A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (31 page)

When the French ambassador Cominges was insulted that the ministers did not leap to their feet to greet him on his arrival at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, he did not realise that the aldermen and traders they were talking to were just as vital to the King of England as an envoy of the King of France. Although Charles kept them at a slight distance, the money-men and the merchants were as crucial to him as his great nobles, bishops and MPs. He needed their help, their influence in the city, their taxes and their loans. And beyond all this, for a king who loved ships, he was spellbound by the promise that his country would become – in a phrase used increasingly often as the decade passed – the undisputed ‘master of the seas’.

The bankers’ books also reflected this sea-going power. One set of figures related to loans to merchants, noted down as ‘Adventures of the East India Company’, ‘Adventures of the Royal Africa Country’ or, more vaguely, ‘Adventures to Severall Places’. Cromwell had boosted England’s trade and Charles was determined to match him. In 1661 parliament quickly confirmed and extended Cromwell’s Navigation Act of 1651, which excluded Dutch traders from the English import trade. The new Navigation Act of 1660 was drawn up by George Downing, who was a member of the Convention Parliament as well as ambassador at the Hague, a difficult man, but a moderniser with an acute grasp of the economic realities of British life. Downing also cleverly tied the colonies into the act, by decreeing that all trade between Britain and the plantations, and between the colonies themselves, must be in English vessels.
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(The Irish could be carriers, under specific conditions, but the Scottish ports, to their fury, were omitted from the acts, although this did not stop the flamboyant Glasgow ‘tobacco kings’ building up a trade of their own.) A second act in 1663, the Staple Act, stipulated that the colonies must buy all the goods they needed in England, closing a loophole that had let them deal directly with European ports. Downing also argued that British boatbuilders should concentrate on fast, large carriers, and suggested developing London as an
entrepôt
port to rival Amsterdam.

John Michael Wright’s painting of
The Family of Sir Robert Vyner
, 1673, suggests the pride and status of the new bankers.

Under the new acts the western ports and the Atlantic trade in particular enjoyed a boom.
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Ships set out from Bristol, Plymouth, Liverpool and Whitehaven in increasing numbers. For speculators, investing in ships and cargoes was attractive since an investment could be spread over several vessels and the cargoes were usually owned by a syndicate of four, eight or sixteen partners, sharing the danger of loss between them. And those dangers were certainly great. Storms and shipwreck, disease and pirates took a heavy toll. Sometimes a ship simply vanished, and no cause was ever found.

The two great British companies, the Levant and the East India Company, took different routes to offset risk. The Levant, like most companies at the times, was ‘regulated’, with each merchant trading independently on his own capital. The company was having a hard time in these years. Algerian pirates raided its ships, its agent in Constantinople struggled with demanding Grand Viziers, its deals were undercut by subsidised French rivals, and its price-fixing of imports and exports was attacked by independent merchants. Yet the company had a lasting allure and always attracted new apprentices, from the gentry as well as the city. Land and trade were not as antipathetic as Restoration comedies might make us believe. Many country gentry had been merchant adventurers under the Tudors, and trade, at least in the big city companies, attracted younger sons with no clear career. At the end of the decade Dudley North would write that the army, law and medicine were suitable but ‘neither is merchandise to be condemned, whereunto in foreign lands persons of the most honourable condition do apply themselves’.
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Jack Verney was one young man who persuaded his reluctant father to buy him an apprenticeship.
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In 1662, aged twenty-one, Jack set sail for ‘Scanderoon’, the English name for Iskenderun on the far eastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey, where English merchants landed bales of fine cloth, dyed in bright colours for the eastern market, and ‘money goods’ – pepper, cochineal, sugar and tin. These were carried inland and traded for silk and mohair and spices at Aleppo, the great trading post on the Turkish–Syrian border. At the other major depot at Smyrna, modern Izmir, seventy British factors and apprentices sweated in the Turkish heat, setting aside the local robes that their predecessors had adopted, in favour of black suits, silk stockings, white gloves and wigs.

Charles supported the Levant Company, appointing one of their men to check all lading bills, so that they could catch outsiders trading in their territory. But he knew well that the most crucial company, in terms of royal profit, was the East India Company. In contrast to the Levant, this was a joint-stock venture (copying the Dutch East India Company).
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It raised money by issuing permanent dividend-paying shares, and each costly voyage was financed by selling up to five hundred shares at around £100 each. When the boats returned, the goods were stored and auctioned off gradually in a succession of sales, to avoid any sudden glut that might lower prices. As the cargo was sold, so the shareholders were paid. The risk, and the return, were thus widely spread.

In April 1661 Charles confirmed the East India Company’s charter, an action sweetened by presents of plate worth £3,000 for himself and £1,500 for James. Both brothers were among the company’s five hundred investors, and Charles was always careful to consider its interests. Forty years before, the Dutch had seized the East Indian island of Pulo Run, one of the Banda islands to the west of Papua New Guinea, which was the company’s base in Indonesia, and burned its spice trees, thus depriving the company of a vital supply of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. Not only did Charles and his envoys press the Dutch hard to return the island, according to an agreement with Cromwell, but in 1662, when two of his most prominent courtiers, Henry Bennet and John Grenville, petitioned to import spices from Germany, Charles made sure that he consulted the company before granting their request.
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As a compromise, he allowed free trade in the spices, but only until the company could set up a new base.

The East India Company had twenty-eight of the finest ships, sending half out each year. Instead of building their own vessels, the traders hired them, which cut their overheads (and led, incidentally, to the start of an insurance and shipping business in the City). Each long journey was arranged around the seasonal winds, with the ships stopping for provisions at the new South Atlantic settlement on St Helena. Some sailed as far as China, but the main destination was India, especially the great Mughal port of Surat, which traded in saltpetre, indigo and cotton from the interior. The presidency of the company was based here, protected by the local Mughal viceroy. Many English soldiers and company men now lived permanently in India, becoming part of an intricate two-way exchange of cultures. The exotic fusion is strangely illustrated in a Deccani painting where an Indian prince is entertained by a courtesan, gorgeously dressed in silk knickerbockers, with a cavalier’s plumed hat on her head and a small King Charles spaniel at her feet.
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The fort and harbour of Surat in the seventeenth century

Charles had his own foothold in India, just down the coast from Surat, in Bombay, with its seven islands, which had been included in Catherine’s dowry. But to begin with Bombay was a burden rather than a boon. Five ships sailed from England in March 1662, under the command of the Earl of Marlborough, expecting to take possession of all Bombay’s dependencies. When they arrived, however, they found the Portuguese adamant that only the islands were included in the treaty. The deadlock took time to solve, and while Marlborough sailed home, the troops, already sick after weeks at sea, were left stranded on the small, uninhabited island of Anjediva near Goa. Hundreds died there of disease, and in 1665 only ninety-seven private soldiers marched into Bombay, out of the four hundred who had embarked. But when Surat was raided by a neighbouring Indian force, and the merchants needed to find a new deep-water port, Bombay, with its superb harbour, was the obvious choice. In 1668 Charles leased it to the company for a nominal annual rent of £10 in gold and Sir George Oxenden, president of the Surat factory, became its first governor.

The East India Company wooed Charles with presents, silks and jewels, rare birds and animals, and gave generous gifts to the favourite or mistress of the day.
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The company showed off their treasures at East India House, which had a menagerie of exotic creatures from India and Virginia and a collection of rarities ‘to gratify the curiosity of the public’.
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Secure in the royal favour, the directors purred over their books, priding themselves on their meticulous record-keeping. They had reason to be pleased. In 1663 profits reached around £130,000, and the return on investment rose from twenty to forty per cent. The return for the crown was handsome too: between 1664 and 1667 the East India Company would lend the king almost a quarter of a million pounds.

Like the natural philosophers, the money-men were developing a new intellectual approach, questioning, observing, collecting data and building theories on how trade grew and money circulated. They argued about money supply, interest rates and the best structure for trade to flourish, and pondered for the first time about the ‘balance of trade’. Since the early years of the century one group of thinkers had worried that the import of goods meant loss of physical bullion – gold and silver – to overseas. In opposition, another group asserted that ‘value’ lay not in intrinsic things like bullion but in the act of exchange itself – in the great circulation of trade, money returned amplified to its source.
England’s Treasure by Fforaign Trade
, by Thomas Mun, written in 1622 but published in 1664 (pointedly dedicated to the Lord Treasurer, Southampton), put it succinctly: ‘Money begets trade and trade begets money’.
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But while some writers held that the market was infinitely flexible and elastic and therefore backed freedom of trade and competition, as Samuel Fortrey did in
England’s Interest and Improvement
in 1663, others, like John Bland in
Trade Revived
(1659) saw demand as finite, and therefore recommended monopolies and protection.

The language of trade, of contract, obligation and ‘equity’ provided a model of relationships, which, as Charles and others around him slowly saw, could be applied to government as well as trade. This way of thinking brought a new respect for mediation in disputes, social as well as mercantile, and the idea of ‘coming to an agreement’, without invoking aristocratic codes of honour.
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The strength of the great companies also influenced the argument for religious toleration since the directors of the Levant Company and the East India Company included many nonconformists who could not be dislodged, however hard Sheldon and his allies tried, and it was important for the crown to keep them sweet.

As traditional sources of royal revenue from prerogative courts, fees and fines halted or diminished, so the duties from customs and excise, and loans from the companies, became vital to the Exchequer. Charles himself was named as an investor in many ventures (though he rarely paid the sum marked against his name). Hundreds of reports and letters relating to trade and the colonies stacked up in the Treasury, and the offices of the Secretaries of State and the Chancellor. In late 1663 and early 1664 these ranged from the East India Company’s worries about negotiating with the King of Persia, to Governor Willoughby’s problems with ‘factious spirits’ in Barbados and the recruitment of new settlers for the Carolinas and Jamaica.
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