London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  London’s Triumph

  For my parents, with love

  O London, thou art great in glory, and envied for thy greatness: thy towers, thy temples, and thy pinnacles stand upon thy head like borders of gold, thy waters like fringes of silver hang at the hems of thy garments. Thou art the goodliest of thy neighbours, but the proudest; the wealthiest, but the most wanton.

  Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly

  Sinnes of London (1606)

  Moved by the good affection … and much more by that good will, which of duty I bear to my native country and countrymen, which have of late to their great praise (whatsoever succeed) attempted with new voyages to search the seas and new found lands …

  Richard Eden, A Treatyse of the

  Newe India (1553)

  Contents

  The Triumph of London

  Author’s Note

  1 A Merchant’s World

  2 Londoners

  3 Landmarks

  4 In Antwerp’s Shadow

  5 ‘Love, serve and obey’

  6 Searching for Cathay

  7 A Russian Embassy

  8 The Brothers Isham

  9 ‘So fair a bourse in London’

  10 Aliens and Strangers

  11 ‘Travails, pains, and dangers’

  12 Flourishing Lands

  13 The Unknown Limits

  14 Master Lok’s Disgrace

  15 Shylock’s Victory

  16 St Bartholomew the Less

  17 Change and Nostalgia

  18 To the East Indies

  19 Virginia Richly Valued

  20 Time Past, Time Present

  Notes

  List of Illustrations and Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Images

  The Triumph of London

  This book tells a story that breaks all the rules of historical probability: how one city grew in spite of huge and recurring demographic crises of mortality and disease, coped with massive levels of immigration and, on top of all this, found the confidence by the late sixteenth century to explore, trade with and colonize far parts of the world unknown only two generations before. It is a story about money, wealth, poverty, self-confidence, greed, tenacity and remarkable happenstance and accident. It is the story of Tudor London, the city William Shakespeare knew.

  As much as this is a book about a single city, it also explores significantly changing worlds of experience, knowledge, possibility and imagination within and beyond London. To say that English horizons were opened up between 1500 and 1620 would be a severe understatement. Where for centuries London’s merchants had been content to send their ships to and from the Low Countries (today Belgium and the Netherlands), France and the Baltic, by 1620 they knew Russia, Persia, the far eastern Mediterranean and Africa, and had bases from the Red Sea to Japan, as well as colonies in North America. Their ambitions were without limit; they built vast trading corporations and entertained hopes of trans-and inter-continental business that would circumnavigate the globe. Hand in hand with this was the discovery by ordinary people of faraway places through books printed in London. In 1500 the keenest bibliophile would have struggled to fill even a modest shelf with books printed in the city. A century later, thanks to a combination of a thriving industry and readers eager for new knowledge, the same shelves would have heaved with pamphlets and volumes of explorations, navigations, exotic peoples, sermons, foreign languages, histories, poetry and drama. Add to this what was effectively the quadrupling of London’s population in just over a century and the physical reshaping of a city bursting with people, and it is no wonder that we are left with the exciting task of trying to understand (or sometimes frankly to keep pace) with a dizzying story.

  We need right at the beginning to leave behind some big modern assumptions. The first is that the kingdom of Tudor England was a major player in Europe; the second (a hard notion to let go of today) that to speak English counted for anything. In European terms, England in 1500 was a marginal backwater, London a solid enough but broadly unspectacular city. English was a minor language spoken by some, but by no means all, of the inhabitants of what today we call the British Isles. Survey the various fields of European endeavour in 1500 and England barely registered; its cultural pulse was very faint indeed. The great names of the day in art (Sandro Botticelli and Albrecht Dürer, for example), church power (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X), finance and banking (Jakob Fugger), navigation and exploration (Christopher Columbus), political analysis (Niccolò Machiavelli), science and human knowledge (Leonardo da Vinci) and university scholarship (Erasmus of Rotterdam) all had, as well as their brilliance, at least one other thing in common: they were not English. The most powerful royal courts and most impressive seats of learning were to be found in Italy, Spain, France and Germany. The Tudor Henry VII, king of England in 1500, was able to punch above his weight diplomatically by signing international peace treaties and marrying off his children to fellow princes. But Henry’s wider influence was as nothing compared with the kings of France and Spain and, pre-eminently, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who ruled the great agglomeration of territories that make up modern Germany and central Europe. To be understood abroad, an Englishman had to speak either another European vernacular or, ideally, Latin. English was a language whose furthest reach was Calais, at least when Calais was still an English possession (but it was lost by battle to the French in 1558).

  In terms of trade and navigation, England was a very long way behind other European powers. As we will see, the great entrepôt of north-western Europe, where the riches of the Middle East and Asia were bought by English merchants, was Antwerp; before that it had been Bruges. The Italian cities of Genoa and Venice were formidable commercial powers in the eastern Mediterranean, and Naples was much larger even than Paris in terms of its population (and Paris in turn was considerably bigger than London). Banking houses of Augsburg like the Fugger and the Welser dominated the financial scene of western Europe, lending huge sums of money to kings and emperors, including (a little later) kings of England. London was a modest satellite of a European system of international trade whose weight was settled firmly in the middle of the continent.

  When it came to the wider world, by 1500 Spain and Portugal had well-established global ambitions. Blessed by the papacy, those two Iberian powers had practically carved up the whole world between them, as in 1493 Pope Alexander VI divided the globe by a meridian drawn north to south 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain’s western imperial ambitions were just at that point beginning to develop. Already by 1500 Portuguese explorers knew Africa and the Middle East and were establishing bases in the East Indies to import pepper and valuable spices into Europe. Within a few decades the vast riches of Mexico would be opened up to plunder and exploitation; the silver fleets returning across the Atlantic by way of the Caribbean became the greatest prop of global Spanish power. In 1503 the Casa de la Contratación, a department of Spain’s central government, was set up to process the immensely valuable cargoes returning from the other side of the world. It was also a highly regarded school of navigation that developed ever more advanced techniques of further exploration. In this new world, English merchants and navigators were nowhere to be seen. To say ‘empire’ or ‘colony’ to such a merchant in 1500 would be to invite a puzzled look at words which had no obvious relevance to his life and business. Equally, English navigators would take another half century even to begin to catch up with the advanced skills of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains.

  If the rise of London looks all the more remarkable in the light of the utter marginality of England at the beginning of the sixteenth century, then just as confounding is the fact that the city flou
rished as, in the decades that followed, continental Europe was torn by religious war, massacre and revolt.

  Europe at the best of times was a hotchpotch of kingdoms, provinces, dukedoms and city-states. Even relatively settled kingdoms like France and England had all kinds of semi-autonomous regions and princedoms. Notionally Europe was bound together by the idea and structures of Christendom, in which the formidable multinational spiritual corporation that was the Catholic Church, with its pope in Rome, offered to all Christian Europeans the keys to heaven and gave a sense of unity to an otherwise disparate and diverse continent. In 1500 the enemies of Christendom were firmly on the outside: the Ottoman Empire in the far eastern Mediterranean (always a danger), or Muslims forcibly pushed out of southern Spain in the late fifteenth century. Other than isolated heretics and heresies here and there, there were few enemies within. But all that changed in 1517, when the lectures of an Augustinian monk and university teacher called Martin Luther escalated into a movement that shook Christendom to its foundations.

  What became the Reformation is one of the great backdrops to this book. After 1517 the whole of Europe was turned upside down by Protestant ideas that unravelled the fabric of Christian Europe. There was more than one kind of Protestantism and many Protestant leaders of different generations: Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, John Calvin, Theodore Beza and others. What each of these movements and theologies had in common was the power to challenge not only the Catholic Church, but also the authority of kings and princes: the Bible as God’s unimpeachable word could be used to challenge fundamental assumptions of who was in charge of kingdoms and peoples. For a century Europe was convulsed by wars between and within its greatest powers. After the 1560s France was all but paralysed by periodic and vicious bouts of religious civil war. In the same decade, patriotism and faith combined together in the Low Countries to stimulate resistance to the rule of the imperial Habsburg family, and the greatest king of his day, Philip II of Spain, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, would spend a fortune on sending armies of crack Spanish troops to crush the rebels. Nothing in Europe between 1517 and 1600 stood still for very long. For more than eighty years, every assumption about religious faith and political order and authority was shaken to its core.

  In all this, England sat slightly apart. Its own Reformation was of a strange kind. Not provoked by a popular movement, it was Henry VIII – emphatically no Protestant but rather a highly idiosyncratic kind of Catholic – who for reasons of politics, dynastic statecraft and raw ego broke away in the 1530s from the Church of Rome. With the exception of the years between 1553 and 1558 (the reign of Henry’s older daughter, the Catholic Mary I), the England ruled by his son Edward VI and younger daughter Elizabeth I was a Protestant state whose monarch was the spiritual leader of his or her people. Queen Elizabeth’s advisers believed that England was a model kingdom and a beacon of hope in a continent soaked in the blood of martyrdom and persecution. To Catholic Europe, however, Tudor England was a pariah state, isolated and embattled; Philip II of Spain in particular thought England’s heresy an abomination. A plausible counterfactual history of the later sixteenth century might comfortably imagine Elizabeth I’s Protestant England by 1600 crushed and beaten out of existence. Instead, it clung on to survival.

  London was not insulated from the storms battering Europe in the later sixteenth century. True, in so many ways Londoners were fortunate. They enjoyed a civil peace that in 1572 Parisians could only yearn for: in that year Catholics in Paris massacred thousands of their Protestant neighbours. Yet in their own way Elizabethan Londoners felt the challenges of the age. They wrestled with domestic and foreign immigration, a fact of life over decades as thousands of displaced refugees and émigrés made new lives for themselves in the city. Ordinary Londoners had to come to terms with outsiders who threatened their livelihoods. At times the city crackled with hostility and threatened violence. Equally, London had in the sixteenth century an impressive ability to absorb new arrivals into its social fabric.

  London’s merchants had no choice but to trade with a Europe where little seemed truly stable. Over the decades they became used to having their goods and ships seized in diplomatic spats between monarchs, or being denied access to the ports of the Low Countries by Spanish military blockades and diplomatic embargoes. With English sailors and troops fighting Spain at sea and on land in the Low Countries in the 1580s and 1590s, they learned to adapt to war conditions, lending money to a royal exchequer squeezed almost to exhaustion. Merchants thought about money in new ways, shrugging off centuries of church teaching about the evils of usury, pragmatically embracing the benefits of interest. They began to look for new markets and opportunities. In part prodded by circumstances beyond their control, they went very much further afield than western Europe, helped by geographers and navigators who were convinced that it was possible to sail vast distances and build new trading links, emulating – perhaps even surpassing – the achievements of Portugal and Spain. Odd though it may seem in a book on London to write at length about voyages to Asia and Russia, America and the East Indies, it would be impossible to understand what made the city’s mercantile elite tick without taking in the whole globe. And it just so happened that in this formative time in London’s history the businesses of merchants and the policy interests of the monarch’s advisers meshed: this book shows how effortlessly money and power can sit together. Without looking closely at what was going on in Elizabethan London, we would struggle to understand how a global trading organization like the East India Company, which in later centuries built an empire, came into being. If the world helped to reshape London, then London helped in turn to change the world.

  This is an ambitious book; there is, I hope, no other quite like it in terms of approach and method. Certainly there are already plenty of books about London. Some tell the city’s story in a vast historical sweep of two millennia. Others, impressive models of close scholarship, explore London’s government, its merchant elite and trade guilds, its archaeology, its demography, its religious reformation, its print culture, its architecture and its literary life. Though much of the academic substructure of London’s Triumph is buried away in my notes and references, I should say at the beginning how acutely conscious I am of just what I owe to scholars who have devoted their careers to these specialist fields of study.

  My wish was to do something different, pushing forward the subject (and also pushing myself) by trying to capture London’s life in three dimensions: to explore the city and its buildings, certainly, but to look above all at its people, trying to make out a little of the texture of their lives. I give as much importance to woodcuts, fabrics, letters and gravestones as I do to portraits, letters, plays and poems, sermons and books of travel adventure. All of these sources help to bring back to life, imaginatively, Elizabethan Londoners. Exploration and encounter are two words that occur and recur. This book is in part about how people come to terms with a world changing all around them. For Londoners of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries those changes – physical and material, intellectual and imaginative – were real, and there was no escape from them.

  At the beginning we have to take into account what was lost in the Great Fire of London. Most of the buildings and places I describe were reduced to ashes in 1666, when most of the Tudor city was razed. We rely for our knowledge of sixteenth-century London on archaeology and those books, papers, maps and pictures that did survive the fire, and have since survived wartime bombs and the gradual erosions of time. There is still so much to work with, and it is striking how far we can bring the Tudor city into light and focus. There is all the difference between the simple woodcut of London’s church spires from a medieval chronicle and the way we can use later plans, sketches, engravings and surveys to explore every nook and cranny of the Elizabethan city. That city developed a sense and understanding of itself; it is as though Londoners and others came to recognize the vastness and substance of everything around them, a
nd set about recording London in new ways – here, for example, the drama of the Elizabethan playhouses gives us the sights, sounds, colours, fashions, pastimes and manners of a city developing a new and arresting cultural self-confidence.

  Some of the greatest names of Elizabethan history, like Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake or even Queen Elizabeth I herself, are purposely on the margins of this book. I have given much more space to characters who otherwise lurk too much in the shadows of the familiar. Some are remarkable and deserve to be better known, like the younger Richard Hakluyt, geographer and theorist of colonial plantation, whose magnum opus, The principal navigations, is one of the glories of English prose. Another is the explorer and merchant Anthony Jenkinson, who carried the name of London and the interests of its trade to Russia, Persia and beyond. Sir Thomas Smythe, who bridged the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was the consummate mercantile bureaucrat whose skills gave shape to English trade and plantations in the East Indies and America. Other characters are less spectacular; and yet they made up the complex weave of London’s life, whether they were workaday merchants trading with Antwerp, ordinary Londoners worshipping in their parish churches, foreign immigrants who came to the city to find safety and work, angry young apprentices kicking against authority, or preachers calling Londoners to repentance. This book spends more time on the streets of London and with its merchants abroad than it does walking the corridors of power at the Elizabethan court, and deliberately so.

  People have helped me to bring something of Tudor London to life. Indeed, it is impossible in its story not to be struck by the sheer cumulative weight of human life, energy and experience, the rich variety of community, the sheer force applied to far parts of the globe, all in one city.

  Author’s Note

  Dates are given according to the Old Style Julian calendar. Though Elizabethans exchanged New Year gifts on 1 January each year, the calendar year began in Europe on the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Lady Day (i.e. 25 March). Throughout the book I have adjusted all dates to a calendar year that begins, as ours does, on 1 January.