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

by Stephen Alford

  Present once again were those tensions that together, out of a peculiar alchemy, made for something strikingly creative. First, there were the conservative and protectionist instincts of the city elite, which embedded themselves in the Muscovy Company’s determination to protect its hard-won achievements. But secondly, there was something ambitious at work in the encounter between city and government. After this, for better or worse, it was very difficult to prise apart merchants, investors and royal government. This was a working model for the future.

  The Tudor search for Cathay, the empire of the Great Khan, was never quite given up. But in 1555 it could wait. Russia, alien and unfamiliar, was the opportunity of the moment, to be seized and exploited.

  * * *

  * A pinnace was a small sailing boat that could be towed by a larger ship.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Russian Embassy

  Sebastian Cabot was governor of the Muscovy Company for perhaps two years. He probably died in 1557, though from the sources, such as they are, it is hard to tell. He seems to have drawn his royal pension at the end of September 1557, but not at Christmas of the same year. Richard Eden was apparently with him at the end, many years later describing Cabot as ‘the good old man, in that extreme age, somewhat doted’. Cabot’s papers, ‘his own maps and discourses, drawn and written by himself’, were still in private hands in the early 1580s. A proposal to publish them came to nothing. It is an odd anticlimax. Visionary and dynamic, then within a very few years elderly and confused: with fantastic understatement, Sebastian Cabot shuffles quietly out of the story.1

  Yet even without Cabot’s energy, the Muscovy Company thrived and flourished. Within a few years it was impressively successful. Its base after 1564 was a large tenement on Seething Lane in the parish of St Olave, Hart Street, abutting the garden of the old Crutched Friars and close to the Tower of London and the gallows and scaffold of Tower Hill. The whole parish spoke of mercantile prosperity and comfort, and Muscovy House was one of the grandest places on a city lane of ‘divers fair and large houses’.2 The company’s tenement had once belonged to Sir Richard Haddon, one of the grandees of the Mercers’ Company in the early sixteenth century, and it was still described as Haddon’s ‘great place’. When he died in 1517, he left it to his widow Katherine, for life. Katherine’s first husband was Thomas Wyndout, the mercer we met in the first chapter of this book. When Katherine herself died in 1525, Sir Richard’s palatial townhouse passed (as he had specified in his will) to the Mercers’ Company, and some of the money the company made in renting it out paid for Haddon’s commemorative prayers in the mercers’ chapel of St Thomas of Acon.3

  What had been Haddon’s ‘great place’ gave the Muscovy Company just the cachet it needed, for once it had found its feet, this experimental trading company deserved an impressive second headquarters. Its first, in the parish of St Dunstan in the East, was no more than a stone’s throw from the wharves and quays of the city’s port and customs house, probably in one of the ‘many fair houses large for stowage’ that stood to the north and south of Thames Street.4 If Cabot did not live long enough to know Muscovy House on Seething Lane, he was certainly familiar with the company’s first home, where it all began – with trade and hard graft. In 1555 the founding members knew that they were building a corporation from the ground up, a working endeavour.

  And busy the company certainly was in 1555 and 1556. In November 1555 George Killingworth, the first resident agent the company sent to Russia, reported from Moscow on the initial full negotiations over its privileges. Richard Chancellor was in the city too, the company’s premier Russia expert by virtue of the months he had already spent in the country, as well as Robert Best, a talented linguist and the company’s first English translator.5 Killingworth was optimistic. Sweetened by a present of sugar from London, Ivan IV and his officials seemed receptive; certainly his secretary met them ‘with a cheerful countenance and cheerful words’, and they were dined in grand style. All this time the merchants were making sense of the new country, its geography, the distances between its towns and cities, its natural resources and commodities, its markets and traders, its weights and measures, and its currency of roubles and altines. The company’s agents and servants had a pragmatic eye for detail: they observed and they learned, and all for the purpose of trade and business.6

  The scale of the venture was huge. Russia, with its often brutal climate and perilous autumn and winter journeys by sled, was a world away from the familiar bustle of St Dunstan’s in the East. Letters in theory passed between London and Moscow through English merchants resident in Danzig on Poland’s Baltic coast, speeding up communication by avoiding the entire journey from St Nicholas on the White Sea back to Muscovy House, a route impassable anyway for part of the year. Even within Russia the company’s officials had to deal with one another over hundreds of miles. London’s Russia operation was from its beginning a triumph of mercantile grit over some formidable obstacles.7

  In 1557 the company entertained in London the first ambassador Ivan IV sent to England. He was the elusive Osip Nepea (or Osip Nepeya Grigor′ev) for whom this single embassy is the only reconstructable incident of an otherwise inscrutably obscure career. He may have been a senior official in the service of the tsar’s chancellory of foreign affairs, and probably he was a prosperous merchant from the city of Kholmogory, one of the Muscovy Company’s bases in Russia. But whoever or whatever he was, Nepea played his part to perfection. Received in London (in the understanding of at least one observer) as a ‘duke of Moscovia’, his embassy was treated in the city and at court as deserving of fantastic and lavish spectacle.8

  It was no easy assignment for Nepea and a delicate business for the company. Nepea’s job was to represent in person the emperor whose long string of titles had to be set out in full in order not to bruise his imperial dignity. There was tricky diplomatic protocol to navigate, along with the challenge of communication, though, thanks to George Killingworth’s companion Robert Best, the company was quickly building up its expertise in Anglo-Russian translation.

  Where Killingworth had sat down with officials in Moscow to negotiate on behalf of Cabot’s new company in London, Nepea had likewise to agree with Queen Mary’s Privy Council the terms for trade between Muscovy and England, doubtless with an emphasis on reciprocity: for all of the privileges granted to the Muscovy Company (which it needed to defend and nurture), Russian merchants had to be given a fair share of the trade passing between the two countries. If Nepea was indeed both an official of the chancellory of foreign affairs and a successful merchant, then he was the ideal man of experience to send to London. It seems likely in fact that in 1555 Nepea had led the negotiations with Killingworth and the Muscovy merchants in Moscow.9

  For Nepea and the Muscovy Company men that left Russia with him, it turned out to be a perilous and appalling journey. They sailed for England in the summer of 1556 and arrived in London on horseback in February 1557. Four of the company’s ships left the port of St Nicholas on the White Sea, but only one returned to England – the Philip and Mary – which took months to limp its way back, arriving in the Thames in April 1557. Of the others, one was smashed to pieces on rocks on the coast of Norway, and another disappeared and was never seen again.10 The fourth ship was the Edward Bonaventure, carrying Richard Chancellor. At anchor in the bay of Pitsligo in Aberdeenshire on 10 November 1556, having successfully negotiated Arctic waters with Ivan’s ambassador, the ship faced a great storm that blew up and pushed it dangerously onto the rocks. When it began to break into pieces, Chancellor ordered Nepea and his men into a boat that was itself quickly overwhelmed by the sea. At night, in tempestuous waves, Nepea nearly drowned. Chancellor lost his life, along with seven of Nepea’s party and a number of his own crew.

  In their efforts to establish Anglo-Russian trade, the Muscovy Company of London took very heavy losses: the lives of Sir Hugh Willoughby, Richard Chancellor and some London merchants, as well as many ships and thei
r crews. The serious cost in men and money of global mercantile endeavour was viscerally clear from the beginning.

  To add further pain and grievance to this latest disaster, most of the goods that Nepea had brought with him from Russia were looted from the wreck by what the company’s account of the journey called ‘the rude and ravenous people of the country thereunto adjoining’. The cargo of the Edward Bonaventure was worth a fortune, estimated by the Muscovy Company at a sum of £26,000, of which £6,000 worth of goods may have belonged to Nepea himself. As well as the loss of train oil, tallow, furs, felts and yarns, the looters pulled the ship itself to pieces and made away with almost everything on it.11

  Nepea was stranded in the north of Scotland, but with deft diplomacy the government of Queen Mary and King Philip was able to negotiate his safety and accommodate him there. Men from the company were sent up to Edinburgh with money and a translator. Hoping to recover some of the goods (but discovering instead the loss of ‘jewels, rich apparel, presents, gold, silver, costly furs and such like’), their most important job was to conduct Nepea to London.12 Instead of a grand reception for the ambassador on the River Thames, he and the survivors of his party had an impromptu journey through Scotland and England. They arrived in Berwick-upon-Tweed on 18 February 1557. Moving down the Great North Road as briskly as ambassadorial dignity would allow, nine days later Nepea and his escort were a few miles away from London.13

  The first encounters between Nepea and the Muscovy Company lodged themselves firmly in the memory of Henry Machyn, a citizen of London and merchant taylor who kept a journal of life in his city. Machyn’s keen mercantile eye was able to appreciate fully the sumptuousness of Nepea’s reception by the city’s grandees. Another eyewitness was the Muscovy Company’s official representative who, though his name is not recorded, was in all likelihood Robert Best, the ‘talmach or speechman’ (translator) the company had sent up to Edinburgh in December.14

  Just outside the village of Shoreditch were waiting eighty of London’s merchants dressed in all their finery, in ‘coats of velvet and coats of fine cloth guarded with velvet, and with fringe of silk and chains of gold’. Attending them were servants in the full blue livery of the Muscovy Company. Greeting the ambassador, they led the party to within four miles of the city. Presented ‘with a quantity of gold, velvet and silk, with all furniture thereunto requisite’, Nepea was made welcome for the night at a merchant’s country house.15

  The following day, 140 members of the Muscovy Company, with at least as many servants dressed in the blue livery, came out to meet Nepea and his party and lead them into the city proper. On the way he was shown ‘the hunting of the fox and such like sport’. To everything there was a purposeful choreography. Nepea’s movement towards the city was like a moving tableau – all at once an entertainment and an education in the life of England and London. Nothing was spared in making him welcome. Received and embraced on behalf of the queen by Viscount Montague, Nepea was given an escort of 300 mounted knights, esquires, gentlemen and yeomen. Four ‘notable merchants richly apparelled’ presented him with the gift of a large gelding ‘richly trapped’, the footcloth of which was a fine eastern crimson velvet sewn with gold lace. Mounting the horse, Nepea rode to Smithfield, where he entered London proper with Montague on one side and the lord mayor, Sir Thomas Offley, on the other. With the mayor were the aldermen in their scarlet gowns and great numbers of London’s merchants, followed by servants and apprentices. The streets were packed with people trying to keep up with the procession.16

  Henry Machyn saw it all for himself. Lapsing into a kind of historical present tense, there is a breathless immediacy to Machyn’s account of Nepea and his embassy passing by:

  And after comes my Lord Montague and divers lords and knights and gentlemen in gorgeous apparel; and after comes my lord mayor and aldermen in scarlet, and the ambassador, his garment of tissue broidered with pearls and stones; and his men in coarse cloth of gold down to the calf of the leg, like gowns, and high coping capes, and so to Master Dymoke’s place in Fenchurch Street, the merchant; and his cape and his night cap set with pearls and stones.17

  Nepea and his men were dazzling. Here was an ambassador dressed in the fashion of a Russian nobleman, as described by a later writer:

  First a Tassia or little night cap on his head, that covereth little more than his crown, commonly very rich wrought of silk and gold thread, and set with pearl and precious stone . . . Over the Tassia he weareth a wide cap of black fox . . . with a tiara or long bonnet put within it, standing up like a Persian or Babilonian hat.18

  Machyn was gripped by the colour and exoticism of the spectacle. Osip Nepeya Grigor′ev would have looked to Londoners on that February day like the model of a fantastic eastern potentate – the nearest it was possible to come to meeting the tsar himself.

  John Dymoke of Fenchurch Street was one of London’s mercantile greybeards, at the age of about sixty; he was a member of the Drapers’ Company. Nepea and his men were offered Dymoke’s townhouse at their own convenience. It was grand enough to serve the same purpose a few years later for ambassadors from the Holy Roman emperor and the regent of Flanders.19 For Nepea, two chambers had been beautifully furnished and hung with sumptuous tapestries, while he and his embassy dined off valuable plate, every day visited by city aldermen and prominent members of the Muscovy Company. It was at Dymoke’s house that Nepea was presented with the most powerfully symbolic of all the gifts, those of Queen Mary: ‘one rich piece of cloth of tissue, a piece of cloth of gold, another piece of cloth of gold raised with crimson velvet, a piece of crimson velvet in grain, a piece of purple velvet, a piece of damask purpled, a piece of crimson damask’.20

  Osip Nepea’s long stay in London was a masterpiece of stage-managed munificence. The timing was fortunate: Mary’s court was at an elevated pitch of anticipation at the return to England of the queen’s only occasionally present husband, King Philip of Spain. Four days after Philip’s arrival in Westminster, Nepea went to Whitehall Palace; it was Lady Day, 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, the first day of the new calendar year. With no context against which to judge what he saw, Nepea experienced London as a Catholic city in a kingdom now part of a composite Habsburg monarchy that stretched from England and the Spanish Netherlands to the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Nepea may have been entirely unaware of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, or the scouring Reformation of Edward VI, the young king who had once given his blessing to Sebastian Cabot’s efforts to find the riches of Cathay.

  Nepea went to Whitehall on 25 March dressed in cloth of tissue (interwoven with gold and silver thread), with a hat and cape set with pearls and other precious stones. Those with him, merchants like Feofan Makarov and Mikhail Grigor′ev Kosityn, were resplendent in cloth of gold and red damask. The whole party was accompanied to the palace by city aldermen and London’s Muscovy merchants, Nepea taking a barge at the Three Cranes stairs, a busy wharf of warehouses and lifting gear a little way down the Thames from Queenhithe: this was exactly the journey that a new lord mayor made to the landing stage at Whitehall. When Nepea arrived at court he gave to Mary and Philip his letters from Ivan IV, made an oration, and presented a gift (less impressive than it would have been before his shipwreck) of eighty sable furs which had been salvaged from the Edward Bonaventure. Everything he said was translated into English and, for the benefit of King Philip and his entourage, also into Spanish.21

  Behind the impeccable protocol were negotiations on the terms of Anglo-Russian trade. That, bluntly, was Nepea’s job, however much his visit to London was on the surface an exercise in public relations. On the English side, Mary’s government and the Muscovy Company worked powerfully together on the terms of the agreement: Mary had given the company its charter, and the company and its investors possessed financial clout – many of those investors being, of course, courtiers and government officials.

  Nepea and his team negotiated with Mary’s advisers to produce a ‘league and articles o
f amity’, a grand document in Latin authenticated by the great seal of England.22 These articles reciprocated to Nepea’s satisfaction (or at least to the full limits of his negotiating hand) the Muscovy Company’s privileges in Russia. They gave trading rights and protection to Russian merchants in England, including the right to establish a base in London, or indeed in any other English city – potentially a headquarters like the Steelyard of the Hanse, matching to some degree the Muscovy Company’s warehouses in Kholmogory, Vologda and Moscow.

  Diplomats and merchants were pragmatic men with an eye for the possible. But the language of the league with Russia addressed more generally – even aspirationally – the benefits of international trade: ‘So do we trust that this good foundation of mutual friendship thus well laid and agreed upon shall bring forth plentiful fruits both of brotherly love and assured amity between us and our successors and perpetual traffic between our subjects.’23

  However, the Anglo-Russian agreement was much more than this. Of huge significance was the fact that, together, a chartered trading company and the English Crown had used the instruments of diplomacy to negotiate with a foreign power a mercantile treaty. An agreement of international weight and meaning had been drawn up to facilitate privileged trade between two nations. More than this, even, was the fact that the political priorities of Mary I’s government fitted hand in glove with the business interests of London’s mercantile elite.