by Don Jordan
On 9 December 1672 a young doctor named John Fryer set sail from Gravesend, bound for one of the foreign lands over which the war was being fought – India. The son of a London family of merchants, Fryer was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in medicine. A year later he contracted as a surgeon for the East India Company. He was engaged at fifty shillings a month as a ‘Chyrurgeon for Surat’, in other words, a surgeon for the company’s trading post at Surat, in western India, the first to be established in the subcontinent.1 The company paid for the tools of his trade, his ‘Chyrurgery Chest’, and sent it ahead to India.
Fryer sailed on the Unity, a 34-gun frigate under the command of Captain William Cruft.* The Unify was part of the East India Company fleet which left the Thames at the beginning of winter each year to catch the most favourable winds for the voyage to Arabia, India and beyond to China. Fast fighting craft such as the Unify escorted large cargo ships known as East Indtamen, of anywhere between 600 and 1500 tons, which at an average speed of four to five knots could sail around 120 miles in a day. If all went well, the voyage to India would last six to eight months.
To sail each ship took a crew of 140 or so. On top of that there would be a handful of merchants and their clerks. Those who served on the ships, or merchants making the round trip, could reckon on being away from home for two to three years, a long and anxious wait for EIC investors in London to see a return on their investment. Those on a one-way ticket for a posting abroad knew they might not see England again for many years, if ever. Fryer himself was to be away for eight years.
The fleet carried a huge cargo of‘treasure’, as cargoes of fine or valuable goods were called, destined for Madras, on the southeast coast of India. Once there, the treasure would be traded for other goods. When the fleet arrived off the Coromandel Coast in June 1675, they were faced by the unwelcome presence of a Dutch naval fleet blockading the coast and hampering English shipping. After some skirmishing with the Dutch, the EIC fleet determined it was unable to put into port at Madras and headed for its trading post at Masulipatnam further along the coast. Finally, the Dutch lifted their blockade and the fleet put into Madras,
Madras was the second trading post the EIC had set up in India. The city was built on uninhabited land purchased from the ruling Vijayanagara empire. Here the company built its first Indian fortress, naming it Fort St George. It was a square, stone fortress, with two concentric lines of walls, heavily defended by cannon. In the middle stood the governors house, a fine building with a domed roof in the Indian manner. The city of Madras (present-day Chennai in Tamil Nadu) grew up around the fort. By the 1670s the population was around 50,000. Propelled by nothing more than the EIC’s trading activities, a heterodox population expanded to cater for the needs of Europeans and their Indian middlemen. According to Fryer, there were 300 Englishmen and 3000 Portuguese, The ‘Moors’ had routed the latter from their stronghold at St Thomas and they now carried on their trade under English protection, paying duty of 4 per cent for goods in and out of the city.2 The city boasted several Hindu temples and a mosque, but not yet a church, though there was a chapel inside the fort. Fryer noticed how the EIC’s administration emulated the pomp and luxury of the Indian grandees they traded with. The governor of Madras was Sir William Langthorne, the son of a London merchant and investor in the East India Company. Emulating his father, Sir William had invested early in the company, becoming so successful that he was knighted in 1668.
In 1670, the company had asked Sir William to go to Madras to investigate charges of malpractice brought against its governor, Sir Edward Winter, who was caught up in a power struggle with his rival for the position, George Foxcroft It seems Foxcroft was untrustworthy, while Winter was an honest man traduced by Foxcroft’s agents, or factors. The result of Langthorne s investigations was that Winter and Foxcroft were both called home, and he himself was installed as governor.
By the time Fryer landed, Sir William had succumbed to the same pecuniary disease as had done for Winter. On top of his annual salary of £300, Sir William was said to be making £7000 a year by illegally trading on his own account. In the journal he kept of his travels, Fryer noted that that Sir William – a gentleman of Indefatigable Industry and Worth’ – lived and travelled in grand style:
His personal guard consists of three hundred or four hundred blacks, besides a band of fifteen hundred men ready on summons; he never goes abroad without fifes, drums, trumpets, and a flag with two bells in a red field, accompanied with his Council and Factors on horseback, with their ladies in palankeens [palanquins].3
The mention of ‘three hundred or four hundred blacks’ is telling. In 1620, the East India Company had begun importing slaves into India, At first they came from England’s main slave supply zone on the Guinea Coast in West Africa, and later from East Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar. Later still, some slaves were imported from Indonesia. Sir William’s ‘blacks’ were almost definitely West African slaves.
Under company rules, the governor had the power of life or death over his non-English employees and all others who resided in his territory. Though omnipotent in his own bailiwick, however, even minting his own money, Sir William still answered to London. In time the company read his reports, looked at the ledgers, caught up with Sir William’s private trade and removed him. He returned to England, bought an estate in Kent, became a Justice of the Peace, and endowed almshouses and a school, gaining a reputation as a ‘rich and beneficent nabob’4 It is interesting to note that his replacement, Sir Streynsham Master – also sent to India as a reformer – was able upon his retirement to buy a castle and estate in Derbyshire and become High Sheriff of the county.
Fryer was finally able to sail for his posting in Surat, retracing his voyage round the Cape and beading up the west coast of India, arriving at his destination on 9 December 1673, a year to the day since he had left the Thames Estuary. Surat was founded in 1615 when Sir Thomas Roe gained from Mughal emperor Jahangir the right to establish a ‘factory’ in what is present-day Gujarat‡ Surat nevertheless suffered from the insecurity that attended all European trading ports in India. The Dutch had arrived in India many years before the English, and the Portuguese long before that. More recently the French had established an interest. The hereditary rulers often quarrelled with the Europeans over land and trading concessions, sometimes favouring one country over another.
The climate also took its toll. Situated twenty-one degrees north of the equator, Surat had a tropical climate that was difficult for Europeans. For eight months of the year the temperature rose to above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there, sometimes hitting as much as no degrees or more. The monsoon lasted at least three of the hottest months, and the rest of die year remained hotter than any English summer. The climate was relieved only by occasional cooling breezes from the Arabian Sea.
So why did men like Fryer go? The answer was either the lure of the East or the hope of wealth. In Fryers case, it was the former, for his company doctor’s pay was never going to make him rich. While some who served with the EIC as senior merchants were able to return home with fortunes, most made it back, if at all, with little.
To begin with, Surat had been important to the EIC as a staging post on the spice run to Java. At its height, the city had a population of several hundred thousand and boasted the presence of the man said to be the world’s richest merchant, Virji Vohra.5 Vohra had become rich thanks to monopolistic trading and money lending, first within India’s well-established proto-capitalist economy and later with Europeans. He was flexible, adapting his methods and spheres of business to the changing needs of local and European trade. He lent money to both the EIC and the Dutch East India Company at rates of between 1 and 1.5 per cent per month. According to EIC factory records, he regularly lent very large sums, often to English officials acting on their own behalf, in breach of company rules.6
Vohra controlled a trading network made up of a large, extended family, plus a web of associated merch
ants reaching from the Persian Gulf, across India to Hyderabad in the centre, down to the Coromandel Coast in the south-east, and as far as the Spice Islands of Indonesia. He specialised in buying up entire supplies of commodities and selling them on at inflated prices. Hence, he bought all the pepper brought into Surat by the Dutch from the Far East and sold it on to the English at a considerable profit. When EIC factors tried to buy pepper from other sources, Vohra’s contacts enabled him to find out about their plans and swipe the pepper from under their noses.7 It is hard not to believe that more than one EIC official might have seen a grim irony in the fact that one monopolistic entity forced another to trade at inflated prices. However, when the expensive pepper reached London it could still make a good return for EIC investors when sold on to other European countries without maritime trading systems of their own.
Vohra and his associates traded in anything from gold to opium, silk, spices and coral. He bought or exchanged lead, broadcloth, tin and copper imported by the EIC, selling in return the eastern commodities European consumers craved. London merchants travelling across India soon became aware that a sophisticated banking system was in operation, far in advance of anything London had to offer, with transferable loans available across the continent. In this way, a merchant like Vohra could buy in one region on locally arranged credit, sell on in another, buy again in a third with the credit passed on to another local banker, and so on until the merchant chose to bring the chain to an end and settle up.
The world Fryer had sailed into might not have had a climate suitable for Europeans, but it was one of power and wealth Londoners could only marvel at. The rulers of India ran empires of enormous mercantile wealth, trading goods in quantities and at values London could never match. To English eyes it must have seemed like a veritable paradise of luxury and capitalism. The effect on EIC officials of coming into contact with such a powerful and wealthy Indian merchant class does not have to be imagined: as we have seen, temptation among officials to grow rich by taking part in unofficial personal trading was often too much to bear.
When Fryer arrived at Surat, he discovered the port’s EIC trade beginning to decline. The reason was that the company had recently opened up a trading post further down the coast at Bombay, ceded to the English as part of Queen Catherine’s dowry and given by the King to the EIC at a rent of £10 a year. The Portuguese had cheated Charles over the dowry, failing to fulfil all its terms. But Bombay would prove to be the unexpected jewel in the English colonial crown, becoming the most important EIC outpost in India. Thanks to its topographical spread over several islands, Bombay offered a secure harbour and a base secure from land attack. In time, Bombay would replace Surat as the centre of EIC activities in India, controlling the company’s far-reaching network of factories and staging posts.‡
The EIC’s extensive business in the subcontinent required a huge logistical effort. The company had its own locally based warships and garrisons in order to protect its shipping, warehouses and quaysides from pirates and foreign interventions. The enterprise was enormous – thousands were indirectly employed – and it was all controlled from the company’s headquarters in the Elizabethan mansion on Leadenhall Street with a Jolly Jack ‘far bestriding its rooftop.
*
While the English and Dutch vied for supremacy in the East, the war between them continued in the North Sea. What finally caused a dramatic turn of events was the power of the press. A Dutch propagandist used the might of the country’s printing industry (the biggest in the world) to shower London with leaflets claiming that Charles’s alliance with the French was part of a greater plan to make Britain into a Roman Catholic state. It was an unwitting bull’s-eye. Opinion turned violently against the war.
As if to defy his critics, Charles conferred the titles of Baroness Petersfield, Countess Fareham and Duchess of Portsmouth on his French mistress Louise de Kérouaille. Previously, Louise had preferred to express her independence by being painted by the court painter to Louis XIV, Pierre Mignard; now’ Peter Lely, who by this time had established himself as the leading court painter, was commissioned to paint her. Various dates between 1671 and 1674 have been suggested for this portrait. By its composition and colouring it renders Louise as a duchess, formally seated in a classical landscape, wearing a loose-fitting antique gown of palest blue-grey silk. The tone of the portrait, together with the fact it is by Lely at all, leads one to conjecture that it was painted to mark Louise’s elevation to several English titles. The portrait’s cool tones and restrained style made a bold departure from the painter’s usually overblown style of depicting women at court as languid, doe-eyed beauties in colourful gowars and elaborate hairdos. It marked a special moment for both sitter and painter, and also for the King, who was showing his disdain for those who questioned the real values and allegiances of the House of Stuart.
A month after Louise’s elevation, on 20 September 1673, James, Duke of York, married Mary of Modena, a Catholic Italian princess chosen by Charles. A new Test Act passed through Parliament, making it obligatory for all public servants to take the Anglican Eucharist and declare an abhorrence of the doctrine of transubstantiation. James refused, resigned from his position as Lord High Admiral, and was thereby publicly outed as a Catholic.
The reliably unreliable Duke of Buckingham, who was privy to the secret Anglo-French treaty made three years before, now blabbed about it to various members of the cabinet. The Earl of Shaftesbury was so shocked he began to ponder how England might be ruled by anyone except a member of the House of Stuart. By late 1673, with no support at home, it was clear to Charles that he had to terminate the war. Parliament forced Charles to make peace in a humiliating climbdown. The King’s secret foreign policy was in tatters; so too was his relationship with London’s financial powerhouse. When the peace treaty was signed there was public jubilation in London.
It took time for the city’s financiers to recover from the default of the Exchequer. When they did, men like Sir John Banks took to lending solely on commercial ventures rather than to the Crown. Charles had to look elsewhere for funding. By now he had promoted the immensely capable Thomas Osborne to the post of Lord Treasurer, a position to which the cold and calculating Osborne was well suited. He immediately set about modernising the nation’s finances.
The man who had taken it upon himself to carry out one of the most urgent and difficult tasks facing the Crown – and therefore the City of London – was far from a copybook hero. Even Osborne’s friends found his character unappealing. John Evelyn, who had known him since they were young men travelling on the continent, described him as haughty. Osborne was criticised for being personally grasping, an attribute born of his lack of inherited money allied to the huge expenditure entailed in clawing his way to the top. On his way up the political ladder he ran up a debt of £10,000 and faced bankruptcy. He was seen as insincere and cunning, leading to Lord Shaftesbury’s waspish remark that he had the qualities of a courtier.
Shaftesbury was correct. When introduced to the court by his friend and neighbour George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, Osborne had taken to court life with relish, seeing London’s political milieu as his gateway to power. Buckingham had wasted no time in showing Osborne the backbiting ways of politics. Together they had attacked Lord Clarendon and helped hasten his downfall following the disastrous second war with the Dutch,
Osborne’s greatest strength was that he perceived his own future as connected to his ability to solve problems for the state. Largely thanks to Buckingham, he was appointed joint Treasurer to the Navy. His ambitions did not end there. He saw clearly that several national issues needed to be addressed: costs cut, the war ended, military pay redirected to settle debts, farming of customs reorganised so that more revenue would actually reach the Exchequer. Charles was lucky to have him. Osborne’s efficiency earned him not only his appointment as Lord Treasurer but his elevation to the peerage, as Earl of Danby.
Osborne had an unlikely ally in his radical views
, particularly regarding how to balance the national books. Slingsby Bethel was a disgruntled Commonwealth man grown wealthy as a merchant in Hamburg. As a sideline, having retired to London, Bethel wrote pamphlets on the country’s ills as he saw them. His was the voice of London dissenters, longing to be recognised and given equal status. Bethel saw clearly that London’s power lay in overseas trade, which he argued was impeded by a trade war with the Dutch. Bethel believed in free trade, a notion, at least in theory, supported by the Dutch themselves.
In The Principal Interest of England Stated, Bethel set out his blueprint for the ideal country. The King should be the champion of Protestantism, granting freedom to all dissenters so that they could use their natural propensity for hard work to enrich the nation, and should forge an alliance with the country’s natural Protestant ally, Holland, supporting Protestantism against the ambitions of Louis XIV. Taxes should be kept low to encourage growth in trade. Finally, banks should be set up and the power of monopolies limited. Taking more than a few leaves out of the book according to the Dutch, Bethel’s plan was in most ways admirable.8
Charles listened to many of Danby’s proposals without acting. While Danby saw France as the enemy, Charles was all for negotiating more money from his secret benefactor, Louis.
Fortunately, thanks to Danby’s modernisation of the Exchequer, tax revenue did improve – aided, paradoxically, by Charles’s secret money from France. Danby knew about the secret deal and disapproved in principle, but understood it was necessary all the same. He negotiated a new agreement with the bankers ruined in the Great Stop.