Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Nor were the Westons particularly wealthy. Their land ran to little more than two hundred acres, and they did not serve as JPs, one of the defining marks of a solid gentleman. Their hopes centered on Richard, who went to Oxford. Excelling in the law, he became a judge with a knighthood under Charles I, grew the estate, and built a new manor house. For the younger sons a less exalted future lay in store: there were six children, and that was too many.

  In England in the seventeenth century, the average member of the landed gentry fathered two male children from each of his two marriages, but the professions were much smaller than they later became, and no standing army existed to absorb surplus youths. Each year, genteel occupations such as the law, the Church, the government, and the navy recruited between them no more than five hundred new entrants. In time, demographic facts such as these encouraged men and women toward America, but for the Westons there was only one available option.

  Before Thomas Weston’s father, Ralph, died in 1605, he decided that Thomas and three of his brothers should become apprentices. This was the only way to maintain their status as gentlemen. To avoid working with their hands, they had to build a career in commerce, as an apprentice draper, haberdasher, or the like.9 The Westons sent Thomas to London to train under another Shrewsbury man, Rowland Heylin, a godly donor to good causes and a leading figure in the Company of Ironmongers.

  Jacobean London swarmed with apprentices, thirty thousand or so, and at the time of Ralph’s death they found their dramatic incarnation in Dick Whittington. It seems that the year 1605 was also the date of the earliest performance of The Legend of Whittington, telling the folk story of the provincial youth who walks to London with his loyal black cat. Dick becomes an apprentice, overcomes hardship, survives ill-treatment, and makes a fortune with the cat’s clever help in the West African trade. He marries the boss’s daughter and ends up as lord mayor three times over. Soon Dick was a household name, with a ballad version of the story set to music. Clearly the play spoke directly to the predicament of many young men, including Thomas Weston.

  It was becoming much harder to find a place as an apprentice, and still more difficult to make a success of what came later. Competition between gentry families bid up the “premium,” a fee paid up front to the master to whom the boy was apprenticed. It might come to as much as one hundred pounds, the price of twenty acres of land. Once accepted, an apprentice often lived a menial life, little better than an unpaid kitchen porter, with no guarantee of ultimate entry to his chosen trade. Less than half of London’s apprentices finished their training. This was the case with the Pilgrim Edward Winslow. Another boy from a minor gentry family in the West Midlands—the Winslows lived only forty miles from Rugeley—he was apprenticed at eighteen to a London printer. He quit after only five years of the customary seven and took off for Leiden, where the Pilgrims had work for a young man with his skills.

  Besides death, the most common reason for dropping out was brutally obvious: a lack of capital with which to start a business of one’s own. In his will, Ralph Weston stipulated that when his sons completed their apprenticeships, they should each receive one hundred pounds “for a stocke to set up with.” Far too small a sum, this would barely fund a shopkeeper in London. A Shrewsbury draper needed four times as much, and an overseas trader to Whittington’s Africa might require two thousand pounds. As for ironmongery, the business involved far more than selling odds and ends of hardware: Heylin and his like ran iron foundries, supplying shipyards and construction sites, but this was far beyond the capacity of Thomas Weston.10

  He finished his apprenticeship at the age of twenty-five, but it seems that he never bought or sold an iron rod for his own account: if he did, no evidence has been found for it. Instead, Weston took advantage of the so-called custom of London, which allowed a freeman of one company to do business in the trade of any other: this is why, for example, we find merchant taylors dealing in wine, and salters importing goatskins while skinners exported woolens. By 1612, Weston was doing the same, selling textiles to the French and the Dutch. For capital he had to rely on the flimsiest resources.

  London had nothing that remotely resembled even a Victorian bank, let alone a modern example. So men like Weston paid their way with private bills of exchange—postdated checks, or IOUs—which circulated like an unofficial currency, bought, sold, and swapped between merchants often hundreds of miles apart. If chains of packhorses linked Welsh hill farms to London, they had their counterpart in these loops of credit that wound back and forth from one city and town to another. Weston paid for Welsh cottons with a bill dated many months in the future. He hoped to redeem it when he sold the cloth in France or the Netherlands, either by shipping home goods that an English merchant wanted or by obtaining a bill from a Dutchman or a French trader, an IOU that Weston in turn could sell in London.

  This sounds complicated, and it was. If the economy grew, and everybody’s sales expanded, the multiplication of credit could carry on indefinitely. But if the economy faltered, even for a moment, and ready buyers failed to appear for English cloth or French wine or Dutch copper kettles, then credit would begin to vanish like sand down the throat of an hourglass. Since men gave personal guarantees for each other’s bills, the system might disintegrate if a few large merchants failed to meet their obligations. At that point, the hourglass would empty entirely; and, as we shall see, exactly this occurred in the early 1620s.11

  Thomas Weston managed to survive in this fashion for seven years or so. The few surviving customs books from London refer to him often. Between the spring of 1616 and the autumn of 1617, we find him sending twelve cargoes from the Thames to Rouen, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. Half of his consignments were cottons like those from Shrewsbury, but he also dealt in hundreds of sheepskins, and he shipped out six gross of garters and fourteen dozen pairs of plain leather gloves, on a vessel aptly named the Sheep. Occasionally, Weston dealt in quite high grades of cloth, but mostly he traded at the bottom end of the market. This was not the way to make one’s fortune.12

  By far the largest profits flowed from luxury imports, spices, silks, and wine, sold at high margins to the wealthy. Again, this required capital and connections, and in practice a small elite controlled the richest trades, men such as Sir John Wolstenholme. In theory a small merchant might accumulate capital from trading profits, earned by hard years of graft. But in practice an array of monopolies, cartels, and legalized forms of racketeering occupied the commanding heights of the economy.

  For Weston, the most relevant monopoly was the one operated by the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers of England. Eager to encourage weaving at home, Tudor monarchs had given the fellowship an exclusive right to send undyed, unfinished white woolens to the Netherlands: a very big business indeed, which reached its peak in 1614, when their sales to the Dutch exceeded the entire tax revenues of King James.

  Joining the fellowship was difficult and expensive, and far beyond the means of Thomas Weston. This left him with only two options. Either he stuck to selling Welsh cottons, where profits were mediocre, or he could engage in “interloping.” By virtue of a statute from the fifteenth century, any merchant could legally sell woolens to the Low Countries, provided he paid a fee to the fellowship and complied with their regulations. It was not a crime to interlope, and the interlopers, including Weston, traded openly and paid their taxes.

  However, if circumstances changed and times became harder, the fellowship might try to enforce their monopoly more strictly. If they did so, they would push men like Weston to the wall: and that was what occurred, propelling him across the North Atlantic. It happened in the following way.

  As soon as Robert Cecil became lord treasurer, he began to devise schemes for strengthening the royal finances, but the Crown and Parliament could not agree on measures to close the budget deficits that the king habitually ran up. Cecil died, taking with him to the grave the ashes of fiscal rectitude. In 1614, James made a last attempt at reform, by way of the so-called
Addled Parliament, but he and its members soon fell out with each other, and so he dissolved the assembly. Forward stepped Alderman William Cokayne with a plan to strengthen the economy, to outwit the Dutch, and to replenish the Exchequer, all at the same time. It came to be known as the Cokayne Project.

  Cokayne persuaded the king and the Privy Council to terminate the monopoly enjoyed by the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers. In its place, Cokayne would create a new monopoly, to finish and dye white woolens before exporting them across the North Sea. This would create English jobs for English workers, while King James would receive a royalty for each roll of the stuff, yielding a sum uncannily close to his wardrobe bills and those of his son combined. Everybody would be happy, including the interlopers and members of the old fellowship, since they would all be invited to join, pledging their capital to the new venture. In June the Addled Parliament ended, a few weeks later the Cokayne Project began, and soon it proved to be disastrous.13

  Hearing of the scheme, the Dutch bought all the raw cloth they could find and banned imports of Cokayne’s new product. The members of the old fellowship went on strike, refusing to buy woolens from England’s weavers. Cokayne’s investors failed to supply new capital, and unsold cloth piled up in workshops and warehouses. Soon acute observers suspected that the project was a fraud, simply aimed at elbowing aside the fellowship and transferring their business to Cokayne, with no finishing and dyeing done at all, no investment, and no new employment. In 1616, as Shakespeare fell ill and died, in the weaving districts business faltered, and came to a stop.

  Thousands of workers lay idle, and the king concluded that Cokayne had cheated him. His project was, James told the Privy Council, “playne Cosonage.” The word “cosonage” meant “theft,” and James told them to put a stop to it. For another year, the crisis continued as the Crown negotiated a solution. At the opening of 1618, the old merchant adventurers struck a new deal with the king, agreeing to pay him fifty thousand pounds in return for their old monopoly. At the same time, as part of the deal they insisted that the Crown halt trading by the interlopers, including Thomas Weston.

  At first, the interlopers stood their ground, even when sent to jail. In The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton heard stories of the affair, about defiant interlopers who “claime and challenge free trafficke by the lawes of the realme and theyre birth-right, and divers of them are committed to the Marshalsee for refusing to enter into bond to desist.” Weston’s name appears on a list of six offenders reported to the authorities in June. No record seems to survive of official sanctions against him, but it looks as if his business collapsed. The fragmentary customs records that survive show no trace of exports by Weston in 1619.

  As we have seen, William Bradford often forgot to give chronology, and so we do not know exactly when Weston first made contact with the Pilgrims. But we do know that a link between them existed, by way of a haberdasher named Edward Pickering, who kept shops in London and Amsterdam, and acted as Weston’s agent in Holland. A Separatist himself, and involved with Weston since about 1612, Pickering became a strong supporter of the Pilgrims, leaving money in his will to help them. The introduction must have been his. Weston needed a new source of income to replace what he had lost when interloping ended, and Pickering had friends in Leiden who needed help. Between them, it seems, they recruited the rest of the Mayflower consortium.14

  PEDDLERS AND PILGRIMS

  We have the names of forty-six investors in the Plymouth Colony, chiefly from a list of forty-one men and one woman compiled in 1626 and contained in a letter transcribed by William Bradford. From information elsewhere, we can establish the origins or occupations of eighteen. Tentatively, we can identify the backgrounds of another five whose names, like John White, are too common to prevent uncertainty.

  A handful, perhaps no more than three or four, were religious radicals like the Separatists. Most of the rest were either mainstream Puritans or men with no pious enthusiasm either way. When it came to North America, it seems that none possessed prior experience of any kind. In 1620, the Virginia Company made a list of its own shareholders, and no overlap exists with the names of those who backed the Pilgrims. Captain John Smith implied that they were small traders and minor members of the gentry, and this seems to be correct, but not entirely. In the City of London, two of the young men who financed the Mayflower, John Pocock and John Beauchamp, both in their late twenties, were rising stars. Like the mariners in Plymouth Sound, they left a mass of evidence in their wake. By way of their careers, the Mayflower finds her place in the wider history of England at the time.15

  Both men stand out from their colleagues because, in 1626, they were among the very few investors still prepared to commit more capital to the Pilgrims after years of losses. We start with John Beauchamp, aged about twenty-eight in the year of the voyage. His name appears nearly thirty times in Bradford’s History, and he worked closely with Weston. Though he never went to America, the Pilgrims granted him land at Scituate, between Plymouth and Boston. His brother-in-law helped to found the Cape Cod town of Sandwich.

  We know almost nothing about his character besides a comment by a fellow investor that Beauchamp “seemed somewhat harsh.” His will contains evidence of stern paternal piety: he urged his children not to marry without their mother’s approval, “as they expect a blessing from God the ffather of us all without whose blessing nothing can prosper.” He was also a Puritan, and in the 1650s the Cromwellians made Beauchamp a justice of the peace. But while his inner life remains obscure, his business career is quite another matter.

  Beauchamp came from the same world as Autolycus. His family were the most prosperous yeoman farmers in a village called Cosgrove, fifty miles from London in Northamptonshire, a county where the low undulating hills supported sheep in immense numbers. When John Beauchamp’s uncle Christopher died in 1622, he left a ewe and a lamb each to a daughter and two granddaughters, and ten shillings to the poor of “Cowesgrave,” as he called his township.

  A solid man and a churchwarden, Christopher Beauchamp left nearly three hundred pounds, not bad for a yeoman, and the Beauchamps ranked among those wealthy enough to pay taxes and vote. Although they were rural, they were far from isolated. Just as the Great North Road ran along the edge of Austerfield, the ancient highway of Watling Street passed close to the boundary of Cosgrove. Along it walked peddlers heading north toward Chester and Liverpool, while packhorses plodded past them on their way south to London.

  John Beauchamp was a third and youngest son, and when his father died in 1614, he received a legacy worth only eighty pounds, even less than Weston’s. By that time he was already apprenticed as a salter, but with what must have seemed like only modest prospects of success. His eldest brother inherited the family’s land, but died young in 1625. A second brother, a London haberdasher, died the same year, probably from plague, and left only feeble legacies of a few shillings.16 John, however, did exceptionally well. Like Weston, he traded as an interloper, exporting cloth, but Beauchamp made his fortune in another way, as an entrepreneurial pioneer. Within less than a decade, Beauchamp rose to become by far the largest London importer of the sorts of goods carried by traveling salesmen such as Autolycus.

  With his roots in the countryside, Beauchamp began by sending rural commodities to Amsterdam: fleeces, horsehair, and black rabbit skins. Using the same Dutch ships that carried woolens for Weston, he exported stockings, of the kind farming families knit by the fireside as a way to earn a little extra money. Then back from Holland he brought merchandise to feed the peddlers of the kingdom as they built their networks of consumption, selling lightweight articles to housewives and provincial shopkeepers. In 1621, we find Beauchamp importing from Holland an assortment of tennis balls, pins, needles for securing bundles on a horse’s back, and six thousand thimbles. By 1626, as he tried to keep the Plymouth Colony afloat, his business had grown from these modest beginnings to reach an unrivaled scale.

  Ship after ship sailed into the Thames carr
ying items for John Beauchamp. Among them were hundreds of the “inkles” and “caddisses” found among the wares sold by Autolycus: an inkle was linen tape used by seamstresses, and a caddis was woolen tape for stocking garters. We find, for example, the Cornelius of Amsterdam unloading for Beauchamp a cargo of caddis ribbons, inkles, hairy goatskins, plates, sewing needles, nearly seventeen thousand thimbles, and more than 200,000 iron tacks. Alongside Beauchamp another Mayflower investor, James Sherley, plied the same trade, dealing in similar items. They apparently worked together, and their business volumes far outstripped those of other London importers of the same merchandise. Sherley and Beauchamp were the pair who bought a country place in Clapham with their profits from the fur trade.

  If men like this supported the Mayflower, then a riddle can be solved. Among the twenty-one households that traveled on board the ship, five had no documented ties of any kind with the Leiden congregation, and several came from country locations a long way from London. How did they hear about the venture? If the backers were men such as Beauchamp and Sherley, whose peddling contacts roamed the country, then the mystery vanishes.

  Take, for example, William Mullins, a shoemaker from Dorking in Surrey. Twenty-six miles from London, Dorking had a grain market, and a firm chalk road that led toward the capital. Mullins was a small businessman who carried with him to New England a stock of boots and shoes, together with his wife, son, and daughter. For buckles and laces, he would have turned to wholesalers like Beauchamp. This is how talk of the Mayflower project must have circulated, carried by tradesmen and peddlers on foot between the open fields along the highway.17