The greatest event the Muscovy Company put on for the ambassador was a dinner held in his honour in the hall of the Drapers’ Company on 29 April. His embassy was nearly over. So far as the company was concerned, its most important business had been settled weeks before in the trade agreement. But in trade, as in diplomacy, great symbolic gestures were essential. As the Russians well understood – and as the Muscovy Company’s men knew from their weeks and months in the Moscow Kremlin – there was nothing like a feast of epic proportions, well lubricated with alcohol, to show all at once generosity, magnificence and friendship.
The choice of the Drapers’ Hall was no accident. The Muscovy Company’s own base in the port of London was a working headquarters, and probably lacking in space and glamour. Senior and wealthy drapers like John Dymoke and Sir William Chester were investors in the Muscovy trade, and certainly both men were busy in preparing for what the company’s accounts called (with a sense of great ceremony) the ‘coming of the Moscovian to the hall’.27
The hall was on Throgmorton Street, and it was one of the grandest in London. Quick to spot an opportunity, the drapers had bought it four years after the execution of the man who built it, Thomas Cromwell. The great complex of buildings reflected Cromwell’s anticipation of the political muscle he would come to exercise during the 1530s. It was a very impressive house for a very important man, with a great gate and a paved courtyard, a winding staircase lit by bay windows and clerestories that led into the hall, a parlour, butteries, kitchens, a cellar, a jewel house, and a beautiful and extensive garden. This garden was an acre and a half, and the drapers nurtured it as much as Cromwell had done, planting it with lilies, roses, columbines, fruit and herbs. With garden borders and hedges of privet and whitethorn, the company had added in 1546 two bowling alleys and a sundial. On a late afternoon in spring, there would have been few more peaceful or pleasurable retreats in London.28
But peaceful the meal was not. In Nepea’s honour, the city and the Muscovy Company laid on ‘a notable supper garnished with music, interludes and banquets’, with a heavy emphasis on friendship and good will. They drank toasts, and as a mark of their generosity the company gave Nepea gifts to compensate for his costs in travelling from Scotland to England.29 Any pain felt by merchants and investors of London at the loss of four ships from its fledgling fleet and of the looting of Edward Bonaventure had to be forgotten for the evening: doubtless the company men put their minds to further investments of capital, dazzled by a formidable display over months of canny public relations.
It was certainly not a supper over which to count costs. Instead, there was a trading relationship to be further embraced, a new and exclusive commercial pact between two very different powers. The Muscovy Company had pulled off something remarkable: it now had privileges in importing and exporting goods that other merchants and countries in Europe would envy for decades. The future rewards would be immense.
Dining in the Drapers’ Hall that Thursday was most probably Sir William Cecil, perhaps wearing a cap newly bought and the black velvet gown trimmed with fur that had been repaired only a few days before the feast. Cecil was a confident investor in the Muscovy venture, so confident in fact, that he had sent one of his servants along to Muscovy House with the handsome sum of £30 for further shares a fortnight before Nepea and Mary’s councillors agreed the new treaty.30 But there again Cecil had impeccable sources. The chief English negotiator in March 1557 was Sir William Petre, a former colleague and a close friend of the Cecil family. During these months Cecil took boats up, down and across the Thames from his house on Cannon Row near Whitehall Palace to visit friends in Westminster, Lambeth and London. He passed his time at Whitehall playing cards with Queen Mary’s advisers and courtiers. Doubtless the few pennies he lost in the games – usually about 4 pence and never more than 12 pence – were well worth the gossip and information he was able to absorb.31
At this time Sir William Cecil was temporarily out of high office. One day he would be secretary again, and after that – as Lord Burghley – lord high treasurer of England. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there would be no commercial venture in which William Cecil did not have a stake or on which he did not have an opinion.
Osip Nepea left London for Gravesend on 3 May 1557. Any later in the year and the voyage back to Russia would have been too dangerous. He was sent off with gifts from Queen Mary and King Philip: beautiful fabrics, a lion and a lioness, as well as plate and tableware and a chain of gold. For his part, Nepea could only describe the gifts sent by Ivan that had been looted out of Pitsligo Bay: furs and skins, a hawk and other birds, with drums and hoops and a lure to call the gyr falcon. The account of the whole embassy, along with an inventory of gifts, was held to be of such significance that it was written up and sworn to by city aldermen and other leading members of the Muscovy Company. With the help of Robert Best, his interpreter, Nepea agreed that it was a wholly accurate narrative. It was a record for posterity – and evidence for both parties of the company’s generosity.32
A number of things stand out from the visit of Osip Nepea to London in 1557. One is the energy and dynamism of the Muscovy Company, the city elite and the queen’s government. The interplay of money and political power was obvious from the beginning. No expense was spared by a company that in the first two years of its existence had lost many men, thousands of pounds in merchandise and equipment, and most of its fleet – in fact, the whole of its £6,000 initial capital investment.33 Nothing was spared to put on the grandest possible show for Nepea. Its stage management was superb. Everything that London had to offer – its sights, its riches, its impressive livery companies, its people and of course the court of the king and queen – was thrown at the hope of building Anglo-Russian relations. It was very different from what future English ambassadors often experienced in the Kremlin, where, rather than being honoured as guests, they felt more like prisoners.
Who knows what Osip Nepea made of his months in London. Elizabethans who went to Russia often struggled to make sense of people they believed to be little better than barbarians. Even the high nobility and officials were difficult to read: brusque and uncommunicative, they survived (or not) in an imperial court that even by Tudor standards was stark and brutal. Perhaps Nepea’s assessment of his English hosts was as unflattering.
In London the effort was believed to be worth it, the potential of Anglo-Russian trade immense. Dedicating a book to the governors of the Muscovy Company six months after Nepea left the city, Robert Recorde wrote: ‘if you continue with courage, as you have well begun, you shall not only win great riches to yourselves and bring wonderful commodities to your country, but you shall purchase therewith immortal fame and be praised for ever’.34 Recorde, like Richard Eden and many others, was overstating the reality. Versed in the arts of persuasive rhetoric, they knew how to talk up a project. But their optimism was infectious: what the investments of men like William Cecil and work of London’s Muscovy merchants show very clearly is that what Cecil called ‘The society of adventurers of Russia’ was breaking through into a new world full of unknown but surely enormous possibilities. ‘Adventure’, or simply ‘venture’, soon became fixed in the vocabulary of world ambition, fusing together exploration, trade, investment and, in the future, colonial plantation.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Brothers Isham
A star in the London mercantile firmament like Thomas Gresham was a very long way from being a typical city merchant. He, like his father Richard, was a grandee, set apart from others by wealth, power, reach and influence. The same was true of the great merchants like John Dymoke of Fenchurch Street, who put their capital into the Muscovy Company and entertained Osip Nepea so lavishly in 1557. Masters of the livery companies, holders of high office in city government, connected by marriage to other influential families, and, of course, possessors of vast fortunes – these were the elite of London, its super rich, the men the city’s workaday merchants could only hope to emulate.
From a later family history, for which his son was an important source, we know something of Isham’s character and personality. Heavy with platitudes and conventionalities, the account tells us that Isham was generous and upright, a loving but strict father to his children (rarely did he show them ‘a familiar countenance, as some fond fathers do’), companionable, and a recounter of stories and table talk, fond of sayings and proverbs. An intellectual polymath he most certainly was not: ‘Worthily it might be reported of him, he was a wise man, though altogether unlearned, writing and reading English only excepted.’ And he loved his food, on which subject the biography is disarmingly blunt: ‘Of body he was corpulent, big-boned and reasonably tall of stature, a man of very good stomach to his victuals.’ When his term as renter warden came to an end, he gave a feast for the company of almost embarrassing magnificence, so proud was he of having held the job. Just to prove a point, he had made sure before the meal that the carcasses of the thirty-three ‘fat and large’ bucks for the kitchen were put on display, leaving his fellow mercers goggle-eyed.1
A portrait of John Isham from this time shows him in all his mercantile bulk. Given that his only exercise was in the saddle, riding on business between London and the cloth country of the West Riding of Yorkshire, by his early forties he was heavy and thickset, with dark cropped hair and a greying beard. Put this together with the family biography, and we might assume that Isham was merely a sedentary bore with a stock of tedious stories and trite proverbs. But actually his portrait quickly brings us up sharp. Though not a brilliant picture, the artist managed nevertheless to capture the alertness and resolution of Isham’s eyes. A prominent nose and high cheekbones suggest that before he encountered the bulk of middle age, Isham had been physically imposing as a young man. Even in this modest portrait, he looks perceptive and appraising. In business he was no man’s fool. His were not the exceptional talents of a Gresham or any other merchant prince, to be sure: they were instead the solid achievements and comforts of a man who knew his trade and operated according to principles of business he had tested over a quarter of a century.
The man himself looks, not surprisingly, conventional enough. Isham’s heavy black gown is edged with brown fur, and he wears a merchant’s black cap. He has an eye for fine things, of course, and in his left hand he holds brown leather gloves so delicately patterned that set beside the bulky merchant they look a little incongruous. The artist offers all the usual reminders of mortality, the standard kit of the standard portrait. The rich material evidence of Isham’s success in life sits alongside emblems of the inevitability of his death. Sometimes they are one and the same thing. Above the table in the picture is a wall clock in black, red and gold, a neat way of showing Isham’s taste for a beautiful and functional object, while at the same time reminding the viewer of the passing of time and the futility of worldly goods. Isham’s index finger of the same hand points to a human skull, the familiar memento mori of portraits.
The portrait tells us even more, though. John Isham had ambitions that lay outside the city. As a younger son of minor gentry with very little money, he wanted an estate of his own, and for twenty years or more Isham dreamed of the life of the country gentleman. Standing out boldly in his portrait is Isham’s coat of arms, that defining badge of gentility and landed belonging. In Tudor society, true gentlemen kept estates, not warehouses – indeed, true gentlemen were often socially contemptuous of the very merchants who kept afloat with loans their pretensions to gentility. But Isham, born a gentleman, was not shy about how he made his money. In the picture, his account books and ledgers sit prominently on a plain and handsome wooden cabinet.2 We can imagine Isham sitting for the portrait in the counting house of his house on St Sithe’s Lane in the parish of St Antholin’s. If the coat of arms and the folds of the background curtains were the standard contrivances of the portrait of any man of substance, the account books, as well as paper and a quill, were the immovable fixtures of Isham’s mercantile life, and he was proud of them.
It had all begun a quarter of a century earlier on a summer’s day in the last half decade of Henry VIII’s reign. On 19 June, St Peter’s Day, in 1542, sixteen-year-old John Isham arrived in London from his father’s estates at Pytchley in Northamptonshire, a quiet rural backwater. John had no schooling to boast of and no rounded education to prepare him for the wider world. He was thrown into a city that must have left him utterly stunned.
John’s new master was Otwell Hill, a native of Rochdale in Lancashire, a young man probably still in his middle twenties, and a rising star of the Mercers’ Company, to which he had been admitted as a freeman only two years earlier. Hill had married into the great mercantile dynasty of Lok, as prominent in London in the 1520s and 1530s as the Greshams (and a family to be followed a little later in this book), having served his apprenticeship with William Gresham, Sir Richard Gresham’s brother and Thomas Gresham’s uncle. Young John Isham had fallen on his feet, working for a master who was young, dynamic and successful.
But John’s time with Otwell Hill was all too brief. Within months Hill was dead, and Isham worked out his apprenticeship with another mercer, Thomas Gigges, who ran a successful business between London and Antwerp. From Gigges, Isham learned his trade from the ground up, doing menial chores like carrying water to and from the Thames, a fact that Isham’s titled successors later tried to expunge from the family biography.3
John Isham always knew that he would have to make his own living. In a landed society that privileged eldest boys as the heirs to estates, John was the fourth youngest of five sons of Euseby and Ann Isham. Euseby’s ancestors had owned their land since about 1300, but the fantastic size of his family (he and Ann had twenty children in the space of twenty-one years) stretched an at best modest income, and the Isham boys had to make their own way in the world. The older boys, Giles and Robert, were able: Giles, the eldest, went off to London to study law in the Middle Temple; Robert to Cambridge with an eye on the priesthood. The three youngest sons, Gregory, John and Henry, whether by inclination, choice or circumstance, became merchants. Each one steadily worked his way from apprenticeship to the freedom of the Mercers’ Company.
In the case of Gregory Isham the fit was perfect: he was an instinctive merchant, astute and intelligent, with the keenest eye for business of all his brothers. Gregory, we can guess, was our John’s hero: five or six years older, the young man who, by the time John went to London, was impressively settled in the life of the city. Giles and Robert were men of different spheres; their talents and accomplishments in London and Cambridge were so many strides ahead of John’s very limited education. Taught by his father in order to save money, John’s written English was at best passable.
So much of John Isham’s story is bound up with Gregory’s, a little of whose energy and talent is captured by the family history: ‘bred up likewise in his youth at learning’, Gregory ‘afterwards being of sufficient years was sent to London, and there bound prentice to one free of the company of the mercers, to which trade he diligently applying himself did in short time grow to such great wealth …’4 Needless to say, he was a great success.
Gregory Isham got his freedom of the Mercers’ Company in 1546, and it is likely that from the beginning he had an excellent feel for mercantile strategy. He almost
certainly kept a close and protective eye on his brother. John worked hard. As Thomas Gigges’s apprentice he saw at first hand his master’s operation in Antwerp, buying and selling real estate in the city, but principally trading in luxury textiles, importing into England through Antwerp fine silks and satins. This was the foundation for the Ishams’ own businesses as mercers.5
Gigges himself died in 1551, the ninth and final year of John’s apprenticeship. With his freedom of the Mercers’ Company granted that same year, Isham was now a merchant in his own right. Like any young man setting himself up in the city, he needed capital, but there was no family fortune for him to call on. When Euseby Isham died in 1546, he had left to John a little over £3: it was not a sum of money to sniff at, but it was a long way short of what John needed to establish his business.6
John Isham knew how to seize the moment, though, and that is exactly what he did – surely with Gregory’s advice – in October 1552, when he married Elizabeth Barker, the widow of Leonard, a fellow mercer, who had died a few months earlier. Elizabeth had been Leonard’s second wife; his first, next to whom he was to be buried, lay in the mercers’ chapel of St Thomas of Acon. The Barkers were well provided for in Leonard’s will. Elizabeth would have the lease of the family home on Ironmonger Lane, and if she remarried (which Leonard’s will rather assumed that she would), their eldest son Thomas would inherit a tenement on White Hart Street, as well as other property. The Barkers’ daughter Anne, set up as well as a daughter could be, was her father’s executrix. As a business arrangement, Elizabeth’s marriage to John Isham was perfect. She opened up for her new husband further contacts in the city. Most importantly of all, she was the source of capital. This fact was recounted by the family history with some delicacy, which recorded that the ‘convenient sum’ Elizabeth brought to the marriage was increased by John’s ‘careful heed’.7 This ‘convenient sum’ was in fact a fortune. It was the classic pattern of life in the very small world of the city. There seems little doubt that John Isham would have known the Barker family very well, and probably soon after Barker’s death he had been among those enjoying the mercers’ dinner for which Leonard had left the generous sum of £8.8
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