London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City

by Stephen Alford

  When he made his will in the summer of 1499, Thomas Wyndout’s career in city government had just taken off. Ahead of him might have been years of office – perhaps he even aspired to be Lord Mayor. As it was, he had at best months in the court of aldermen. And yet he was a success: his business interests flourished; he knew rich and powerful men whom he counted as allies and friends. Wyndout was international in outlook, yet he was rooted firmly in London. He was one of the fortunate and established: a mercer, a citizen, a sheriff, an alderman, elected to the House of Commons for London in 1497. Trade, family, friendships: in mercantile London in 1500 – as in 1600 also – it was impossible to disentangle the three strands of life and career so closely interwoven.

  Saturating Thomas Wyndout’s world was a late medieval Catholic Christianity that marked out in long-established ritual the rhythms of life and death. In a city of tens of thousands of people jammed together in urban congestion, existence was precarious and uncertain: faith, by contrast, was reassuringly fixed in belief and practice. Even over the busy, hectic and jostling world of the city there hung the promise of the peace of heaven. Wyndout needed to attend to his soul just as much as any other Tudor Londoner.

  He wanted to be buried in the thirteenth-century chapel of St Anne in St Antholin’s church. It was all prepared: in 1499 a blank stone was waiting there for the appropriate inscription. In so many ways, the church contained Wyndout’s London life. In its stained glass he saw Henry Colet and Colet’s sons and daughters, Thomas’s first family in the city.9 His own family worshipped there, surrounded by the memorials of men just like him. And he knew that in St Anne’s chapel his corpse would lie until the day of his bodily resurrection.

  Tudor Londoners could not afford to take life for granted. They were fond of memento mori – so much in the city reminded them of their own mortality. They lived under God’s scrutiny and they prepared for heaven. The stone tombs and brass plaques that Thomas, Katherine, Bartholomew and Joan saw in St Antholin’s week in and week out both celebrated the material success of the parish’s merchant benefactors and reminded the living that life was fleeting and temporary. On his memorial, Thomas Knowles, the lord mayor who had rebuilt the church, was celebrated in rhyme: ‘Here lieth graven under this stone/Thomas Knowles both flesh and bone’. ‘Such as I am, such shall you be’, said the tomb of a fifteenth-century grocer. Even more uncompromising are the words of another inscription:

  Example by him ye may see

  That this world is but vanity:

  For whether he be small or great,

  All shall turn to worms’ meat.

  There was no escape from death even for the greatest and the richest of the city: no one was spared the judgement of God.10

  When the end came for Thomas Wyndout, he was buried in St Anne’s chapel to the light of eight torches and four tapers. We can imagine St Antholin’s on that day: incense hanging heavily on the air, the familiar Latin liturgy, the lights burning at the graveside and on the altars of other chantry chapels. It was a city event, the church full of London’s worthies from the livery companies and government, aldermen in gowns of violet, with the sword-bearer in black processing before the Lord Mayor. For the London elite, strict protocol and long tradition meant everything. The torches at Thomas’s grave marked his journey from this world to the next; they were symbolic of memory and obligation – for Wyndout himself and for those members of his family who had lived and died before him. In his will he bequeathed torches and tapers to the church in Buntingford where his father and mother were buried.11

  Wyndout asked his executors to commission a priest to sing at his burial the office of the dead ‘with other orisons accustomed . . . and mass of requiem’ for his soul. He left money to pay for nearly 400 requiem masses for the souls of his father and mother and instructed his executors to find a ‘good honest priest’ to pray for him, his parents and all Christian souls for a period of twenty years. Charity was essential for a Catholic Londoner of Wyndout’s generation, and for a Protestant a century later too, though the emphases were different. For Wyndout, Christian generosity would help to ease his way through a purgatory that Protestants later did away with.

  Wyndout’s charitable bequests show the rich patterning of institutional life in London, as well as all the obligations to others that men of substance felt they needed to make. It was a kind of spiritual quid pro quo. Religious houses and churches were high on his list of beneficiaries. Thomas gave money to the Carthusian priory at the London Charterhouse near Smithfield, to the Charterhouse at Richmond, to the high altar of St Antholin’s, and to the mercers’ chapel in St Thomas of Acon. In the same spirit of Christian duty and civic obligation, he left money for the repair of the city’s roads, for its poor, for its prisoners, for scholars in Oxford and Cambridge, and for the marriages of poor maidens, expecting their prayers in return for his charity.

  In preparing for death, Wyndout looked above all to his family: to the security of his wife Katherine, to their children, and to his servants. He appointed as executors and overseers of his will and estate seasoned and experienced men. They were men of his own kind, each one a freeman and citizen of London, each a member of a powerful and privileged livery company. Some were his friends and partners in business, heavyweights in the city; others former servants, loyal to the end.12

  Thomas Wyndout’s obligations were manifold: to God, to family, to the Mercers’ Company, to his fellow Londoners. They found expression in the ordering of his affairs and in charity. The passage of a life was part of an inextinguishable human continuity, something Wyndout articulated most powerfully when he wrote in his will of his family and inheritance, and of ‘my fellowship of the Mercery of London’. Fellowship was belonging.

  To Thomas Wyndout, the Mercers’ Company was more than just a club or a trade guild: for him (and for others) it was a way of life bound by long tradition – something instinctive to him, part of his being. This is why he wanted to make a gift to the company of a fine cup in silver gilt, eventually presented, with great ceremony, by his executors to the company’s wardens in 1503. It was a celebration of the mercers’ past and present. And it was something, too, for the future, a reminder of Wyndout in the years to come. Friends remembered him in prayers to be said annually in the mercers’ chapel, and there was more to this than good form or routine. When in 1506 the company’s priests found it difficult to squeeze Thomas’s memorial prayers into a busy chapel schedule, his widow Katherine went to the wardens to suggest a neat solution, and they were moved instead to the feast of St Katherine – simply and touchingly because that was her own name.13

  Katherine Wyndout lived a quarter of a century beyond Thomas’s death. Fairly quickly she remarried. Her new husband was Sir Richard Haddon, a widower himself, and one of the powers of the city: a sheriff and an alderman like Thomas, in 1506–7 lord mayor, and a senior official of the Mercers’ Company. By his first wife Sir Richard was a brother-in-law of Wyndout’s great friend and former business partner, the goldsmith John Shaa – a single but far from unusual example of how intricately interwoven were ties of friendship, business, blood and marriage for families like the Wyndouts and Haddons and very many others like them.14

  The women of mercantile London helped to bind together the city’s elite. Marrying, having children, seeing to the welfare of their sons and daughters and their families, the women are often in the background and taken for granted. But they are most certainly there, sometimes in the precarious conditions of a marriage, where their value might be measured by a dowry, or sometimes as widows. Remarriage was common for younger widows with family and a dowry. Marriage was an efficient and necessary way of moving capital between families and businesses. In making their wills and testaments, husbands often made sure that their wives were set up securely for the rest of their lives with a home and income, while upholding the principle of patrilineal succession. Sons inherited houses, money and businesses; daughters helped to build mercantile dynasties.


  It is hard not to be impressed by Dame Katherine Haddon. She was scrupulous in honouring both of her husbands. For the sake of Thomas’s soul, she went, as we have seen, to the Mercers’ Company in 1506, and when Sir Richard Haddon died in 1517, she maintained his prayers and charities. For his part, Haddon never avoided his duties to Katherine and her family, especially to her daughter Joan, who was also, through Joan’s marriage to his son and heir William, Sir Richard’s daughter-in-law. Haddon had to take urgent action against William to protect Joan in what was a painfully stormy marriage.15

  In 1499 and 1500 Thomas Wyndout, citizen, alderman and mercer of London, had made his final reckonings. He had looked to his soul, provided for his wife and family, saluted his friends and his fellowship, and tried to ease the burdens of the poor in the hope that they would pray for him. He had prepared for Heaven, settled his affairs, and made his confession, with only the slimmest sense of what the future might hold for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Londoners

  Thomas Wyndout brought miraculously back to life in 1600 would have boggled at the numbers of people then living in London. About 50,000 people lived in the city he knew; that figure rose to approximately 75,000 in 1550 and somewhere in the region of 200,000 by 1600. No other urban centre in England came remotely close to that scale or pace of growth. Bristol and Norwich, jointly second in size to London, had populations of about 10,000 people in 1500 and 12,000 a century later. London was a leviathan, massive and overwhelming – and it ranked in European terms. In the middle of the sixteenth century it was the sixth largest city in Europe. By 1650 only Paris was bigger, London having overtaken major ports and commercial centres like Antwerp, Lisbon, Naples and Venice.1

  In many ways, the city’s population was merely catching up with itself after the horrors of the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century. That generation of Londoners had known cataclysm: of perhaps nearly 100,000 inhabitants, some 48 per cent had died of bubonic plague. The city’s elite was cut down with savage speed; the poor were even more vulnerable.2 It is a wonder that London was able to function. It took two hundred years for the city to recover itself, a recovery that began in the middle decades of the sixteenth century.

  With roughly 115 male to 100 female births, there were more men than women in Tudor London, a trend further exaggerated by the high numbers of young men coming to the city to apprentice themselves to merchants. Early middle age as we know it was the beginning of a fairly brisk journey to the grave, so Thomas Wyndout’s death in around his middle forties was no great surprise. Here we have to rely on the complicated mathematics of population models that, because of the nature of the records kept, work better for men than they do for women. Of all the male infants, boys and men in the city in about 1550, a fraction more than six out of ten were under the age of thirty-four years. According to this model, the proportion of men in the city aged over thirty-five shrinks quickly, and only a handful of Londoners were over the age of sixty, meaning that there were very few greybeards in the city Shakespeare knew. On the face of it, the demography of Tudor London was much more like that of a society in the developing rather than developed world in the twenty-first century.3

  Two blunt realities stalked Londoners in the sixteenth century. One was the very high level of mortality in the city, the second its persistently low birth rate. For the seventy years between 1580 and 1650 there was fewer than one (0.87) baptism for every burial in the city, and that number is unlikely to have been higher for the years before 1580. What struck the city hardest were epidemics of disease. In 1563 plague killed 17,404 men, women and children, just over 85 per cent of all Londoners buried that year, and probably somewhere in the region of 20 per cent of the city’s entire population. Though the city government could do almost nothing to stop the spread of infection, it was at least assiduous in recording the numbers of dead.4

  All of this means, of course, that London should have shrunk and contracted. But when we look at what actually happened – the quadrupling of the population – we see at once that something very important was going on. That something was migration into the city: migration that was heavy, sustained and necessary. The city’s mercantile elite had no choice but to renew itself by means of recruitment from outside London. In the 1550s, fewer than two in ten of new freemen in the city’s livery companies had been born in London. The rest came from throughout England, nearly 30 per cent of them from Yorkshire, Lancashire and the other northern counties.5 London was able to draw young men, especially, and young women from across the whole kingdom, who came to the city to change their lives. What they found when they arrived was, we can be sure, an intensity of human society on a scale beyond their experience.

  Elizabethans themselves pondered the reasons for London’s success, sensitive to the charge that it was massively overbearing, and that its merchants were ruining the trade of other English towns. The antiquary John Stow, the greatest Elizabethan expert on the city, summed up the case in five words: situation, estimation, service, government and benefits. Decoded, Stow meant that London was ideally placed geographically, that it had played a long and distinguished role in English history, that its reputation as a city was unparalleled, that it enjoyed excellent government, and (an argument as controversial in Stow’s day as it is in ours, at least for anyone living outside London) that it benefited the whole realm.6 It is easy to see what Stow was driving at. London was undoubtedly England’s chief city, and for most of the time the king’s or queen’s court, from where the kingdom was ruled, was close by. Royal courts, which needed provisions, were good for business, just as courtiers, with houses near the city, had expensive tastes for fine things. London benefited, too, from the purses of the country gentlemen lodging there when they had business in the law courts of Westminster.

  Most significant of all were the Thames and the merchants who used it to send out ships to the ports of mainland Europe. As formidable as the great river were the livery companies of London: they were extraordinary concentrations of money, mercantile dynasty and privilege. Together, London’s merchants were a powerful constituency that could help to make up the minds of monarchs and their councils.

  Londoners were used to seeing foreigners and strangers on the city’s streets. Foreign merchants and financiers had long had outposts and offices in London, though it had not always been in the premier league of Europe’s great trading cities. Best known are the Hanse merchants of the London Steelyard, whose league was founded in Lübeck in the fourteenth century, and whose international European trade connected London to Hanse bases in the Low Countries, the Baltic and Russia. Resident Italian merchant bankers had made loans to English medieval kings. The Pope’s Head on Lombard Street, one of the great taverns of Tudor London, had its origins in the fourteenth century as a house owned by the Bardi merchants of Florence.7 Italian ships docked on the city’s quayside in the fifteenth century, bringing from the Mediterranean wines, spices, sugar and fine cloths, their crews recruited from the coast of Dalmatia, the Peloponnese and the Greek islands, as well as southern Spain.8 Merchants from France and the Netherlands were also frequent visitors to London.

  Some Londoners stood out more than others. The slaving voyages of Sir John Hawkins in the 1560s brought about 300 Africans to the city.9 In 1588 ‘a man blackamore’ was found dead on a street in the parish of St Olave, Hart Street, not far from the Tower of London. He was buried in its churchyard, as were two black women, Mary and Grace, who had lived in the same parish as servants to the physician and merchant Hector Nunes (or Nuñez).10 Nunes was a Portuguese Jew by birth whose family had been forcibly converted to Christianity. He lived in London for over fifty years, practising as a doctor to the nobility at the queen’s court and trading as a merchant with Spain, Portugal and Brazil.

  Striking in London’s sixteenth-century story (and a subject to be picked up later in this book) is the arrival in the city of thousands of Protestant refugees. F
leeing war and persecution, families from France and the Netherlands settled in London. On one level they were welcomed as fellow Protestants. On another, many Londoners were troubled by fears of competition, especially given that many of the émigrés brought skills in clothworking, metalworking, printing and brewing. The city’s elite prickled at the notion of outsiders challenging the privileges of citizens. Occasionally the atmosphere of the city was heavy with violence against the strangers, as young men roamed the streets in gangs looking for a way to vent their frustrations and resentments.

  This was London’s diversity: French merchants, Dutch craftsmen, Italians who kept seedy bowling alleys, a handful of Africans, foreign teachers and printers, refugee doctors, promenading gentlemen, wide-eyed boys and girls from across England, rich, poor or middling – the city was a complex and sometimes volatile human patchwork made up of many thousands of individual pieces.

  Most Londoners had to work hard to survive. Illustrations on maps and plans of the Tudor city show laundresses laying out clothes to dry on frames, milkmaids with pails, water-bearers with buckets and drovers with their cattle. The wharves and docks of London were always busy, with an armada of wherries, barges and rowing boats moving up, down and across the Thames. There were gun foundries at Houndsditch near the Tower and on the corner of Water Lane and Thames Street. Lime and brick kilns pumped out smoke. Windmills, built on top of rubbish tips in Finsbury Fields, ground corn. Throughout the city there were shops and buildings for dyeing, brewing, butchery and tanning, foundries for making bells and factories for making pottery.11

  The city’s merchants lived in grand townhouses built of stone, slate, timber and plaster. These often served as their business headquarters as well as family homes. Life for merchants was comfortable. They were able to furnish their chambers with tables, beds, cupboards, chests, fine carpets and tapestries and silverware.12 Many merchants had houses and estates in the countryside outside the city. All of this was a very long way removed from those Londoners who scratched a living and found themselves in overcrowded and filthy tenements. London was both a triumph of riches and a triumph of poverty. And yet there was an equality of sorts to be found in the city’s parish churches, where records were kept of the baptisms of the sons and daughters of gentlemen, merchants, serving men, carters, joiners, glaziers, wool-packers, bakers, porters, musicians, cloth-workers, smiths, chandlers, tailors, labourers and strangers – all Londoners united by a church and a font.13