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

by Stephen Alford

  London’s parishes made the city a kind of federation of urban villages. Its churches offered to their parishioners the hope of God and eternity; to wealthy benefactors the opportunity for patronage, to craftsmen and artists commissions for beautiful objects of devotion, and to priests very modest livings. Over the sixteenth century the churches changed as the Reformation did away with chantry chapels, altars, stained glass and colourful wall paintings, preferring the austerity of God’s true word to what reformers dismissed as Catholic idolatry: instead of altars, plain communion tables; instead of wall paintings of saints’ lives, instructional texts like the Ten Commandments. To walk into a London church in 1500 and then again in 1600 was to enter the same building, but to experience a wholly different apprehension of God.

  The parishes of London were a frantic patchwork of shapes dividing apparently at random streets, shops, houses and tenements, a growth over time of ancient boundaries and jurisdictions. Most of the parishes within the wall were small – and some were tiny – covering only a couple of streets and a few alleyways. Those outside the wall, like St Sepulchre-without-Newgate and St Giles-without-Cripplegate, were very much larger and tended also to be poorer.

  Fixed in the spiritual life of the city for centuries were London’s abbeys, priories and friaries – a strange thought, perhaps, when today we often think of the surviving ruins of monasteries tucked away in secluded spots in the countryside. Here Wyngaerde’s panorama is suggestive: he drew it at a time of huge change, a few years after King Henry VIII had suppressed the monasteries. While Wyngaerde was occupied in making sense of London’s fabulous cityscape, powerful and aspiring families were busy buying up former monastic properties to turn them into either grand townhouses or tenements for London’s ever-growing population. Wyngaerde’s bird’s-eye view necessarily misses the transformation at street level, but to Londoners some old, great and familiar institutions were being broken down before their eyes by the aspirations to power of a king’s government.

  In 1530, a decade and a half before Wyngaerde drew London, the city’s religious houses were still wealthy and powerful. In the far western corner of the walled city was the Blackfriars, London’s Dominican friary founded in the thirteenth century, used on occasions for meetings of Parliament and, in 1529, for the legatine court that heard the case made by Henry VIII to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine of Aragon. The preaching friars were also common in London: the Franciscans (or Greyfriars) near Newgate, in a complex founded in the thirteenth century and greatly enlarged in the fourteenth and fifteenth; the friars of the Holy Cross next to Tower Hill, whose house, the Crutched Friars, was founded at the very end of the thirteenth century and whose church was rebuilt in about 1520; and the Carmelites (or White Friars), part of whose church and precincts, the Austin Friars, later became London’s Dutch church. Inside the city wall at Aldgate was Holy Trinity Priory; outside it at Bishopsgate was the priory and hospital of St Mary Bethlehem. Also beyond the wall was the vast Augustinian priory and hospital of St Bartholomew in Smithfield, and north of that a Carthusian monastery known as the Charterhouse. Charterhouse was founded in 1371 on the site of a plague cemetery, and over the centuries it grew ever larger, with the Carthusians adding chapels, conduits for water, cloisters, courts and cells. Thomas More knew the London Charterhouse well, and it was in this contemplative and ascetic house that he lived for three years between 1501 and 1503. Before their very visible and deliberate destruction by Henry VIII, the London Carthusians were a commanding moral presence in the city.

  More or less hidden in Wyngaerde’s panorama, given its angle, are London’s streets, of which there were hundreds. A few of them – the big thoroughfares running north and south – we can make out from Wyngaerde’s quickly sketched lines of steeply pitched roofs. The streets had apparently no order to them, seeming to make sense only on their own terms. Some of their names are striking: Ave Maria Lane and Bladder Street, Broken Wharf, Conyhope Lane and Seething Lane. These names came to be settled after centuries of changing and often erratic spelling. Seething Lane was once Sydon Lane, ‘Babeloyne’ (Babylon) of the late fourteenth century became London Wall, and Black Raven Alley was lost to the much duller-sounding Pope’s Alley. London so often reinvented and renamed itself – it was oddly fixed and fluid at the same time.

  But out of the tangle the eye begins to see some kind of pattern to the city’s thoroughfares. There was a very rough rectangular arrangement to the relationship between some of the streets in the western portion of the city. Upper and Lower Thames Street, Fish Street, Knightrider Street, Candlewick Street, Catte Street and Cheapside ran broadly in parallel with the line of the River Thames, and they were intersected by roads, streets and alleyways running at an angle of more or less ninety degrees to the waterfront. Of course there were all kinds of twists and turns and weird and wonderful lines and curves in the city too; but nevertheless there is a sense – or at least a hint of a sense – of some very deeply buried notion of arrangement, like builders’ Chinese whispers played over centuries. One shape that does stand out strongly is the dividing of Cheapside and the Poultry into Threadneedle Street, Cornhill and Lombard Street. This was right at the centre of the walled city, and it was here, close to the Poultry, that in the 1560s one of the greatest merchant princes of the Tudor century, Sir Thomas Gresham, built London’s bourse, the Royal Exchange.

  When Anthonis van den Wyngaerde positioned himself in Southwark near the end of Henry VIII’s reign, he saw before him London Bridge connecting Southwark to the city proper, sitting on nineteen huge piers driven into the riverbed of the Thames. After a long history of rebuilding and repositioning, by the sixteenth century London Bridge had become a grand city street itself, within the lord mayor’s jurisdiction and a symbol for citizens of their city’s greatness. Piled upon it were a chapel, many houses and shops and (an amenity to boast of) a public privy. The northern end of the bridge was in the parish of St Magnus the Martyr; its southern end in the parish of St Olave in Southwark. The chapel on the bridge was dedicated to St Thomas, for centuries Thomas Becket, but from the 1530s St Thomas the Apostle: Henry VIII resented any churchman who questioned the power of a king, as Becket had done. King Henry sent men like that to the block and put their heads – Thomas More’s was one – on display over the bridge’s gateway.

  Between the claims of God and the king was the city. And that is what London Bridge really stood for: London’s power and corporate independence, its wealth and mercantile prowess, its separateness and self-government. Coming into London from Southwark, it was impossible to miss the city government’s coat of arms high up on the gateway, and of course the bulk and scale of London beyond the bridge; it was the urban profile that Wyngaerde saw in the middle 1540s – massive and complex. Leaving London for Southwark would have affected the senses in a different way, though Southwark too, with its churches, houses, bear gardens and (a few decades later) theatres, was impressive enough. But nowhere in England was quite like London, and any traveller heading south must have known that they were leaving behind them one of the great cities of Europe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In Antwerp’s Shadow

  To understand Tudor London fully and properly we have to take account of the pre-eminent mercantile and financial centre of Europe in whose shadow it sat for a very long time. That centre was Antwerp on the Scheldt river, a town English merchants had known for generations. We need to make sense, too, of exactly the kind of London merchant who thrived in Antwerp and who took his success and ambitions back to London. And we have a model in the career of Richard Gresham of Milk Street in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry, a London merchant prince with impeccable political connections, who was able to rise through the city establishment to become lord mayor, with great ambitions for a talented son.

  Antwerp was made rich in the fifteenth century by a happy combination of Portuguese spices from the East Indies, precious metals from the mines of southern Germany, and English cloth. A nexus for
global trade and an essential marketplace for the merchants of London and other English towns, Antwerp’s great fairs were the biggest events in the European mercantile calendar. High finance followed on from the trading of commodities. The major bankers of Europe like the Fugger, the Welser and the Höchstetter had offices and agents in Antwerp, and with their loans they kept imprudent and ambitious governments in power and at war with one another. Art, music and printing all flourished in cosmopolitan Antwerp, which meant that merchants with full purses bought tapestries and pictures for their houses, altarpieces for their local parish churches and books for their private libraries. It was impossible to imagine English mercantile life in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries without Antwerp.

  Antwerp’s fairs were the Sinxen mart held in late spring and the Bamis mart in late August. Those at nearby Bergen-op-Zoom (a port town powerfully under Antwerp’s influence) were the Passmarkt held at Easter and the Cold mart in early winter. During these fairs Antwerp’s streets, squares and cloisters were full of sellers’ stalls. The fairs guaranteed freedom of movement for foreign merchants, as well as an opportunity for fun and spectacle, especially dazzling for young men just out of London.1

  Through Antwerp, English producers and merchants were able to reach the whole of Europe and beyond. In the 1530s and early 1540s fashionable lightweight woollen cloths called kerseys were bought by German merchants and sent as far as Hungary, while Italian firms from Ancona and Genoa traded them to the eastern Mediterranean. These firms used the Antwerp fairs and also operated through their own agents living in London.2 To get an idea of Antwerp’s importance as a hub of European trade, and of London’s reliance upon it, we need to multiply those transactions and movements across the continent – and of course the money made from them – many hundreds of times over.

  International trade in the sixteenth century was difficult, dangerous and expensive. The risk of losses through accident, weather, theft or piracy was very high. Crossing the borders of kingdoms, merchants had to negotiate Europe’s various currencies. The mints of Augsburg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Württemberg, Salzburg and Regensburg, Prague, Ulm, Denmark, Poland, Lübeck, Switzerland, Venice, Paris, Antwerp and of course London produced hallers, guilders, shillings, groschen, marks, pounds, ducats and crowns.3 Merchants had to be skilled in what looks to us like a chaos of coins and a nightmare of exchange. They had to know one another’s languages and employ agents and factors abroad. They had to endure the vicissitudes of travel, and they had to be able to trust fellow merchants to honour the paper bills of exchange that, rather than moving around great chests of coin, did the job of carrying money to different countries. And they had to hope for stability in a Europe where international politics and internal peace rested on the often precarious treaties and alliances between the great powers of the day – the Holy Roman emperor and the potentates of his empire, the pope, the king of France, the king of Spain and the king of England. Situated close to the emperor’s court at Brussels, Antwerp was particularly exposed to the shifting of great power politics.

  Merchants in early sixteenth-century Europe wanted and needed peace – war and political and civil unrest upset the operation of trade and business. Merchants had an international view whose values and interests sometimes transcended those of Europe’s sovereign powers struggling for supremacy and initiative. At the same time – and in contradiction – merchants were instinctively protectionist. They wanted to secure for themselves privileged conditions of trade that others did not have, especially foreign merchants. Joining with fellow traders of the same town, city, trade or nationality helped to share out the risks and dangers, and special privileges in paying reduced customs duties, for example, meant that profits were not entirely consumed by the expense of travel and carriage. For these reasons, national and city guilds and companies of merchants throughout Europe had for centuries used collaborative muscle to negotiate exclusive trading rights abroad.

  In Antwerp it was the Company of Merchant Adventurers who looked out for the interests of English merchants. By the fifteenth century this powerful organization was dominated by London’s mercers. The adventurers negotiated and protected the charters they had secured from successive dukes of Brabant since the late thirteenth century. These privileges inevitably nourished local grumblings and grievances, and even minor incidents could precipitate crises that called for emergency talks and renegotiations. One, for example, was the disagreement that took place at the Sinxen mart in 1457, which began with an argument over a bale of madder (a plant used for dyeing cloth) that had split during weighing. This was followed by a hot-tempered exchange of words between a young English mercer named John Sheffield and one Martin van Hove of Antwerp, in which van Hove is alleged to have used the well-known insult that the English were born with tails like devils.4 But if beneath the surface calm of trade there simmered national rivalries and prejudices like these, there was an obvious mutual interest too, certainly between England and the Low Countries. Antwerp needed English cloth just as English merchants owed their businesses to Antwerp, and so the merchant adventurers were a fixed feature of the Antwerp scene. From the early fifteenth century they had a permanent salaried governor living in the town, and in 1474 Antwerp gave the company a house on the Wolstraat as a mark of the ‘special love and friendship’ between the town and the company, a place known simply as the English House.5

  Many of London’s merchants knew Antwerp as well as they did their home city, and it would have been difficult for them not to draw comparisons between the two. Antwerp’s town hall faced northwards onto its great marketplace; it was a building of the early fifteenth century with an impressive façade of niches for statues, and instinctively Londoners would have compared it to their own Guildhall, a complex of buildings in English Gothic. Grandest of all was the New Bourse, or merchants’ exchange, which opened in the city in 1532. One report says that 5,000 people congregated at its sessions, ‘some of whom had to stand outside halfway into the street, not to talk or to hear the news, but only to do business’.6 Merchants in London, by contrast, met together out in the open on Lombard Street whatever the weather.

  In some ways, London was not so very different from Antwerp. Both were river ports. Antwerp’s population, like London’s, was rising quickly: 40,000 people in around 1496, about 55,000 in 1526, and about 84,000 in 1542–3, a little way ahead of London.7 Both places had very high levels of immigration, and the townscapes of Antwerp and London changed considerably in the early decades of the century. For any town or city, a population of such size and density offered opportunities as well as challenges: there were benefits to the sheer mass of energy of human activity, just as there were sometimes problems in having so many people jammed together in such close proximity. Antwerp was for decades pre-eminent, the great entrepôt of Europe, but that changed in the sixteenth century. London was enjoying the outstanding benefit of civil peace, while by contrast both the economy and population of Antwerp were hit very hard indeed by the war and religious turmoil of the Dutch Revolt, which began in the 1560s.

  At the height of its glory Antwerp was prosperous and cultured, and that prosperity was shared widely. Art and architecture flourished. Visiting Antwerp in 1520, the artist Albrecht Dürer praised the beautiful stonework and tower of the collegiate Church of Our Lady, the town’s spiritual focus as well as the largest parish church in the Christian world, where music and lay guilds and confraternities flourished. Dürer described the procession on the Sunday after Assumption:

  the whole town of every craft and rank was assembled, each dressed in his best according to his rank. And the ranks and guilds had their signs, by which they might be known. In the intervals great costly pole-candles were borne and their long Frankish trumpets of silver. There were also in the German fashion many pipers and drummers. All the instruments were loudly and noisily blown and beaten.8

  Several hundred artists and craftsmen worked in Antwerp, making and selling the luxury goods that London’
s merchants bought to take home to furnish and beautify their town and country houses: paintings, sculpture, jewellery, tapestries and stained glass. Antwerp’s art market boomed when its economy did and when the merchants of Europe were doing good business.9

  The printers and booksellers of Antwerp were also prolific. London’s book trade took a long time to catch up with the scale and sophistication of Antwerp’s. Between 1500 and 1540, sixty-six printers were active in the town, producing well over 2,000 titles, or 55 per cent of all the books printed in the Low Countries.10 Paul’s Churchyard was busy with activity by the 1560s partly because so many of Antwerp’s exiled expert printers had settled in London. For decades, English merchants were able to read books in Antwerp that were impossible to buy in London. Works by Martin Luther were on sale in Antwerp as early as April 1518, only months after his famous protest in Wittenberg against the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences. Before London’s print trade was fully developed, Antwerp’s printers knew that merchants from England were a key market for new ideas and contentious debates about church and religion: Antwerp was probably the largest producer of Protestant literature in English before the 1540s.11

  So for centuries English merchants had breathed the air of Antwerp, depended upon its markets and money, known its people, heard news and gathered information there from all over the known world, seen its sights and absorbed its rich culture. Generations of English merchant adventurers had negotiated and renegotiated charters and privileges. They had seen Antwerp in all its mercantile glory. They would see it fall too, and their own city rise.