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

by Stephen Alford

  FIRK: Ha, ha! Good master, hire him. He’ll make me laugh so that I shall work more in mirth than I can in earnest.

  Firk sees at once the chance for heavy drinking with strong beer. Making fun of his foreign accent, he says that Lacy’s ‘yes, yeses’ sounds like a pet jackdaw: ‘Yaw, yaw! He speaks yawing like a jackdaw that gapes to be fed with cheese-curds. Oh, he’ll give a villainous pull at a can of double beer.’ (I. iv.75–95)13

  Dekker plays here with all kinds of jokes. We find the social order turned upside down (the nephew of an earl becomes a humble shoemaker), the familiarity of the drunken Dutchman, and of course Rowland Lacy’s comedy patois. We can assume that Lacy’s mock Dutch was understandable enough to be funny for Dekker’s audience. This was exactly the kind of humour that must have gone down a storm with London’s theatre audiences: sharply observed, irreverent, subversive and satirical.

  Of course the contrived fantasy of Rowland Lacy’s assumed life on stage – the lovelorn gentleman playing a part with a funny accent to get close to his master’s daughter – was a long way from the more common experiences of London’s Elizabethan strangers. They were probably laughed at (at least on the stages of Southwark) and more often than not tolerated, but sometimes resented and hated. While Thomas Dekker made fun of Rowland Lacy’s ‘Yaw, yawing’, the residual grievances of London’s dispossessed, especially of its apprentices and apprentice drop-outs, boiled over on occasion into riots and violence. In 1606 the lord mayor accused the strangers, working outside the city’s jurisdiction, of having ‘devised and practised by all sinister and subtle means how to defraud and defeat’ London’s charters.14 These were strong words to use. If the wealthy and comfortably established of London felt under assault by the strangers, then it is no surprise that the city’s disenfranchised underclass took to the streets against those they considered aliens and outsiders.

  In a conservative and protectionist society, resentments and accusations bubbled away under a surface tolerance. There were worries about secret corruption, with foreigners up to no good. Early in Elizabeth’s reign, for example, there were allegations that a cabal of thirty-seven Italian merchants working in England had together tried to subvert the English cloth trade in Antwerp and used sharp practice by making bogus entries in the London customs books.15

  More potent a decade later was the worry about economic migration. Seeking a new life in London to follow one’s faith free from persecution was one thing, but coming to the city just to work was quite another. The data that London’s government and stranger churches (by Elizabeth’s reign there were French and Italian congregations as well as the Dutch community at Austin Friars) sent on to the queen’s Privy Council gave cause for concern – for the churches as well as for the London corporation. In 1573, returns showed that 7,143 resident aliens were living in the city and suburbs. Of these, 2,561 (nearly 36 per cent) admitted that they had come to London only to find work. A high number of strangers belonged to no church at all, but even of those who attended the stranger congregations, 1,828 said that they were in London primarily for work and not for religion.16 With these numbers in mind, all the systems that the corporation, the stranger churches and the Bishop of London had in place to monitor foreigners in the city, including certificates of church attendance and formal letters of introduction from congregations in mainland Europe, seem to mean very little. Effectively under the radar of discipline and supervision, large numbers of strangers wanted to live their own lives and work to keep themselves in the city.

  A worry for natives was that the strangers were more skilled than they were: the fear was that a stranger employed meant an unemployed Londoner. Those at the lower end of London’s social hierarchy believed that strangers threatened their fragile livelihoods. For those at the top of the city hierarchy, the fear was, oddly, a similar one. The privileges of citizenship seemed to be under attack, and if strangers were allowed to compete on equal terms with citizens, disaster would follow. When in 1587 the Privy Council suggested opening up the city’s cloth market fully to foreigners and strangers, the mayor and aldermen reacted in horror: such a change, they protested, would break apart the Company of Merchant Adventurers and bring violence to the streets of the city.17 Hackles were quick to rise, sharp accusations easy to make. In 1595 London’s English silk-weavers wrote directly to the pastors of the French and Dutch Churches, alleging that strangers sought ‘their own private lucre without any Christian regard of the native born of our country and without respect of the liberties of this honourable city’.18

  With worry and anxiety bubbling away for decades, it was no surprise that London’s strangers lived with threats and intimidation and sometimes open violence. Trouble never seemed far away. In 1567 the city’s watch was put on alert because posters were pasted up around London that showed Flemings strung up on gallows. Conditions in the city inflamed native prejudices and grievances. London had a sizeable underclass of young apprentices, masterless men, vagrants and demobilized soldiers. By the 1590s there were high levels of unemployment in the city, some vicious outbreaks of plague and sickness, successive crop failures, rising prices and military conscription. It was easy to blame the strangers for problems not of their making. Resentments built and built, to be released either by riot or the threat of it.

  At about the time of the performance of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, in 1600, Thomas Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, including William Shakespeare, on a play about the life and career of Sir Thomas More. A part of the play went back to the events of ‘Ill May Day’ in 1517, when the houses of merchant strangers in London had been attacked. In Sir Thomas More, More himself, as a city under-sheriff, confronts the rioters. At the end of the sixteenth century, such a dramatic moment acted out on stage was something much more than a remote historical reference. The play dealt here with an issue so delicate and potentially inflammatory that it was censored by Edmund Tilney, an official of Queen Elizabeth’s court. Tilney insisted upon a sleight of word: any reference to ‘stranger’ had to be replaced by the much less problematic (but still to some extent loaded) ‘Lombard’, a reference to the powerful bankers who had lived and worked in London a century or two earlier.19

  In the surviving manuscript of the play, the scene written by Shakespeare does not have this concession to Tilney. In it, citizens and apprentices come on to the stage armed and looking for trouble. Using language that Shakespeare would have heard for himself on London’s streets and in its alehouses and taverns, they complain about the price of food, claiming that butter would rise to an astronomical eleven pence a pound (in 1600 this was easily more than the daily wage of a London labourer), meal at nine shillings a bushel and beef at four nobles a stone. One of them says, ‘It will come to that pass if strangers be suffered’. They get angrier, talking about the infections brought into the country by foreign vegetables. ‘Strange roots’ undo poor apprentices; they are trash, breeding sore eyes, infecting London with a palsy that will make the city shake; the unfortunate vegetables are ‘bastards of dung’ (II. iii.1–20).

  Thomas More speaks to their humanity. He speaks also to the worries, fears and anger of Londoners at the turn of a new century:

  MORE: . . . what is it you have got

  Although we grant you get the thing you seek?

  BETTS: Marry, the removing of the strangers,

  which cannot choose but much advantage the poor handicrafts of the city.

  MORE: Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

  Hath chid down all the majesty of England;

  Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

  Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,

  Plodding to the th’ ports and coasts for transportation,

  And that you sit as kings in your desires,

  Authority quite silenced by your brawl,

  And you in ruff of your opinions clothed:

  What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

  How insolenc
e and strong hand should prevail,

  How order should be quelled . . . (II. iii. 78–93)

  The message, powerfully written, was plain: in persecuting poor refugees seeking shelter, the rioting men of London were persecuting humanity itself – insolent power would break down already wretched men, women and children. It was a brave and provocative piece of theatre: Sir Thomas More confronted a Southwark audience with its own prejudices and discontents, the rumblings and moanings of a city on the edge, picking on the outsiders out of fear or hatred or both. The words of More in the play are Shakespeare’s, and so too is that unerring sense of the human condition. And Shakespeare himself knew some of the strangers of London at close hand: on Silver Street, tucked away in the north-west corner of the walled city, he lodged from 1603 with a family of French émigrés called the Mountjoys.20

  To make a home in a city is to make in turn all kinds of adjustments to life, work and worldview. Given that London was the kind of city it was, there were tens of thousands of new Londoners, most of them not strangers, who had to adapt themselves to its sheer scale. It must have been a big enough shock for natives, but for strangers the challenge was immense, especially given the restrictions on where they could live and how they could (or could not) work. Not surprisingly, the strangers tended to coalesce in their own communities. To break out of those created further difficulties; to live and talk like a native while holding on to one’s family and community was the greatest feat of all, and we can be sure that many second- and third-generation strangers achieved it, though not without a struggle.

  An illustration of all this can be found in the lives of two Cornelis Spierincks, father and son, who lived in Elizabethan London. The elder Cornelis, born in Antwerp, was a prominent Calvinist there, and brought his family and servants to the city soon after Antwerp’s short-lived ‘Wonderyear’, when Calvinists experienced freedom of worship – until King Philip of Spain sent the Duke of Alba into the the Low Countries with an army of 10,000 crack Spanish troops and, in the Conseil des Troubles (nicknamed by Calvinists the ‘Blood Council’), established a mechanism to root out heresy. The Spierincks, like so many Protestants in the Low Countries, found in London safety for both body and conscience.

  They rented first in the parish of St Benet Sherehog, but then settled in Ironmonger Lane close to Guildhall, where Dr Spierinck practised as a physician. He was an elder of the Italian Church in London and a pillar of his community. He died in 1578, leaving a rather terse will that he dictated in Dutch. It was witnessed by two notaries, of whom one, Paul Typootes, was a fellow elder of the Italian Church. To his son Cornelis, Dr Spierinck bequeathed his estate, his six best shirts, a piece of fine black cloth, and his summer and winter clothes. As for his daughter Mary, he expected from her no complaints about what she received from the will: she and her husband Francis still owed him 500 guilders from the 1,000 they had borrowed.21

  The younger Cornelis was training to be a notary public with Paul Typootes. To read the wills Typootes and Cornelis drew up in the 1580s and 1590s is to be taken to the bedsides of stranger merchants living in London, and to see something of the weave of community life. What stands out from these wills are double obligations of charity to the stranger churches and London parishes and the complexities of having far-flung families, businesses and real estate in the Netherlands.

  On a July day in 1582, Cornelis and Typootes went to a house on St Nicholas Lane, close to the Royal Exchange, where they witnessed the will of a Dutch merchant stranger called Melchior van Asse. Cornelis must have known Melchior for the whole of his life in London: he was a man of substance from the old country, a native of Gelderland in the central Netherlands, and for years a stalwart of the Dutch congregation in London, living in the city probably before Cornelis was born. In 1550 he had been one of the first deacons at Austin Friars. Responsible for supporting the members of the congregation, Melchior would have seen at close hand men and women making new lives for themselves in the city, as well as keeping in touch with friends and family in the Low Countries. Melchior van Asse was one of the foundation stones of a proud community.22

  He was married twice, first to Anna, the mother of their four children, and then to Maijken (or Mary) Obrijs. Melchior and Maijken had married at Austin Friars in April 1575. Maijken was the widow of a Dutch church elder called Thomas Soenen, and probably Melchior had known her since she and Thomas had first come to England about ten years before. The stranger community of London, especially at its elite end, neatly paralleled the patterns of citizen marriages and remarriages – theirs was a very small world.23

  And so, on that summer’s day in 1582, Paul Typootes and Cornelis Spierinck helped Melchior van Asse tie up his affairs in London and the Netherlands, overseen by at least one of Melchior’s very old friends, another merchant stranger called Geleyn de Beste, with whom he had once served as deacon at Austin Friars. Melchior van Asse had known London for over three decades – easily the entire lifespan of an Elizabethan Londoner. Yet he was bound by the deep ties of the Dutch community whose focus, for van Asse and others like him, was the Jesus Temple at the Austin Friars.24

  With the wills and testaments of London’s strangers, Cornelis Spierinck learned his trade. The kind of work he did meant that he knew the most private business of many families just like his. And he did well for himself. By 1585 he was a notary in his own right. Eight years later he was living in St Christopher’s parish with his wife Katherine, their boys of seven and five, and their two servants, both strangers, one born in London, the other in Brabant. A few years after that, in 1599, he moved to the neighbouring parish of St Bartholomew’s near the Exchange, a place we will return to later.25

  This very short account of the two Cornelis Spierincks could be replicated many hundreds of times over. It is the classic émigré story: a father who spoke his own native language to the end – conservative, wary, comfortable in his community; and a son who was able to push further out into the stronger currents of city life. Where Dr Spierinck was a man who had preserved his separateness, young Cornelis was of a different generation and experience. His memories of Antwerp, if indeed he had any, must have been fragmentary. Though rooted in the émigré community, his world was London and its people. In the 1590s his life was settled in a part of the city that was busy and international, five minutes’ walk from Austin Friars and the French strangers’ congregation on Threadneedle Street, and just across the road from the Royal Exchange. He and his family heard the bells of St Bartholomew’s ring to celebrate the queen’s birthday in September and the anniversary of her coronation each November. They were Londoners by adoption – but so too were many thousands of others.

  Cornelis Spierinck takes us back, just for a moment, to Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange. The Exchange was a notary’s paradise of merchants’ business, with news brought daily from the Low Countries by the posts and couriers. Its very architecture conjured a memory of Antwerp. For those in the shadow of its bell tower, natives as well as strangers, it spoke to a cosmopolitan reality – a difference and otherness accepted or challenged – that a growing and complex city was trying to make sense of.

  CHAPER ELEVEN

  ‘Travails, pains, and dangers’

  When Ivan the Terrible’s ambassador, Osip Nepea, had left London for Russia in 1557, the young man who went with him as the Muscovy Company’s captain was already one of the most precocious mercantile adventurers of his day. His name was Anthony Jenkinson. Four years earlier, when he was twenty-four, Jenkinson had seen the Ottoman sultan ride into Aleppo at the head of a vast army. It was a memory to last a lifetime: Suleiman the Magnificent in cloth of gold and precious stones, his crown topped by white ostrich feathers, a monarch resplendent and commanding. Jenkinson stands out from his contemporaries, almost a prototype for the hero of a John Buchan thriller: a man of the world, tenacious and imperturbable, endlessly inventive, a born diplomat equally at ease in royal courts and hostile wildernesses.

  The Musco
vy Company in 1557 was ambitious for success. Its losses in men, ships and cargo in only three years would have broken any other mercantile venture. But behind the company was the combined financial and political heft of the city of London, its charter members and its investors. Those investors were some of the most powerful figures in England: law officers, royal councillors and leading courtiers. In its trade negotiations with Nepea in 1557, the full power of international diplomacy had been directed at a single corporate operation that, by its charter, commanded a monopoly of trade and exploration, not only with and beyond Russia, but throughout the whole northern ocean. No mercantile company could have been more enmeshed in city and government.

  Much of the company’s attention was given to building up its knowledge and expertise: it was, after all, trying to make sense of an empire that it had bumped into by accident on the way to Cathay. They possessed fragments of knowledge, from old books of cosmography to tentative maps of Asia. Richard Chancellor and others had written accounts of their months in Russia; the company’s agents continued to measure and map the tsar’s territories; every fleet that went out to the White Sea refined by practice the hard business of sailing in northern waters. In London there were experts, prominent among them Richard Eden and Robert Recorde, and probably also the elder Richard Hakluyt, a barrister of the Middle Temple, a keen geographer. Another was John Dee, the son of a London mercer, a brilliant and eccentric polymath whose mind was never at rest. A graduate of Cambridge who had travelled into the Low Countries for further study, Dee was introduced at Edward VI’s court by the king’s own tutor. On Richard Chancellor’s return to London from Russia in 1554, Dee and Chancellor had worked closely together. Dee could not praise the Muscovy Company’s leading Russian expert highly enough, later celebrating him as ‘the incomparable Master Richard Chancellor’. After Chancellor’s death, Dee gave tuition to the company’s chief pilots, the brothers Stephen and William Borough.1