from its sudden unsettlement, as just related; and, though it continued to subsist as a trading association throughout the greater part of the present period, its circumstances were those of a struggling and gradually declining body, till at last Elizabeth, in the year 1597, took advantage of a mandate issued by the Emperor Rodolph for shutting up all the factories of the English Merchant Adventurers in Germany, to direct the lord-mayor and sheriffs of London to shut up the house occupied by the merchants of the Steelyard, which put an end to the existence of the company. In this proceeding, although the queen made a show of acting on the principle of retaliation, and went through the form of demanding a revocation of the imperial decree before she took the final step in the business, she was very well pleased that her application was rejected, and that she was thus afforded a fair pretext on which to get rid of an association, the services of which, however useful they might have been in earlier times, the country no longer stood in need of. The company of late, indeed, had been only an annoyance and a source of strife: to the last the Hanse merchants, on the one hand, continued to clamour importunately for the renewal of their ancient privileges, while the Merchant Adventurers, on the other, were as incessantly exclaiming against the unfairness of any association of foreign traders being suffered to reside in the kingdom, and to interfere with its commerce at all. The time was certainly now come in which native capital and enterprise were quite vigorous enough to dispense with any foreign aid.
The trade that had been opened with Russia in 1553 was vigorously prosecuted in the reign of Mary, from which sovereign the Russia Company, as already noticed, obtained its charter of incorporation in 1554. By this charter Sebastian Cabot was appointed, during his life, the first governor of the company, which was authorised, to the exclusion of all other English subjects, to trade not only to all parts of the dominions of the Russian emperor, but to all other regions not already known to English merchants. The following year two more ships
