London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  In the years that followed, John worked with his brothers Gregory and Henry to build up a business that concentrated on the familiar trading axis of London–Antwerp. They did not involve themselves in ventures like the Muscovy Company, though they knew merchants who did: Gregory’s brother-in-law Walter Marler, a London haberdasher and merchant adventurer, was one of that company’s charter members in 1555.9 The brothers’ business was a success, and Gregory, John and Henry worked well together. With their base in London and factors handling most of the Ishams’ business in Antwerp, they exported fine plain-woven black cloth (broadcloth) from Suffolk, Somerset and Wiltshire and light kerseys from Yorkshire, and bought and imported luxury textiles. To find the best cloth John was a frequent visitor to Halifax and the precipitous Pennine hill country of Yorkshire. His London house in the 1550s was on Bow Lane, not far from Cheapside, the showcase of London’s riches.10

  Mortality was as real to Isham as it was to any other Londoner of his generation. The first death in London that shaped his life was Otwell Hill’s. The second, Leonard Barker’s, helped him to trade as a merchant in his own right. The third was the most shocking and challenging of all: his brother Gregory’s in September 1558. Gregory was thirty-eight years of age, a talented and rich man, the father of Euseby and Mary and the husband of Elizabeth, who was pregnant with their third child. Gregory, seriously ill, had made his will at his manor house at Braunston in Northamptonshire on 3 September. John was there to witness it.11

  Something of Gregory’s plainness manages to sidestep all the conventional phrasings and formulae of a standard will. He chose not to preface the disposition of his worldly goods with elaborate declarations of faith and intercession. What little he said by way of preamble was earnestly to the point. He wanted to settle his affairs ‘to the intent I may be the more at quiet to give myself wholly to godly meditations’. Leaving ten shillings to the curate of his London parish, Sir Draper (the ‘sir’ was an old-fashioned honorific title for a priest), the work of burying him would fall to the priests of Braunston: Gregory Isham wanted to lie in his own soil. He gave money to the poor of the parishes of the Isham family’s estates, with no direction (as would have commonly been the case decades earlier) that they should pray for him. He made bequests for his family and servants: to his ‘loving mother’, to large numbers of cousins, and to nephews and nieces. He wanted his many friends to have mourning rings. He left £20 to give his fellow mercers two commemorative feasts, knowing very well the form of the company’s dinners and suppers, with their sumptuous courses of venison, sturgeon, pike, salmon and quails. Perhaps he too had attended Leonard Barker’s dinner a few years earlier.12

  Most important to Gregory was the future security of his children – Euseby, Mary and Elizabeth, the unborn little girl he never knew. He sought the help of powerful men in the city, one a former master of the Mercers’ Company, two others city aldermen, asking them ‘to be good to my wife and children and that they will be a means that my children’s portions may be distributed according to my will’, all for the reward of £5 each: it was a token sum of money for men worth thousands of pounds, a modestly significant mark of friendship and obligation. Gregory, it was clear, was a young man with friends in high places.

  What is striking about Gregory’s will is how far he also fell back on the help and support of all his brothers. There were years between them, and yet together they would keep an eye on Elizabeth and their children. They would even, in the event of Elizabeth’s remarriage, step in to take the custody of Euseby, Mary and little Elizabeth. Though it looks today a peculiar and even cruel arrangement, this was simply a further device to protect the children’s inheritance and future.

  Lying sick in his Northamptonshire manor house, Gregory knew that tying up the business of his estate would be tricky. He took no chances, naming all four of his brothers as his executors and appointing six others to oversee the whole process, one of whom, Sir Edward Griffin, was a Northamptonshire neighbour as well as the queen’s attorney general. Another was Gregory’s brother-in-law and partner in business, Walter Marler: no one would have been better acquainted with Gregory’s financial dealings.

  Time was short for Gregory Isham. London and the English countryside were being ravaged by fever and influenza. Whatever killed Gregory, it did its work quickly. He was dead within a couple of weeks at most.

  Death invites the inevitable processes of officialdom and administration. Three weeks after Gregory Isham settled his affairs and made his peace with God, a post mortem inventory was made of his London house, and less than a fortnight after that, the same was done for the manor house in Braunston. The searching eyes of the appraisers missed nothing. Everything was reduced down to sums of money in pounds, shillings and pence, even the rites of parting. At Braunston, precisely £100 was spent on ‘meat and drink, black gowns, priests’ wages and other things’ for Gregory’s funeral.13

  From the bare bones of these documents, we can make at least a bit of sense of Gregory’s life in London: we can visualize what a merchant’s house looked like in the middle of the sixteenth century – we can imagine the colours and the textures.

  Gregory’s London house was in the parish of St Michael Paternoster, a stone’s throw from the Vintry wharf and the Three Cranes stairs, a busy place for boats and passengers into the city. The bustle of the Thames was very much part of Gregory’s life. Not far away was an almshouse founded by Richard Whytyngdone (the ‘Dick Whittington’ of the popular story) in the early fourteenth century and still supported over 200 years later by the Mercers’ Company. Gregory left in his will the handsome sum of £20 ‘towards the maintenance of the poor children’ there.14

  The large townhouse had plenty of room for family and servants to live and work in comfortably. It had a kitchen, a hall, a parlour, a buttery, nurseries, a great chamber and attics. One chamber was put aside for Elizabeth Isham’s confinement in the final weeks of her pregnancy. The Ishams’ possessions were, not surprisingly for a family in the business of importing fine materials, sumptuous. Their parlour was furnished with tapestries, a Turkey carpet, cushions, chairs and stools. The colour scheme of their great chamber was red and green, and in it were featherbeds and bolsters, a table, a money chest and blankets and rugs. Cushions were of crimson velvet, the carpets of hard-wearing fustian (a coarse cloth woven out of cotton and flax), which Gregory imported through Antwerp from Italy. The curtains were strikingly colourful: crimson sarsenet (this was a very fine material of silk) with vallances of taffeta (a type of plainly woven silk with a flecked surface) and sarsenet and gold fringes.

  Gregory had looked every inch the successful merchant. About town he had cut a dash in gowns faced with damask and satin, cloaks of velvet and damask, coats of satin and taffeta, his russet satin doublets, and others of black satin and taffeta with satin sleeves. He had a cape and carried a sword, that essential accessory for any gentleman.15

  What the Ishams did to relax is harder to ascertain, though the appraisers noted two virginals in the family’s London parlour. Familiarity with the virginal was, like learning to dance, part of the repertoire of gentility and refinement. Did Gregory himself play, or was it a pastime for the whole family? Tuition on the virginal was cheap enough in London for a man of Gregory’s fortune. Just over a year before he made his will, for example, one Master Ellys had been paid nine shillings and fourpence for seven weeks’ teaching of the virginal to the young gentlemen in Sir William Cecil’s household, and to tune the instruments themselves cost two shillings – the combined cost of a gallon of strong beer, four short boat trips on the Thames and two loins of veal for the kitchen table.16

  Gregory’s intellectual interests are much harder to make out. Probably he sat somewhere in the middle range between his brothers: at one extreme there was Giles and Robert, barrister and priest, and at the other John. The appraisers in 1558 noted only two books or manuscripts in the London house. One was ‘a story of Mary Magdalene’, the other ‘a story of Jo
nas’. Both were biblical and probably devotional. But the second title offers an intriguing possibility, for it might refer to ‘The Storie of the prophete Jonas’ by William Tyndale. This had been printed around 1531 in Antwerp, the town Gregory knew so well, and it was a risky book to be found reading in Mary I’s Catholic England. Tyndale was a banned author, and Protestants in 1558 were being burned at the stake, or in exile. It was common enough for English merchants to pick up Protestant beliefs in the trading cities of mainland Europe; Tyndale himself had sought refuge in Antwerp. This might explain the plainness of Gregory’s will when it came to expressions of faith. With no reference to the intercession of the Virgin Mary or the holy company of heaven, Gregory was businesslike to the end: ‘I commit myself wholly both body and soul into the hands of Almighty God … believing perfectly through Christ’s death and passion that it [his own body] shall be raised up again at the latter day and joined to my soul to live there everlastingly.’ This is a very long way from being conclusive evidence that Gregory was a Protestant. But if he was, one of his elder brothers – a brother whom he trusted with the welfare of his family – was a chaplain to a combatively orthodox Catholic queen.17

  Gregory’s townhouse was a business headquarters as well as a family home. It was self-contained and self-sufficient, with its own courtyard and well, a counting house and warehouses. And those warehouses in September 1558 were full of valuable goods: a fortune’s worth, in fact, of Dutch worsteds and English kerseys, along with a great stock of the finest Italian fabrics, like fustian, satin, silk canvas, sarsenet and mockado, the latter an imitation velvet of wool and silk. All of this was valued at the eye-watering sum of over £1,200.18

  What is clear is that Gregory Isham’s business was in full play. ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ is the famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (I. iii. 75), but no London merchant – especially not the entrepreneurial Gregory Isham – could take Polonius’s advice very seriously. Gregory’s accounts show how complex and extensive his interests were: he imported and exported textiles, and he both owed and was owed great sums of money. Many of his cloths – and his debts – were in Antwerp. It was business on a grand scale. Well over £7,000 was owing to him, and he had debts not far short of £9,000 in England and Flanders. The cloths sitting in his warehouses in St Michael Paternoster had come, through Antwerp, from some of the greatest Italian merchant houses in Genoa and Lucca. He had warehoused in Antwerp £3,000 worth of English cloths, and he was beginning to store wool at his country house in Braunston. His landed estates had a capital value of about £8,000. Just for comparison, in the 1550s the yearly income of Eton College, a prestigious royal school foundation of about 100 boys and men, was something around £1,000.19

  Gregory was a moneylender: he used his capital to make loans for which he charged interest, something long condemned by the Church and actually illegal in England. As we will discover later in this book, Elizabethan preachers and moralists were caught up in a moral panic about usury. But merchants were not theologians. To a man like Gregory, money was a commodity, to be lent out for a reasonable price.

  A single example neatly illustrates Gregory’s financial and social reach as a moneylender. In 1553 he and his brother-in-law Walter Marler and a fellow mercer called Thomas Revett lent £3,700 to the earls of Westmorland and Rutland, a loan secured on some of the earls’ properties in Northamptonshire and Devon. Careful to keep within the letter of the law, no payment of interest was stated, though concealed it was probably in fact the sum of £700 – that is 23 per cent of the loan amount of £3,000. Their contract stated that the full amount of money was to be repaid on 30 November 1554, St Andrew’s Day, ‘at the font stone … in the cathedral church of St Paul in London … betwixt the hours of nine and twelve o’clock in the forenoon … in gold or in new fine silver money current in England’. This was common and established practice: before the building of the Royal Exchange (the subject of the next chapter), the font of St Paul’s was well known as the place in London where debtors settled with their creditors.20

  We have to make the imaginative leap for ourselves: Gregory, Walter and Thomas pacing St Paul’s on a morning in late autumn, waiting for the earls’ stewards to bring the bags of gold and silver coins. It would have been one transaction among many – the practice of usury right under the nose of the Church. And the Church knew it. One Elizabethan bishop was furious at how openly the cathedral was routinely abused for worldly purposes: ‘The south alley for popery and usury, the north for simony, and the horse fair in the midst for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawlings, murders, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary payment of money, as well known to all men as the beggar knows his bush.’21 How Gregory Isham reconciled all this with the ‘godly meditations’ of his will, we will never know. But there again he did not become a rich young man through naive passivity; his eye for business was a shrewd one.

  Steady, perceptive, careful, solid, a taker of few risks: the John Isham of the portrait is very much the man we find at work in London after Gregory’s death. John had only a little of Gregory’s mercantile panache, and there is no way to tell how, had Gregory lived for a decade or two more, the brothers would have done business. Perhaps they would have invested in the new opportunities beyond Europe; perhaps Muscovy might have beckoned. Already London ships like the Swallow and Charity were coming in from Russia with their cargoes of wax, tallow, cordage, silk, calf skins, cinnamon and rhubarb, yarn, wolf skins, seal skins, wolverines, minks, ermines and beavers. New markets beyond Antwerp called.22

  Yet John Isham was content to follow the old path. In the 1560s, ships came into the port of London carrying Isham’s cargoes of fustian from Genoa and Naples, boultel (a very fine cloth that could be used for sieving), worsted and frizado, velvet and mockado, and madder for dyeing cloth. But some of the old certainties were changing. By 1567, when John Isham gave that great carnivorous banquet for his fellow mercers, London’s trade with Antwerp was a long way from its days of mercantile glory decades before. There were political pressures and fears of revolt, with religious civil war in the Low Countries, as well as diplomatic wrangling with England. An especially harsh winter in 1564 and 1565 had frozen the Scheldt river and precipitated famine in Brabant, and there was reported to be ‘great anxiety and lack of business’ in Antwerp. All of these realities shook some of the old faith in Antwerp’s greatness.23

  John Isham typified London at its most conservative. He was not a man built for new markets, opportunities and challenges. He knew his trade, and he was canny with money and, like Gregory, understood the technique of lending money while staying within the law and was himself a prolific moneylender. For years he had had an eye on the country of his Pytchley ancestors, and in 1560 he once again seized a life-defining opportunity. In that year he borrowed £250 from three fellow mercers to buy the manor of Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire. The seller was none other than Sir William Cecil, friend of Sir Thomas Gresham, Muscovy investor, and now, after a few years out of office in Mary’s reign, secretary to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1572 John Isham retired from London and went off to live at Lamport as a country gentleman.

  When John Isham made his will, in 1594 or 1595, he saluted his former life in London. Just as his merchant’s account books had been props in his portrait, he was not embarrassed about how he had made his money. A gentleman with a manor house and estates, as well as a merchant, he wanted ‘a fair plain stone’ to lie on his grave showing

  such other arms, superscriptions, verses and posies … to testify to posterity of what house I descend both of my father and my mother’s side, that I was a merchant adventurer of the city of London and free of the company of mercers and by that means, with the blessing of God, received of my preferment, and was enabled to purchase the manor of Lamport and patronage and the church thereof.24

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘So fair a bourse in London’

  Right at the heart of Elizabethan London was a building that John Isham
would have visited only in the few years before his retirement from the city – and one that Gregory Isham would not have known at all. It became the centrepiece of London’s mercantile world, a mark of the city’s ambition, exercising a magnetic pull on all Londoners. It was just as much a stage for London as the city’s theatres. Every day a drama was played out there that never changed or altered: London’s double triumph of riches and poverty. The building was Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange.

  There is something neatly symmetrical about the story of the Exchange – like the building itself, a late Renaissance masterpiece so startlingly different from the old Gothic crevices of St Paul’s Cathedral and Guildhall. In the 1530s London’s ruling corporation tried and failed to build the kind of bourse of which other towns and cities could boast. As lord mayor, Sir Richard Gresham had nudged along Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. All the obstacles were overcome, but, for reasons that are not at all clear or obvious, nothing happened. A generation later, Sir Richard’s son Thomas took it up as his own project. As the royal agent in Antwerp he knew that town’s New Bourse as well as anyone else alive, monitoring every nuance of its business. And so the story’s symmetry lies in the completion by Thomas Gresham of a project more than thirty years in gestation in which his father had played a part.