In this way, Cathay had for Elizabethans a physical presence. It existed; it was a reality. It was, of course, waiting for the blessing of English trade, as it had been for decades. What the merchants and experts at Muscovy House expected to find and to do in Cathay tells us all kinds of things about their own world. It is a truism that the way we prepare for and record our encounters with others says as much about ourselves as it does about the people we meet, and probably the effect is only deepened when we have at best an impression of who those others are and what they are like – a model fashioned by our own imaginations, assumptions and prejudices.
The briefing paper for the northeastern voyage was prepared for the company by the elder Richard Hakluyt. In it we find an expedition on its best behaviour, ready to show a famously splendid and accomplished people the civilities of England. On board the company’s ships lying at anchor in the harbour of Cambalu, the English officers would dine the great and the good of those fabulous cities of Cathay; the ships would be perfumed, the guests sprinkled with ‘good sweet waters’. Here the English and the Cathaians would meet in peace, their friendship marked by the giving of gifts. Books showing the herbs, plants, trees, fish, birds and animals of Europe would ‘much delight’ the Great Khan, his nobility and merchants. But all the gifts and the charm was to one purpose: to convince the rulers of Cathay of the benefits of English trade.25
This was a mercantile voyage of the old-fashioned sort. The ships would go out to Asia stocked with the kinds of commodities that arrived every day into the port of London: kerseys, frieze cloth, felts, taffeta, sailors’ caps, quilted caps of Levant taffeta, globes, shoes, purses, pewter, English and Venetian glass, looking glasses, spectacles, hour glasses, combs, linen, handkerchiefs, knives, buttons, needles, English coins, locks, keys and bolts. The elder Hakluyt saw the benefits of trade extending even beyond ‘the gain of the merchant’. It would offer employment and a way out of poverty for those currently supported in London’s charitable hospitals – of ‘more worth to our people’, he wrote, than Bridewell and the Savoy. A healthy market for sailors’ caps, Hakluyt reflected, ‘would turn to an infinite commodity of the common poor people by knitting’.26 He – and others – saw in trade and colonization an answer to pressing questions of poverty and crime.
Hakluyt emphasized that the expedition should advertise the kingdom and the great city from whence it had sailed. ‘Take with you the map of England set out in fair colours,’ he wrote, ‘one of the biggest sort I mean.’ They should also take a large map of London ‘to make show of your city’, with the Thames ‘drawn full of ships of all sorts, to make the more show of your great trade and traffic in trade of merchandize’.27
After 1580, two proposed destinations, more concrete than Cathay – America and then the East Indies – came to preoccupy mercantile London. America had for a long time been at the edges of the Tudor understanding of the world. But something had shifted by the early 1580s, thanks in good part to Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s success in securing his royal patent in 1578 to plant a colony in the territory somewhere between what is now southern New England and the Strait of Belle Isle.28 John Dee helped with the project, and drew in 1582 a polar map that gave geographical shape to his notion of a great northern empire of English colonization and trade. The Gilbert patent helped also to rehabilitate Michael Lok, who had been struggling with debt and periods of imprisonment after the ignominious failure of his Cathay company. Lok produced in 1582 a map of Meta Incognita and America that served as a kind of real estate brochure for prospective investors interested in putting their money into this new colonial project.29 In the few years after the Frobisher debacle Lok, like many others in London and at the queen’s court, became a convinced Atlanticist. After some dark days for Lok, he could at least enjoy the praise of the younger Richard Hakluyt:
The map is Master Michael Lok’s, a man, for his knowledge in divers languages and especially in cosmography, able to do his country good, and worthy in my judgement, for the manifold good parts in him, of good reputation and better fortune.30
America now became the latest challenge and new opportunity. The soldier and adventurer Christopher Carleill was a committed Atlanticist. Himself the son of a founding charter member of the Muscovy Company (and stepson of Sir Francis Walsingham), in 1583 he urged London’s Russia merchants to redirect their efforts to America. Where ten ships sailed annually between England and Russia, he wrote, within decades twenty would go out to America twice a year.31 Michael Lok, writing in the early 1580s a long apologia for his part in the Frobisher voyages, neatly reinvented the purpose of that expedition. The ‘natural riches and infinite treasure and the great traffic of rich merchandize’ to be found in Cathay, China and India were well known from ‘every book of history or cosmography of those parts of the world, which are to be had in every printer’s shop’. Waiting to be discovered, however, was America, as full of people and ‘such commodities and merchandize’ as the territories of Russia and beyond: it offered raw materials, potential for colonization, and the hope of future transatlantic trade.32
It also preoccupied the younger Richard Hakluyt, who in 1584 wrote for his patrons at court a highly speculative paper on the benefits of ‘planting’ America with English colonies. Hakluyt, by now in his early thirties, was well connected both in London and court, supported at Oxford by the skinners’ and clothworkers’ companies of London (one of his great supporters in the clothworkers became later a prominent founding merchant of the East India Company) and close to the influential Sir Francis Walsingham.33 Hakluyt’s first book, Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America (1582), became a source book on the new continent.
Hakluyt’s agenda was an overtly colonizing one. This was not surprising given developments over the last thirty years: the desire for new markets and trade, the experimentation with new structures of royally chartered corporate organizations like the Muscovy Company, increasing expertise in England on techniques of navigation, the notion of Christian civilizing missions, and the prospectuses for ‘proprietorial colonies’ under the Crown, with patents like Gilbert’s for America.34 Now, for the courtier Walter Ralegh, Hakluyt wrote about the possibilities of colonial ventures. He saw all kinds of interlocking benefits for a kingdom like England, being squeezed hard by the power of King Philip II’s Spain, and set out a strategic case for the push on America. He saw the likelihood of being able to clip Spain’s wings, especially in the Caribbean. He perceived a way for English merchants to escape the stranglehold of Spanish power, and to engineer a fantastic boost for the kingdom’s trade. Like his cousin of the Middle Temple, he saw the social benefits of employment for the poor, making commodities to trade. He imagined rising customs revenues for the queen’s government, the development of her navy, and the precedence of Elizabeth’s title to foreign dominions over that of King Philip. But he called too for quick action in planting America before other powers began to settle their own colonies. His first reason for this ‘western planting’ across the Atlantic was what he called ‘the enlargement of the gospel’ – the spreading of Protestant Christianity to far parts of the world.35
And so the scene was set, the foundations laid down. Colonial ventures could appeal to any English merchant throughout the kingdom. This was a national project: for a long time, experts like Hakluyt had been thinking and writing for the good of the whole kingdom. But London, in its concentration of families, capital and experience, was ideally placed to enter brave new worlds of discovery and trade. It was in the city, and for these reasons, that two of the greatest Elizabethan colonizing and trading ventures, the Virginia Company and the East India Company, came into existence.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Shylock’s Victory
The sad boast of Michael Lok in the years following the Frobisher debacle was that he had seen the inside of every gaol in London. Burdened by debt for the rest of his life, he never recovered his position. The Cathay voyages had broken a man who, in his own way, was as v
isionary as Richard Hakluyt or John Dee. The problem was his venality, for which Nemesis had her revenge, with a further instalment to follow in the twentieth century. For the esoteric conspiracy theorists who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by John de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (even by the often unimpressive standards of the Elizabethan nobility one of most appallingly arrogant, conceited and superficial men of the time), Lok was the model for Shylock in Oxford’s The Merchant of Venice. That he had conned the earl out of £1,000 was indeed one of the many bitterly contested allegations made by Frobisher. Resurrected from his tomb to face this further stain upon his reputation, poor Michael Lok must have shuddered at the humiliation.
Both Lok and Shakespeare’s Shylock lead us by different paths to the same point and place. Elizabethans worried about money: about how it was made and how it corrupted good Christians. But attitudes towards money were changing in the sixteenth century. The old fixed position on usury was under attack: language was evolving to reflect the loosening of some old moral restraints. Elizabethans may still have said that love of riches put a soul in peril, but did they really mean it?
Though these new and more lenient attitudes surprised Elizabethans, they should not surprise us. As the limits of their experience were expanded through travel and exploration, Elizabethans were obliged to confront alien peoples and places. At home Londoners were able to read new books on subjects that would have been unthinkable at the end of the fifteenth century: the arresting translations by Thomas Hacket of Jean Ribault’s and André Thevet’s accounts of America were a very long way from Mandeville’s fabulous monsters. Yet the effort to fit everything they were discovering into the rigid structures of old assumptions was immense. Their world was all the time being reshaped in wonderful and unexpected ways, and only slowly and falteringly did Elizabethans come to terms with the consequences of the changes that they themselves were helping to engineer.
Mercantile ventures entrenched a new vocabulary of money: of capital, stocks, shares, dividends, interest – all words we take for granted now, but whose unfamiliarity was felt by anxious Elizabethans. Of course the opportunities were fantastic; but still money was a problem. Great riches had long troubled the values of Christian Europe, or at least afflicted the consciences of theologians and preachers. Money could be a corrupter of souls and an instrument of power over others, something shown so powerfully by Hans Holbein the Younger in his allegory of The Triumph of Riches. Money could subvert morality, even turn the world upside down. In ‘yellow, glittering, precious gold’ there was, as Shakespeare saw, the power to make ‘black white, foul fair, / Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant’ (Timon of Athens, IV. iii. 26–30).1
Slowly something changed. By increments attitudes shifted. Shylock had his victory – but not without a fight.
*
As we saw in earlier chapters, emperors, kings and princes across Europe had long relied on wealthy merchants for credit. This had been the reality for centuries, where bankers (at first Italians and then Germans like the Fugger and Welser) kept up the pretensions of monarchs by loaning them huge sums of money at interest. When it came to matters of state, however, questions of usury were conveniently put to one side.
On the face of it, the high finances of princes were governed only by principles of pragmatism and necessity. Going crown in hand to one of Europe’s great banking houses was a marriage of convenience voluntarily entered into; but, like a real marriage in the sixteenth century, all the power rested with one partner only. For monarchs, the short-term sigh of relief at the prospect of money in the royal exchequer was always followed by the long-term regret of years of painful repayment – or worse still, loan default. The Tudor Crown was indebted to foreign bankers for three decades. Even monitored and massaged by Sir Thomas Gresham, the interest alone was eye-watering: it was, as one of Elizabeth I’s councillors once told the House of Commons, an ‘eating corrosive’ and ‘a most pestilent cancer that is able to devour even the states of princes’.2
The royal agents in Antwerp managed the day-to-day realities of royal debt. As Stephen Vaughan wrote from Antwerp in 1546, ‘The Fugger is never from me, the house of Bonvisi … pulleth me by the sleeve.’3 Gresham or Vaughan or their factors could not really afford to ponder the theology or canon law on usury. Their job was to negotiate favourable terms for loans, and it could be thankless work. Vaughan, for example, experienced the indignity of making late payments to Henry VIII’s creditors, as well as having the bankers’ factors rifling through chests of money in order to determine which coins they would and would not accept.4 Gresham’s official accounts tell their own story – setting out the loans taken up, brokers’ fees to be charged and the interest to be paid. His letters to Sir William Cecil prickle with the anxieties of high finance in Antwerp. Sometimes the bankers were nervous, spooked by business bankruptcies or the churning fear of loan defaults by great sovereign debtors like the king of Spain. Gresham described ‘great bank routs’, and the miseries of Elizabeth’s own wobbling creditors, keen to get rid of the queen’s bonds.5 And all this was before the Dutch Revolt and the Spanish assault on Antwerp, which further shook what until then had been the greatest financial centre in Europe.
Thomas Gresham was superbly accomplished at advertising his mastery of the Antwerp exchange. But even his hope was to wean the English Crown off foreign loans and to look for credit instead at home. If the queen used her own merchants to raise money, Gresham maintained, she would show to the whole of Europe what ‘a prince of power’ she was.6 Gresham had long prided himself on his skill at influencing and manipulating the Antwerp exchange in Elizabeth’s favour. Now he believed that she – and he – should use her ‘money merchants’ both tactically and strategically ‘for the service of the prince’.7
English merchants came later to banking than their continental counterparts. One clever London mercantile analyst of the early seventeenth century, Gerard de Malynes, looked back to the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509) and found that ‘in his time the bankers had their beginning, who did invent the merchandizing exchange, making of money a merchandize’.8 Malynes meant by this the lending out of money to make more money.
In the 1560s Gresham was able to raise loans from merchants in London, who lent money – naturally at interest – in order to make payments to the queen’s creditors in Antwerp and Augsburg. These ‘money merchants’ were the city’s super-rich: serving and former lord mayors, aldermen, governors and masters of the livery companies, leaders and financiers of new endeavours like the Muscovy Company. Here were merchants at once rooted in the old mercantile world of Europe and investors in the new corporate ventures. And they were as hard-nosed as a Fugger: Gresham set out the terms of their loans in exactly the form he used in Antwerp – with the sum taken up, the broker’s fee charged for negotiating the loan, and the sum eventually payable in interest.9
Gresham knew that he was working at the far boundaries of the law. The queen’s merchant creditors had to be given special protection from prosecution under a statute of King Edward VI that prohibited outright the charging of interest.10 Gresham was, however, a pragmatic man who believed that there needed to be, in the words of his own factor Richard Clough, ‘some reasonable interest between man and man’.11 To Cecil, Gresham emphasized that he needed to be able more easily to accomplish ‘her highness’s enterprises’ – in other words, he needed the right tools for the job he had been given. Cecil, however, was of the old school, believing, like most people, in the need for vigilant protection at law against usury.12
Usury was not for Elizabethans a pretty word or notion. It was also a complicated one. Though lending out one’s money for one’s own financial return was very difficult not to class as usury, it was still a tricky thing to define precisely – in part because so many inventive minds and ingenious practitioners had spent centuries trying to get round it, finding loopholes in the law. The nearest we have to a dictionary definition of usury as Elizabethans understoo
d it is by Dr Thomas Wilson, writing in 1572, a year after the law in England was relaxed to allow for an increase of interest up to 10 per cent: ‘usury is committed only where lending and borrowing is, and that when any overplus or excess is taken over and above the principal that was lent, for the very respect only of lending, and in consideration of forbearing money for time’.13 The ‘principal’ was the capital sum lent and the ‘overplus or excess’ the interest charged for the loan of it. But was all interest usury, as Wilson seemed to be suggesting, or was it really just excessive interest? Did it extend to more than money? Wrestled with for centuries, questions like these (and many more too) occupied anxious Elizabethans.
And so Sir Thomas Gresham’s pragmatism bumped up against one of the great taboos for the Church and Christendom. Money was as necessary as it was problematic. And it was problematic because how it was made was under the scrutiny of God, from which there was no escape.
The Merchant of Venice (1596/97) illustrates beautifully Elizabethans’ ambivalence over usury, interest and money. The brilliance of Shylock is that he is an outsider, embittered and isolated – a rich Jew, that stock figure of fear and hatred in sixteenth-century Europe, who despises Christian society and its codes and values. In the characters of Shylock and the merchant Antonio, Shakespeare gives us two extreme positions on money. Where one is monstrously grasping, the other is admirably generous but hopelessly naive.
Antonio and Shylock operate their two businesses on entirely opposing principles. Shylock grumbles that Antonio’s Christian scruples are bad for the city’s moneylenders:
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