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

by Stephen Alford

  Making sense of all this change at the very end of the sixteenth century was John Stow, citizen and antiquary, whose Survey covered every nook and cranny of London, celebrating the city’s antiquity, prosperity and beauty. Like all antiquaries he was an instinctive recorder and classifier, and he wanted the London of his book, all its wards and parishes, to be packaged up neatly and tidily. But the rapidity of change in the city had given places once so familiar to Stow new ‘mongrel natures which frustrated a [i.e. his] categorical mind’, in one historian’s memorable phrase.21 For Stow, the ordered past was in very great danger of being broken apart by an unpredictable and disconcerting present.

  John Stow was a son of the city, born in 1524 or 1525 in the parish of St Michael Cornhill to a citizen father, Thomas, a tallow-chandler. The Royal Exchange was on John Stow’s doorstep: he saw it begun and completed with his own eyes. He was a boy when Thomas Cromwell lived close by (Cromwell in fact took without asking or recompense some of Thomas Stow’s garden to build himself a new grand house), and in his twenties and thirties John witnessed the reformation of London’s churches, regretting the forcible cleansing by zealous Protestant iconoclasts of tombs and memorials that bore witness to the deep continuities of the past. His was not an outstanding career: he kept a low profile, quietly beavering away at books and manuscripts, reading and writing. The son of a decent and respectable family, though not quite a gentleman, he was unable to boast of a school or a university or his freedom of a livery company – something of an irony, perhaps, for one whose cause was to set down forever the achievements of mercantile London. But he was tireless in grasping every last detail of his subject, a mastery he attained by walking and observing. A Survey of London was the distillation of the hundreds of perambulations Stow made of his city over decades.

  We might be tempted today to read Stow’s Survey as a sort of hybrid of Baedeker’s guides and Pevsner’s architectural handbooks, with the volumes of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments thrown in for good measure, and missing only the photographs. We could also add to these venerable institutions Alfred Wainwright’s twentieth-century guides to the English Lake District, because like them the Survey seems to look to every contour and detail, missing nothing. Both Stow’s and Wainwright’s projects were long labours of love, even of obsession. Wainwright and Stow shared a devotion to landscape – the former for fells and mountains, the latter for a city (though Stow, too, loved the countryside), as well as a deep and unapologetic conservatism. In Stow it was the conservatism of age as much as of temperament. In 1598, when his great book was first printed, John Stow was in his middle seventies; it was a remarkable run of years given that most Londoners were lucky to reach forty, and in a society that set great store by ancient memory it made him a formidable authority.

  It is easy to read Stow’s Survey as a comprehensive inventory of what was there in his city, a kind of antiquary’s catalogue. That is how it looks from the Contents page, moving from London’s origins and history to its sources of water, its ditch and walls, bridges, gates and so on, before embarking on a study of the city wards (really the main body of the Survey) and the names of the lord mayors, aldermen and sheriffs. The book considers, too, old games and pastimes, evoking a comfortable sense of a lost merry England; Stow was nothing if not nostalgic for that which had once been.22 It is so obviously the work of an antiquary: a book written by someone who knows his history and is reluctant to leave out any fact, as well as a man who has used up a huge amount of shoe leather in walking the streets, noting and recording houses and halls, crosses and conduits, and inspecting every crevice of London’s churches in search of monuments and inscriptions. Stow’s Survey is a masterpiece of first-hand observation, fact and detail.

  But actually Stow’s Survey is more than this. It is an effort to mark change and to record loss. The place we know as Stow’s London was located somewhere in a past of his own making, and it was being eroded away before his eyes. And it was not just the built city that was changing. Londoners of Stow’s present were not quite up to the mark of their predecessors. For Stow, old social bonds of charity and generosity were loosening. Behind Stow’s celebration of ‘Troynovant’ (‘New Troy’), with its fair merchants’ houses, fine churches and great livery company halls, was the sense of new and disconcerting forces at work. The most corrosive of these was private profit.

  Stow wanted to record in 1598 the London he had known as a boy and a younger man, the city fast disappearing. He read in the memorial inscriptions of London’s churches old traditions of city piety. Now the city was choked with people, Stow clung to the security of the old benefactors who had built London and made it great.23 He saw what he wanted to see, and he was frank in ignoring what did not interest him. ‘In Addle Street or Lane [close to Silver Street, where Shakespeare lodged] I find no monuments’ – and that was that.24

  Stow knew where the new Londoners were living. He had seen in the course of his life open spaces covered over with houses and tenements, and suburban filth and congestion ruin a city once all the more magnificent because of its surrounding countryside. He was disturbed by the enclosing of common land ‘all which ought to lie open and free for all men’.25 Nowhere, he felt, was immune from change. The country farm, near the Tower of London, from which as a boy he had collected fresh warm milk, was a memory. It was a vision almost of the Golden Country, an idealized lost world of imagination, to which Stow was able to add memories of old families and characters he had known.26

  Yet this was more than simply a private nostalgia. At stake, indeed, was the very identity of the city. This Stow understood in his own peculiar way, both compressing and telescoping centuries of the city’s history. In many ways Stow was more at home with his records of twelfth-century London (especially the work of the chronicler William Fitzstephen) than he was in the city of the late sixteenth. London’s distant and recent pasts seemed to coexist for Stow; it was the present and the future that disturbed the fragile equilibrium of history, place and people. This was what he wanted to record in his Survey. Completing it was to Stow as necessary a task as it must have been for him a dislocating one. His book was in some ways a eulogy for a better London – and better Londoners – dead and gone.

  And yet even this new London stood out impressively. No other English town or city came close to it, and by the end of the sixteenth century it ranked in European terms. Stow concluded his Survey with an ‘Apology’ – a defence – of London against the charge that it was too big and powerful for England’s well-being. Stow being Stow, he offered to his readers a long and elaborate essay on the origins of towns and cities and their benefits to humanity as instruments of civilization, commerce and charity. True, some complained that London possessed too much money and power; true also that other English towns, especially the trading ports, complained that London had ruined their livelihoods – and Stow admitted that probably they were right. But it was no wonder, in Stow’s view, that so many retailers and tradesmen left their home towns for London. The queen’s court, so often positioned near to the city, was greater than ever. The Thames and its ships helped to make London ‘the nurse’ of the navy. The southern counties of England flourished because of the city. It was a reserve of money and taxation for the royal government, as well as an engine of charity for the poor and support for the universities. ‘It only is stored with rich merchants,’ Stow wrote, ‘which sort only is tolerable: for beggarly merchants do bite too near, and will do more harm than good to the realm.’27 London’s self-evident success was in the end an easy justification for the disproportionality of its size and power.

  For a Londoner who felt all the discomforts of a changing city, it was a bravura defence by Stow of London’s uniqueness: all the regrets and the nostalgia were for the moment forgotten.

  To compare John Stow and Richard Hakluyt in 1598 is to put side by side two Londoners of different generations with strikingly similar talents, but very different obsessions. One was an old man for whom
London meant everything. The other, thirty years younger, was a church minister whose vocation was to serve God by chronicling English navigations across the globe. Both Stow and Hakluyt were the sons of London citizens, but where Stow was a self-taught antiquary who moved in fairly humble circles, Hakluyt was a university-trained scholar who had the knack of securing high patronage. He was able to impress the great men and women of Elizabeth I’s court, dedicating the first edition of his masterly Principal navigations (1589) to Sir Francis Walsingham and its hugely expanded successor (1598– 1600) to Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral of England, and Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s influential secretary and the son and protégé of Lord Burghley.

  The three volumes of Principal navigations Hakluyt produced between 1598 and 1600 exceeded in ambition even Stow’s Survey. The work was colossal: 1.76 million words, ranking in scale with the English Bible and John Foxe’s Acts and monuments, the famous ‘Book of Martyrs’. It is perhaps the largest repository we have of Elizabethan prose. Each of the volumes took a portion of the globe: the first, the north and north-east, the second, the south and south-east, the third America. Hakluyt had spent years gathering together the sources from navigators, mariners, merchants and diplomats. His skill was to let their voices be heard, carefully cueing them in for the reader, but then stepping unobtrusively into the background. He was not shy about the hard work he had undertaken, or about what he had achieved. He saw it as a task of national importance, preserving ‘certain memorable exploits of late years by our English nation achieved, from the greedy and devouring jaws of oblivion’.28

  Hakluyt knew that he had to dig deeply into the past to look at very old sources, sources which helped to explain the present. Like Stow, Hakluyt was able to compress the centuries into a single reflex, moving with surprising speed from a voyage back in the mists of ancient British history to an expedition of one of the great Elizabethan navigators – Drake, say, or Frobisher. His book is a celebration of achievement, something plain enough from the title page: The principal navigations, voiages, traffiques and discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1500. yeeres. He had used the same title in 1589: a decade later nothing had changed, other than that Hakluyt had gathered so much more evidence with which to prove his point.

  Lurking over England’s shoulder were Spain and Portugal, and Hakluyt knew what those sea powers had achieved. ‘True it is, that our success hath not been correspondent unto theirs,’ he admitted. But in fact England had had to work harder than its rivals, showing grit and determination in sailing tough northern seas. What he called the ‘golden success’ of Spain and Portugal – the colonies and the conquests – would come. English mastery of a ‘convenient’ sea route to Russia was comparable in his mind to Portugal’s discovery of the East Indies.29

  At the beginning of this great project, Hakluyt introduced a roll call of heroes like Richard Chancellor, Sir Hugh Willoughby and Anthony Jenkinson.30 Of these, only Jenkinson was then alive, having retired to a country manor near Northampton after a busy second career as a royal diplomat. It was thanks to Jenkinson, Hakluyt wrote, that English merchants had pushed even beyond ‘the farthest eastern and southeastern bounds of that huge empire’ to the unknown and dangerous Caspian Sea.31 In Principal navigations Hakluyt completed the script of a century, one that had been put together over decades by Hakluyt himself, as well as his cousin Richard of the Middle Temple, Richard Eden, John Dee, Anthony Jenkinson, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Michael Lok. It was by now a familiar narrative: England, the plucky outsider, was quickly catching up with the once great powers. Global supremacy would come, the evidence was clear – it was only a matter of time.

  For Hakluyt, it was all part of a greater endeavour blessed by God’s providence, in which, as he had shown in his long and important ‘Discourse on Western planting’ (1584), the ambition was to plant colonies in America. Proceeding by fits and starts, thanks to men like Gilbert and Sir Walter Ralegh, at the turn of a new century this was at long last becoming realizable. A convinced Atlanticist from the beginning, Hakluyt’s purpose in the third volume of the new Principal navigations was to understand all the efforts made so far in discovering America. He printed all the sources he could on what had been found so far on that continent: a fair portion of them had to do with Sebastian Cabot of the Muscovy Company and Martin Frobisher’s heroic voyages in the Canadian Arctic, the various patents granted by Elizabeth I to explorers in their claims to the new continent, as well as to Ralegh’s voyages to Virginia in the 1580s. Virginia, as we shall see, was of special interest to Hakluyt.

  London had a central place in Hakluyt’s big project. He believed that English global ambition had deep roots in history: ‘But that no man should imagine that our foreign trades of merchandise have been comprised within some few years, or at least wise have not been of any long continuance.’ For proof of this, he asked his readers to turn to a later page of the volume. There they read the Latin of the Roman historian Tacitus, and with it Hakluyt’s English translation: ancient London, ‘which though it were not honoured with the name and title of a Roman colony, yet was it most famous for multitude of merchants and concourse of people’.32 John Stow used the same short passage in his Survey to make the identical point: London was historically unrivalled in England as a city of merchants.33

  The great volumes of Stow’s Survey and Hakluyt’s Principal navigations were on sale in London at the beginning of a new century. Both were serious works, full of meaning. They articulated something stirring in the ancient city – and that was change, a force that by instinct Elizabethans found disturbing and uncomfortable, but one that they somehow managed to embrace. London was not quite what it had once been. But in the transformation there were fresh possibilities – the hopes of a future there to be discovered, new ventures, new commerce and new worlds.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  To the East Indies

  When John Sanderson planted his tree in Moorfields in 1606, he was more or less retired from trade. He was a native Londoner; his father’s house, where he had been born, was in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, and he had attended St Paul’s School in the churchyard. His experience there was not a happy one: he wrote of his ‘unaptness’ for study and of beatings so severe that they left him scarred for life. Work out in the far eastern Mediterranean was a kind of freedom for Sanderson. It brought standing and responsibility. On his first posting to Constantinople in 1584, when he was twenty-four, the queen’s ambassador there had made him steward of his household. Over the following decades Sanderson went on to explore the East, learning languages, travelling to Egypt (where he saw the Sphinx) and touring the villages and towns of the Holy Land. In his time there, he journeyed overland through Asia Minor to Antioch and Aleppo, and visited Tripoli and Damascus.

  Sanderson never married. Once as a young man there had been a servant girl, but any hope of marrying her had been squashed by her mistress. In 1606 that must have seemed a lifetime away: by then he was in his middle forties and settling down as well as a restless temperament would allow him. He was never an easy man to rub along with – his temper could be ferocious and he had a long memory for old scores and grievances. By middle age he knew that marriage was not for him. He remarked in a letter of 1608 that the rich widows of London were being quickly snapped up by new husbands: ‘I look not after any,’ he wrote, ‘better liking a free single life than with more wealth to be subjected to a woman’s humours.’1 That independence he celebrated with the occasional visit to the theatre. Often he played his lute, which was something of a passion. And he never quite let go of the mercantile life: in London, where he lodged with his brother, he went to the Royal Exchange to hear the latest news and kept in touch by letter with old contacts in Constantinople.

  No great sense of vocation had originally taken the young John Sanderson out to the Mediterranean. Bound as an apprentice in
his late teens, he had been turned over by his master to a syndicate of London merchants trading with the Ottoman Empire without his knowledge or consent. Before the first journey out to Constantinople, he and the gentlemen passengers got ‘merry drunk’ in the cellars of the governor of the Isle of Wight, Sir George Carew.2 On the voyage they came close to disaster when the ship ran aground; the master’s mate had fallen asleep at his post. It was not the only shipwreck Sanderson experienced. Another was near Rosetta on the voyage between Alexandria and Cairo. For all the danger, he took pretty well to his new life; he was a robust traveller, even if his short temper tested the patience of his seniors. Sanderson was a man who could not leave an argument alone.

  Once upon a time Venetian ships had sailed up the Thames carrying the spices and silks of the East. In the sixteenth century, London’s merchants went instead to buy them in Antwerp. Some Tudor merchants went further, trading and sailing in the East, two of whom were Anthony Jenkinson and Michael Lok. In Aleppo, Jenkinson had seen Suleiman the Magnificent the best part of a decade before John Sanderson was born. But for English merchants, Mediterranean trade was a tentative business and highly risky. Pirates operating from the coast of North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews. And negotiating with the great Islamic power of the East, the Ottoman Empire, was fraught with hostility. For Elizabethans, Turkish power was both fascinating and repellent. As one writer put it, ‘Many men do wonder at the great power and puissance of the Turks’, a people ‘most rude and barbarous’.3 The poet Thomas Nashe called the Ottoman Empire ‘the adamantinest tyranny of mankind’.4 Any merchants who wanted to open up direct trade with Turkey had somehow to persuade the Ottoman sultans that Anglo-Turkish trade was a worthwhile enterprise to be protected and nourished. It was not an easy pitch to make.