… in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice. (I. iii. 43–5)
By ‘usance’ Shylock means the period of the loan that determined the amount of interest to be paid on it. Easy to miss – but in fact the most significant thing to notice – is how being a merchant is very different from being a moneylender. Antonio is an old-fashioned merchant adventurer: he trades in commodities and puts ships out to sea. He is an amateur lender of money (and for good and just reasons), where Shylock is the professional moneylender, grasping and unscrupulous. There is a world of difference between the methods employed by the two men. Shylock simply uses his money to make even more of it. Trade plays no part in his business, and he is contemptuous of it. Where the moneylender is in this sense passive, the merchant is active. Antonio takes risks, whereas in merely lending money Shylock risks nothing. What Shylock calls his own ‘well-won thrift’ (I. iii. 50–51), Antonio calls ‘interest’. It was a word and a concept that would have been as offensive and oppressive as usury to many in Shakespeare’s audience.
For Southwark’s playgoers in the 1590s, Antonio’s practice of lending money for free would have seemed long out of date. Shylock’s business model was well established not only in London but throughout Europe. There was little difference in technique between a Shylock and a Fugger (though the Fugger, as tough as they were, stopped short of cutting chunks of flesh out of their debtors).14
‘Interest’ was a significant word for the Elizabethans, who worried about the degrading of honest language. Some felt that sharp financial practices were being blunted by weasel words, and that clever obfuscations were disguising old sins. There is nothing, after all, like a euphemism to distract one’s attention from what is really being said or going on. One writer, in 1594, believed that gentlemen and merchants were using ‘fine terms’ to cover up their usury: ‘they will not say, let their money to usury, but to interest; or put it to usance, or they take consideration, rent or an honourable reward’.15 Usury, said another, was being covered up by a ‘goodly cloak to cover the shame thereof’: ‘I mean the name of interest, or profit of money.’16 The idea that the purpose of money was simply to facilitate trade and commerce went all the way back to Aristotle. But what if trade played no part in making fortunes? What was frightening was the idea that money could simply regenerate itself, ‘multiplied by drawing of continual profit upon the use of the principal stock from month or month, or year to year, by the loan of money till it be repaid’. For the moralists, this was usury under the newly invented name of interest.17
It is here that we can begin to see how Elizabethans made moral sense of the fortunes built up by merchants and traders. The Merchant of Venice helps once again. Antonio’s fortune means something: his merchant adventuring was red-blooded, vital, alive. Trade was hard-won and tangible. Textiles and spices, furs and oil, ships and caravans, encounters with foreign merchants and princes, risk with legitimate reward, or loss and misfortune according to the will of providence: goods and wares, and the wealth that came from them, spoke to mercantile prosperity and the common good. There was all the difference, in the Elizabethan mind, between sitting on ever-growing piles of money (like Shylock or any other usurer) and the hard slog of Anthony Jenkinson fighting his way to the silk road with the Muscovy Company’s fardels of London cloth.
London’s preachers saw before them a city infected by the love of money. Usury, they believed, was a special pestilence, a plague of vice and sin that threatened destruction. At Paul’s Cross, during the plague time of 1577, one preacher opened his sermon with stark words:
Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city, she heard not the voice, she received not correction, she trusted not in the Lord, she drew not near unto her God, her rulers within are as roaring lions, her judges are as wolves in the evenings.18
The devil stalked the streets of London in search of worldly men to get into his clutches. One morality play has Satan celebrating the ‘worldly man’ who is able to avoid being entrapped by usury law. Satan continues with a warning:
All you worldly men, that in your riches do trust,
Be merry and jocund, build palaces and make lusty cheer:
Put your money to usury, let it not lie and rust,
Occupy yourselves in my laws while ye be here.19
London’s usury sermons are common enough to be called a genre, and the most compelling of them was preached by the minister of the city parish of St Peter’s Cornhill, Richard Porder, from Paul’s Cross in 1570. The striking thing about the sermon (or at least the book of it, which ran to nearly 40,000 words) is that Porder gave Londoners something more than the usual preacher’s fare of biblical text, godly exhortation and doom. Porder was a young graduate with a sharp eye and a clear brain, and he looked closely at how merchants did business with one another, discerning their sleights of hand, and watching Christian morality give way under the weight of gold.
Porder was not at all sure that it was possible to be both a good Christian and a clever merchant who did deals in the marketplace or bourse. Too many merchants, he believed, convinced themselves that what made them their money was the lucky uncertainty of markets and exchanges. What Porder saw, by contrast, was ‘the malice of men, who spying their neighbours’ need do make gain thereof to themselves’.20 For Porder, the ‘market’ was something tangible and physical, that space and place where merchants and others went to buy and sell, regulated by rules for good behaviour – quite literally ‘The laws of the market’.21 But for him, it was also a place where people made moral choices about how they treated others, for which they had to take personal responsibility.22 Elizabethan dramatists took the same kind of view – a rare alignment of the values of playwright and preacher.
Richard Porder was swingeing in his condemnation of what he saw round about him in the city, recognizing the pernicious work of run-of-the-mill usurers who (in one of Porder’s illustrations) might on a loan of forty shillings take in interest five shillings a week.23 Elizabethan moralists like George Whetstone believed that this kind of small-scale loan-sharking was endemic in London. He explained with great passion how young and naive gentlemen were drawn into the clutches of ‘brokers’, bankrupt citizens or other indebted gentlemen who got their victim ‘to credit’ with their own creditors and then took a share of the spoils.24 ‘Broker’ used in a different sense meant pimp: one kind of broker procured money for his clients, the other sex.
Most striking in Porder’s sermon is that he engaged in a full frontal assault on the way merchants used the foreign exchange. Criminal loan-sharking was one thing: anyone could condemn a grasping moneylender. But to treat the use by merchants of bills of exchange as illustrations of usury was something else entirely.
The bill of exchange was the bread and butter of the trading merchant, for decades making possible English trade with the Low Countries. It was the instrument of Antonio, not Shylock – the means by which hard-working merchants earned their living by buying and selling commodities at the Antwerp and other fairs. Without the bill, Thomas Wyndout, Richard and Thomas Gresham, Gregory and John Isham and thousands of other reputable merchants could never have conducted the kind of trade that they did.
But Porder offered a different perspective. He used the example of a bill drawn up in London between two merchants. One was the ‘deliverer’, the other the ‘taker’. The taker ‘took up’ from the deliverer a sum of money in pounds sterling. The bill was the taker’s promise to pay back that sum of money in Antwerp in the local currency, the Flemish groat, calculated according to the exchange rate between the two currencies. It looks like a simple enough transaction, described thus by an Elizabethan expert: ‘money is delivered in one country plainly and simply … and bills delivered and received for the payment of the same in another country, according as money is current by merchants’ valuation [i.e. the exchange rate] between those two countries’.25
Cruci
al to any bill of exchange was the date agreed by the two merchants for repayment. They used the word Shylock used: ‘usance’. The taker might pay the amount to the deliverer’s factor or representative in Antwerp after the standard period of a month (‘at usance’) or perhaps fifteen days (‘half usance’) or two months (‘double usance’).
Porder saw the bill of exchange for what it really was: a temporary loan of money from one merchant to another. And so it was: bills of exchange had allowed generations of merchants, in need of money but anticipating good sales, to go over to Antwerp to sell their cloth. Porder’s objection was that, because of the nature of business on the bourse, and the way exchange rates worked, the sum the taker would almost always pay back in Antwerp was in fact more than he had borrowed in London. In the transaction Porder saw that the taker was in reality a debtor borrowing money from a creditor (the deliverer), paying an amount of money on top of the ‘principal’ for the privilege of taking out a fixed-term loan. He was certain that this was usury.26
He knew that the merchants would respond by citing risk. By long tradition, usury was committed only where the lender was guaranteed a profit without regard to the borrower’s risk.27 The risk, merchants might say, was the variability of the exchange rate. Instead of a deliverer taking ‘overplus’ (yet another word for interest), the sum of money paid back by the taker might not be worth the sum borrowed.28 Porder brushed aside the objection. He recognized what he called the ‘hazard’ of the market. But he knew – as the standard authorities on the workings of the exchange also knew – that it was so much more likely for a deliverer to take a profit than to make a loss.29 Porder saw no difference between a ‘plain usurer’ (someone who simply lent out a sum of money at interest) and the ‘exchange usurer’. In both cases, in his view, the expectation of profit easily outpaced the likelihood of loss.30
Though he was no financial analyst or exchange expert, Porder thought his way through and around a subject that continued, even after the later change in the law in 1571, to perplex and worry Elizabethans. He saw how the value of money might be said by merchants to vary with the exchange. He made his own estimate of risk in exchange transactions. He sensed the power relations between a deliverer (as creditor) and a taker (as debtor). He refused to accept as an excuse for exploitation the workings of a market or exchange. And he saw how, at huge moral and spiritual cost, money could be used simply to make more money by being moved ‘to and fro upon the exchange’, so making it ‘a continual trade to gain by’.31 Here was the danger of Antonio developing the instincts of Shylock: a merchant with enough capital to keep bills running between exchanges, in order – without doing much by way of trade – to make a profitable return.32
Like Richard Porder, what offended his exact contemporary Thomas Wilson (widely recognized as the most distinguished Elizabethan expert on usury) was that money was being traded like a commodity, ‘making the loan of money a kind of merchandize’.33 Wilson’s great work, A Discourse upon Usury (1572), is a brilliant companion piece to Porder’s sermon. Where Porder was a minister, Wilson was a lawyer, as well as a classical scholar and a government official. Porder’s parish of St Peter’s Cornhill was not so far away from Wilson’s apartments in the hospital of St Katherine near the Tower of London. Both men saw usury and its toxic effects all around them. Both spoke in and to the city in stridently moral terms, trying to put money back under the control of God and law.
Wilson’s Discourse is a long dialogue between a merchant, his kinsman apprentice, a preacher, a dilettante gentleman acquainted with the inns of court, and a ‘civilian’, an expert in the civil (or Roman) law. The cleverest and most astute speaker, not surprisingly, is the civilian: that, after all, was Wilson’s specialism.
Wilson’s setting for his dialogue is the merchant’s townhouse on a hot London afternoon, following a morning sermon on usury. The merchant and his guests enjoy a good lunch, after which the apprentice lays out cushions in the beautiful garden. The merchant, welcoming and cheerful, is ‘merry as a pie’, and looks forward to their conversation, happily complacent in admitting the preacher’s charge that he minds ‘nothing so much as getting of money’.34 They talk about merchants’ bills and about uncertainty on the exchange. The merchant’s guests (and Wilson himself) are as dismissive as Richard Porder is of the defence of risk: what the exchange really exposed was ‘the greediness of man, and the covetous desire which he hath to enrich himself by hook or crook’.35 Wilson’s position is clear: the mechanisms of trade and finance could not be used to argue away an individual’s moral responsibility to act according to divine and human laws.
Wilson enjoyed a savage joke at the city of London’s expense, telling the story of a famous preacher who gave a sermon ‘wholly against usury’. The preacher dined that same day with a rich and important merchant. After dinner the merchant thanked the preacher for his sermon, saying that ‘he had done great good that day in speaking so much against usury’. One of the merchant’s friends asked him why he had said such a thing, given that no one in London made more from usury than the merchant himself. ‘Tush,’ said the merchant to his friend, ‘you are a fool. I do thank him, and thank him again, for wot you what? The fewer usurers that he can make, the more shall be my gain, for then men shall chiefly seek me out.’ Did his friend really think that he would ‘leave so sweet a trade for a few words of his [the preacher’s] trolling tongue’?36
The merchant in the Discourse presents as his common-sense defence the way he actually treats money. What trade would there be if merchants were deprived of the hope of gain? ‘What man is so mad to deliver his money out of his own possession for naught?’ His kinsman apprentice goes a step further. What was the point of risking everything in the travail, toil and hazard of trade and merchandise? ‘I am young,’ he says, ‘and gladly would I learn of mine elders to get goods with ease, and gain money with money, which I take to be a good gain.’ This was a notion made all the more shocking by the young man’s unembarrassed bluntness in saying it.37
If we take preachers and writers like Porder and Wilson at their word, cold money was triumphing over the warmth of Christian charity. City and society were tempting God’s judgement. The preacher says in Wilson’s Discourse: ‘It is very certain, as I take it, the world is almost at an end.’ His attitude is in sharp contrast to the merchant’s cheerful complacency and full belly. But Wilson meant what he wrote; in dedicating the book to his noble patron, he wrote: ‘I do verily believe, the end of this world is nigh at hand.’38 Like so many of his contemporaries, Dr Wilson was reluctant to let go of some deep moral assumptions and associations.
It is striking how peculiar all this febrile moral commentary is when we set it alongside the trading ventures of Elizabeth’s reign, the complexities of Crown finance, the workings of exchanges and the new chartered trading companies. But old habits and values were hard to cast off: a society soaked in Christian morality, viewing usury as sin, could not very easily attune itself to new economic thinking. Such an adjustment took time, and people had to be prepared to think in new ways – someone like the author of a policy paper of c. 1570 on the need for a stern look at the law, who cut through the fug of moral outrage to a reality that to him was clear as day. An absolute prohibition on usury encouraged merchants to conceal their profiteering in complicated exchange dealings: such ‘Usury tendeth to the destruction of the commonwealth, but the borrowing of money or any other thing, yielding to the lender true and just interest, is one of the commodities which issued by the society of man.’39 Contained in this sentence were deep traditions and new ways of thinking about economic realities – and a blurring of some old moral and theological certainties.
To add to the complexity, London’s late Elizabethan merchants themselves defy simple categorizations. Porder called them plain usurers and exchange usurers, where Wilson produced two caricatures, one the full-bellied merchant, the other the morally bankrupt apprentice. Both the preacher and the lawyer must have known that they were
using tabloid generalizations, and that in London in the 1570s and 1580s they were very much more likely to encounter earnest merchants all too conscious of the city’s need for moral reformation. Many of London’s late Elizabethan merchants were inclined to puritanism, and they spent as long in churches listening to impossibly long sermons as they did in their counting houses.
In fact there was a pronounced godly feel to the city’s aldermanic elite, thinking on God and justifying to their consciences and to others the kinds of business dealings that scrupulous preachers worried about. London’s godly merchants looked out to the world, hoping to export Christianity to godless savages. At the turn of the new century, London would help to take trade and the true faith out to the new world. They attended also to London itself: to their own parishes and the lives of fellow parishioners in a growing and changing city, policing lives and morals and offering charity.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
St Bartholomew the Less
Imagine a city whose population is swollen by migrants from an English countryside ravaged by crop failure and starvation, crammed into squalid tenements in ever-growing suburbs. It is a city without any kind of social safety net beyond the resources of parishes and charitable hospitals, and where poverty, riot and the fear of crime so terrify the government that martial law is sometimes declared; where men are conscripted for foreign wars, and those lucky enough to make it home have, like so many others, to beg on the streets; where wages keep falling and prices rising, impoverishing many thousands; where everyone from the poorest to the richest – but especially the poorest – feels the sting of plague epidemics that claim so many families and stalk parish communities: imagine that city, locate it on the River Thames just over 400 years ago, and you have imagined London in the 1590s, in the punishing fin de siècle of the Tudor century. This, supposedly, was the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth I.
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