New World, Inc.

by John Butman

  By the mid-1500s, almost everyone in England was involved with, benefited from, or was affected by England’s dominant industry. In a speech before Parliament, Sir Edward Coke, one of England’s most prominent judges, later remarked that if one were to “divide our native commodities into ten parts… nine arise from the sheep’s back.”6

  Many of England’s leading families built their livelihoods, fortunes, estates, and, in the long run, their legacies, on the cloth trade. One prosperous merchant etched an encomium in a window of his home:

  I praise God and ever shall…

  It is the sheep hath paid for all!7

  AMONG THE MOST successful of these families were the Greshams, who originally hailed from Norfolk on England’s blustery North Sea coast and who initially prospered as purveyors of hats made from worsted, the cloth named after the local village of Worstead. Then, in the first half of the 1500s, three Gresham brothers—William, Richard, and John—rose to become prominent members of the Worshipful Company of Mercers, the most powerful guild of merchants. They specialized in the import of textiles: linen, fustian, and, above all, silk.8

  Over time, the Gresham brothers gained renown across Europe—trading with the Low Countries, Spain, and the Levant—and they came to exert an extraordinary influence over the commercial fortunes of London and, indeed, of England.* At various times, they served as masters or wardens of the Mercers. Also, William became governor—chief executive—of the Merchant Adventurers, while Richard and John each served as Lord Mayor of London. The mayoralty was the pinnacle of achievement for any London merchant. As one contemporary noted, there is “no public officer of any city in Europe that may compare in port and countenance” with the Lord Mayor of London.9 Both brothers were knighted for their service as mayor.

  The Greshams’ success, built on their unquestioned business acumen, was greatly aided by the growing dominance of London as England’s commercial capital. In the early years of the sixteenth century, London had been rivaled in commercial importance by several “outports,” commercial and trading centers on England’s south, southwest, and northeast coasts, including Bristol, Hull, Newcastle, Plymouth, and Southampton. But as the export of unfinished cloth grew, London’s relative proximity and easy access to Antwerp, the staple, or primary trading center, for England’s unfinished cloth, gave the city and its merchants, including the Greshams, an advantage over the outports.

  Antwerp was northern Europe’s greatest entrepôt—a hub for the trading of goods from around the world. Situated near the mouth of the Scheldt river, which rises in France and flows through what is now Belgium and into the North Sea, Antwerp was ideally located to serve as a commercial thoroughfare for the transport and trade of goods throughout Europe. As a nineteenth-century historian wrote, “It was no uncommon sight to see two or three thousand vessels at one time in the Scheldt, laden with merchandise from every quarter of the globe.”10 Here, German merchants traded silver and copper from the mines of central Europe, Venetian merchants displayed silks from the Levant and beyond, and Portuguese merchants, fast displacing Venetians as carriers of luxury goods from the East, arrayed their spices. The Greshams and other ambitious English merchants brought their unfinished cloth to market in Antwerp, exchanging it for the luxury products prized by England’s wealthiest citizens.

  A cosmopolitan metropolis of some 100,000 inhabitants—including William Gresham, who resided in the English community there—the city was a melting pot of cultures and a gabble of languages. While out and about in Antwerp, noted one observer, it was not unusual to meet “a lady who could converse in five, six, or even seven different languages.”11 With so many merchants conducting business and with so much money flowing in and out of the city, Antwerp soon became the financial capital of Europe—and its richest city. Emperors and kings came from across the continent to raise their loans and discharge their debts. Merchants, flush with cash, became bankers. Germans, such as the Fuggers, were preeminent among these, tapping into their networks of merchant-factors with capital to invest and offering a variety of financial mechanisms such as bills of exchange to manage and maintain their accounts. Some English merchants—the Greshams, in particular—became bankers, too.

  In the 1540s, when London’s trade with Antwerp was booming, Thomas Gresham, Richard’s son, emerged as the leader of the next generation. In a portrait dated 1544, when he was twenty-six years old, newly married, and recently admitted to the Worshipful Company of Mercers, Thomas poses in an unadorned black coat with white collar and sleeves, his face characterized by a regal nose, eyes of great clarity, and a modest ginger-colored beard. The impression is of a person both equable and resolute, poised to spend his life—as Greshams before him had—in service to his crown and country.

  But even as the Greshams prospered, it was becoming clear that not everyone was benefiting from England’s trade boom. A few who had the foresight to look deeply into the matter could see that, on the contrary, England was on the cusp of a great crisis: the cloth trade was faltering, the English presence in Antwerp was threatened, the crown was mired in debt, people were homeless and unemployed, towns were ravaged, and disease raged.

  One of the most perceptive analysts of the English situation was a very different sort of character than any of the Greshams—a courtier, a former Cambridge professor, a man with no commercial interests: the brilliant intellectual Sir Thomas Smith.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1549, Smith, one of England’s two secretaries of state and a member of King Edward’s Privy Council—essentially his cabinet of chief ministers and closest advisers—escaped London and the burdens of court. He repaired to Eton College, where he served as provost, a position that brought him an additional salary and the advantage of a fine country retreat. Eton was, and still is, one of England’s grandest secondary schools. It is situated some twenty miles west of London, on the banks of the Thames and within sight of Windsor Castle, the mightiest of the royal residences.

  Smith was deeply concerned about what he called “the miserable estate, our commonwealth.” He had tried assiduously to explain his reasoning and make the case for reforms to Edward Seymour, who was the uncle of the boy-king Edward VI and wielded great state power as effectively regent with the grand title of Lord Protector.12 But Smith had been ignored by Seymour and, feeling aggrieved, retired from court to spend some time at Eton. Over the course of the long summer months, Smith tried to get the frustration out of his system by putting his ideas down in writing. The resulting work, A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, is now considered one of the most powerful social and economic tracts of the sixteenth century.

  Like the Gresham family, the Smith family was rooted in the cloth industry. They were not cloth merchants, however, but sheep farmers, based in Walden in the county of Essex, fifty miles northeast of London. But Thomas was not destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Showing early prowess as a scholar, he won a place at Queens’ College in Cambridge at the age of thirteen. At first, he struggled financially, and came near to abandoning his studies. In the end, however, he persisted, achieved distinction, and, by the age of thirty, he had become not only the first Regius Professor of Civil Law but also the vice-chancellor of the university. But this, it seems, was not enough for him. In February 1547, at the age of thirty-three, Smith relinquished a university career and accepted an invitation to enter Seymour’s service. A little over a year later, he was named Secretary of State.13 It was a meteoric rise.

  Smith’s Discourse manifested his deep understanding of England’s travails and expressed his urgent desire to overcome them. The book is written as a dialogue, a popular literary device of the day, in which a husbandman (farmer), a knight, a merchant, a capper (artisan), and, most prominently, a doctor—who clearly speaks for Smith—engage in an extended debate on what ails England. Smith begins by enumerating England’s many ills, the most alarming of which, according to the doctor, is the matter of wealth disparity. Although rich landowners, with their
large flocks of sheep, and successful cloth merchants such as the Gresham family were making large profits, not everyone in England was prospering in the boom times.

  “Poverty reigns everywhere,” Smith declared.

  One of the root causes of the problem, he wrote, was inflation. Indeed, prices had risen by 50 percent in the first four decades of the sixteenth century, and they continued to rise, especially on goods that were scarce in the realm and were often imported—notably silk, wine, spices, paper, and glass of all kinds. “Every man finds himself grieved” by the rising prices, he wrote.14

  Smith blamed the inflationary spiral on Henry VIII, who spent recklessly on foreign wars and an extravagant lifestyle and plunged the crown into debt. When Henry could no longer raise sufficient money from taxes, loans, and the sale of monastic land, he turned to financial chicanery: currency manipulation. This involved debasing the coinage by reducing the amount of silver in every coin. Although the crown could spend less on silver, the value of the coins plunged and prices were driven even higher. This was a disaster for everyone. In his Discourse, Smith called for an end to this abuse.

  Also, Smith identified another factor that he saw as deleterious to the realm: the practice of “land enclosure.” England’s open lands—the island was a rural patchwork of vast fields and manorial estates—had long done double duty. Generally, arable land was tilled by one owner or tenant, but after the harvest or during an off-season, it was available to everyone and was typically employed for the grazing of sheep.15

  For landowners who sought relief from the damaging effects of inflation, the temptation was to convert some or all of their arable land into pasture for their own animals to graze exclusively. This involved enclosing their fields with wooden fences, rows of stones and mounds of earth, or hedges—and thereby removing them from common use. Such enclosure made good economic sense for the landowners. Wool for cloth was in high demand, and the cost of grazing sheep was considerably less than the cost of growing grain or corn. Thomas Tusser, an old Etonian Norfolk farmer, reckoned that enclosure made land three times more profitable than when it was made available to everyone.16 But the effects on local communities could be disastrous. Smith noted that a plot of land that once employed one or two hundred people would, after enclosure, serve only the owner and a few shepherds.17 Without employment—or even land to grow food or graze small flocks—entire villages were abandoned.

  The practice of enclosure was not new. In the fourteenth century, England, like much of Europe, was devastated by the Black Death—an epidemic of bubonic plague that obliterated nearly half the population.18 With so few laborers available to farm the land, landowners were forced to enclose their property and turn it into pasture for sheep and other animals.

  Of course, some unscrupulous landowners took advantage—even as the population started to rise again—and over the years, the crown had sought to curb the most flagrant abuses: two acts of Parliament, in 1489 and 1515, were introduced to limit or regulate the practice of land enclosure, but they had little effect. By the 1540s, when the practice spiked, the Privy Council, led by Edward Seymour, made another attempt to tackle the problem, issuing a royal proclamation that condemned the “unlawful converting of arable land to pastures.” A commission for the “redress of enclosures” was established and charged with conducting an inquiry into those who had been transgressors or violators of the anti-enclosure statutes already on the books.

  But government intervention had failed before, and as Smith wrote in his Discourse, there was little reason to think that it would work now, particularly as it was the avarice of landowners that underlay the recent practice and this seemed unlikely to change. And so, unless they could find a way to solve the problem, the king and his court could expect to face mounting social unrest. It was no surprise, Smith wrote, that given “hunger is a bitter thing to bear,” the impoverished majority “murmur against them that have plenty.”19

  His observation was prescient. As he penned these words, the country was on the brink of rebellion. About 150 miles away, in the Gresham family’s home county of Norfolk, and just north of Smith’s own home county of Essex, the people were preparing to do a great deal more than just murmur about their discontent.

  IN THE FIRST week of July 1549, a crowd of villagers gathered at the local chapel of the village of Wymondham to attend a pageant, an all-day festival of “processions and interludes.”20 Emotions ran high because the beloved building was scheduled for demolition as part of Edward’s dissolution of church properties—a euphemism for smashing and looting—begun by his father, Henry VIII. In 1534, the king had proclaimed himself supreme leader of the church of England, broken from the Pope and the Catholic Church in Rome, and soon set about stripping ancient monasteries of their treasure, lands, and influence. Between 1538 and 1540, more than two hundred monastic buildings—housing more than 8,000 monks, nuns, and canons (a clergyman or clerk)—were suppressed, their riches seized by the crown and their property sold to raise cash.21

  Wymondham’s churchgoers dearly wished to save the chapel, but their ability to do so against the decree of the king seemed doubtful, if not impossible. As the festival played on, a group of townspeople banded together and marched to nearby Morley, where they began “throwing down” fences erected by landowners there. The fences—and the sheep they enclosed—were, if nothing else, a symbol of the favor shown to the wealthy men who grazed the sheep and whose interests were placed above those of the majority of the local and larger population.

  Throwing down the enclosures at Morley did not fully quell the anger of the Wymondham people, and it discontented others. One of these, a significant landowner called Sir John Flowerdew—a lawyer, whose son was a close friend of Thomas Gresham and who lived in the nearby village of Hethersett—was angry that some of his fences had been removed. Seeking a twisted kind of revenge, he offered money to anyone who would be willing to have a go at the enclosures of another local landowner, a man named Robert Kett.22

  A band of about six men took Flowerdew up on his offer. It is unlikely, however, that they saw Kett as the enemy: he was a local citizen, an ardent supporter of the church, and a tanner by trade. Although a man of rising prosperity, holding property worth about £670, he was no grand figure.23 So, before dismantling his enclosures, the men entreated Kett to return the land to public use. They spoke, they assured him, not just on their own account, or for Flowerdew, but for the “weal of the Commonalty.”

  Kett made no attempt to turn them away or defend his enclosures. He did not even defend his right to have them. Instead, he declared his sympathy with the protestors, revealing that “he felt deeply their own misery.” The “nobility and gentry,” he said, possessed a “power so excessive, avarice so great, and cruelty of every kind so unheard of” that it had to be restrained.

  As if to convince the protestors, Kett marched with them into his field, helped remove his enclosures, and then participated in throwing down those in the fields of other landowners in the county. In doing so, he quickly emerged as the rebels’ leader. As word of the action spread, the handful of Wymondham men grew into a watershed of protestors, at first trickling and then cascading across the fields and pastures and woodlands of Norfolk, destroying hedges and ransacking villages as they went, until they pooled into a great, raging body—estimated to have reached 20,000 at its peak—on Mousehold Heath, an open area on the outskirts of Norwich, the capital of the county of Norfolk.

  From there, where they made camp and established a kind of headquarters, Kett’s rebels expanded their activities across large parts of Norfolk. Within days, the small Wymondham protest turned into a prolonged combination of revolt, crusade, campout, and riot. The rebels seized control of Norwich and scoured the countryside for food, slaughtering and devouring 20,000 sheep in the process. They captured members of the local gentry—the few who had not fled their estates—and held them hostage in the woods.

  While enclosures were a tangible symbol of the rebels
’ plight and an easy target for their anger and aggression, Kett and his men knew their removal alone would not restore the England they had once known. So, in their wooded haven at Mousehold Heath, they drew up a petition of twenty-two grievances to be presented to King Edward. It was a laundry list of complaints. One grievance directly addressed the issue of land enclosure, others railed against high and rising prices as well as exorbitant and unregulated rents, and yet others called for revisions to fishing rights, greater standardization of weights and measures used in trade, and questioned the duties of priests.

  The rebels made it clear that, despite their grievances, they were loyal supporters of the king, and their only goal was to achieve justice and, again, to “deliver the common-wealth.”24 But Edward Seymour, as regent to the boy-king, saw Kett’s action as a serious threat to the sovereignty of the king and the peace of the nation. He ordered William Parr, the Marquis of Northampton, to lead a royal force against the rebels. Extraordinarily, Kett’s men rebuffed the attack.25

  A second royal force was mounted. This time, Seymour, taking no chances, gave command to his long-standing friend and ally on the Privy Council, the dashing forty-five-year-old John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Dudley was typical of yet another class caught up in England’s crisis. Neither a merchant like Gresham nor an intellectual like Smith, Dudley was an aristocrat and a man of action who had won a fine reputation as, among other things, a tournament jouster. John’s father, Edmund, had been a close adviser of Henry VII but was executed on trumped-up charges of treason when Henry VIII acceded to the throne. Without a father, John was sent to be raised in the household of one of the king’s favorite soldier-courtiers, and he was quickly marked out for great things, receiving a knighthood at the age of nineteen after distinguishing himself on the battlefield against France. Seymour was knighted at about the same time, and the two became companions at arms. Over the next twenty years, Dudley emerged as one of Henry’s stalwart supporters, and benefited from gifts of land and offices. In 1543, he joined the Privy Council as Lord Admiral, responsible for England’s naval activities. After Henry’s death, he was granted the earldom of Warwick by Edward, and over the course of his reign, the boy-king came to think of the earl as a mentor—even a father figure.26