Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (46 page)

As their parliamentary influence implies, the Merchant Adventurers were fabulously wealthy and powerful, the greatest of them rivaling important nobles in these respects. No government could afford to offend or ignore them, for their loans, their ships, and their ability to move goods might come in very handy in time of war. They dominated the corporation and city government of big port cities: between 1550 and 1580 nearly every lord mayor of London was a Merchant Adventurer. These men lived in great multi-story, multi-chimneyed houses, their rooms decorated with molded plaster ceilings, expensive tapestries, and ornate carved furniture, their presses brimming with gold and silver plate, their closets bulging with expensive gowns lined with velvet and fur. And yet, by the end of the Tudor period, their power and privilege was crumbling.

The main reason for this was the increasing stagnation of the wool trade. The wool trade was England’s one major industry through the first half of the early modern period; its tentacles reached deep into the countryside, connecting remote villages with market towns and big cities. Shepherds and farm wives raised sheep in all parts of England, but especially in the rugged and forested country of the North, West, and Wales. These sheep were shorn in spring. The wool was carded or combed in the village, then spun into wool thread and woven into heavy wool broadcloth for sale to big London merchants (i.e., Merchant Adventurers). At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the last two steps in the manufacturing process took place in big towns, but by its end, technological improvements in spinning machines and looms made it possible to farm out even this part of the process to smaller towns and country villages, hence a decline in urban manufacture.

Wool had been a very lucrative commodity through the boom years of the Yorkist and early Tudor periods. But by about 1550 this trade began to experience a century of stagnation or slow growth, punctuated by dramatic slumps in 1551–2, 1562–4, 1571–3, 1586–7, 1614–16, 1621–4, 1641–2, and the 1650s. One reason for the leveling off of wool exports was the chaotic political, religious, and military situation of Europe during the period 1550–1650. The Merchant Adventurers’ shipments to Antwerp were disrupted by the Wars of Religion, the Dutch revolt, the war against Spain, and, from 1618 to 1648, the Thirty Years’ War. As a result, after 1568, Antwerp was often closed to English trade. While the Merchant Adventurers found other ports in these storms (Emden, Hamburg, Stade), none was as convenient to them or to their customers as Antwerp. In addition, wool prices began to fall at the end of the sixteenth century because the European market was flooded. The inhabitants of the continent had enough heavy English wool. English manufacturers responded to this situation by embracing new, lighter, cheaper forms of wool cloth introduced by Protestant refugees from Europe, known as the “new draperies.” These were moderately successful, leading to some good years at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But the overall foreign demand for wool continued to lessen and its price to fall. During the bad years noted above merchant incomes stagnated, clothworkers lost their jobs, and farm families were unable to supplement their incomes in areas highly dependent on the trade, such as the West Country, Kent, Suffolk, and the north Midlands. Other areas saw regional industries pick up the slack: tin mining in Cornwall, lead in Derbyshire and Somerset, and coal around Newcastle and in Nottinghamshire and North Wales; ironmaking in Kent and Sussex; steelworking in and about Sheffield; pottery in Staffordshire; and shipbuilding along the Thames estuary. Coal shipments from the northeast to London alone rose from 50,000 tons in the 1580s to 300,000 tons in the 1640s. Under Elizabeth the Privy Council encouraged native industry and by 1640 England no longer had to import soap, starch, glass, paper, or pins. But none of these undertakings was large enough to put the nation to work. In early modern England, for good or ill, wool was still king.

The decline of wool, disastrous for the Merchant Adventurers, meant fiscal crisis for the State. The Crown, increasingly willing to regulate the economy, began to encourage other companies to find new markets for England’s chief commodity; and other, luxury, industries and trades, like silk-growing. It granted royal charters to the Muscovy Company (1555), the Spanish Company (1577), the Eastland Company (to trade with the Baltic, 1579), the Turkey (later the Levant) Company (1581), the Senegal Adventurers (1588, later the Royal Africa Company), the East India Company (1600), the Virginia Company (1606), and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629). In most cases these organizations were originally intended to sell wool to the area concerned, but in order to maintain profitability they often found it necessary to export fish, tin, or, when all else failed, gold in return for lucrative commodities like silks, spices, fruit, wine, and, later, tea in the case of the Spanish, Levant, and East India Companies; timber and naval stores exported by the Eastland Company; and, most notoriously, African human beings, sold into slavery in the New World by the Royal Africa Company. Later companies were founded with little expectation of assisting the wool trade: the Virginia Company was interested in gold mining but eventually specialized in tobacco; the Massachusetts Bay Company, in animal pelts. Thus, luxury imports and re-exports to Europe were coming to replace wool exports as the motor of English trade. These new trades led to the beginnings of a thriving consumer culture and the revival of ports other than London, such as Bristol, Exeter, Hull, Newcastle, or Southampton.

All of the above enterprises were royal monopolies. That is, trade remained unfree, channeled by the government for its own purposes and toward its own friends. Typically, a group of merchants or courtiers fronting for merchant partners would offer the Crown a tempting cash payment to secure their privileges, sometimes with disastrous results for the trade in question. For example, the Cokayne Project, so-called after a favored alderman of that name, was a government attempt to encourage the English finished-cloth industry by forbidding the export of raw wool by the Merchant Adventurers. But English cloth could not compete in either quality or quantity with its continental equivalent and the result was a depression in the cloth trade 1614–17. In contrast, the East India Company had the potential to benefit a wider clientele, for in 1613 it became the first joint-stock company in England. From this point, anyone could buy stock in the company, which used the money to mount its voyages. Thus, as with all stock companies, risk, profit, and loss were
shared
. Still, because the French and the Dutch already had a foothold in the Asian trade, it would be half a century before the East India Company made many people rich. Nor could it do much for the great mass of the unemployed.

It was partly for this reason that the English began to look beyond existing products, markets, and routes to those which could be discovered through exploration and established through colonization. They had noticed how Spain, a poor, disunited country with dynastic problems prior to 1492, had, within a generation, become a world power. Tudor monarchs sought a piece of the same action. The discovery of a route to the wealth of the East or to new sources of wealth in the West might solve the Crown’s chronic money problems as they had for the Spanish monarchy. Thus, the earliest English explorers and colonists left their homeland to seek out, first, new markets for the flagging wool industry; second, new sources of wealth for the royal treasury; and, third, new areas of vulnerability for England’s enemies, such as Spain.

Unfortunately, England’s location and late start meant that English adventurers and merchants were limited to less desirable routes and colder, less hospitable climates in the northern hemisphere. Put simply, by 1603, all the good colonies were taken. The geographical point is made easily by looking at a map. If you sail due west from “the sceptered isle,” you do not bump into China, India, or the tropical paradises of the Caribbean as Columbus did; instead you run into Newfoundland. Thus, in the 1490s, when Europeans dreamed of finding an easy route to the riches of the Orient, Henry VII supported John and his son Sebastian Cabot (ca. 1451–98 and ca. 1471/2–1557, respectively) in their search for a
northwest
passage to Asia. In 1553 the Crown sponsored a similar attempt to find a northeast passage around Russia. Both operations were doomed by the pack ice of the North Pole. The English never found a convenient route to the fabled East, though by 1603 the fishing off the Grand Banks was providing a valuable food source for home.

When the English tried to trade in southern waters, say with Africa, South America, or India, they ended up having to fight the Europeans who had set up shop there first. Hence the raids of Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins that eventually helped provoke war with Spain. Similarly, in 1623 the Dutch massacred an English trading colony at Amboyna in the Moluccas. From this point on, English East India ships would be armed and trading posts fortified, in preparation for literal trade war. By the late seventeenth century, the English East India Company was fielding vast armies in India and fleets in the Indian Ocean, ready to fight the Dutch, the French, and their native allies in order to force a monopoly trade on the local populace.

Long before this, the English realized that the most effective way to infringe upon the Spanish, Dutch, or French trading position was to establish permanent bases or trading posts of their own in the New World. The earliest such attempts, sponsored by groups of adventurers and courtiers like Sir Walter Ralegh, were all abortive, though they did manage to claim for England a portion of the eastern seaboard which they dubbed “Virginia,” after the Virgin Queen. Only in 1607 did a consortium led by Sir Thomas Smith (ca. 1558–1625) succeed in establishing a permanent colony in Virginia at the headwaters of a river which they named the James, after the new king who had ascended in 1603.

But Jamestown did not immediately get off the ground. The colonists discovered that, while Virginia soil contains no gold and is not especially favorable to the growing of English wheat and barley, it will grow tobacco. The habit of taking, or smoking, tobacco was just beginning to be popular in England, despite the prescient opposition of King James. At first, the hard work of planting and harvesting the tobacco plant was done by indentured servants from the British Isles. But in 1619 the colony discovered a more sinister alternative that would come to predominate by the eighteenth century: the importation of African slaves. Thus, within a dozen years of the founding of the first viable English colony in North America, the cruel foundations of the plantation/slave economy were laid. Still, the colony did not prosper. By 1635 Jamestown and the surrounding area had a population of 5,000, but it was bankrupt. Eventually, the government stepped in and made Virginia a Crown colony, the first of what would be 13 such colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. More successful were British colonies in the Caribbean, like Bermuda (settled 1612), Barbados (settled 1627), Jamaica (seized from Spain in 1655), and, much later, Nevis and St. Christopher (awarded to Britain 1713). Here, British plantation owners relied on the labor of indentured servants, Scottish and Irish refugees from the Civil Wars (see chapter 8), and, finally, African slaves to harvest tobacco, cotton, indigo, and, after 1640, cane sugar, under extremely harsh conditions. Sugar, in particular, became a fabulously lucrative commodity, much demanded by Europeans. In the next century, profits from the sugar trade would erase all memory of the crisis over wool – and stifle unease about its cultivation by slaves.

The English colonies of the New World offered solutions to two additional problems vexing the mother country. First, they provided an alternative to the Poor Law for many who could not make a go of it in England. Second, they offered a refuge for those who could no longer put up with England’s religious rules. In 1608 a congregation of Puritan separatists emigrated to Leyden in the Netherlands. In 1620, about 100 from this group returned to England via Plymouth and then embarked on the
Mayflower
for what would become the Plymouth Plantation. This colony, too, had a difficult first winter, but, not least because of good relations with the native population, it survived and grew. The Massachusetts Bay Company, a joint-stock company chartered in 1629, established a much larger settlement around Boston which absorbed the Plymouth community in 1691. Its charter allowed for self-government and its leaders, notably Governor John Winthrop (1588–1649), consciously set out to found a Puritan “New Jerusalem,” a “city on a hill” where Scriptural liturgy and morality could be enforced free from the persecution of Archbishops Whitgift and Laud (see chapters 5 and 7). While Massachusetts Bay Puritans sought freedom for their own form of religion, they banned other religious groups, as well as traditional Christmas celebrations and other calendar customs. But most Massachusetts Bay colonists came for economic opportunity, not out of religious conviction. Poor people driven out of England by bad harvests and a stagnant economy, as well as the less poor searching for cheap, plentiful land, chafed under a religious regime that was less tolerant than that of the mother country. In response, a Salem clergyman named Roger Williams (ca. 1606–83) founded a colony at Rhode Island, based upon religious toleration for Protestants. Later, in 1632, George Calvert, Lord Baltimore (1579/80–1632), a Catholic, received royal permission to establish Maryland, which eventually enacted toleration for all Christians, including Roman Catholics.

The English colonies of North America proved to be of limited commercial or military significance before, say, 1650. Yet, between 1629 and 1642, about 60,000 English men, women, and children made the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic, perhaps half a million by 1700, with another 100,000 Scots and Irish apiece. Unknowingly, they laid the foundations for a new civilization.