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

by Stephen Alford

  Like other Europeans, Antwerpians loved the kind of predictions of the future that offered at least the promise of security in a challenging world. Jaspar Laet’s ‘prognostication’ for Brabant and Antwerp in 1520, the year of Albrecht Dürer’s visit, was a skilful and judicious blend of likely challenges and predictable happenings. The duchy of Brabant, he said, would do well, ‘peradventure a little dissension may arise there’. It would experience sickness, but no pestilence – though (to cover all eventualities) perhaps there would be just a little pestilence in March, July or August. Moisture or rain might cause corruption in some places. There would be no war in the duchy, ‘but rather peace by reasons of astrology’. The noble town of Antwerp would behave itself wisely, profiting in ‘lucre and substance’.12

  It was Richard Pynson of London who printed the Prognostication, Laet’s readers being those hundreds of merchants in the city who traded with Brabant and Antwerp. Though men of the world, merchants were as nervous as anyone else of the operations of the heavens. Only a fool ignored news and intelligence from whatever sources it came – and for a very good reason. International trade was profoundly uncertain; fortunes made could quickly be lost. Any number of things might make economic life in Antwerp and elsewhere deeply uncomfortable: wobbles in currency exchange, the debasement of a kingdom’s coinage, defaults on loans and national bankruptcies, wars, rebellions and uprisings, and the making and breaking of international treaties.

  Tit for tat between major powers was fairly common. In 1545 the Emperor Charles V, in one of his tussles with Henry VIII, seized English goods and shipping and arrested English merchants. In Antwerp at the time was Stephen Vaughan, the king’s financial agent and go-between with brokers in arranging bankers’ loans for Henry. Vaughan was having lunch with the governor of the merchant adventurers at the English House when an officer of the emperor marched in and wanted to know what and who they were. ‘We answered “Englishmen”,’ Vaughan reported, to which the officer had replied, ‘I arrest every one of you by commandment of the emperor’. Nothing was to be removed from the English House, and throughout Antwerp merchants’ counting houses were sealed up. Before long the Antwerp exchange was in a panic and business on the New Bourse came to a standstill.13 A single order from the Holy Roman emperor had managed to paralyse the financial centre of Europe.

  Merchants always operated in the knowledge that politics between princes could disrupt or even ruin their businesses. This was a fact of mercantile life. The arrest of the English merchants in Antwerp in January 1545 took three months of hard negotiations in Brussels to resolve. But if kings and emperors could push around the merchants, the merchants – or, at any rate, those of them who lent money as well as trading in commodities – exercised their own kind of power. Financial agents like Vaughan worked to negotiate loans with the great banking houses, and the bankers set the terms. The irony is that the emperor who brought the Antwerp exchange to a standstill in 1545 was the same Charles V whose imperial crown had more or less been bought for him with Fugger loans thirty years before. Probably the notion that any state was absolutely sovereign was really a myth: each, the greater as well as the smaller, depended upon inescapable financial interests. Kings and emperors dressed up in armour, led armies and made treaties – but it was banking houses like the Fugger and the Welser that in effect paid those armies and kept kings and emperors in the business of looking and sounding magnificent.

  For the prudent merchant and banker, reliable, good intelligence about what was going on was everything. Information gathered from throughout Europe was its own kind of currency, a fact shown brilliantly by the famous newsletters of the Fugger.14 Antwerp, as well as being a powerhouse of money, was also a processor of intelligence: trade, finance and knowledge constituted power, and they were impossible to separate from one another. Antwerp was well known as a centre of rumour and speculation. Only a few hours’ ride from Brussels, merchants brought news to the exchange and took it away with them. In 1553, for example, it was ‘reported for a truth and many wagers laid’ in Antwerp that King Edward VI of England was dead, a rumour with apparent substance that was quickly relayed to the imperial court in Brussels.15

  The experienced politician and the canny merchant saw at once the mutual good they could do for each other. Where the merchant provided information, the politician offered protection. The best merchants were skilled at telling powerful men what they needed to know. One such merchant was the Londoner William Lok, who sent to Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell detailed political, commercial and military intelligence from the Low Countries and Germany, passing on news that came from his own sources. If Lok hoped to catch Cromwell’s eye, he also knew his place in the great scheme of things, as Cromwell saw them, ending his letters: ‘Yours to his little power, William Lok, mercer of London’.16 There was literary and social convention here, but for Lok a hefty dose of reality too.

  Few English merchants knew Antwerp as well as Richard Gresham, and only a fraction of those merchants got anywhere close to his wealth and influence. Richard and his brothers John and William were of the elite of mercantile London.

  In their own minds, no doubt, the Greshams were merely the kind of gentlemen whose gentility was enhanced by the dignity and chartered standing of the city of London. They were proud of their roots as solid Norfolk landed gentry. In fifteenth-century East Anglia, Richard’s grandfather James had adopted a grasshopper as his family’s crest. Over a century later it was the outstanding symbol in Elizabethan London of the Greshams’ wealth and influence.

  Richard Gresham was himself born in Norfolk, near Holt, around 1485, later going off to London to serve his apprenticeship with the mercer John Middleton. Admitted to the freedom of the Mercers’ Company in 1507, he went into partnership with William Copeland. Their trade flourished. Making full use of cheap credit on the Antwerp exchange, between about 1508 and 1517 they bought silks, velvets, satins, taffeta and sarsenet (a type of very fine and soft silk-like material often used to line doublets and gowns) and exported a huge volume of English cloth. Copeland’s death brought to an end a successful partnership, but his money was kept in the family by the strategic marriage of his widow to Richard Gresham’s elder brother William. The business went from strength to strength. John Gresham had important trading interests in the far eastern Mediterranean, while the family operation more generally, under Richard’s direction, pursued a trade in Italian silks and woollens and tapestries from the Low Countries, with a niche sideline in importing armour and weaponry, something carried on by his son Thomas into the 1550s.17

  By 1520 Richard Gresham was writing letters to Cardinal Wolsey in which we discover his talent for nourishing a reciprocal interest between a clever merchant and the consummate politician-diplomat – Richard working for Wolsey (‘your own servitor’), and Wolsey, the king’s powerful minister, able to direct his influence in Richard’s favour. In October 1520, after measuring up eighteen chambers in Wolsey’s new palace of Hampton Court, Gresham was arranging to buy and ship hundreds of pounds’ worth of tapestries for the cardinal, as well as ‘certain cloths of golds for to hang’ in Wolsey’s new private chapel there.18 This kind of elite procurement had benefits for both parties. For Wolsey, we can be sure, London merchants like Richard Gresham were ten a penny, but for Gresham the great cardinal’s favour and patronage really mattered. His strenuous efforts to please Wolsey were worth every moment of his time.

  Richard Gresham had always an instinctive eye for an opportunity. Recognizing in 1520 the likely consequences for England of a poor harvest, Gresham filled his ships with wheat. They left Antwerp and went on to Zeeland. When he ran into political difficulties there, he asked Wolsey to intervene on his behalf with the government of the Low Countries.19 Five years later Gresham found himself arrested at Nieuport by the Emperor Charles V’s officers. His words to Wolsey had the breezy confidence of an experienced man who knows he can call upon a powerful patron. It was a routine matter of presenting his do
cuments in Brussels, he wrote: ‘That done I trust in God to be at my liberty, who ever keep your grace in good health.’20

  When Cardinal Wolsey fell from Henry VIII’s favour in 1529, Richard Gresham simply shifted his attentions to Wolsey’s protégé Thomas Cromwell. It seems likely that Gresham and Cromwell already knew each other. Cromwell had spent at least some of the years of his obscure early career in the Low Countries. He was at the Sinxen mart in 1512, and he may have worked at the English House in Antwerp, possibly as a clerk or secretary, at the time Richard Gresham and William Copeland were building up their successful business.21 Gresham probably saw at first hand the extraordinary rise of Cromwell – at first the young man of little account who became a broker of power at Henry VIII’s court in the 1530s.

  It was in the 1530s that Richard Gresham decided to stand back from his Antwerp trade. He was a brilliantly accomplished international merchant with a keen political instinct, rich, and one of London’s leading citizens – and still only in his late thirties. He began to concentrate instead on property and finance, lending money to powerful men in the king’s government and the Church. One of his early debtors was Cardinal Wolsey himself, who on his death still owed Gresham a substantial amount of money. Gresham treated Wolsey’s debt like any other: he would have his money and he asked Cromwell to press Henry VIII to make good the sum.22 It was a bold pitch – to ask the king himself to honour the debt of a disgraced minister by then dead for three years. Gresham would have said, no doubt, that he was merely being assiduous in balancing his accounts, but others had a different view of his activities as a moneylender. On his death in 1549, a popular ‘epitaph’ described him as a man who had turned away from the poor and driven young men into bankruptcy; the men of Cheapside praised God that Richard Gresham was now with the devil.23

  Gresham wanted to serve in the city’s highest offices and he became a grandee: sheriff of London and Middlesex in 1531; alderman in 1536; and, at the apex of city government, lord mayor in 1537.

  The office of lord mayor was hedged about by all kinds of very old traditions. One was the ancient custom that on entering office, he should shave off his beard. It caused quite a fuss when one Elizabethan lord mayor chose to keep his, though his eccentricity was offset just a little bit by his willingness to adopt the four-cornered bonnet traditionally worn by his predecessors.24 The lord mayor pursued a demanding round of ceremonial duties: the election of the sheriffs in August at Guildhall and their swearing in at Michaelmas; the appearances at fairs, holy days, dinners, sermons and funerals; the mayoral election itself on Michaelmas eve. There was intricate protocol on dress, with all kinds of permutations and changes of gowns, hoods and cloaks to be worn by the sheriffs, mayor and aldermen on different occasions. It was a performance the purpose of which was to celebrate the dignity and importance of the city, emphasizing rank and office and the exclusivity of London’s mercantile hierarchy.

  But the lord mayor of London was more than a tailor’s dummy who spent his year in office at dinners and suppers. Behind the protocol and ceremony was the fact that any good and effective mayor had to be a political operator of the first rank. He represented a powerful constituency of citizens and livery companies, and they expected him to defend the chartered interests and liberties of the city of London. The lord mayor was their spokesman at the king’s court; his credibility was everything, and he had to be a persuasive diplomat. But he was at the same time the king’s man in London, who saw to the efficient execution of royal governance, negotiating and navigating the city’s corporate will. Etched deeply into London’s history were the events of June 1381, when the mayor and his ceremonial sword-bearer had, with King Richard II, faced down Wat Tyler (using the alias of Jack Straw), the leader of a peasants’ revolt. The sword-bearer had insisted that Tyler pull down his hood in the presence of the king, at which Tyler, going for his dagger, was killed by the lord mayor himself: ‘William Walworth, mayor of London, drew his baselard [a long dagger or short sword] and smote Jack Straw on the head.’25

  The ceremony of his election, oath-taking and confirmation spoke to the lord mayor’s challenging double role and expectation. He took his oath to London’s citizens in the hustings court at Guildhall, after which he received the sceptre, keys, purse and seal of the city. On the following day the new lord mayor and his entourage took a barge from the Vintry, an area on the Thames waterfront with warehouses that stored wine from Bordeaux, and were rowed up the river to Westminster. In their scarlet gowns and cloaks, the mayor and aldermen entered the ancient and cavernous Westminster Hall, where in the king’s Exchequer the mayor took an oath to the monarch. There followed a tour of the law courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas before a formal visit to the tombs of England’s kings in Westminster Abbey, then a barge back to the city and the grandest dinner of the year at Guildhall with all the livery companies in attendance.26

  Freshly dignified by a knighthood, Sir Richard Gresham – as lord mayor – was all at once London’s man and the king’s. He was helped by nearly two decades’ worth of political and international experience, as well as a relationship with Thomas Cromwell in which Gresham knew his place: Cardinal Wolsey’s ‘servitor’ became Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon, ‘Your own, at your lordship’s commandment, Richard Gresham’. The voice of dignified and humble service was an important one for any lord mayor to practise.

  Sir Richard Gresham was scrupulous in two other aspects of his own business and the city’s corporate life. His mayoralty coincided with the dissolution of England’s religious houses, and with Cromwell’s influence and help Sir Richard gathered up for himself a handsome portfolio of dissolved monastic property all over the kingdom, coming more or less to control the market in lead stripped from former religious houses.27 This made him a further fortune. To the city and to the Mercers’ Company he was a public benefactor, supporting the foundation of a hospital for the poor at St Mary’s Spital in Bishopsgate, as well as using his influence to buy outright for the Mercers’ Company the hospital and chapel of St Thomas of Acon on Cheapside.

  A brilliant merchant, an unforgiving moneylender, a city politician, a patron benefactor, a political facilitator: Sir Richard Gresham was all of these things. In his letters to Wolsey and Cromwell he was always attentive, always alert. Only in one thing did he fail, and that was to build for London an exchange to rival Antwerp’s. This was a ‘bourse’ or ‘burse’ – a word believed in the sixteenth century to have originated from the name of a meeting place for merchants in medieval Bruges, Antwerp’s predecessor as the great mercantile city of Europe.

  London’s citizens had for years felt the indignity of having to transact business in the open air – and in all weathers – on Lombard Street. Other cities had specially built exchanges, the grandest of them all being Antwerp’s New Bourse. London could only hope to catch up. But in the 1530s there was a spark of interest. In 1534 the Court of Common Council at Guildhall began to discuss the project, and three years later the aldermen chose a site near the Pope’s Head tavern on Lombard Street.

  During his year in office as lord mayor, Sir Richard Gresham pushed and pressed Thomas Cromwell on the project, showing him the ‘plat’ (plan) for the site, and suggesting a cost of £2,000 ‘and more’ to build a beautiful exchange ‘for the honour of our sovereign lord the king’. At first, only the curmudgeonly Sir George Monnocks stood in the way of progress, refusing to sell his property on the intended site. But even when Monnocks gave way, under pressure from the king himself, nothing happened, and the city’s records fall silent.28

  Had the exchange been built in 1538, it would have been a great feather in Sir Richard Gresham’s mayoral bonnet. But a purpose-built bourse for London had to wait for the better part of thirty years – and its builder and founder would be Sir Richard’s son Thomas.

  In fact Thomas Gresham was his father’s greatest legacy. With fantastic wealth, Richard Gresham was the friend of very powerful men, the toast of the city and the Mercers’ Compan
y, the giver of charity – to his fingertips the merchant prince. Of his three sons, Thomas was the young man who would continue and develop his father’s business. Sir Richard’s training of Thomas was meticulous. And it was worth every penny, for no other merchant in early Elizabethan London would be grander than Thomas Gresham.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Love, serve and obey’

  Our first impression is of a handsome and commanding young man with a long straight nose, high cheekbones, cropped brown hair and a light beard. He is calm and composed, fixing the artist eye to eye. Of that artist we know nothing at all, beyond the fact that he was a painter of talent whose studio was in or near Antwerp. Of the sitter, however, we can be certain. The letters and numbers stand out clearly: ‘1544. Thomas Gresham. 26’, with the addition of Gresham’s monogram, as well as two sets of initials – A. G. and T. G. – and the motto ‘Love, serve and obey’.

  It would have been impossible for the artist to contrive a plainer setting for young Thomas Gresham’s portrait. The colours are muted – greys and browns and the dark shadows of a wall, of a human skull laid on one side, and of the subject himself. Gresham’s cap, doublet, gown and hose are black: the only relief is provided by the white of his shirt collar and cuffs and the plain brown leather gloves he holds in his right hand. Decoration is sparing: the delicate lace of his shirt, the leaf patterning of his doublet, the rings on his left index finger and on his right little finger. He stands at the slightest of angles to the artist, his left leg just in front of his right. His left hand rests on his waist, its thumb tucked halfway into his doublet. He wears no sword.