In their negotiations at Syon, the Merchant Adventurers’ Company was able to offset just a little the damage about to be done to their purses. With Edward’s government they agreed a quid pro quo. The ancient privileges of the Hanse merchants of the Steelyard, for a long time deeply resented by the adventurers, would be abolished. Only a week after the Syon meeting, the Privy Council recorded in pungent language the king’s decision to deprive the Hanse of their accustomed trading freedoms and liberties: the foreign merchants’ ‘disorders, colourable and deceitful dealings’ deserved ‘both in law and conscience the deprivation of their said liberties heretofore enjoyed’.20 The council’s formal language and high moral tone covered an instance of naked mercantile politicking.
It was not quite the end for a medieval trading organization that had been in London for centuries: they would return in the reign of Mary I and Philip (1553–8), just able to cling on, embattled by a predatory city establishment, until their final expulsion from London in 1597 (and even then they returned in the seventeenth century). But perhaps in 1552 – and then again at intervals over the following four decades – the German merchants in London looked up at The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of Riches in the Great Hall of the Steelyard: ‘He who is rich … fears hourly that the inconstant wheel of fortune may turn.’
Thomas Gresham himself knew as much about the inconstant wheel of fortune as he did about strategic planning. He relied, like any courtier, upon the favour of his monarch. Young Edward VI, who was himself interested in money, exchanges and markets, recognized the value of Gresham’s work for his prince and government, giving him the honour of a favourable audience and a royal pension.21 But when Edward died in 1553, his successor Queen Mary removed Gresham from office. As the agent of what had been an aggressively Protestant government, he was not trusted; it was a frankly political dismissal. He defended his success and his service, but did so almost with a shrug of his shoulders, simply returning to his business as a merchant.
In fact it turned out to be more a period of leave than it was a permanent retirement. Months later, Gresham was back in Antwerp to act for the new queen, picking up the pieces of a poorly judged loan negotiated by his successor, the inexperienced Christopher Dawntsey, with the German banker Lazarus Tucher. On the loan of 200,000 guilders, Dawntsey had agreed a particularly high rate of interest. Gresham’s speed and command of detail were formidable, making Dawntsey look feeble. Within hours of arriving in Antwerp at nine o’clock on the night of 17 November 1553, Gresham knew the terms of the loan, having spoken personally to Tucher. Their relationship was an old and complicated one: Gresham called Tucher a friend, but also described him for Mary’s Privy Council as ‘a very extreme man, and very open-mouthed’.22 Probably Tucher was no different to any other agent, broker or banker in Antwerp – outwardly friendly and amiable and a purposeful gossip, but behind all that hard as steel, well able to take advantage of Christopher Dawntsey. Gresham himself showed off his talents to the council: with apparently no effort at all he was able to give a full account of what was happening in Antwerp, including his view of the financial standing of the emperor and the King of France.23
Thomas Gresham was in his element. He knew precisely who to talk to and what to do. It was evident that Tucher, no doubt irritated by the silence from Mary’s government, had been gossiping: the bargain between the banker and the queen, Gresham reported, was open knowledge amongst all the merchants at the exchange. A week later, Tucher came up to Gresham at the bourse and asked him plainly ‘whether his bargain should take place or not’. Gresham’s answer was as deft as it was diplomatically evasive and non-committal: ‘I could take it but in good part, and that there was no fault in me, for that I knew not the queen’s majesty’s pleasure afore my present coming away.’ He could not resist wondering out loud to Tucher why Dawntsey ‘would give so great interest’. He said that his own commission did not extend ‘to so high a price’.24 It was the subtlest of pokes in the eye for Mary’s Privy Council. But Thomas Gresham was back – skilled, subtle and indispensable as ever.
When Lazarus Tucher and Thomas Gresham met at ‘the bourse’, Gresham meant Antwerp’s New Bourse in the centre of the town between the great thoroughfares of the Meer and New Street. The first exchange for Antwerp’s merchants was built in 1515, a grand enough building on Garden Street, with a gallery or portico over two of its four sides. Before that merchants had met in a large courtyard off Wool Street, close to Market Place and the English House. By 1530 even the Old Bourse was too small for the fantastic volume of business in Antwerp, and so in 1531, at a cost to the town of 300,000 crowns, the architect Domien de Waghemakere built a new one.25
The New Bourse was one of the wonders of Europe, a rectangular court around which there was a portico resting on thirty-eight decorated columns, each unique, with two great towers and four double doorways leading in from the streets that look from contemporary woodcuts like elegant boulevards. Where geographically and symbolically it was at the heart of Antwerp, economically the New Bourse was at the heart of Europe.
Thomas Gresham knew it intimately – its stone and mortar, its men and its business. The New Bourse was as much a part of his world as Milk Street, St Lawrence Jewry, Basinghall Street or Guildhall. It was the definitive mark of Antwerp’s pre-eminence in European trade and banking. By the 1560s Gresham had a clear ambition: with the New Bourse as his model, he would complete what his father and the livery companies of London had attempted to do in the 1530s. London would have its own exchange, and Thomas Gresham would be its patron.
Gresham’s career captured something of a shift of focus in the mercantile life of Tudor London. Like every other London merchant for generations, he knew Antwerp. But perhaps he had seen the city through different eyes, measuring the possibilities of London against the achievements of Europe’s greatest mercantile and financial centre. If English merchants had for decades gone to Antwerp, then perhaps it was time for London to fix its own ambitious claim in the European mercantile world.
Thomas Gresham was aware, too, of a way of linking up money and political power, of getting merchants and governments to work together. For centuries there had been a delicate and pragmatic trade-off: kings recognized and confirmed in their charters London’s liberties because they needed to have its merchants on their side. Gresham’s hope by the 1560s was to wean the English Crown off its dependence on loans made by foreign lenders, and indeed Elizabeth I would look for security to her own city. Gresham wrote: ‘I would wish that the queen’s majesty in this time should not use any strangers but [instead] her own subjects, whereby … all other princes may see what a prince of power she is.’26
And perhaps London’s merchants could look to opportunities and horizons even beyond Europe. The mercantile elite of the city, though to some extent hidebound by tradition and the ancient ways and structures of its livery companies, possessed a remarkable energy. The wobbles in the trade between Antwerp and London in the early 1550s were deeply unsettling. In difficult times merchants might even strike out to distant oceans and continents: to test maps and sea charts, to find new markets, to build a different kind of trade with a new kind of organization, made up not just of merchants but investors also. For many years navigators had wondered about routes to the oceans of the Far East and the wonders of the fabled empire of Cathay. Just beginning to come into focus was a brave new world of adventure and encounter.
CHAPTER SIX
Searching for Cathay
No place on earth came to fire the early Tudors’ imagination like Cathay. It was, so they believed, the most formidable power in Asia, whose ruler, the Great Khan (or Cham or Chan), was a descendant of Noah. His empire was as far from London as it was possible to travel, in ‘superior or high India’, north of China on the coast of what was known as the Scythian Sea, approximately what is today the East Siberian Sea.1
Cathay was an inspiring fantasy, skilfully deployed by a Venetian-born Anglophile called Sebastian Cabot,
who wanted to take English ships to the other side of the world to find the great empire. Cabot, an expert sea pilot who had taught in the elite school of navigation in Spain’s Casa de la Contratación, arrived in England sometime after 1547, bringing European skills and ambitions to a kingdom that was lagging well behind the achievements of Spain and Portugal. He brought, too, an innovative business model for long-distance trade that helped to change London forever.2
The enduring popularity of Sir John Mandeville’s medieval Travels (it was printed in Westminster in the 1490s) certainly helped Cabot’s cause, lending an exotic texture to the Far East: ‘Cathay is a fair country and rich, full of goods and merchandizes; thither come merchants every year for to fetch spices and other merchandizes more commonly than they do into other countries.’3 Translators, scholars and mapmakers added layers of detail and authority to the existence of Cathay, an empire of so ‘many provinces, people and princes, and innumerable islands in the great east sea, called the Great Ocean’. The Great Khan, who sat upon a throne of precious stones, was enormously rich and powerful. His mighty capital city was Cambalu, which was described in 1553 by the cosmographer and translator Richard Eden, though even Eden’s formidable literary talents struggled to describe just how wealthy and impressive the court was: ‘What great pomp, glory, and furniture of all things, is observed in the emperor’s court, it cannot be spoken.’4
And so Cathay was the golden key to trade with Asia, ‘rich, full of goods and merchandizes’ like precious stones, pearls, silks and all kinds of spices from India and other regions.5 There were obviously wonderful possibilities for trade and accumulating wealth. The challenge was simply how to get there. The best route was surely a northern one through the Arctic oceans, which, according to the experts, were perfectly navigable. From the beginning, English navigators, buoyed up by patriotic self-congratulation, believed it would be easy – certainly far easier than the long sea journey around the Cape of Good Hope that Portuguese ships had to make to Portugal’s outposts in the East Indies.
Early English efforts to find a sea route to Asia had taken navigators and their crews across the north Atlantic towards America – and Sebastian Cabot and his father John had led the way. After living for some time in Valencia, the Cabots, a family of Genoese origins, came to England at some point in the 1490s, where their first base was the port town of Bristol. When and where they sailed is impossible to determine for sure; around 1497 they perhaps reached Labrador or Novia Scotia, and ten or eleven years later Sebastian might have explored the Arctic waters of the northern coast of North America, possibly reaching the entrance to Hudson Bay.6
In 1512 Sebastian left England for Spain. Six years later he was appointed pilot major at the Casa de la Contratación, where he worked for the better part of thirty years, following in the footsteps of pilots as distinguished as Amerigo Vespucci and Juan Díaz de Solís. His job was to train and license Spain’s navigators; he was, in other words, at the cutting edge of navigational technique and theory, which gave him unrivalled experience.
Sebastian Cabot’s return to England in 1547 or 1548 is one of the pivotal events of this book: it is hard to imagine London’s global ambitions getting quite the start that they did without his energy and vision. He was an accomplished cartographer: between 1544 and 1549 he produced a world map, manuscript copies of which he sent to Seville and to England. It was a map that a later adventurer, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, saw in the Queen’s Gallery at Whitehall Palace in the 1560s, and engraved copies hung in the houses of many London merchants as well.7 Cabot’s knowledge was priceless. He knew all about Spanish efforts in the Americas and Portuguese encounters with the southern coast of Ming China, seeing the limitations as well as the achievements of the Iberian powers.8 Actively recruited by Edward VI’s government, Cabot’s move from Spain was orchestrated by the king’s Privy Council, which paid £100 – a huge sum of money then – to bring him over ‘to serve and inhabit in England’. Thereafter he was paid a very generous yearly pension of £166.9 In 1549 and 1550, after King Edward was pointedly informed by Charles V that Cabot was drawing an imperial salary, there were some months of diplomatic frostiness over his refusal to return to Spain, with Cabot himself admitting that he had ‘knowledge of certain things very necessary for the emperor’s knowledge’.10 One of the things that infuriated Charles was that Cabot’s world map incorporated many of the secret details from that used by the Casa de la Contratación. In many ways, Sebastian’s departure for England was practically a defection.11
In London Cabot put together an embryonic trading company he called ‘The mystery and company of the merchants adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown’. If the title was unwieldy, the idea behind the company was strikingly new, at least in London. Here Cabot was at his most effective, putting in place the structures of an organization that owed a debt to the advanced business practices of Italy and the Mediterranean. What Sebastian did with his ‘mystery’ was to build a company whose focus was on a single venture and expedition to make the first, definitive breakthrough to Cathay, and whose funding came not just from merchants but from other investors too. How much of this was planned by Cabot in the earliest stages is not clear. But the speed with which his new company was transformed into a formidable corporate entity shows that Cabot and those London merchants who backed him were thinking a long way beyond the conventional.
Cabot captured the moment perfectly. London’s mercantile elite were feeling the pinch. The years between 1550 and 1553 were painful for merchants and deeply unsettling for Edward VI’s government. With the king’s Privy Council spectacularly mishandling economic policy, and Thomas Gresham trying to get Crown debt under control at the New Bourse, London’s merchants found themselves squeezed on all sides. In 1550 the price of the cloth they were taking across the English Channel had fallen sharply on the Antwerp market, rising only to fall again: the problem was one of over-production of cloth for a market already saturated with it. Sterling, too, seemed precarious. The security of the Antwerp–London axis of trade, which for decades had served English merchants so well, suddenly looked fragile. The Cathay project offered hope.
Cabot was able to secure political backing. The most powerful man in the boy king’s council, the Duke of Northumberland, was a supporter, and it was no accident that he was the dedicatee of Richard Eden’s translation of one of the greatest contemporary works of world geography, Sebastian Münster’s formidable Cosmographia (1544). Eden knew exactly the point to make. Playing on English sensitivities about the global reach and power of Spain and Portugal, Eden wrote to Northumberland of Spanish treasure then in Seville that might instead have been sitting in the Tower of London.12 Whether or not Cabot briefed Eden on this, the suggestion was provocative, tantalizing and patriotic: what the Spanish are doing, we might do better – and should have done sooner. At a time of unpredictable markets and shaky trade, surely there was so much wealth to be gathered in from Asia. The model of Spain’s global reach was a compelling one for Eden, who in another of his translations (from 1555) published Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s multi-volume compilation The decades of the newe worlde or west India conteynyng the navigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes, with the particular description of the moste ryche and large landes and Ilandes lately founde in the west Ocean perteynyng to the inheritaunce of the kinges of Spayne.13 In 1553 Eden saw in his mind’s eye great fleets returning to England loaded with treasure. Cathay would be to England what the Americas were to Spain.
And so Cabot’s expedition had a political complexion. It was all at once a mercantile venture and an effort on behalf of the English kingdom to find new riches. Eden, celebrating the Duke of Northumberland as ‘a great furtherer’ of the voyage, commended efforts at commercial exploration to the ‘glory of God and commodity of our country’.14 And many were convinced. One further striking feature of Sebastian Cabot’s ‘mystery’ is that it spoke to a waiting constituency of persuadable wealthy in
vestors outside London’s mercantile community – men and women with the means and the inclination to put their money into this kind of venture. This opened up huge possibilities not only for Cabot’s project, but for future expeditions also. Experienced and astute men invested, including Sir William Cecil, King Edward’s secretary and Northumberland’s right-hand man, who had worked with Thomas Gresham on that ambitious plan in 1552 to pay off the king’s debts. Cecil was a supporter of Cabot’s enterprise, buying a share in the new company in March 1553.15 Another was Sir Henry Sidney, a friend to the young king and a gentleman of his Privy Chamber. Both Cecil and Sidney were highly intelligent and experienced men who entertained the hope of a good return on their money.
If London’s merchants and other investors believed Cabot’s venture had substance, the geographers and navigators felt they knew what they were doing. Cabot was as sure of success as Richard Eden. Eden was convinced that it was perfectly possible to sail from London to Cathay by a northeastern route, up the coast of Norway and into what he called the ‘frozen sea’. He had little time for those who doubted the navigability of those northern regions: many faint-hearted men, he wrote, were discouraged when they looked at globes and maps and saw land extending all the way up to the North Pole, but he put that down to the old and mistaken geography of Ptolemy. As Eden pointed out to his readers, Ptolemy knew nothing about the existence of America. With all the certainty of a scholar sitting comfortably in his study, Eden was convinced that the expedition was worth the effort, even in the face of failure: ‘if no good can be done this way, it were worthy the adventure to attempt’.16 For the sailors who months later found themselves in wooden sailing ships of between 90 and 160 tons in freezing and stormy seas, it was quite a different matter.
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