Edward IV

by Charles Ross

  There were, however, a number of excellent reasons, other than private profit and personal inclination, why Edward took a close and direct interest in that important and wealthy section of his subjects who made their living from trade. The most compelling reason was his extreme dependence on both English and foreign merchants as a source of loans. Amongst the English by far the most important were the Londoners. We have seen that the support of London had done much to help Edward to win his throne, and the financial backing of the London patriciate was a major prop of the regime, especially in the first decade of the reign. In contrast with Henry VI, he was remarkably successful in persuading them to invest in his government.3 In return, Edward courted, honoured, flattered and rewarded the leading London merchants more assiduously than any king before him. Under his rule London was the permanent centre of court and government, in contrast to the neglect of his capital by Henry VI. On 9 November 1462 he gave the city a charter, which confirmed some useful privileges it had received in 1444 and added new ones, including the right to impose taxes on foreign merchants, except the German Hanse – a royal concession to the anti-alien prejudices of the London patriciate.1 Between 1461 and 1471 he knighted no fewer than eighteen London citizens, a remarkable number when one reflects that only eleven had ever been knighted before, the last of them in 1439. Five London aldermen, including Sir Thomas Cook, were signally honoured by being made knights of the Bath at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1465: it was, ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’ remarked, ‘a great worship unto all the city’. The remainder were knighted as a reward for London’s gallant resistance to the Bastard of Fauconberg’s attack in 1471.2

  Quite apart from his intimate association with at least one London merchant’s wife, Edward was far more socially accessible to the London patriciate than most of his predecessors had been, and in this too he was followed by many members of his court. In 1465–6 the mayor, Ralph Verney (afterwards knighted for his share in the defence of London), is said to have feasted ‘the king, the queen, and the queen’s mother, the lady of Bedford, and many other lords’, and from the inclusion of this item in a London chronicle, it seems likely that it had not been a usual practice.3 Social flattery of the leading merchants continued to the end of the reign. In 1482 the king invited the mayor, aldermen, and leading commoners out to a summer hunting party in Waltham Forest. A meal was served in ‘a strong and pleasant lodge made of green boughs’, where they were served ‘right plenteously with all manner of dainties as if they had been in London’, washed down with ‘all kinds of Gascon wines in right plenteous manner’. Twice during the dinner, the lord chamberlain (Hastings) ‘was sent to them from the king to make them cheer’, and the king refrained from eating until he saw they had been served. In the afternoon they joined the king in his hunting – a highly aristocratic pursuit in which merchants rarely shared. As they took their leave, much gratified, the king gave unto the mayor ‘good words and to them all favourable and cheerful countenances’. Soon after Edward despatched a gift of two harts, six bucks and a tun of Gascon wine to the mayoress and the aldermen’s wives.4 Fabyar’s Chronicle adds the information that this bounty was to honour the mayor, William Heryot, because he was ‘a merchant of wondrous adventures into many and sundry countries, by reason whereof the king had yearly from him notable sums of money for customs, besides other pleasures that he had shown to the king before times’.1 Sir Thomas More, commenting on this episode, pointed out the effects of the king’s graciousness and friendliness: ‘no one thing in many days before, got him either more hearts or more hearty favour among the common people, which oftentimes more esteem and take for greater kindness, a little courtesy than a great benefit’.2 The connections between some of Edward’s great men and the city of London is a subject which would repay closer investigation, but it is unlikely that they were any less close than their master’s. John, Lord Howard, for example, was married to Margaret Chedworth, the widow of a former lord mayor of London, and through her was cousin to Sir John Crosby, who, as sheriff of London in 1471, had driven off the Bastard’s attack on London Bridge and was knighted by Edward IV: he had recently built the splendid Crosby Hall which was later to serve Richard III as a London residence. Sir Thomas Vaughan, treasurer of the king’s chamber from 1465 to 1483, married the widow of a London grocer. William, Lord Hastings, was closely connected with the Irish-born goldsmith, Hugh Bryce, a generous lender to the Crown, who for much of the reign was Hastings’s deputy as master of the royal mint. Bryce was important enough to be able to name the archbishop of Canterbury as overseer of his will, and Hastings himself was overseer for the will of Sir John Plommer, K.B., one of the men accused of treason along with Sir Thomas Cook in 1468.3 Such ties of self-interest and social connection ensured for the great London merchants ready access to the king and his great men. The records of the London mercers show how often they saw and talked with the king and many members of his council, and the intensive lobbying which they could apply in consequence. Some at least of the commercial legislation of the reign was prepared in advance between king, council and groups of merchants before being placed before parliament.4 In the context of this otherwise careful and consistent wooing of the Londoners, Edward’s persecution of Sir Thomas Cook and his fellow-citizens in the trials of 1468 stands out as a singular lapse of judgement. Less influential, but still important as a source of loans, were the Italian interests in England. Pre-eminent amongst these were the Florentine merchant-bankers. The Medici founded an independent branch in London in 1466 – formerly their English affairs had been run from Bruges – and under their chief agent, Gerard Caniziani, Medici money played a large part in financing both the king and many of his nobles. Some at least of these loans were unwise, and Caniziani’s wish to ingratiate himself with his English patrons overrode his loyalty to his employers, with the result that the affairs of the London branch had finally to be wound up and its business transferred to Bruges in 1478. Caniziani, who had become a naturalized Englishman in 1466, stayed on in London, and was still acting as a royal agent in financial matters at the close of the reign: he was, for example, receiving part of Margaret of Anjou’s ransom from Louis XI in 1478, and two years later he was a joint custodian of the exchange at Calais and of the exchange in England for foreign parts.1 Loans to the Crown were a means of obtaining licences to export wool, and help to explain Edward’s relative tenderness towards Italian mercantile interests, as compared with the equally unpopular Hansards.

  Within the general context of his financial needs, however, Edward was prepared to be responsive to native English demands for commercial advantage and encouragement. Yet these, too, were subordinate to his political and diplomatic objectives. It would be hard to find an occasion in the reign when he allowed commercial pressures to compete successfully with the demands of foreign policy and internal politics. Yorkist commercial policy, therefore, was formed from a series of pragmatic responses to conflicting and competing demands. If English interests often came out on top, it was largely because of their financial and political importance to the Crown.

  Unfortunately for Edward, even the English mercantile interests rarely spoke with a united voice. The two main groups of English merchants, the Company of the Staple and the much more loosely-organized Merchant Adventurers, were constantly at odds with each other. The political importance of the Staple derived less from its share in the overall volume of English trade – which had been declining for more than a century – than from its place in the system of public finance. Wool exports were disproportionately heavily taxed, and the subsidy on them formed a major item in customs revenue. It was therefore important that they should be channelled as far as possible through the Staple system at Calais, where they could be controlled, and this need was increased when, in the early years of the reign, the Company was made responsible for the financing of the Calais garrison from the customs revenue it had collected.1 The Company also had to bear the burden of repeated attempts by the English government to
ease the chronic shortage of cash and bullion in the country by forcing the Staple to compel its foreign customers, mostly from the Low Countries, to pay for a large proportion of their purchases in cash, which could then be brought back to the Calais mint, and turned into coin of the realm.2 For all these reasons, and aware too of their declining share of trade, the Staplers bitterly resented any expansion of alternative methods of exporting wool. The Italians, under royal licence, might export direct to Italy by sea through the ‘Straits of Marrock’ (or Gibraltar), and the merchants of Newcastle-on-Tyne were allowed to export the cheaper and coarser wools of the four northern counties directly to the Low Countries. The Italians competed with the Staplers especially for the highest quality wools, such as the clip of the Cots-wolds and Herefordshire, and there was a danger that the Newcastle export might, if not properly regulated, allow good wool from other northern regions to evade the Calais Staple. Even more bitterly resented was the royal practice of granting licences to export wool other than by the Calais Staple to foreigners, native merchants and members of the royal family, often as a means of paying off debts.3 The cloth export trade of the Merchant Adventurers was no less a danger to their interests, since it absorbed increasing quantities of English raw wool at source, whilst bearing a very small share of customs duty (only 2–3 per cent as compared with 25 per cent on wool for English merchants) and the Staplers were always attempting to restrict the Merchant Adventurers in the interests of their own wool business. It has even been suggested that the Staplers encouraged the duke of Burgundy to ban the import of English cloth into the Low Countries in order to increase their own sales.1

  The various companies or associations of Merchant Adventurers, which already existed or were coming into being in the major provincial towns, such as Bristol, York or Newcastle, and were particularly important in London, were not yet as tightly organized as the Staplers. But they represented a powerful commercial lobby, for by 1483 they controlled 38 per cent of English exports and more than 66 per cent of the import trade, as compared with the Staplers’ 27 per cent share of the export trade, and already more than 50 per cent of the wool exported from England was in the form of manufactured cloth.2 The interest of the Merchant Adventurers lay in an absence of restrictions on their export and import trade to foreign markets, and they deeply resented the competition of privileged aliens, above all the German merchants of the Hanseatic League. In the previous twenty years the Hansards had succeeded in excluding them almost entirely from any direct participation in trade with North Germany, the Baltic lands and Scandinavia, and, through their dominance over Denmark and Norway, were gradually forcing them out of the Icelandic trade also.3 At the same time the Hansards had succeeded in maintaining a highly privileged status in England, including an extra-territorial status headquarters at their Steelyard in London, and exemption from the customs duty of poundage (an ad valorem levy of 12d in the £) on all their exports and imports, which all English merchants were required to pay.4

  Alien merchants and residents in England – Italians, Hansards, Flemings and Dutch – were generally unpopular in England, especially in London. In the lax days of late Lancastrian rule, xenophobia had led to serious anti-Italian riots in London in 1456 and 1457, which carried over into Southampton. Anti-Italian sentiments led to violence again in London in 1463. After Edward’s flight in 1470 the Kentishmen broke into the London suburbs and attacked the beerhouses owned by Dutchmen and Flemings. But violence was for the most part restrained by the king, who intervened from time to time to protect the aliens. In May 1463, for example, he removed from office the anti-alien mayor of Southampton, John Payne, senior, whose attacks upon the Italians were jeopardizing the trade of the port. In January 1483 the London mercers were told that the king was displeased with affrays against the Dutch. But this did not prevent the Londoners from maintaining their anti-alien campaign in other ways, especially in the early years of the reign, when the Hansards were the prime target. Attempts were made to deprive them of their privileges in London, by pressure in parliament, and to persuade the king to impose a poll-tax on alien residents in England. The Hansards were unable to obtain anything more than a series of temporary renewals of their privileges.

  Anti-alien campaigns, however intense, usually foundered on the rock of England’s inability to dispense with their products. This was particularly true of the Hansards, whose imports of corn, timber, pitch, tar and ashes (used in the clothing industry) could not be replaced from other sources, and whose control of great north-European markets made them valuable customers of many English manufacturers, especially the cloth-producers.1

  The influence of some of these conflicting and competing pressure-groups, especially the native merchants, and Edward’s response to them, is reflected in the legislation of the reign. More than half the statutes enacted by Edward’s parliaments deal directly with matters of commerce and industry, and form much the largest single area of parliamentary interest.2 The parliament of 1463–5, in particular, produced a body of legislation which was markedly protectionist and nationalist in tone. In its first session in 1463, it re-enacted, in a modified form, some legislation of Henry VI’s reign, which reflects the interests of the Staplers as well as Edward’s concern with the drain of bullion from his realm. By severely restricting credit to foreign wool buyers, and requiring payment in cash for all sales from the Calais Staple, it was bound to be deeply resented by the merchants of the Low Countries, as it had been in the past.3 At the same time the act prohibited any export of wool by alien merchants, which dealt a severe blow at the Italian wool trade to the Mediterranean, largely conducted through London, Sandwich and Southampton. The act also incorporated a ‘navigation’ clause requiring all native merchants to ship their goods in English vessels whenever available.1 Another act, which prohibited the import of foreign corn unless English prices reached a certain level in times of dearth, aimed at protecting the interests of English arable farmers. English silk manufacture, centred in London, was likewise protected by a prohibition of imports of foreign wrought silk, and earlier exceptions for certain Genoese silk goods were now dropped (3 Edw. IV, c. 3). To avoid the impoverishment of native artificers, another act (c. 4) banned the import of a wide range of ‘fully wrought’ manufactured goods from abroad, mainly articles of clothing and metalware.

  In the second session (1465) the commons returned to the charge. The king accepted three statutes reaffirming and tightening the regulations controlling the wool export trade, which again reflect pressure from the Staplers. One of these criticized the king’s free use of licences to export by channels other than the Staple, and another attacked evasion of the controls on the export of northern wool. Another statute, aimed at closer regulation of the wool trade, was also protectionist, and gave preference to native clothiers and yarn-makers in the purchase of their raw material. Meanwhile, the duke of Burgundy had responded to the provocative English legislation for the Staple by prohibiting the import of all English goods into his dominions, and parliament now riposted by imposing a total ban on all Burgundian imports, except victuals, into England. The king, however, refused to accept a demand for penalties on any man who accepted a royal licence in contravention of the act, and he retained freedom of action in his dealings with Burgundy by declaring that the ban should remain in force only during the royal pleasure.2

  In all, this parliament produced no fewer than eleven statutes strongly favouring native mercantile and industrial interests.3 Edward’s acceptance of them reflects his extreme need of internal support. Part of his reward came in the grant to him for life in the 1465 session of the customs duties, though at reduced rates: he would not, however, accept a commons’ demand that the Hansards should be deprived of their privilege of exemption from paying poundage.4 The first session of the parliament of 1467–8 passed an act in the interest of native clothiers, by banning the export of woollen yarn and unfinished cloth (7 Edw. IV, c. 3). But no later parliament produced any comparable programme of economi
c protectionism; though many statutes dealt with the regulation of trade, industry, customs, and bullion and currency matters, these were for the most part concerned with internal organization.1 But for a variety of reasons even the programme of economic nationalism laid down by the 1463–5 parliament could never be enforced in full or maintained for long. The ‘Navigation Act’ of 1463 was little more than a well-meant aspiration, for although shipbuilding was already a growth-industry in England, the English merchant marine was not yet sufficiently developed to tackle the country’s entire carrying trade, and in any case the act did not extend to the trade of alien merchants.2 Edward was still much too dependent on Italian financial support to allow the anti-alien legislation to bear too hard on his foreign friends, and during a period of commercial feud with Burgundy he could not risk alienating the Hansards. Finally, the demands of Edward’s foreign policy could override even the most pressing of commercial considerations.