. I, p. 225.

  21Bishop James Pilkington of Durham, in Kingsford, vol. II, p. 316.

  22The port and trade of early Elizabethan London: documents, ed. Brian Dietz (London Record Society, vol. 8, London, 1972), p. 130; Willan, Muscovy merchants of 1555, p. 83.

  23Herman van der Wee, The growth of the Antwerp market and the European economy (fourteenth–sixteenth centuries), 3 vols (The Hague, 1963), vol. II, pp. 230–38, at p. 231.

  24PROB 11/87/356.

  CHAPTER 9: ‘SO FAIR A BOURSE IN LONDON’

  1Richard Ehrenberg, Capital and finance in the age of the Renaissance, trans. H. M. Lucas (London, 1928), p. 238; Dan Ewing, ‘Marketing art in Antwerp, 1460–1560: Our Lady’s Pand’, Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), p. 577.

  2Elizabeth I and her people, ed. Tarnya Cooper (London, 2013), pp. 136–7; BL, Lansdowne MS 5, fos. 95v–96.

  3SP 70/57, fo. 56v; Ann Saunders, ‘The building of the Exchange’, in The Royal Exchange, ed. Ann Saunders (London Topographical Society, no. 152, London, 1997), p. 36.

  4Saunders, ‘The building of the Exchange’, pp. 37–9; Jean Imray, ‘The origins of the Royal Exchange’, in Royal Exchange, ed. Saunders, pp. 28–32; Stow, Chronicles, p. 135; Kingsford, vol. I, p. 193.

  5Kingsford, vol. I, p. 193.

  6John Earle, Micro-cosmographie. Or, A peece of the world discovered; in essayes and characters (STC 7441, London, 1628), no. 54.

  7Julia Gasper, ‘The literary legend of Sir Thomas Gresham’, in Royal Exchange, ed. Saunders, p. 101.

  8John Payne, Royall exchange: To suche worshipfull Citezins/ Marchants/ Gentlemen and other occupiers of the contrey as resorte therunto (STC 19489, Haarlem, 1597), p. 42.