by the Emperor Charles V., to sell to King Henry a right, which he pretended to have as King of Spain, to the Molucca Islands, which, however, came to nothing. The same year, also, this author tells us, the English king "sent out two fair ships to discover new regions, then daily found out by the Portuguese and Spaniard;" but in this attempt he met with no greater success than his father. It appears, moreover, from a passage in Hakluyt's Collection, that some merchants of Bristol had now for some years been in the habit of exporting cloth, soap, and other commodities to the Canary Islands, by means of the ships of San Lucar in Spain, and of receiving back by the same conveyance dyeing drugs, sugar, and kid-skins. But the chief branch of the foreign commerce of the country still continued to be the trade with the Netherlands, where, at the great emporium of Antwerp, the English merchants both found purchasers for their native produce and manufactures of all kinds, and were enabled to supply themselves in return with whatever quantities they required of the productions of all parts of the globe. Accordingly, the apprehended interruption of this trade on Henry's declaration of war against the emperor, in 1528, threatened to derange the whole system of the national industry. "Our merchants," says Lord Herbert, " (who used not the trade to the many northern and remote countries they now frequent), foreseeing the consequences of these wars, refused to buy the cloths that were brought to Blackwell Hall, in London; whereupon the clothiers, spinners, and carders, in many shires of England, began to mutiny." To appease this clamour of the manufacturing population, Wolsey issued his commands to the merchants that they should take the cloths at a reasonable price from the poor men's hands, with a threat that, if they did not, the king himself should buy them and sell them to foreigners. This procedure may let us into the secret of the means by which, in the quarrel with the government of the Netherlands in the last reign, the merchants of London were induced, as related in a preceding page, during the three years that the quarrel lasted, to continue their pur-
