New World, Inc.

by John Butman

  Called into action after Kett’s unlikely victory, Dudley assembled a much larger force than William Parr had put together. With six thousand foot soldiers and fifteen hundred cavalry—including fourteen hundred mercenary soldiers from Germany and Italy—he rode toward Norwich. As he approached Kett’s encampment, he stopped for the night at the home of Thomas Gresham, whose family estate, Intwood Hall, lay just three miles south of Norwich.27

  The next morning, Dudley set out to engage the Mousehold rebels. But before he unleashed his forces, he sent two emissaries into the rebel camp in an attempt to persuade Kett to surrender and offer them leniency if they did so.28 It was a notable display of compassion that seems out of character for a commander sent out to quash an act he saw as rebellion. His efforts failed, however. Kett distrusted Dudley and his promises and refused to back down.

  Given Kett’s unbending response, Dudley had little choice but to order an attack by his royal force. The result was mass slaughter. Kett’s ragtag army was no match for Dudley’s mercenary soldiers. In a single August day, some thirty-five hundred rebels were killed at a place called Dussin’s Dale.29 Kett, seeing that the cause was lost, fled. When his followers saw him abandoning the battlefield, they too lost heart, and at last surrendered.

  The next morning, most of the leaders were rounded up and hanged. In the following weeks, Dudley presided over court proceedings, after which many more of the Mousehold rebels were executed, some in gruesome fashion: “first their privy parts are cut off, then their bowels pulled out alive, and cast into the fire, then their head is cut off, and their body quartered: the head set upon a pole, and fixed on the tops of the Towers of the City, the rest of the body bestowed upon several places, and set up to the terror of others.”30 Eventually, Kett himself was captured, tried, found guilty, and hanged in chains from the top of Norwich Castle.31

  The punishment meted out to the rebels did not satisfy some of the local gentry, who demanded even greater action. Dudley retorted, “There must be measure kept,” even in punishment. Was there, he pleaded, no place for “humble petition” or even “pardon and mercie?”32 His apparent sympathy may be telling, but he would have known the potential danger that Kett’s rebellion posed to the kingdom. Uprisings were taking place across the country—in neighboring Suffolk, as well as in Cornwall and Devon. The motives varied and overlapped—sheep and enclosures, taxes and subsidies, new religious strictures, laws concerning vagrancy and treason. But at their heart there was a continuing and growing disgust with the avarice of the nobility and gentry, the 2 percent who governed the 98 percent of yeomen and husbandmen, artisans and apprentices.33

  KETT’S REBELLION SHOOK England to its foundations. Some feared that the country might even descend into civil war. In the febrile atmosphere at court, Seymour started to lose the confidence of the Privy Council, and Dudley, the hero of the hour, emerged as the most powerful royal adviser. It helped that he had not fully disbanded his fighting force and, within a couple of months of suppressing Kett’s rebellion, he staged a coup d’état, arresting Seymour, becoming the effective regent, and assuming the title of Lord President.

  In his new role, Dudley’s tasks were nothing less than to restore confidence in Edward’s reign, rescue England from economic calamity, and resolve the damaging social divisions that were being exposed by land enclosure. His job was made immeasurably harder with an abrupt and seemingly catastrophic collapse in demand for cloth from mainland Europe. In 1550, as he took over from Seymour, the cloth trade was buoyant, and total exports numbered 132,767 cloths, as lengths of fabric were called. But in 1551 this slumped to 112,710 cloths, falling to 84,968 the following year.34 At a time when the monarchy was already heavily in debt, the decline in demand seemed to rule out any hope that royal loans could be paid back with customs revenue from the cloth trade. As one merchant reflected, some years later, England’s economy was “waxing cold and in decay.”35

  The situation was made worse by another development. In 1549, as Smith wrote his Discourse, Antwerp collapsed as a center for Europe’s spice trade. For fifty years, Portuguese merchants had used the Flemish port as its staple, trading spices there for German silver. But now the king of Portugal, João III, had decided that, with sufficient silver pouring into Lisbon from Spanish silver mines in America, he did not need to trade in Antwerp.36 This disruption left English merchants facing a double hit: the decline of their export business in cloth and the loss of their import business in spices and associated luxuries from Asia.

  To help sort out this complex crisis, Dudley called on a number of friends and associates to advise him. These included the merchant Thomas Gresham as well as several scholars, many associated with Cambridge University, including Thomas Smith, Richard Eden, Clement Adams, John Dee, and Ralph Robinson, most of whom were in their late twenties and early thirties. But even with this talented group of advisers, it is doubtful that Dudley would have made much progress without the active involvement and influence of a government administrator of genius, William Cecil, Dudley’s right-hand man and, officially, Secretary of State.

  Like Gresham and Smith, Cecil also grew up with the sights and sounds of the sheep, wool, and cloth business. Born in 1520, the son of a minor royal servant and local landowner, he was raised in Stamford, a market town in Lincolnshire, one of the centers of the cloth industry: as early as the thirteenth century, merchants from Venice and Lucca were travelling to Stamford to buy scarlet and halberget, a richly textured cloth.37 After attending local schools, Cecil went to St. John’s College in Cambridge, founded by Edward VI’s great-grandmother. There, from the age of fourteen, he was taught by Thomas Smith and John Cheke, a renowned Greek scholar. Young Cecil was among the first generation to follow the “new learning” introduced to Cambridge by the Renaissance scholar Desiderus Erasmus. This promoted Greek as a way of accessing the rediscovered writings of philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, Ptolemy, and Euclid—and, as a result, new subjects such as astronomy, arithmetic, and cosmology.38

  At the age of nineteen, Cecil advanced to Gray’s Inn, the grandest of the four Inns of Court, situated beyond London’s old Roman wall. Today, Gray’s Inn is one of the professional associations where barristers have their chambers and practice as advocates in the nearby law courts. But in Cecil’s day, it was seen as a kind of finishing school for young aristocrats who needed to understand enough about legal documents to manage their estates or for future royal administrators who would be involved in keeping the statute books. There, in an atmosphere very different from the cloistered world of Cambridge, Cecil was able to connect with leading figures at court and in commerce.

  He soon followed Smith into royal service, almost certainly through the good offices of John Cheke, whose sister he had married and who had left Cambridge to tutor Edward VI. Initially, he served Edward Seymour, and he was briefly imprisoned when Dudley made his move for power. Unlike Smith, however, who lost his place at court, Cecil, displaying the remarkable political dexterity that would become his trademark, managed to extricate himself from the Tower of London and quickly secured Smith’s old job as Secretary of State.

  Now, as Cecil pondered how best to advise Dudley and address England’s crisis, he may well have considered the ideas of his former tutor. Although Thomas Smith did not publish his Discourse in the summer of 1549, he did share it with Cecil. Knowing how potentially explosive his views were, he had urged Cecil not to distribute the treatise. Keep it “between us two,” he pleaded.39

  Nevertheless, Cecil may well have promoted some of Smith’s recommendations. And, as it turned out, there were others in this constellation of merchants, intellectuals, courtiers, and government officials who shared Smith’s perspective—notably the thirty-three-year-old businessman Thomas Gresham. He was invited to appear before the king and Privy Council to offer his opinion about the most effective way—with the “least charge”—that his majesty might “grow out of debt.”40 As he later recalled, he argued persuasively that a progra
m of reforms was needed.41

  This program, which included a revaluation of the coinage that Dudley soon put into effect, featured an initiative to give English merchants greater control over English exports by reducing the influence of the powerful German merchants then resident in London. Ever since the 1470s, merchants from Lubeck, Danzig, and other market towns on the Baltic—which formed a commercial confederation known as the Hanseatic League—had enjoyed significant trading privileges in England, thanks to their usefulness in supplying the royal navy with timber, hemp, and other essentials. By the late 1540s, they were handling around 35 percent of England’s cloth exports.42 This, according to Gresham, was a key cause of the cloth crisis, “the chiefest point of the undoing” of the realm. Gresham urged Dudley “to overthrow the Steelyard,” the enclave on the banks of the Thames where the Hanse merchants were headquartered—and Dudley did precisely that. In February 1552, the foreign merchants’ privileges were withdrawn, and as a result England’s merchants managed to capture a greater share of the country’s cloth trade.43

  With these measures, Dudley was able to address some of the causes of England’s economic crisis. Yet many of England’s political, intellectual, and business leaders felt strongly that something more—and something different—needed to be done to prevent England from falling into decay once again. As Clement Adams, one of Cecil’s coterie of Cambridge-educated protégés, put it, many people “perceived” there was not sufficient demand for “the commodities and wares of England” from people in the countries nearest to them.44

  The situation had to be remedied. But how?

  2

  THE LURE OF CATHAY

  IN THE DARK months toward the end of 1551, as England’s economic malaise worsened, a number of London’s “grave” citizens—the word signifying their gravitas, although it might have signified their mood, too—came together to discuss ways to remedy what they called the “mischief” of England’s decay.1

  The “great furtherer” of the endeavor—its mastermind, principal architect, and the convener of the group—was the aristocrat and vanquisher at Dussin’s Dale, John Dudley, who now bore the title Duke of Northumberland.2 Two prominent merchants worked with Dudley as leaders, or “principal doers,” as John Stow, the contemporary chronicler, described them: George Barne and William Garrard. Both were members of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers. Barne, in his early fifties, was being talked about as a candidate for Lord Mayor, a position he soon achieved. William Garrard, ten years younger, was described by Stow as “a grave, sober, wise and discreet citizen, equal with the best, and inferior to none of our time.”3 Another key participant in the discussions was Sir Andrew Judde, a member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners.4 About to turn sixty, he had just stepped down from an exhausting year as Lord Mayor, during which he had dealt with some big issues, including the slump in cloth exports, rising prices, and the sweating sickness.

  William Cecil may or may not have attended the discussions among the members of the group, which were referred to as “sit-togethers,” but he was almost certainly responsible for bringing forward a timely piece of intellectual analysis for the group to consider: the first English translation of the book Utopia, by Sir Thomas More. A work of brilliant literary invention, the little volume, first published thirty-five years earlier, had originally been written in Latin. The new English version was translated by Ralph Robinson, who dedicated it to Cecil, one of his old school friends. By allowing his name to be associated with this literary endeavor, Cecil seems to have been endorsing the case that fresh thinking and radically new approaches were needed to rescue England.

  Utopia tells the story of a fictional traveler, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who lived for five years on an imaginary island called Utopia—More’s neologism combining the Greek words for “no” and “place.” Although Hythlodaeus is a made-up character, More provides him with a plausible, real-life backstory: he claimed to have voyaged with Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine explorer, who sailed along the coast of Brazil and South America at the turn of the sixteenth century.

  Raphael has much to say about the sorry state of affairs in England. He portrays it as a dystopian place: dominated by a parasitic noble class who “live idle” lives, and who rely on that which “others have labored for,” it is a country troubled by rising prices, overrun with sheep, and blighted by the practice of land enclosure. “Your sheep that were wont to be so weak and tame…” says Raphael, “now, as I hear say, become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.” He continues: “They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities.”5

  More then goes on to describe, through Raphael’s narrative, a land where these social and political problems have been solved: an ideal place called Utopia. It is, in effect, a new England. More was the first Englishman to envision—in print, at least—the enormous potential that the New World held for remaking society.

  More’s vision, when first published in 1516, may even have been compelling enough to have inspired England’s earliest attempt at overseas colonization. The initiative was organized and led by his brother-in-law, John Rastell, a lawyer, author, and printer. In 1517, Rastell embarked with forty soldiers on a voyage to establish a trading post and military camp somewhere in the “New Found Lands,” as the New World was typically called in England.6 Rastell got no farther than Ireland before his crew mutinied, but he did write a play about the expedition, called A New Interlude, and lamented a missed opportunity. “O what a thing” it would have been, he wrote, if “they that be Englishmen” had been the first to “take possession” and make “the first building and habitation” in the New World.7

  The publication of the English translation of Utopia in 1551 seems to have been intended to exert a similar catalyzing influence on the grave citizens as they pondered solutions to England’s crisis. To ensure the long-term future of the cloth industry, perhaps they would have to go looking for new markets with new customers beyond the familiar European centers. If so, the next question was where? Where would they find the new markets and new customers they desired?

  The ideal place, they determined, would be Cathay.

  TO LONDON’S MERCHANTS, “Cathay”—which comes from “Khitai,” for the land of the Khitans, who held sway in northern China in the tenth century—was shorthand for all that was wondrous: a commercial utopia. Other parts of Asia had their allure: pepper came from India’s southwestern coast, cloves and nutmeg from a handful of Indonesian “spice islands.” But it was Cathay, dreamy and far-off, that inspired the greatest awe.

  Nearly three hundred years earlier, Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant, had traveled to Cathay. He spent more than twenty years in the court of its ruler, Kublai Khan, and then brought back his stories of the kingdom’s magnificence. In his Travels, Polo reported that the Great Khan’s territories overflowed with spices, silver, and silk. One vast city, known as Quinsay, or “the City of Heaven,” stretched out over a hundred miles, contained 12,000 bridges, and included a lake thirty miles wide, in the middle of which stood two royal palaces.8 To many Venetians, Polo’s stories were scarcely credible. Indeed, the sheer number of people and places he described defied belief—to the extent that he was mocked as Marco “The Millions” Polo.

  Yet much of what he had to say about China was accurate, and by the 1500s the information Polo had gathered was accepted far and wide, as if nothing had changed and as if “the Great Khan” still ruled the country. But Kublai Khan was long dead. A new dynasty, the Ming, was in power. For a while, under their leadership, Chinese culture had blossomed. In a series of remarkable voyages of discovery in the early fifteenth century, a eunuch admiral, Zheng He, took his fleet of giant ocean-going treasure ships—four hundred feet long, with nine masts, nearly one hundred support vessels, and a crew of 28,000 sailors—to the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa.9 But these expeditions were abruptly halted in the 1430s when China turned inward, shunning the outsid
e world. It remained the richest country on earth, however, with an extraordinary gravitational pull on the global economy. By 1500, China accounted for 25 percent of the world’s output of goods and services. England, by contrast, accounted for just 1.1 percent.10

  Through the fifteenth century, a tangled web of trade routes connected Cathay to Europe, stretching five thousand miles across oceans, mountains, steppes, and deserts. Along these routes—which the German explorer Baron von Richtofen labeled the “Silk Road” in the 1870s—all manner of luxury goods were carried by ship, camel, and horse.11 By the time they reached Europe, their price could have risen by as much as 1000 percent, having been handled by many middlemen—factors, traders, government officials—who charged fees, exacted their portion, skimmed a percentage, imposed taxes and duties, and demanded bribes.12

  For centuries, it was the Venetians who were the primary importers of Chinese, Indian, and other Asian goods into Europe, collecting them from Arab merchants who had overseen their transportation to the key markets of the eastern Mediterranean—Alexandria in Egypt and Aleppo in what is now Syria. It was a highly profitable business, not least because the Venetians held an effective monopoly. And it was partly to break this Venetian stranglehold on the spice trade that the Portuguese launched a succession of voyages in search of a faster, cheaper trade route to the East. In 1498, after nearly a century of exploration, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the southern tip of Africa—the Cape of Good Hope—sailed into the Indian Ocean, and reached Calicut, on India’s Malabar coast. This port was the great trading center of the East, a fabulous emporium, every bit the equal of Venice and Antwerp, where Indian, Arab, and Chinese merchants came to trade.