Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (16 page)

Money invested in the woollen industry made further profits, and more capital accumulated. This was available for trade in general, supporting ventures of a size and over a distance beyond the resources of the ship-owner. Rich clothiers like Spring of Lavenham, Byrom of Manchester and Winchcombe of Newbury could do much as they liked; they were independent of the Merchant Adventurers, lived well, married well, and thought themselves equal to the landed aristocracy. And the capital of the great wool-masters and landowners was also available for industry and mining. Bacon wrote of a certain nobleman who was ‘a great sheep-master, a great timber-man, a great collier, a great corn-master, a great lead-man, and so of iron’. The Willoughby family of Nottingham throughout the sixteenth century supplemented their income from land by the manufacture of iron and glass and the mining of coal. Towards the end of the century they were spending £20,000 a year on the iron mills at Codnor. Tin and lead were mined in Cornwall, lead in Somerset, coal in Durham; all these industries required large amounts of capital to keep them going. Tin from the Cornish mines was paid for only twice a year. In the meantime the miners wanted their wages and the tin masters needed money for the day to day costs of production. Capital was essential and the speculators like Bulmer, Maynard, Palavicino, Gresham himself, and Stoddard the former grocer’s apprentice, were pleased to supply it.

The capitalists, who now found themselves indispensable to the commercial well-being of the country, were irked by the regulation of trade and the restrictions on enterprise which were part of the economic legacy from the Middle Ages. They were against monopolies and privileges, whether those privileges were enjoyed by the English cloth exporters banded together in the Merchant Adventurers, or by the foreign merchants of the Hanse who controlled most of the trade to the North and had been resident at the Steelyard in London since at least 1350. They were against the exclusive
rights of the gilds and of municipal organizations, and they resented the restrictions on apprentices which prevented the growth of business. They demanded the right to trade where, when and with whom they could. They felt that the only restriction on trade should be the limits of finance, and they were in business to extend that. So they set out to break down the medieval barriers to free trade; they infiltrated the gilds and captured their organization; they evaded municipal regulations by taking business outside the towns; they became Merchant Adventurers themselves; they harried the privileged foreign merchants and finally drove the Hansards from the Steelyard in 1578; and they pressed unceasingly for legislative changes.

As the old exclusive trading corporations died away, business ventures were now undertaken through a new device called the joint stock company. This kind of company, which grew out of certain medieval partnerships, became prominent in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Muscovy Company, founded in 1553, was an early and famous example which was followed by the Africa Company and the Levant Company; even the plundering expeditions of Elizabeth’s privateers were organized as joint stock ventures. The old regulated company such as the Merchant Adventurers was an exclusive club of fortunate merchants; entrance was difficult, admission fees were high, rules were strict. But the joint stock company was a much more democratic affair and, drawing its stock from all sections of the public, a much better source of capital. ‘Divers noblemen, gentlemen and persons of quality, no ways bred up to trade or merchandise’ purchased their shares and left the running of the company to the few powerful merchants who directed the trade. Undisturbed by the competition and jealousies of merchants within the company, and blessed with adequate capital from the shareholders, the joint stock companies were both efficient and profitable. Men who had before never thought of trade could now buy their shares, taking a profit without any knowledge of sails, tides and harbours, or bills, exchanges and dockets. The wider the rewards spread, the less was the criticism. By the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 the secret victory of capitalism was accomplished. Only the poor, the dispossessed, the moralists, and the government would not see it.

In the new economic age after the mid-century, with so many opportunities for speculation and trade, the capitalist merchant
wove around him a complex web of business. Besides being the Royal Agent, Gresham was a Mercer and a Merchant Adventurer; he was the constructor and owner of a paper mill and engaged in the production of iron. As part of his financial dealings he loaned money to the aristocracy. He advanced £4,000 to Viscount Bindon, held a mortgage on the manors of Lord Thomas Howard and of Sir Henry Woodhouse who was foolish enough to take an action against Gresham for usury. In this expansive and inflationary time the aristocracy were committed to luxury and show. ‘We that be courtiers’, says an Elizabethan play, ‘have more places to send gold to than the devil had spirits.’ But the revenue from ancestral lands was no longer sufficient for such conspicuous expense, and the aristocrat was an eager client of Gresham and his kind. The aristocrats were not the only large spenders. Throughout society affluence was at work, and the financier was the gainer. In the house of the merchant or gentleman, William Harrison wrote in the
Description of England
he compiled early in Elizabeth’s reign, one could see ‘great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate, worth five or six hundred or a thousand pounds’. Within his lifetime, Harrison wrote, he had seen chimneys added to the meanest houses; flock beds taking the place of straw pallets; pillows used instead of logs or sacks of chaff; and wooden platters and spoons giving way to pewter vessels and tin or silver spoons. And few citizens lived as well as the financier. The description of luxury in Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew
would have been a fitting tribute to Gresham House in Bishopsgate, the home of the wealthiest commoner in England:

      My house within the city

Is richly furnished with plate and gold:

Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands;

My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry;

In ivory coffers I have stuff’d my crowns;

In cypress chests my arras counterpoints,

Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,

Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss’d with pearl,

Valance of Venice gold in needle-work,

Pewter and brass, and all things that belong

To house or housekeeping.

The riches piled up. Gresham had his house in London; he also had houses at Osterley in Middlesex, Mayfield in Sussex, and at Westacre, Kingshall and Intwood Hall in Suffolk. The furniture at Mayfield alone was valued at £7,500. When he died he was able to leave his widow an income of over £2,000 a year. Was Gresham content in the midst of his magnificence? After the final return from Antwerp he was a lonely man perhaps. His money made more money without him looking at it; though still not old, he retired from business entirely in 1574. Also, whatever his wealth, he was still a commoner and subject to the peremptory whims of the Queen. In 1569 Lady Mary Grey, the youngest sister of Lady Jane, who had unwisely married a ‘sergeant-porter’ of the Queen’s household, was sent to lodge with Gresham. Why Sir Thomas should have been made her gaoler is not known, but for more than three years her unhappy presence poisoned the life of his home. He drank Rhenish, cursed his gout and was dissatisfied. Was it conscience or philanthropy that caused him to endow Gresham College in his will?

‘Was it not for prodigality’, wrote Bernard Mandeville, the unconventional mocker of the next century, ‘nothing could make us amends for the rapine and extortion of avarice in power.’ In 1575 Gresham made his will. He left his house in Bishopsgate to his wife for her lifetime, and then it was to become Gresham College. Seven professors were to teach seven subjects. The lectures were to be free and the professors paid £50 a year (a generous salary for the time) from the rents of the shops in the Royal Exchange. The government of the College was vested in the Corporation of London and in the Mercers’ Company. When Lady Gresham died in 1596 the College began; for a hundred years and more it was London’s university, attracting some of the greatest scholars in the land. Then the income that supported it fell off, the building was in disrepair, and covetous eyes wanted the valuable city site. The professors were turned out of their pleasant lodgings, their wages left unpaid, and the building razed. Occasional lectures in a gloomy room at the Royal Exchange were all that were left of Gresham’s grand design of a university. It was founded on commerce and commercial values killed it. On 21st November 1579 Sir Thomas himself died. ‘Coming from the Exchange to his house’, wrote the chronicler, ‘he fell down in his kitchen; and being taken up, was found speechless, and presently dead.’

‘In the world of commerce and finance’, the Greek orator Demosthenes had said, ‘it is thought remarkable if a man is both clever and honest.’ The arrival of capitalism brought in a new age of deceit and notable greed. In England men were, John Lyly wrote in
Euphues,
‘as in every place all for money’. And in pursuit of it men preyed on each other remorselessly. The terms of the ubiquitous money-lenders were extremely hard, interest of 20 per cent and above being the rule rather than the exception. A country gentlemen seeking £100 to help a needy friend approached a scrivener. The scrivener demanded 20 per cent interest, a £2 fee, £20 for legal expenses, the repayment of an old debt owed by another friend of the gentleman, and when all these charges were met ‘there was no bond delivered’. A grocer who had loaned money to another gentleman discounted the bills at 25 per cent, renewed them at compound interest and, having sold up the debtor, became lord of the manor. Needy gentlemen were an easy mark, but the great were equally put upon. For a loan of £3,000, the powerful financier Sir Horatio Palavicino suggested that Lord Shrewsbury should convey to him land worth £7,000, pay all legal and other fees, and forfeit an interest in the land unless the mortgage was paid off within three months. The great financier was an even more rapacious hawk than the small money-lender. The little group of London capitalists who supported the tin mines of the West Country diverted between 40 and 60 per cent of the profits of the industry into their own pockets.

In this world of sharp practice Sir Thomas Gresham, the richest financier of them all, was no sluggard. His rates of interest for his loans were as high, and higher, than those of his fellows; the unfortunate Sir Henry Woodhouse was driven to try to bring Gresham before the courts for usury. And Gresham had no scruples about his dealings. His dishonest plan to help the royal debts by cheating the Merchant Adventurers was a matter of great pride to him, even though he was himself a Merchant Adventurer! Nor can it be said that he made an honest profit from the government for his official work, though perhaps his conduct here was retaliation for the notorious meanness of Elizabeth to her servants. He was allowed a brokerage of ½ per cent, and he calculated this at an arbitrary rate of exchange well in advance of the actual market rate and naturally in his favour. When his books were audited at the end of his time as Royal Agent it was discovered that he
owed the crown £10,000. Gresham was not dismayed. He immediately produced a fictitious counter-claim for £11,500, and when the auditor spurned this went behind the man’s back to the Queen’s favourite, Leicester, who persuaded the Commissioners of the Treasury to discharge him from the debt.

‘Treasure doth then advance greatness’, wrote Bacon, when ‘the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few.’ The fear of Tudor government was not only that the individual enterprise of capitalists concentrated wealth into very few hands, but also that the greedy self-interest of the capitalists hurt the life of the community. The dreadful social havoc caused by certain types of enclosures was a warning of the danger of speculation and profiteering too sad to be ignored. And the grip of the capitalists on emerging industry often had unhappy consequences for the poor workers. In the tin mines the capitalists squeezed the mine owners and they in their turn imposed upon the miners, to whom they had made advances in money or in truck at usurious rates of interest. The Tudors, who always relied on the support of the many against the ambition of the few, were not naturally advocates of capitalism. The young, inexperienced and religious Edward VI, in his
Discourse about the Reformation of Many Abuses
, put the social idealism of the Tudors in its most simple, naïve form: ‘I think this country’, he wrote, ‘can bear no merchant to have more land than £100; no husbandman nor farmer worth above £100 or £200; no artificer above 100 marks,
¹
no labourer much more than he spendeth. … This Commonwealth may not bear one man to have more than two farms, than one benefice, than 2,000 sheep, and one mind of art to live by. Wherefore as in the body no part hath too much or too little, so in a commonwealth ought every part to have
ad victum et non ad saturitatem
.’

It was a sentence of St Jerome that ‘the merchant can never please God’, and much of the economic thinking of the Middle Ages seemed to have been governed by this text. The medievals did not object to a reasonable profit from trade, but they considered money itself to be barren and financial dealings to be a sin against the community. The money-lenders were, as a later writer put it, ‘the true drones of the commonwealth, living upon the
honey without any labour’. These views on finance were perhaps endearingly simple, arising out of an agricultural economy that had no experience of problems of widespread trading. But because they had in mind the well-being and moral cleanliness of the community, they were actively promoted by the Church. The Renaissance, which changed so many things, brought to England a new view on finance, a new sense of individual enterprise (often at the expense of the community), and a new Reformed religion. All these combined to make the government slowly and reluctantly alter its economic ideas. And, as usual, the new capitalist practice was well entrenched before the regulations of the old theory were swept away.