Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  The decline of wool, disastrous for the Merchant Adventurers, meant fiscal crisis for the State. The Crown, increasingly willing to regulate the economy, began to encourage other companies to find new markets for England’s chief commodity; and other, luxury, industries and trades, like silk-growing. It granted royal charters to the Muscovy Company (1555), the Spanish Company (1577), the Eastland Company (to trade with the Baltic, 1579), the Turkey (later the Levant) Company (1581), the Senegal Adventurers (1588, later the Royal Africa Company), the East India Company (1600), the Virginia Company (1606), and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629). In most cases these organizations were originally intended to sell wool to the area concerned, but in order to maintain profitability they often found it necessary to export fish, tin, or, when all else failed, gold in return for lucrative commodities like silks, spices, fruit, wine, and, later, tea in the case of the Spanish, Levant, and East India Companies; timber and naval stores exported by the Eastland Company; and, most notoriously, African human beings, sold into slavery in the New World by the Royal Africa Company. Later companies were founded with little expectation of assisting the wool trade: the Virginia Company was interested in gold mining but eventually specialized in tobacco; the Massachusetts Bay Company, in animal pelts. Thus, luxury imports and re-exports to Europe were coming to replace wool exports as the motor of English trade. These new trades led to the beginnings of a thriving consumer culture and the revival of ports other than London, such as Bristol, Exeter, Hull, Newcastle, or Southampton.

  All of the above enterprises were royal monopolies. That is, trade remained unfree, channeled by the government for its own purposes and toward its own friends. Typically, a group of merchants or courtiers fronting for merchant partners would offer the Crown a tempting cash payment to secure their privileges, sometimes with disastrous results for the trade in question. For example, the Cokayne Project, so-called after a favored alderman of that name, was a government attempt to encourage the English finished-cloth industry by forbidding the export of raw wool by the Merchant Adventurers. But English cloth could not compete in either quality or quantity with its continental equivalent and the result was a depression in the cloth trade 1614–17. In contrast, the East India Company had the potential to benefit a wider clientele, for in 1613 it became the first joint-stock company in England. From this point, anyone could buy stock in the company, which used the money to mount its voyages. Thus, as with all stock companies, risk, profit, and loss were shared. Still, because the French and the Dutch already had a foothold in the Asian trade, it would be half a century before the East India Company made many people rich. Nor could it do much for the great mass of the unemployed.

  It was partly for this reason that the English began to look beyond existing products, markets, and routes to those which could be discovered through exploration and established through colonization. They had noticed how Spain, a poor, disunited country with dynastic problems prior to 1492, had, within a generation, become a world power. Tudor monarchs sought a piece of the same action. The discovery of a route to the wealth of the East or to new sources of wealth in the West might solve the Crown’s chronic money problems as they had for the Spanish monarchy. Thus, the earliest English explorers and colonists left their homeland to seek out, first, new markets for the flagging wool industry; second, new sources of wealth for the royal treasury; and, third, new areas of vulnerability for England’s enemies, such as Spain.

  Unfortunately, England’s location and late start meant that English adventurers and merchants were limited to less desirable routes and colder, less hospitable climates in the northern hemisphere. Put simply, by 1603, all the good colonies were taken. The geographical point is made easily by looking at a map. If you sail due west from “the sceptered isle,” you do not bump into China, India, or the tropical paradises of the Caribbean as Columbus did; instead you run into Newfoundland. Thus, in the 1490s, when Europeans dreamed of finding an easy route to the riches of the Orient, Henry VII supported John and his son Sebastian Cabot (ca. 1451–98 and ca. 1471/2–1557, respectively) in their search for a northwest passage to Asia. In 1553 the Crown sponsored a similar attempt to find a northeast passage around Russia. Both operations were doomed by the pack ice of the North Pole. The English never found a convenient route to the fabled East, though by 1603 the fishing off the Grand Banks was providing a valuable food source for home.

  When the English tried to trade in southern waters, say with Africa, South America, or India, they ended up having to fight the Europeans who had set up shop there first. Hence the raids of Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins that eventually helped provoke war with Spain. Similarly, in 1623 the Dutch massacred an English trading colony at Amboyna in the Moluccas. From this point on, English East India ships would be armed and trading posts fortified, in preparation for literal trade war. By the late seventeenth century, the English East India Company was fielding vast armies in India and fleets in the Indian Ocean, ready to fight the Dutch, the French, and their native allies in order to force a monopoly trade on the local populace.

  Long before this, the English realized that the most effective way to infringe upon the Spanish, Dutch, or French trading position was to establish permanent bases or trading posts of their own in the New World. The earliest such attempts, sponsored by groups of adventurers and courtiers like Sir Walter Ralegh, were all abortive, though they did manage to claim for England a portion of the eastern seaboard which they dubbed “Virginia,” after the Virgin Queen. Only in 1607 did a consortium led by Sir Thomas Smith (ca. 1558–1625) succeed in establishing a permanent colony in Virginia at the headwaters of a river which they named the James, after the new king who had ascended in 1603.

  But Jamestown did not immediately get off the ground. The colonists discovered that, while Virginia soil contains no gold and is not especially favorable to the growing of English wheat and barley, it will grow tobacco. The habit of taking, or smoking, tobacco was just beginning to be popular in England, despite the prescient opposition of King James. At first, the hard work of planting and harvesting the tobacco plant was done by indentured servants from the British Isles. But in 1619 the colony discovered a more sinister alternative that would come to predominate by the eighteenth century: the importation of African slaves. Thus, within a dozen years of the founding of the first viable English colony in North America, the cruel foundations of the plantation/slave economy were laid. Still, the colony did not prosper. By 1635 Jamestown and the surrounding area had a population of 5,000, but it was bankrupt. Eventually, the government stepped in and made Virginia a Crown colony, the first of what would be 13 such colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. More successful were British colonies in the Caribbean, like Bermuda (settled 1612), Barbados (settled 1627), Jamaica (seized from Spain in 1655), and, much later, Nevis and St. Christopher (awarded to Britain 1713). Here, British plantation owners relied on the labor of indentured servants, Scottish and Irish refugees from the Civil Wars (see chapter 8), and, finally, African slaves to harvest tobacco, cotton, indigo, and, after 1640, cane sugar, under extremely harsh conditions. Sugar, in particular, became a fabulously lucrative commodity, much demanded by Europeans. In the next century, profits from the sugar trade would erase all memory of the crisis over wool – and stifle unease about its cultivation by slaves.

  The English colonies of the New World offered solutions to two additional problems vexing the mother country. First, they provided an alternative to the Poor Law for many who could not make a go of it in England. Second, they offered a refuge for those who could no longer put up with England’s religious rules. In 1608 a congregation of Puritan separatists emigrated to Leyden in the Netherlands. In 1620, about 100 from this group returned to England via Plymouth and then embarked on the Mayflower for what would become the Plymouth Plantation. This colony, too, had a difficult first winter, but, not least because of good relations with the native population, it survived and grew. The Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint-s
tock company chartered in 1629, established a much larger settlement around Boston which absorbed the Plymouth community in 1691. Its charter allowed for self-government and its leaders, notably Governor John Winthrop (1588–1649), consciously set out to found a Puritan “New Jerusalem,” a “city on a hill” where Scriptural liturgy and morality could be enforced free from the persecution of Archbishops Whitgift and Laud (see chapters 5 and 7). While Massachusetts Bay Puritans sought freedom for their own form of religion, they banned other religious groups, as well as traditional Christmas celebrations and other calendar customs. But most Massachusetts Bay colonists came for economic opportunity, not out of religious conviction. Poor people driven out of England by bad harvests and a stagnant economy, as well as the less poor searching for cheap, plentiful land, chafed under a religious regime that was less tolerant than that of the mother country. In response, a Salem clergyman named Roger Williams (ca. 1606–83) founded a colony at Rhode Island, based upon religious toleration for Protestants. Later, in 1632, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore (1579/80–1632), a Catholic, received royal permission to establish Maryland, which eventually enacted toleration for all Christians, including Roman Catholics.

  The English colonies of North America proved to be of limited commercial or military significance before, say, 1650. Yet, between 1629 and 1642, about 60,000 English men, women, and children made the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic, perhaps half a million by 1700, with another 100,000 Scots and Irish apiece. Unknowingly, they laid the foundations for a new civilization.

  Cultural Life

  Before returning to the chronological narrative of English history, it is important to take note of the cultural life of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England, for it was unprecedented in size, scope, and quality in English history. Never before had the English excelled at so many artistic and intellectual pursuits. Why should this have been so? Certainly, London’s growth, the court’s prominence, and the ruling elite’s relative freedom and wealth all created conditions which made art possible. But we cannot explain exactly why these opportunities were taken; even less can we explain why they resulted in the miracles of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Byrd’s masses, Dowland’s lute music, Hilliard’s miniatures, Jones’s Banqueting House, or the King James Bible.

  Perhaps the first condition for the creation of art is an audience, preferably one which is willing to both pay the artist and supply his or her subject matter. Prior to the Reformation, the principal patron for English art was the Church. But following the break with Rome much existing religious art was destroyed, new images proscribed, and the wealth which paid for culture confiscated. Fortunately for scholarship and the arts, this wealth was deflected into the hands of a royal house and aristocracy willing to spend it on cultural endeavors. Admittedly, the Crown’s patronage of writers and artists was usually indirect, especially under the frugal Elizabeth I. That is, apart from the mounting of tournaments, pageants, and processions, especially on her Accession Day (November 17), the queen commissioned few works of art; apart from the musicians of her Chapel Royal, she paid few artists. She was far more likely to give a poet or a painter, especially an author who glorified her, a court office or a lucrative monopoly. A direct commission was easier to obtain from a great nobleman, such as the earl of Leicester. Still, the monarch’s personality and activities, and those of her entourage, provided subject matter for art and the court was the most important venue for catching the attention of such a patron. As a result, fashions in art or dress either originated or made their debut from Europe at court. In the following paragraphs we will touch briefly upon various forms of art, always beginning at court and moving outward to the productions of the city and countryside.

  Generally, the most dramatic and expensive peacetime activity in which monarchs engage is building. Henry VIII was a great builder and palace renovator but his children were too short-lived or too poor to follow his lead. As a result, most of the great buildings put up from 1547 to 1603 were aristocratic, not royal, palaces – the prodigy houses noted earlier in this chapter. Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was no more comfortable financially, but he was far more willing to go into debt, and he was more able to do so because of peace with Spain in 1604. He commissioned Inigo Jones to build the Banqueting House at Whitehall and the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Jones had studied the neoclassical designs of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1518–80), and so his buildings represented a radical departure from the old late-Gothic (Perpendicular) style in vogue until the mid-sixteenth century. Elsewhere, as we have seen, Jones designed the first large-scale housing development, and the prototype of the London square, at Covent Garden. In the countryside, the Reformation put an end to church building and renovation; instead, as indicated above, this was a great age for domestic architecture, both noble and common.

  The Elizabethan was not a great age for English painting. Indeed, the queen probably set native portraiture back for half a century by her government’s careful regulation and censorship of her image to ensure that she always be portrayed as she was early in her reign: in 1596 she actually ordered unauthorized images destroyed. In any case, there was, arguably, no portraitist in Elizabethan England of the quality of Hans Holbein to grab her attention. The possible exception to this generalization was the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard (ca. 1547–1619), who created exquisite portraits of Elizabethan courtiers on a small scale. A few aristocrats, such as Leicester and Essex, engaged in collecting: the former had over 200 pictures including 130 portraits. But it was not until the Jacobean period that the visual arts received really effective royal and aristocratic patronage. This occurred because James I’s two sons, Princes Henry Frederick (1594–1612) and Charles (1600–49), along with a number of their aristocratic friends, began to take an avid interest in the visual arts. In particular, Charles encouraged his father to bring over and patronize Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). This patronage resulted in masterpieces such as the former’s ceiling for Jones’s Banqueting House, The Apotheosis of James I; and the latter’s royal family portraits. As king, Charles I assembled the greatest art collection in Europe by asking his diplomats and aristocrats on the “Grand Tour” to purchase desirable items. George Villiers, duke of Buckingham (1592–1628; see plate 14, p. 226), Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel (1585–1646), and other courtiers emulated the king by filling their residences with the finest paintings, sculpture, furniture, metalwork, woodwork, porcelain, embroidery, and tapestry hangings the continent had to offer. There were no public art galleries, so the only way to experience such visual splendor was to go to court or visit some nobleman’s house. Fortunately, such buildings were at least open to gentle visitors. Indeed, these collections (as well as elaborate dress) were intended to impress important visitors with the patron’s status, wealth, and lineage. Charles I had exquisite taste and loved beautiful things, but when Van Dyck painted him standing with nonchalant dignity surrounded by the royal regalia (see plate 15, p. 231), the two undoubtedly meant to convey a more particular message about monarchy.

  That message was, for the most part, aimed at the ruling elite. Most English people were never exposed to such sophisticated art. Still, court styles in art did have an influence beyond Whitehall. For example, the sovereign’s Chapel Royal, which included such masters as Thomas Tallis, William Byrd (ca. 1543–1623), and Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625), was the premier center for new Church music, which was then borrowed by cathedral and Church choirs around the country. The court also produced instrumental dance music for balls and madrigals, art songs, lute or keyboard music for quiet hours from the likes of Byrd, Thomas Campion (1567–1620), and John Dowland (ca. 1563–1626). These were often, in turn, published, and sung or played by educated amateurs in aristocratic, gentle, and mercantile households. Toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I the court began to combine all of the art forms available in formal choreographed pageants with allegorical or mythological plots, spoken lines, elaborate
sets, costumes, and music. This reminds us that dance was thought to be highly expressive; increasingly, the ability to dance, a mark of gentility and good breeding. These masques, as they came to be known, achieved their greatest sophistication, splendor, and expense under James I and Charles I thanks to the pen of Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and the scenic designs of Inigo Jones. Their intent was usually to glorify the monarch; however, they, too, were restricted to a courtly audience, so it is difficult to argue that they had much propaganda value for any but a small circle of nobles and gentry.