by Don Jordan
The reformed company’s royal charter was breathtaking in its cold ambition, its monopoly extended to include all of West Africa, from the coast of Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope. To the company was consigned ‘the whole, entire and only trade for the buying and selling bartering and exchanging of, for or with any Negroes, goods, wares and merchandises whatsoever to be vented or found at or with any of the Cities on the west coast of Africa’. The reconstituted company would launch a concerted effort to extract wealth from West Africa in the form of human cargo. New investment was raised from stockholders and a new fleet bought to drive the enterprise to financial success.
European slave trading in Africa had a long and complex history. The Spanish and Portuguese began running African slaves to their extensive colonies in South America around 1500. It is thought that some English privateers may have participated soon after, though in a desultory way. The first organised English trading took place in the 1550s, when a London merchant named John Lock imported ninety-four Africans from the Gold Coast for sale to the Spanish. After that, the trade really took off in London. From 1561 to 1570 the number of African slaves sent to foreign colonies increased to 1591. During the next decade no slaves were transported, but in the 1580s a total of 237 were taken.1
Following that there was a hiatus until 1626, when the trade from England began once more, African slaves, possibly provided by Dutch traders, had first been reported in the English territory of Bermuda in 1617. In 1619 the first African slaves were landed at Jamestown in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, the first successful English colony on mainland America; they were sold by John Colwyn Jupe, a Cornish Calvinist minister turned privateer. There followed another lull in English slave trading in the early 1630s, for the trade was still in an early, spasmodic phase. It began again in earnest in 1638 when the English built Fort Cormantin, also known as Fort Koromantine, on the Gold Coast, in modern-day Ghana. The fort was among the first European buildings in Africa to incorporate a slave hold – a prison in which to incarcerate the human cargo bartered from the local Ashanti people while waiting for the next slave ship to arrive.*
The growth of the slave trade did not go entirely unopposed. In 1657, the Quaker leader George Fox wrote ‘To Friends beyond the Sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves’. Some took this vaguely worded epistle to question the ownership of slaves, while others understood it only to mean that as the gospel was ‘the power that giveth liberty and freedom’, slaves should be converted to Christianity.2 In general, Quakers were either for slavery or ambivalent about it.
On 7 July 1664, the Hopewell, owned by the Company of Royal Adventurers and commanded by a Captain North, set sail from London bound for the Gulf of Guinea. The Hopewell was the first ship sent out by the reformed company to be tasked with loading slaves for sale in the colonies of Barbados and Jamaica. En route for Africa, Captain North had to keep a lookout not only for the Dutch but for Barbary pirates operating out of Salé in Morocco. The Sallee Rovers, as the pirates were known, were the scourge of European shipping. If captured by them, North and his crew could find themselves taken as slaves.
Five days after the Hopewell set out, Captain Thornborough on board the Martha ordered his crew to haul in the anchors and set course for the Gulf of Guinea. Four days after the Martha, Captain John Newman and his crew hoisted sail on the Spy, setting the same course. On 22 July, the Victory set sail under the captaincy of Isaac Taylor. Between them, the five ships were expected to load more than 1500 Africans to sell on the quaysides of the West Indies. If they made £20 a head on the sale, the London merchants, aristocrats and royalty investing in the voyage stood to make a gross profit of £30,000.
They never got their money. The ships successfully evaded the Barbary pirates but once off Africa all were intercepted by the Dutch and taken as prizes before they could load so much as a single slave.3
While the Dutch inflicted such damage upon the fortunes of the Company of Royal Adventurers, in London Sir William Davenant did his utmost to rouse in his audience the strongest possible pro-Stuart sentiments. He put on a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, heavily rewritten and revised by Davenant himself, making the language clearer and ridding it of much poetic complexity. Thanks to the backstage effects department of Davenant’s theatre, the witches were able to fly through the air. And thanks to the vogue he had created for operatic touches, there were many songs and much dancing – quite a striking departure in a tragedy. Davenant must have thought his additions were in danger of unbalancing the play, so he decided to edit Shakespeare’s comic interludes, cutting the famous night watchman scene in its entirety. Besides the crowd-pleasing antics, Davenant rewrote many lines to heighten the play’s theme of regicide, one that was sure to resonate with his audience and with the royal family:
Usurpers lives have but a short extent
Nothing lives long in a strange element4
It’s not known what the King thought of Davenant’s version, but Evelyn thought it excellent and Pepys considered it ‘pretty good’ on first seeing it on 5 November. Davenant’s Macbeth remained the default version well into the eighteenth century.
News of the fiasco off Africa reached London on 22 December, the very day the King, accompanied by the Duke of York, watched a new and larger version of William Petty’s dual-hulled ship launched at Rotherhithe. It was named The Experiment. Pepys, who was among those present, recorded his feelings on the news from Africa, saying the English fleet had been ‘beaten to dirt . . . to the utter ruin of our Royall Company’. The Duke of York and the company stockholders decided immediate retaliatory action should be taken. A new military voyage to West Africa was commissioned. Originally it was to be commanded by Prince Rupert. Again, Rupert’s hopes of adventure and glory were dashed. Due to the losses he had encountered as a Royalist privateer, he had a bad reputation among many seamen. According to Pepys, at the news of Rupert’s appointment to head the fleet, crewmen were displeased as ‘he is accounted an unhappy [i.e. unlucky] man’. The Prince’s reputation threatened to scupper the fleet before it had hoisted a sail.
Once more, the Duke of York told him to step aside; once more Captain Holmes, now appointed the African Company’s de facto admiral, would go instead. While the plans were finalised for a new raid, Charles must have kept a firm hand on events from behind the scenes; after all, it now looked like war.
With the trade war heating up, a book appeared on London bookstalls on the very subject of overseas trade. It was by a man now dead for more than twenty years. Thomas Mun, a successful London cloth merchant and trader in the Mediterranean, had written England’s Treasure from Foreign Trade in 1628 for his son John, who now thought to publish it. The book contained advice on trade far removed from the smash-and-grab tactics advocated by the Stuart family’s African Company. Mun’s guidance concentrated on the skills necessary to be a good merchant, rather than a predatory agent of a rapacious monarchy. He set out twelve key areas of knowledge, ranging from learning ‘the Latin tongue’ to knowledge of international taxes, from understanding how ships were built, outfitted and navigated, to knowing what goods each country made and ‘what be the wares they want’.5 According to Mun, a good merchant was a polymath for whom religious observance went hand in hand with love of one’s country and an ability to serve it through trade. His creed was distilled Puritanism expressed in an era of absolute monarchy.†
Thomas Mun was born into a well-to-do London family. His father was a successful mercer, his grandfather a provost of the Royal Mint. Mun made his money trading in the Mediterranean, in particular with Turkey, before settling in London and becoming a senior figure in the East India Company. At the age of forty-one he married Ursula Malcott and they set up home in the old city in the parish of St Helen s Bishopsgate, an area fashionable among wealthy families. They had three children, of whom John was the eldest. Thomas was a religious man with a strong sense of duty to Crown and country. His parish church, the medieval St Helen’s, had been William S
hakespeare’s church; it was also where Sir Thomas Gresham worshipped and was buried.
England’s Treasure did not confine itself to advice from a father to his son. It offered advice on how all of England might be enriched. This was what convinced John Mun he should publish his father’s work – ‘for the common good’, as he put it. The book’s appearance in 1664 was no happenstance; Mun’s decision coincided with a new and dangerous phase in the trade battle between London and Amsterdam for supremacy in foreign trade. The prize for winning that battle was the unhindered ability to export more goods.‡
England’s Treasure spelt out how London’s merchants could make the kingdom rich by exporting more to create a surplus of the value of exports over imports. It was a clear expression of mercantile capitalism. Mun explained how the use of many different factors, including carefully set import taxes, would help ensure a healthy balance of trade so that the country could flourish.
The debate over how to increase trade had been going on since the beginning of the century. In 1622 the merchant Edward Misseiden wrote an influential treatise in support of free trade as practised by the Dutch, unhindered by tariffs and duties, while still ensuring a positive balance of trade. His work was still read long after the Restoration. Misseiden outlined what he saw as the reasons for a perceived ‘decrease in trade’ in English woollen goods in both the domestic market and for export. Among the reasons he gave for poor trade was the cost of borrowing money, as high as 100 per cent per year:
it is not an Usury of ten in the hundred only, that wringeth this Common-wealth, but an extorsion also of 20-30-40, nay of Cento per Cento per Anno, as the Italians speake, given and taken on pledges and pawnes, and that on poore peoples labours, in London especially: which is a biting Usury indeed, and a fearefull crying sinne before God.6
Mun and Misseiden agreed that high interest rates caused harm to business. ‘Trade decreaseth as Usury increaseth, for they rise and fall together,’ said Mun. In 1660s London the cost of money was still an issue. As the decade progressed it would become of ever greater importance.
According to Mun, English trade was impeded by taxes on the importation of English cloth into neighbouring countries, together with the low value of English money. Mun saw that the balance of trade deficit led to a shortage of silver bullion. A good supply of silver was necessary to fund more trade. This was a key tenet of mercantilism. If the silver, or plate’ as it was called, was used to buy goods in countries outside ‘Christendom’ the money supply dwindled even more. Once plate was spent outside Europe it was likely never to return, whereas at least some of the silver spent in Europe was likely to come back home again sooner or later due to the cyclical nature of trade. Misseiden, however, thought that the export of bullion did not matter, as long as the goods bought with it were re-exported and so created more wealth.
Given Charles II’s keen advocacy of joint stock monopolies such as the East India Company and the Royal Adventurers, Misseiden made interesting reading in the 1660s. Monopolies, he said, were impediments to trade, being vehicles by which ‘this Common-wealth is deprived of that true liberty of Trade, which belongeth to all the subjects: when the Commodity of some few, is preferred to the publique good.’
As an investor in the East India Company, Mun had written in its favour, arguing that in the long term its goals and practices were for the best.7 However, by 1628 he had changed his mind. In England’s Treasure he agreed with Misseiden that monopolies restricted trade. A positive balance of trade was crucial: £We must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers than we consume in value of theirs.’8
Mun and Misseiden were particularly clear-sighted in recognising the need for the government to collate trade figures so that it was possible to keep track of the balance of imports and exports. Without such information, the ideas behind mercantile capitalism could not be practised with accuracy. For example, tariffs on foreign goods might be seen to work, but did they also hinder the business of domestic merchants who sold them? Where the recommendation for measuring the balance of trade fell down was that there was as yet no clear mechanism for doing so.§
There were several defects in the ideas expressed by Mun. The main one was that striving for dominance in trade and in profit wordd almost inevitably lead to war between trading partners as each tried to better the other. Mercantilism inevitably caused instability. And this is exactly what it did with regard to London’s greatest rivals, Holland and France. The balance of trade with Amsterdam was unfavourable, but that with the French was worse, because of what Mun identified as an English love of French lace, wines and other luxury goods. After the return of Charles II, this love of all things French intensified thanks to the royal court taking on French manners and fashion and encouraging others to do the same. Of course, London’s merchants did not see this imbalance of trade as a defect. For them, if the mercantile system were to thrive, then international trade must be ensured at all costs. This line of reasoning rendered it natural that there should be agitation between London, emerging as the largest city in the world, and Amsterdam, the leading trading port in the world.
Amsterdam had long been the pre-eminent European trading port. In the trade battles of the mid-seventeenth century the Dutch had an advantage: their goods were traded freely, without import restrictions, in an early expression of what today is known as free trade, whereas goods coming into British ports were subject to customs duty. The British Exchequer was heavily reliant on duty and customs taxes. Therefore Britain had long been at a trading disadvantage with the Dutch States, which relied on domestic taxes levied through local government.
To counter this imbalance in trade, the British Parliament passed a series of Navigation Acts, encouraged by the diplomat and politician George Downing. His hand was behind almost every piece of legislation regarding shipping and trade during the Restoration, despite his fellow committeeman John Evelyn thinking him not worth a groat’.9
The Navigation Acts had their basis in a sense of the national interest that went back centuries. Many European countries had at various times introduced some form or other of legislation designed to give an advantage to home trade or manufacturing. For example, in the fourteenth century England had forbidden the importation of iron. Whatever its nature, the central purpose of such legislation was the same: to create a trading advantage for the home state by restricting the trade of other countries.
England introduced its first Navigation Act in 1651. The impetus was an economy that was suffering a downturn.10 Primarily, the act was aimed at international Dutch trade. It stated that only British ships could bring in goods from Asia, Africa, or America’, with a similar embargo being imposed on goods from Europe.11 This meant that only English ships could trade with British colonies and only English ships could import goods to England. The new rules meant that Dutch ships could no longer bring goods from Dutch colonies to England. Dutch ships could trade in English ports, but only if they brought goods made in home territories. Hence a Dutch ship could bring gin, but not pepper from the Indies. This trade advantage created the instability that led the following year to the First Anglo-Dutch War.
By the 1660s, as the trade war between the rivals continued to heat up, London cared little for the political dangers of restricting international trade, for there was money to be made. The Navigation Act passed a decade before by a republican administration now deemed to have been illegal was renewed in 1660 and amended the following year, under direct guidance from Charles, and passed by Parliament.12 The trade embargoes stipulated were so strict that had they been fully observed in all territories affected by them, wealth creation would have ground to a halt. The mercantilist creed, however, dictated that protectionism wars necessary to stop wealth flowing outwards rather than in.¶
The time came for the new expedition to Africa to set sail. This time Holmes led a larger fleet. The reason was simple: he was to start a war. It was an enormous gamble by the King, based on the debatable premise that the D
utch were a greater threat to England than the French. If one man can be identified as the architect of this policy, warning against Dutch trade expansionism and arguing for an aggressive policy against it, that man was George Downing. A successful diplomat under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, Downing had switched sides so quickly at the first whiff of the Restoration that afterwards any man who violently betrayed his principles was known as an arrant George Downing’. It was true that Downing was a nasty piece of work, successfully plotting the downfall of several of his former friends and colleagues, hut, as Charles recognised, he got things done.
While his character was not the most appealing, Downing was brilliant, first as a diplomat and spy, then as a politician and financial expert. His financial planning was an important factor in Britain’s adoption of a modern fiscal system. His diplomatic missions to The Hague, first under Cromwell and subsequently under Charles II, had given him first-hand knowledge of Dutch ambitions and of the financial policies that supported them. Downing thought Charles should combat the Dutch with some of their own financial policies and, if that failed, should take them on militarily.
It is worth noting that Charles viewed England’s place in international politics through the prism of a personal desire to place Britain firmly on the European stage, a view held by monarchs since the end of Saxon times# This was reinforced by the great antipathy he had long nursed for the Dutch United Provinces.12 To some extent this stemmed from events following the execution of Charles’s father in January 1649. At that time the Prince was staying in The Hague as a guest of William II. Relations began to deteriorate when Charles planned to wrest back the throne with the help of the Irish Confederacy, a coalition of pro-Royalist Catholics in Ireland. The Dutch were unimpressed by the prospect of an alliance with Catholic forces. As a result, Charles was forced to leave The Hague and return to his mother in France.