London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  On Wednesday, 31 December 1600, a new international trading company was born and another was given a fresh charter: the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, and the Governor and Company of Merchants of Levant.32 For the East India Company, preparations for a voyage to Asia began in earnest: with nearly £70,000 by now raised in capital, every detail was looked to in fitting out the ships and recruiting their crews. Those preparations drew on London’s already extensive international connections: the cordage for rigging ships bound for the East Indies was supplied out of Russia by the Muscovy Company.33

  Between 1601 and 1613 twelve voyages went out to the Indies: five ships in that first year, four out to Bantam in 1604, three to Bantam and the Red Sea in 1607. The company’s chief interest was to bring home ‘pepper, spices, gold and other merchandizes which are like to yield the most profitable return for the adventurers’.34 But what developed was something more complex: a ‘triangular trade’ the three points of which were the Indies, England and mainland Europe. The company traded within the East Indies, brought goods home to London, and re-exported them to Europe. It recorded the export into Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Turkey of nearly £220,000 worth of pepper, cloves, nutmeg and mace. That was in a fifteen-month period between 1613 and 1614.35 This European business in spices, calico and indigo was the architecture for a sophisticated system of trade centred on London, where those commodities were exchanged for bullion and other export goods, further helping the company to invest in its port-to-port trade in the East Indies.36 The company’s charter permitted it for the first voyage to take out of the kingdom £30,000 of ‘foreign coin of silver, either Spanish or other foreign silver’ (in other words the spoils of English privateers), and quickly the company’s export to Asia of coin and bullion became a prominent feature of its trade, as silver commanded a high price in Asia.37 Between 1601 and 1624 the East India Company took out to the East bullion worth an astonishing £753,336.38

  All of this was a very long way from the days when London had been a satellite of Antwerp. The city was now standing on its own two feet. Of course there were new rivals, of which Amsterdam, soon to be a superpower in global finance and trade, was pre-eminent, and the Dutch founded their own truly formidable trading corporation, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), in 1602. But London had at last plugged itself directly into a sophisticated system of global commerce; its merchants were dealing first-hand with producers and traders on the other side of the world. One estimate of the strength of the East India Company’s fleet in 1615 put it at twenty-one ships with a combined tonnage of 10,516 tons; ten of those ships were new, two were being built.39 Company trading stations were set up from the Red Sea to Japan: ‘factories’ in Bantam and in five cities in Moghul India, including Surat.40 By 1621 Bantam was the head factory for the Molucca Islands, China, Japan, Borneo, Java and Sumatra, extending out to company trading posts in the Gulf of Bengal, Malabar and Goa. The Sumatra base supervised India, the Red Sea and factories in Persia and the Persian Gulf.41

  Nevertheless it was a bumpy ride for the East India Company. The ups and downs of global trade over the decades meant that there were both good and testing times for the company. There was armed conflict between the company and the VOC in 1618, settled by an agreement that very obviously favoured the Dutch.42 Yet the scale of the East India’s Company’s achievement was immense. Even by the measure of Russia and the Muscovy Company’s trade out of Persia, the company’s operation represented an achievement of organization and communication never before encountered by London’s merchants. Its administrative machine was impressive. Its printed Lawes or Standing Orders set out in 1621 every aspect of the East India Company’s corporate life, from its committees, courts, officers and accounts to its stores, shipwrights, joiners, wages, porters and clerks – the business of a global corporation in 335 rules and regulations.

  In 1500 merchants from London had gone to the marts of Antwerp to sell their cloth and buy their luxury goods. Theirs was a prosperous but modest city on the edges of the great commercial powers. A century later, the mercantile elite of a growing, complex and at times febrile city looked for their riches to the furthest corners of the known world.

  On Thursday, 29 January 1601, the East India directors gathered for one of their routine meetings. Joining them were the two most senior sea captains of the approaching voyage, James Lancaster and John Middleton. Present, too, was the old Levant hand Richard Staper.

  It was in many ways an unremarkable meeting in which they discussed paying a bill for twenty-two shirts of chain mail and the price of timber. But that was not all, for they were joined by a special guest lecturer:

  Master Hakluyt, the historiographer of the voyages of the East Indies, being here before the committees [directors] and having read unto them out of his notes and books … was required to set down in writing a note of the principal places in the East Indies where trade is to be had.43

  Hakluyt, not surprisingly, was involved at an early stage of the East India project; in the spring of 1600 he had written a paper on Spanish forts in the Indies. Now at their meeting Hakluyt gave the directors a synthesis of everything he knew about the East. He came before them with a huge pile of books and papers. One was Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Discours of voyages into the East and West Indies (1598), a hefty volume translated from Dutch at Hakluyt’s request. It was full of close descriptions of places, peoples and customs. With maps of Madagascar, Sumatra and Java, and all sorts of engravings showing – amongst other things – elephants and the forests and fields of India, Chinese merchant ships and natives of Goa, van Linschoten’s Discours was essential reading for the East India voyage: it gave an idea of who and what would be encountered. Another book was the best available history of China. And there was of course Hakluyt’s own great work, Principal navigations, the third and final volume of which had been printed only a few months earlier. Of the papers, the most important were maps and documents that had come into his possession after being taken from a Portuguese East India vessel captured in 1592. Here privateering had its uses. For Hakluyt, and certainly for the East India Company of London, there was vital intelligence to be processed and understood.44

  Within a fortnight of his meeting with the East India directors, Hakluyt drew up a full account of all the spices of the Indies and where they could be found; just as usefully, he helped to lobby the queen’s Privy Council. He received for his work the handsome fee of £10, as well as thirty shillings for the delivery to the company of three maps. But Hakluyt was interested in so much more than the money. Always possessed of that drive to discover, he saw at once the new opportunities for trade in conditions unknown for two generations: the likelihood of peace with Spain, Europe’s superpower, after half a century of hostility.45

  How far they had come from Wynkyn de Worde’s Travels of Sir John Mandeville, with its strange wondrous beasts, and from the early fantasy of Cathay. Here at last was the real East: in the place of the court of the Great Khan were factories in Java and India, and instead of cosmographical speculations on northern sea routes, a corporation was trading right across the globe. How altered the world looked from London in a century of fresh opportunities – and how different mercantile London looked too.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Virginia Richly Valued

  Standing on the city quays in the first years of a new century, a Londoner might have seen the Dragon, Hector or Susan being made ready for the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, or the Brave, Roebuck, Speedwell, Triumph and Cherubim of the Muscovy Company’s fleet coming up the Thames home from Archangel.1 On the river wharves, cranes loaded and unloaded a fantastic range of goods and commodities. Sailors, workmen, merchants’ apprentices, company factors and agents and customs officers moved between ships and warehouses, as passengers ferried by rowing boats and wherries climbed up quayside steps. The port was so busy that in the
years of war with Spain Sir Robert Cecil had kept a watcher there to look for enemy spies and conspirators entering the city. So much was familiar: Southwark lay across the river, joined to London by the great carbuncle of its bridge that put Billingsgate in shadow. Yet the city was more crowded than ever; there must have been a great din of people, animals and bells.

  Elizabethan London became Jacobean London. In 1603 Elizabeth I died, to be succeeded by King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, now king of Great Britain. His accession was marked across London by churches like St Bartholomew near the Exchange, which spent six shillings and eight pence on ringing its bells ‘the day the king was proclaimed’.2 There was barely a slip in the rhythm of daily life. At St Bartholomew’s there were still locks to be mended, pews to be repaired, the parish pump to see to, dead cats and dogs and other rubbish to be carried out of the churchyard. And in the first months of the new reign Londoners were stung by an especially sharp outbreak of plague. The poet and playwright Thomas Dekker called 1603 ‘The wonderful year’ – a year full of change, of wonders and horrors.

  London had for centuries reached out to the ports of France and the Netherlands, with whom it shared long histories. But now there were new horizons: Russia, Persia, north Africa, Brazil, the far eastern Mediterranean, India, China and Japan. With these new horizons came new challenges.

  At Muscovy House on Seething Lane near the Tower of London the senior men of England’s Russia trade met in May 1604 to untangle a tricky problem. Their chief agent in Moscow had warned them that the company’s trading charter was about to be either cancelled or suspended until an ambassador was sent to renegotiate and confirm their privileges. They wrote urgently to Robert Cecil at court.3

  For half a century the Muscovy Company had fought to maintain its exclusive commercial charter. It was always a hard fight. Agents and factors had filled their own pockets at the company’s expense, just as merchants from other European countries had pressed ceaselessly to open up trade with Russia. Tsars and officials changed; some were friendly, others hostile. Elizabethans found Russian politics to be as brutal as it was mysterious. One former ambassador, Giles Fletcher, published in London in 1591 a scathing analysis of Russia and its rulers and people. So explosive was Fletcher’s exposé of the tsar and his court that the Muscovy Company had gone to Lord Burghley to have the book suppressed. They were successful.4 To upset the most powerful men in Moscow was to threaten the very existence of Anglo-Russian commerce; it was better to keep silent on the gothic violence and tyranny of the Kremlin than to lose valuable trade.

  In 1604 King James’s government acted with speed. At Greenwich Palace on 10 June (a month and a day after the Muscovy merchants’ letter) the chosen ambassador, Sir Thomas Smythe, was presented by Robert Cecil himself to the king. James wanted to know all about Russia. When Smythe told him that he would be away for ‘full fifteen months, by reason of the winter’s cruelty’, the king was surprised. ‘It seems then that Sir Thomas goes from the sun,’ he said; to which the Earl of Northampton quipped, with a courtier’s talent for sycophancy, ‘He must needs go from the sun, departing from his resplendent majesty.’ At this James smiled and gave Smythe his hand to kiss.5

  Sir Thomas Smythe was a merchant experienced in the Russian trade. This was his most important qualification for the embassy. His brief was to negotiate for the Muscovy Company ‘all conditions of safety and profit’ that he could, as well as to handle the tricky subject of Anglo-Turkish relations and the standing of the English embassy in Constantinople.6 In Moscow he was suavely effective, suffering none of the anxieties over ambassadorial status that so often tormented thin-skinned courtiers or scholars. Given the labyrinthine politics of the Kremlin in 1604 and 1605, Sir Thomas had to have his wits about him. When he got there, he was, like Richard Chancellor and Anthony Jenkinson decades before him, feted and feasted. There were three qualifications for any effective English ambassador in Moscow. The first was a practical political intelligence, the second a vast reserve of patience in the face of diplomatic procrastination and maddening protocol. The third was the kind of stomach and head that could cope with great feasts and heavy drinking.

  Half a lifetime before his Russian embassy, Thomas Smythe had had his portrait painted. He was then a young man of twenty or twenty-one. The artist was Cornelis Ketel, a Dutch émigré. Thomas’s picture was one of a set of individual family portraits commissioned by his father, an elder Thomas who was the chief customs officer of the port of London. If Ketel got the senior ‘Customer’ Smythe right, he was the very model of the Elizabethan city man, all bulk, red beard and high colour, wearing the traditional uniform of a black merchant’s cap and a heavily furred gown; he might have been John Isham’s brother. In her portrait, Alice Smythe, young Thomas’s mother, looks every inch the severe Tudor matron, with a gaze that could freeze the Thames. Where Thomas’s sisters are miniatures of their mother, he and his brothers look very different from their father. Wearing a silver-grey slashed doublet and with short dark auburn hair, a pale complexion and reddened lips, Thomas Smythe seems more a poet than a merchant in the making.7

  He became, however, every inch the man of business. Two decades later his name counted for everything – he was all substance and weight. No one in London was more able to exercise such huge influence with his grace and style. A feel and sense for the city, like money and connections, ran very easily in some families; it was a rule to which poor Michael Lok was the spectacular exception. The elder Thomas Smythe was an important man who knew London’s trading world inside out, but even he was in the shadow of his father-in-law, the younger Thomas’s maternal grandfather, Sir Andrew Judde. Judde had been lord mayor, a great power in the Skinners’ Company and, like other fur traders, a founder member of the Muscovy Company. He was a man of great dignity – and very probably his daughter Alice’s no-nonsense severity was a long-perfected family trait.

  Judde’s grandson might have followed in his mayoral footsteps had it not been for Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, once the queen’s favourite courtier. Disgraced and desperate, in 1601 Essex armed his followers and took to the streets of London in a farcical effort to force an audience with Elizabeth. Smythe was by then an alderman, one of the two sheriffs of London for that year and governor of the newly established East India Company. In search of support in the city, Essex and his men went to Smythe’s house. When the coup collapsed, Sir Thomas did his best to disentangle himself from any association with the earl, strongly denying any contact beforehand, and telling his brother John that the only letter he had received from Essex was a recent one ‘touching some matter of the East Indian company’.8 But the damage was done. Sir Thomas Smythe was tainted by Essex’s treason. Interrogated by the Privy Council, hours later he was dismissed as an alderman. He stood down from his other responsibilities as well, discreetly withdrawing from directors’ meetings of the East India Company; his deputy took the chair, and a new governor was elected.9

  For about two years he was out in the cold, but eventually the thaw came. One of Sir Thomas’s formal duties as the king’s ambassador to the tsar in 1604 was to maintain the royal dignity, and rarely were disgraced men allowed the honour of doing that. Half a decade later, Sir Thomas Smythe was seen to be a merchant grandee of extraordinary range. With a bulging portfolio of offices and responsibilities, he was the consummate mercantile bureaucrat. He was at least twice (before and after Essex) governor of the Muscovy Company. From the beginning one of the moving spirits of the East India venture, he was the company’s governor for seventeen years. He was also governor of two later ventures, one to Bermuda, the other a further expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. He was a director of the Spanish Company and a charter member of the Levant Company of 1605. Few men were busier in the corporate power structures of early Jacobean London.

  And then there was the New World. For eleven years Sir Thomas Smythe was the most senior official in a venture to colonize an as yet unexplored continent
. This was the Virginia Company of London, whose corporate ambition was to settle America for God and English trade.

  In the second and definitive edition of The principal navigations (1598–1600), Richard Hakluyt left the ‘fourth part of the globe’ to the final volume. This was America, the continent that had teased and tested cosmographers and navigators for a century following its discovery by Christopher Columbus.

  Richard Hakluyt hated imprecision, and he tolerated the word America as at best convenient shorthand. In one moment of rhetorical excitement, he called the continent ‘my Western Atlantis’. On balance, however, he preferred the functional ‘New World’. Simply, America was new because Columbus had discovered it as recently as 1492, and ‘world’ reflected its size. The continent was huge and mysterious: ‘to this day’, Hakluyt wrote, it was ‘not thoroughly discovered, neither within the inland nor on the coast’.10

  Hakluyt knew that even he, with all his material, could not do justice to America. He recognized that the picture of it he presented in Principal navigations was a monotone lacking ‘more lively and exquisite colours’.11 The spectacular fold-out map that some purchasers of Hakluyt chose to buy separately and had stitched into the third volume – a map four times the size of the book itself – showed the land masses of Europe, South America, Africa and even South Asia in convincing detail. Yet so much of North America, on the map as well as in the text, was unknown, a blank waiting to be filled in. It was surely far from a coincidence that on the map the royal arms of Queen Elizabeth hover over this terra incognita: surely soon enough America would be explored, mapped, colonized, farmed and mined, and the men, women and children who already lived there would have the honour of being civilized by the new settlers.