The History of British Commerce/Volume 2/Chapter 7
HISTORY
OF
BRITISH COMMERCE.
CHAPTER VII.
FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES II. A.D. 1603—1660
The most authentic and comprehensive account we have of the foreign commerce of England at the commencement of the present period is contained in a discourse, or essay, drawn up by Sir Walter Raleigh, and originally presented by him, in manuscript, to James I. soon after his accession.[1] The main object of this small treatise is to point out the circumstances to which the Dutch owed their commercial superiority, and to urge upon the English government the adoption of the same methods; but in pursuing this argument the author takes occasion to give a very full and minute delineation of the trade carried on by each country in all its branches. Some little allowance is perhaps to be made here and there for the bias of a mind occupied with and pleading for a particular object; but in general there is no reason to suppose that Raleigh's statements, the substance of which, in so far as they relate to his own country, we shall now proceed to extract and condense, are, to any material extent, overcharged.
The ordinary trade carried on at this time by the Dutch with England employed not fewer than five or six hundred Dutch ships, but not a tenth of that number of English. But, besides, whenever there was in England a dearth of wine, fish, or corn, it was the custom of the Dutch immediately to load fifty or a hundred vessels with the particular commodity in request, and to dispatch them to all the ports of this kingdom, to reap the harvest of the high prices. In a recent dearth of corn Raleigh affirms that the merchants of Embden, Hamburgh, and Holland had in this way carried away, in a year and a half, from the ports of Southampton, Exeter, and Bristol alone, nearly 200,000l.; and he thinks that, from the whole of the kingdom, they could not have obtained less than ten times that sum. The practice of these thoroughly commercial states was to monopolize, as far as they could, the transport of the produce of all other countries,—of Turkey and the East and West Indies, as well as of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy; and, carrying this merchandise to Denmark, Sweden, Poland, and other northern parts, to bring back thence corn and other bulky commodities, which they stored up to supply the wants of England and the rest of the world. Amsterdam was never without a store of 700,000 quarters of corn, none of it of home growth; and it was remarked that a dearth of one year in England, France, Spain, Portugal, or Italy sufficed to enrich Holland for seven years after. Raleigh contends, nevertheless, that, if the proper methods were taken, England was much better situated than Holland for a general store-house.
He next proceeds to compare the trade in fish of the Low Countries and the adjacent petty states with that carried on by England. The most productive fisheries in the world were upon the coasts of the British islands; yet at this time, while the Hollanders sent to the four great towns on the Baltic—Koningsberg, Elbing, Stettin, and Dantzic—620,000l. worth of herrings every year, England exported to those places none at all; nor any to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the ports of Riga, Revel, Narva, and other parts of Livonia, to which the Dutch sent yearly to the value of 170,000l.; and scarcely 500l. worth to Russia, to which the Dutch sent 27,000l. worth; and none at all to Staden, Hamburgh, Bremen, and Embden, to which the Dutch sent, of herrings and other fish, to the annual value of 100,000l.; nor any up the Rhine to Germany, the people of which bought, every year, 440,000l. worth of herrings and other fish from the Dutch; nor any up the Mouse to Maestricht, Liege, &c., to which places the Dutch sold herrings every year to the value of 140,000l.; nor any to Guelderland, Flanders, and up the Scheldt, all over the dominions of the Archduke of Austria, in which direction the Dutch sent annually 162,000l. worth; and not 2000l. worth to France, which took 100,000l. worth from the Dutch. In short, while, according to this account, the trade of the Dutch in fish brought them in annually not much under 2,000,000l., the English could hardly be said to have any trade in that article at all,—except only, Raleigh omits to notice, to the countries washed by the Mediterranean,—the great Catholic and fish-eating countries of Spain and Italy; but thither, also, the Dutch, he tells us, sent large quantities, although he does not specify to what exact amount.
In other important branches of trade the case was nearly the same. The Dutch sent nearly a thousand ships every year to the countries in the north-east of Europe with wine and salt, both chiefly obtained from France and Spain; England, with equal natural advantages, had not one ship employed in that trade. The timber trade of the Dutch, whose own country grew no wood, employed five or six hundred great ships; the English, with the same access as they had to the forests within the Baltic, neither exported nor imported a single cargo. Even the wool, cloth, lead, tin, and other native products of England were far from being turned to so much account as they might have been. As yet all the woollen cloth that went abroad was exported both undressed and undyed. About 80,000 pieces of woollen cloth were annually sent to foreign countries in that state, the dyeing and dressing of which, as Raleigh calculates, was a yearly gain to the foreigner of 400,000l.; besides about 150,000 northern and Devonshire kerseys and bayes (baize), the colouring of which would come to 100,000l. a-year more. These latter were dressed and dyed at Amsterdam, and then shipped for Spain, Portugal, and other countries, where they were sold under the name of Flemish bayes. Nor were our exports of all descriptions of native produce of any considerable amount in comparison with those of the Dutch. To Prussia and the other countries in the north-east of Europe, for example, the Dutch sent every year nearly three thousand ships, which found their way into every port town: we sent out in the same direction only about a hundred, the merchandise carried by which was chiefly disposed of in the three towns of Elbing, Koningsberg, and Dantzic. No English ships carried any of the commodities of those countries to France, Spain, Portugal, or Italy, which two thousand Dutch merchantmen were constantly employed in supplying with them. In general the foreign trade of England for some years past had been decaying rather than extending. For seventy years a very considerable trade had been carried on with Russia: down to about the year 1590, store of goodly ships were wont to sail annually to that country; but, in 1600, only four had been sent out; and, in 1602, only two or three; whereas the Russian trade of the Dutch had now come to employ from thirty to forty ships, each as large as two of the English, and all chiefly laden with English cloth, herrings taken in the British seas, English lead, and pewter made of English tin. To the isle of Wardhuus, on the coast of Finmark, eight or nine great ships used constantly to go to the fishing from England; in this year, 1603, only one had gone. Those native commodities, besides, that were sent from England to foreign countries were in by far the greater part exported in foreign bottoms.
Raleigh's essay probably attracted very little regard from James or his ministers at this time; but some attempts seem to have been made a few years afterwards to carry certain of his recommendations into effect. Nevertheless English commerce continued in a languishing state during the whole of this reign; no really important measures were taken for its revival and encouragement; on the contrary, the very evil which Raleigh had most deprecated,—the burdensome amount of the customs,—was, in the penury and short-sightedness of the government, augmented instead of being alleviated. One or two new trading companies were, however, incorporated; and the colonisation of different parts of America, which was more or less successfully proceeded with by the enterprise of private individuals, if it produced scarcely any results for the present, was laying an ample foundation of commercial as of all other greatness for a future age.
Captain James Lancaster, who had sailed from England in April, 1601, in charge of the first adventure of the newly-established East India Company, made his reappearance in the Downs, with the two largest of his four ships full laden with pepper, on the 11th of September, 1603, having previously sent home the other two with cargoes composed partly of pepper, cloves, and cinnamon, partly of calicoes and other Indian manufactures, taken out of a Portuguese carrack which Lancaster had fallen in with and captured. The admiral, as he was called, had been well received by the king of Acheen, in Sumatra, who had concluded a commercial treaty with him, and granted all the privileges that were asked; but the great length of time, nearly two years and a half, that the adventure had occupied, and still more the obstructions of various sorts which kept the goods from being all disposed of, and the accounts finally wound up, for about six years longer, prevented the company from deriving either much ultimate profit or any immediate encouragement from this first attempt. Additional capital, however, having been, though with difficulty, raised, the same four ships were again sent out in March, 1604, under the command of Sir Henry Middleton, who did not return till May, 1606, and then only with three of his ships, laden with pepper, cloves, mace, and nutmegs, the fourth having been lost on the homeward voyage. In the mean time a licence in direct violation of the company's charter had been granted by the king to Sir Edward Michelbome and others, allowing them to send out ships to trade with Cathaya, China, Japan, Corea, Cambaya, and any other countries in the same quarter of the globe not already frequented by the English; and Michelborne had actually sailed for China in December, 1604, and, although he did not succeed in reaching that country, had made his way as far as to the Oriental Archipelago, whence he returned to England in July, 1606, bringing with him little else than the plunder of some small Indian and Chinese vessels, which he had attacked with no more regard either to the right of other nations or the character of his own than if he had been a common pirate. Disgusted by this ill-usage on the part of the government, in addition to the disappointment of their hopes of large and speedy returns from the subscriptions they had already risked, and influenced also somewhat by the popular outcry that was raised about the impolitic and destructive nature of the new trade, which, it was affirmed, besides occasioning an unusual mortality of the seamen, would, if persisted in, prove a wasteful drain both upon the treasure and the marine of the country, most of the members of the company were now inclined to put up with their losses and to have nothing more to do with the business. The spirit of others, however, still clung to the hope of better success; and, a new subscription having been opened, three more ships were sent out in March and April, 1607, and two more in !March the following year. Neither of these attempts was very fortunate: the two vessels that sailed last, indeed, were both lost at sea, although the crews and a small part of the cargo of one of them were saved; but a single ship, the Expedition, which sailed in April, 1609, under the command of Captain David Middleton, brought home, about two years after, so valuable a cargo of nutmegs and mace as to produce a dividend of 211 per cent. Meanwhile a new charter, dated May 31, 1609, had been obtained by the company, by which their privilege of exclusive trade, originally granted for fifteen years, was made perpetual, a power, however, being reserved by the government of dissolving them at any time on three years' notice. They now built the largest ship that had ever been constructed in England for the merchant service, some accounts making her burden to have been a thousand, others eleven or twelve hundred tons; and, after the king, with a numerous attendance of the nobility, had witnessed the launch of this portly argosy, which his majesty named the Trade's Increase, and been entertained on board with a magnificent banquet served in dishes of China ware, then quite new in England, it was put, along with two other vessels, under the command of Sir Henry Middleton, who set sail with his little fleet for the Red Sea in the spring of 1610. Neither Middleton nor his good ship, the Increase, ever saw England again; the ship was lost in Bantam Road in 1613, and Sir Henry soon after died of grief; but the other two vessels, which returned home towards the end of the following year, brought such productive cargoes as afforded the partners a dividend of above 121 per cent. Another adventure in a single ship, which sailed from Gravesend in January, 1611, and returned to England in the summer of 1615, produced the still larger profit of 218 per cent, upon the capital invested; and another with three ships, which were sent out in April, 1611, and returned in September, 1614, was very nearly as successful. Another voyage, reckoned the ninth, brought a profit of 160 per cent, after three years and a half; a tenth, in about two years and a half, 148 per cent.; an eleventh, in twenty months, about 340 per cent.; and a twelfth about 134 per cent., in a year and a half. Each of these adventures, it is to be observed, had, in so far as regarded the pecuniary results, been the separate concern of the individual members who chose to engage in it; but the commanders in general appear, nevertheless, to have considered themselves in all other respects as the representatives of the company in its corporate capacity, or even in some sort of the nation, and, as such, to have freely, whenever occasion or opportunity offered, both entered into treaties with the native powers, and employed arms, defensively or offensively, against the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Turks, or whatever other foreigners the rivalries of trade brought them into collision with. Both the Portuguese, who had been long established in India, and the Dutch, who had more recently entered into the trade, early began to employ force as well as intrigue against the new-comers; but hitherto with little effect. In spite of all their endeavours, Captain Best, who conducted what is called the tenth voyage, succeeded, in 1613, in obtaining a firman, or charter, from the Great Mogul, allowing the company to establish a factory at Surat, granting them the privilege of introducing their merchandise at a certain fixed rate of duties, and engaging to protect both their trade and the persons and property of those engaged in it from the hostility of the Portuguese and all others. And the same year Captain Saris, who had gone out with the eighth adventure, obtained from the Emperor of Japan equally ample privileges for his dominions. It was now resolved that all future voyages should be on account of the company as one united body. The first fleet, accordingly, fitted out upon this new scheme sailed under the command of Captain Downton in March, 1614: it consisted only of four ships; but with this small force Downton was fortunate enough to repel a formidable attack of the Portuguese, with whom, on his arrival in the country, he found the Mogul at war, a victory which proved of the greatest service, not only in attaching that monarch to the interests of the company, but in exalting the English name and character in the opinion of the people of all northern and central India. The favourable impression thus made was judiciously followed up by the dispatch in January, 1615, along with another small fleet, of Sir Thomas Roc in the quality of ambassador to the Indian emperor from the king of England, and by the successful exertions of that envoy, who continued to reside at the Mogul's court till the year 1619, and was enabled to obtain various important extensions of the privileges formerly granted to the company. The company now possessed factories, not only at Acheen, Zambee, and Tecoa, in Sumatra; at Surat, Amadavad, Agra, Azmere, or Agimere, and Burampore, in the dominions of the Mogul; and at Firando in Japan; but also at Bantam, Jacatra (the present Batavia), and Japara, in Java; at Benjarniassing and Socodania in Borneo, at Banda in the Banda Islands, at Patan in Malacca, at Macassar in the isle of Celebes, at Siam in the kingdom of that name, at Masulipatam and Petapoli on the Coromandel coast, and at Calicut on the coast of Malabar. In so prosperous a state, also, were their concerns believed to be about this time that in 1617 their stock was currently sold at 203 per cent. The disputes with the Dutch, however, now grew to such a height as greatly to embarrass the trade. Commissioners were actually appointed by the governments of the two countries to endeavour to bring about an amicable arrangement; and the Dutch proposed that the English East India Company and theirs should carry on the trade as a joint concern, a plan which, it was urged, would enable them effectually to subdue their common enemy the Portuguese, and to exclude all other nations from getting any footing in India; but this idea came to nothing. At length, in July, 1619, a treaty was concluded at London by eighteen English commissioners and ten deputies from the States-General, by which it was agreed that the two companies should continue to carry on the trade separately, but upon the principle of each sharing in the different branches of it in certain specified proportions, under the superintendence of what was called a Council of Defence, to be composed of four of the principal servants of each company resident in the country. This agreement was to continue in force for twenty years; but did not last half as many months. The intelligence that it had been concluded was received with great rejoicings in India, in April, 1620; and, in December of that same year, the Dutch governor-general suddenly attacked and took possession of the islands of Lantore and Pulo Boon, the dominion of which was claimed by the English, thus recommencing hostilities by the most decided act of aggression that had yet been committed on either side. This was followed, in February, 1623, by the much more atrocious affair of the massacre at Amboyna, and the subsequent expulsion of the English company's people by their late associates, but now declared enemies, out of all the other Spice Islands. A long course of hostilities, into the detail of which we cannot enter, took place between the two nations, the effects of which were so disastrous to the interests of the English company, that, notwithstanding a valuable establishment they had gained, in 1622, in the Persian Gulf, by the capture, in conjunction with the forces of the Shah of Persia, of the island of Ormus from the Portuguese, they found themselves, two or three years later, in debt to the amount of 200,000l., and, about the close of the reign of James, were seriously thinking of disposing of whatever they possessed in India, and relinquishing the trade. They had, before this, abandoned their factory in Japan, notwithstanding the concession to them, by the emperor, in 1616, of a second and still more liberal charter; and they had also withdrawn from a field of enterprise upon which they had somewhat strangely entered a few years before,—the Greenland whale fishery,—after attempting it first by themselves, and then, with no better success, in conjunction with the Russian Company. They had in 1616, in the height of their reputed prosperity, raised a new stock of 1,629,040l., which was eagerly subscribed by 954 individuals, including fifteen dukes and earls, thirteen countesses and other titled ladies, eighty-two knights, judges, and privy councillors, eighteen widows and maiden ladies, and twenty-six clergymen and physicians, besides mercantile men and others. Now, when a further subscription was proposed, it was found that the money could not be obtained; and the stock, which in 1617, sold at 203 per cent., had now fallen to considerably less than the half of that price.[2]
The operations of the other incorporated trading companies in this reign demand little notice. In 1605 James granted a perpetual charter to a new company, that of "The Merchants of England trading to the Levant Seas," which still subsists, and is popularly known under the name of the Levant or Turkey Company. By means of this company, the plan of which was that every member should trade on his own account, but according to regulations settled by the general court, considerable quantities of English woollen manufactures, and, at a later date, of watches, jewellery, and other descriptions of merchandise, were exported to Constantinople and the adjacent parts of the East, the supply of which with European commodities used formerly to be entirely in the hands of the Venetians. It is said that the ordinary returns of the Levant Company were at first three to one upon the investments. The year after the incorporation of the Levant Company, an English minister was, for the first time, appointed to reside in the dominions of the Grand Seignior, and authority was given to him to nominate consuls for the superintendence of the trade and the good government of the English merchants in the several ports. For some time the Turkish trade seems to have been one of the most flourishing branches of our foreign commerce. In a treatise published in 1621, it is asserted that, of all Europe, England then drove the most profitable trade to Turkey, by reason of the vast quantities of broad cloth, tin, &c., which were exported thither. The profitableness of the English trade with Turkey, however, in this writer's notion, lay mainly in the circumstance that our exports were sufficient to pay for our imports,—the latter consisting chiefly of "three hundred great bales of Persian silk yearly,"—"whereas," he adds, "a balance in money is paid by the other nations trading thither. Marseilles sends yearly to Aleppo and Alexandria at least 500,000l., and little or no wares. Venice sends about 400,000l. yearly in money, and a great value in wares besides. The Low Countries send about 50,000l., and but little wares; and Messina 25,000l. in ready money. Besides great quantities of gold and dollars from Germany, Poland, Hungary, &c. And all these nations take of the Turks, in return, great quantities of camblets, grograras, raw silk, cotton wool and yarn, galls, flax, hemp, rice, hides, sheep's wool, wax, corn, &c."[3] If those other nations, however, got their money's worth for their money, which no doubt they did, they were quite as well off as the English, who of course got no more than the worth of their produce or manufactures. It might be as great an accommodation to the Venetians, Hollanders, &c. to have the Turks to take off their gold and silver as it was to the English to have the Turks to take off their broad cloths and tin. Of all superfluities a superfluity of the precious metals would be about the most useless; produce, manufactures, goods of any other kind that could not be disposed of abroad might be turned to some account at home; gold and silver would not be so valuable as iron, or lead, or clay, if they could not be employed for purposes of exchange. The English, therefore, in sending to the Turks their broad-cloths and tin, gave away that which if kept at home would have had a value in all circumstances, even if all commercial intercourse between nations had come to a standstill: the "money with which the Dutch and Venetians and Germans paid for their silks and other Turkish merchandise would not in that case have been worth the cost of warehousing it. And, in any circumstances, these nations must have found it more convenient to pay for what they got from the Turks in gold and silver than in other exports, else they would not have done so; the Turks would have taken their cloths and other descriptions of manufactures or produce as willingly as they took those of the English. But they found it more profitable to carry on their dealings of that kind with other customers,—to exchange their goods for the money of the English,—and then, with that money in their hands, to go to make their purchases from the Turks. What would they have made by keeping the money and exporting goods to Turkey instead? On the other hand, if the English had had money wherewith to make their purchases from the Turks, it is unquestionable that they would have found that the most profitable way of dealing. Whatever the theorists of the mercantile system may say, the last thing, we may be sure, that any nation will really keep at home when it has an opportunity of sending it abroad is its gold and silver. Money is at once the most effective and economical instrument of exchange, and the most useless of all things when not so employed. The mercantile system rests upon the notion that a country never can have too much money; whereas the truth is, money is almost the only thing of which more than a certain quantity permanently confined within a country would really be of no use. If a country has as much of everything else as it wants, it will always have as much money as it wants; its stock of money or representative wealth, will always be proportioned to its stock of other and more real wealth; and no mode of carrying on trade with another country, or with all other countries,—in other words, no state, favourable or unfavourable, to use the established expressions, of what is called the balance of trade—can in the least affect the matter. In fact, this same balance of trade, about which so much anxious calculation has been expended, is in every view the most purely insignificant thing in the whole world; it is of no more consequence than the balance between the numbers of the red-painted and black-painted ships that may have been employed in any particular trade, or of the light-complexioned and dark-complexioned sailors by which they may have been manned. It is evident that no country can have its general balance of trade permanently or for any long course of years either favourable or unfavourable; either supposition implies that which is impossible. The result of a permanently favourable balance, would be such a constant accumulation of the precious metals in the country as would be only burdensome if it could take place, but, at the same time, really could no more happen than a constant accumulation of water upon a particular spot in a plain. A permanently or long-continued favourable state of the balances, again, is only another expression for the case of a country which should be continually exporting more gold and silver than it imported, a thing possible only for a country of which the precious metals were among the native products. The wealth of a country, indeed, may increase or may diminish: but its stock of money and its stock of other wealth will increase or will diminish together; and the growth or decline of both will not at all depend upon, or be indicated by, anything like what has been called the balance of trade,—that is, the proportion in which the goods obtained from other countries are paid for by money or by other goods,—but will be occasioned solely by the increasing or diminishing productiveness, as circumstances may vary, of its natural resources and advantages, and of the labour and ingenuity of its inhabitants. The balance of trade may in all cases with perfect safety be left to regulate itself: whatever may happen with other things, that can never go wrong.
In 1604, and again in 1617, the Company of Merchant Adventurers obtained new charters from James, confirming all their former exclusive privileges of exporting the woollen manufactures of England to the Netherlands and Germany, with the reservation only of the right of trading within the same limits to the mayor, constables, and fellowship of the Merchants of the Staple—an exception which is said to have soon proved wholly illusory, under the extending influence of the more recent association, who gradually compelled all persons engaged in this trade to submit to their regulations. In fact, the Company of Merchant Adventurers came to comprehend the whole body of English merchants trading to the Low Countries and Germany, a body which, in the latter part of the reign of James, is stated to have amounted to about 4000 individuals. There appear, also, to have been local companies of merchant adventurers established in some of the great towns. Thus, an act of parliament of the year 1606 confirms a charter that had been granted nearly half a century before by Elizabeth, giving to a company of that name of the city of Exeter the exclusive privilege, in reference to their fellow-citizens, of trading with the dominions of the king of France. Another statute of the same session created a still more comprehensive monopoly in favour of the corporation of the town of Southampton, which was empowered to exclude all persons except its own freemen, and the barons and freemen of the Cinque Ports, from buying or selling anything whatever as merchants within that town. Such restrictions were still generally thought to be necessary or serviceable to the interests of trade, and not injurious to those of the public.
Much more pernicious, however, in their effects, as well as more illegal, or at least unconstitutional, in their origin, than these local and statutory grants, were many patents for the exclusive sale or manufacture of particular commodities, which James took upon him to issue by his mere prerogative to persons who purchased from him such licences to pillage the rest of his subjects. The number of these monopolies had been made matter of strong complaint by the House of Commons towards the close of the preceding reign, and Elizabeth had thereupon issued a proclamation annulling all those then existing. But James was not to be restrained by this concession of his predecessor from the exercise of what he held to be an undoubted part of his prerogative; he soon created so many new monopolies that the public clamour became louder than ever, till at last, in 1609, he deemed it prudent to follow Elizabeth's example by again proclaiming a general revocation. Nevertheless, after the suspension of parliamentary government in 1614, this evil, with many others, soon grew up again in all its old rankness; so that, when circumstances at length compelled the culling of a parliament once more in 1621, the oppression of monopolies formed a principal head in the catalogue of the national grievances which the Commons immediately proceeded to redress. At a conference with the Lords, they offered to prove, Rushworth tells us, "that the patents of gold and silver thread, of inns and alehouses, and of power to compound for obsolete laws, of the price of horse-meat, starch, cords, tobacco-pipes, salt, train-oil, and the rest, were all illegal; howbeit they touched not the tender point of prerogative, but, in restoring the subjects' liberty, were careful to preserve the king's honour."[4] James, it should appear, on this occasion professed to have been entirely ignorant, until informed by his faithful Commons, of the abuses alleged to have taken place; and it was contrived that the whole blame as well as punishment should fall upon the patentees, on the pretence that they had exceeded their privileges, and on certain of the officers of state concerned in the granting of the patents, on the somewhat contradictory pretence that they had not been sufficiently careful in limiting the terms of these grants so as to guard them against being abused. "I do assiure you," said his majesty, in a speech which he came down and made to the Lords while the inquiry was going on, "I do assure you, in the heart of an honest man, and by the faith of a Christian king, which both ye and all the world know me to be, had these things been complained of to me before the parliament I would have done the office of a just king, and out of parliament have punished them as severely, and peradventure more, than ye now intend to do. But now that they are discovered to me in parliament, I shall be as ready in this way as I should have been in the other; for I confess I am ashamed, these things proving so as they are generally reported to be, that it was not my good fortune to be the only author of the reformation and punishment of them by some ordinary course of justice." "Three patents at this time," he went on to say," have been complained of and thought great grievances: 1. That of the inns and hostelries, 2. That of alehouses. 3. That of gold and silver thread. My purpose is to strike them all dead; and, that time may not be lost, I will have it done presently. That concerning alehouses I would have to be left to the managing of justices of the peace as before. That of gold and silver thread was most vilely executed, both for wrong done to men's persons, as also for abuse of the stuff, for it was a kind of false coin. I have already freed the persons that were in prison; I will now also damn the patent, and this may seem instead of a pardon. All these three I will have recalled by proclamation, and wish you to advise of the fittest form to that purpose."[5] In the course of the debates upon the subject in the Commons, Mr. (afterwards Serjeant) Noy explained the manner in which these patents were applied for and obtained. "Before any patent is passed," said the learned member, "there is first a petition to his majesty, showing what good will accrue to the commonwealth by granting of the same, and what increase of benefit to the king, and what abuses for want of such a remedy as they propound do abound; whereon the king ever referreth the petition to some whom his majesty thinketh fittest to consider of the petition, both for matter of law, convenience, and good of the state and commonwealth; and thereupon the referees are to certify his majesty the truth of what they think of the petition; and, as they certify for the lawfulness and conveniency and good both of his majesty and his estate, and the particular good of the commonwealth, his majesty accordingly granteth it."[6] With all this show, however, of regard for the public good, no doubt can be entertained for a moment, from the character of these old monopolies, that the only thing that was really looked to in the bargain between the crown and the applicant was the amount of the sum of money the latter was inclined to offer for the patent; if that was sufficiently large, the recommendation of the referees, we may safely presume, was in general a matter of course. It is highly probable, indeed, that they expected and received, in all cases, a bribe for themselves as well as for their royal master. Nobody at this time, however, went the length of maintaining that the right of granting such patents, if properly exercised, was not, at least within certain limits, a prerogative of the crown. Those of the existing monopolies that were attacked were objected to principally on the ground that they were prejudicial to the public interest, either in their very nature or because the patentee had abused the powers entrusted to him by the royal grant. "There are some patents," Noy proceeded to observe, "that in themselves are good and lawful, but abused by the patentees in the execution of them, who perform not the trust reposed in them by his majesty; and of such a kind is the patent for inns; but those that have the execution abuse it by setting up inns in forests and bye-villages, only to harbour rogues and thieves, and such as the justices of peace of the shire, who best know where inns are fittest to be and who best deserve to have licences for them, have suppressed from keeping of alehouses; for none is now refused that will make a good composition. There are also some who have gotten a power to dispense with the statute of vagabonds, rogues, &c., and so make themselves dispensers of the royalties only proper for the king himself. The like patent is granted for tolls, leets, warrens, markets, &c., and they set up bills of it on posts, like new physicians that are new come to town, making merchandises of it." Even Sir Edward Coke, who declared that monopolies were now grown like hydras' heads—they grew up as fast as they were cut off—admitted that, while some patents were against the law, and others neither good in law nor execution, others were good in law and only ill in execution. The patent for inns, in particular, he allowed to be good in law. "He showed," says the report of his speech, in conclusion, "that all the kings, from Edward III. to this king, have granted monopolies; and even in Queen Elizabeth's time there were some granted. Sir Richard Mompesson [perhaps the father of Sir Giles Mompesson, whose conduct as one of the patentees of inns and of gold and silver thread was now in question] and one Robert Alexander procured of Queen Elizabeth a patent for the sole transporting of anise-seed. Monopolies have been granted heretofore de vento et sole; that in Devonshire and Cornwall a patent was granted that none should dry pilchards but those patentees."[7] Another member, Mr. Alford, described the way in which the monopoly of inns operated. "Every poor man," said he, "that taketh in but a horse on a market-day, is presently sent for up to Westminster and sued, unless he compound with these patentees; and all ancient inn-keepers, if they will not compound, are presently sued at Westminster for enlargement of their house, if they but set up a new post or a little hovel more than of ancient was there. And, instead of reformation of abuses, this patent doth but raise reckonings on the poor traveller; and, instead of restraining the number of inn-keepers, at Bath, where there were wont to be but six, and the town desired Sir Giles Mompesson there might not be more, yet he increased them gradatim from six to twenty innkeepers." When he found that the storm could not be resisted, James himself was as ready with his virtuous indignation against all these abuses as any one else: in his speech to the Lords, to which we have already referred, he told them that nothing would be a greater ease to him, and to all about him at court, than some measure that would put an end for ever to the annoyance and pest of applications for the said patents. Even the stir that had already been made, he intimated, had materially contributed to his and their repose; "for I remember," said his majesty, "that, since the beginning of this parliament, Buckingham hath told me he never found such quiet and rest as in this time of parliament from projectors and informers, who at other times miserably vexed him at all hours." And then he launched out in the following characteristic strain:—"And now I confess that, when I looked before upon the face of the government, I thought, as every man would have done, that the people were never so happy as in my time. For, even as at divers times I have looked upon many of my coppices, riding about them, and they appeared on the outside very thick and well grown unto me; but when I turned unto the midst of them, I found them all bitter within, and full of plains and bare spots,—like an apple or pear, fair and smooth without, but, when ye cleave it asunder, you find it rotten at the heart; even so this kingdom, the external government being as good as ever it was, and, I am sure, as learned judges as ever it had, and, I hope, as honest, administering justice within it, and for peace both at home and abroad, I may truly say, more settled and longer lasting than ever any before, together with as great plenty as ever; so it was to be thought that every man might sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree. Yet I am ashamed, and it makes my hair stand upright, to consider how in this time my people have been vexed and polled by the vile execution of projects, patents, bills of conformity, and such like, which, besides the trouble of my people, have more exhausted their purses than subsidies would have done." The sudden dissolution of this parliament, however, prevented anything being done to put an effectual stop to the evil; and it was not till three years afterwards, by which time several new patents of an equally objectionable kind with those here so warmly condemned had been extorted from his majesty's necessities or good-nature, that the act was passed declaring all monopolies, and all commissions, grants, &c., to any person or persons for the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within the realm, except in the case of new inventions, to be altogether contrary to the laws of the realm, and so to be utterly void and of none effect, and in no wise to be put in use or execution.[8] Tacked to this general enactment, however, were provisoes barring its operation in the case of various existing patents and of any others that might be afterwards granted of the same kind,—namely, patents concerning printing, the digging or compounding of saltpetre or gunpowder, the casting or making of ordnance or shot, the compounding or making of alum, the licencing of taverns and retailing of wines. Four existing patents, for the making of glass, for the exportation of calves' skins, for the making of smalt, and for the melting of iron ore, were also specially excepted from the operation of the act.
We will now add a few notices respecting the state of some particular branches of trade in this reign. One of the fields of enterprise that attracted most attention was that of the northern fisheries. Besides whales, the frequenters of the Greenland coasts now began to kill morses, or sea-horses, whose teeth were then esteemed more valuable than ivory. The fishery was at first prosecuted by individual adventurers, but at length the Russia Company having entered into the business obtained, in 1613, a charter from James, excluding all other persons from sailing to Spitzbergen; acting upon which they that year fitted out seven armed ships, with which they drove away from those seas four English fishing-vessels, and fifteen sail of Dutch, French, and Biscayans, and forced some other French ships, which they permitted to remain, to pay them tribute for their forbearance. The next year the company sent out thirteen ships; but the Dutch had now taken care to be provided for them, and, appearing with eighteen vessels, four of which were men-of-war, set them at defiance, and remained and fished at their case, as usual. In 1615 a new claim to the dominion of Spitzbergen and the surrounding waters was preferred by the Danes, who made their appearance with three ships of war, being the first Danish vessels that had ever been seen in that quarter, and demanded tribute or toll both from the Dutch and the English, who were, however, too strong for them to succeed in enforcing their claim. We have already mentioned the junction of the Russia and East India Companies for the prosecution of the Greenland fishery. It is said to be in 1617 that the earliest mention is found of fins or whalebone being brought home along with the blubber. The dispute between the English and Dutch about the right of fishing still continued to be waged with great animosity and occasional violence; meanwhile, "the manner of managing the whale-fishing of both nations," says Anderson, in a summary of the details given by the voyagers of the time, "was then quite different from what it is in our days. The whales, in those early times, having never been disturbed, resorted to the bays near the shore, so that their blubber was easily landed at Spitzbergen, where they erected cookeries (that is, coppers, &c.) for boiling their oil; which cookeries they left standing from year to year, and only brought home the purified oil and the whalebone. The English, having been first in that fishery, kept possession of the best bays. The Hollanders, coming late, were obliged to find bays farther north: yet the Danes, who came later into this trade than the Dutch, got in between the English and Dutch. The Hamburghers came after the Danes; and after them came the French, and also the Biscayners, who, though they were older whale-fishers than any in Europe, except the Norwegians, had not, however, practised this method but by the example of the English and the rest, and who were forced to set up their cookeries still farther off. But, since those times, the whales are less frequent in the bays, and are most commonly among the openings of the ice at a greater distance from land, which obliges the ships to follow them thither. So that the blubber is now cut from the whales, which are taken in small pieces at the ships' sides, and then casks filled therewith, and thus brought home to be boiled and purified, and the whale-fins also to be cleaned. This latter method, however, of fishing being often found dangerous and hazardous to shipping, it discouraged our English adventurers, who then traded in a company, so that they soon after relinquished that fishery; and so it remained till the reign of King Charles II."[9]
We have a proof, notwithstanding the complaints of the decay of the national trade and industry, which, as we have seen, were not wanting now any more than in every other period of our history, that the country still continued, on the whole, to advance in wealth and prosperity, though at a slacker pace than for some time before, in the fact that both the mercantile and the royal navies were considerably increased in the course of the present reign. It has been asserted, as we have seen, that in the fleet fitted out in 1588 against the Spanish Armada Elizabeth had forty ships of her own; but, according to other accounts, what properly formed the royal navy consisted at her death of only thirteen ships, while at the death of James it consisted of twenty-four.[10] While the largest of Elizabeth's ships, also, was only of the burden of 1000 tons, and carried forty cannon, her successor, in 1609, built a man-of-war, called the Prince, of the burden of 1400 tons, and carrying sixty-four guns. At James's accession, it is stated by Sir William Monson, there were not above four hundred ships in England of four hundred tons burden.[11] An anonymous, but apparently well-informed writer, the author of a tract entitled "The Trade's Increase," published in 1615, has given us an account of the English shipping at that date, which, although the object of the writer is not to draw a flattering picture, seems to indicate that its quantity was then very considerably greater than it would appear to have been twelve years before, either from Monson's statement, or from that of Raleigh respecting the general trade of the kingdom, to which we have adverted in a preceding page. According to the author of "The Trade's Increase," there were, when he wrote, twenty English ships, chiefly laden with herrings, employed in the trade to Naples, Genoa, Leghorn, Marseilles, Malaga, and the other ports of the Mediterranean; together with thirty from Ireland, laden with pipe-staves,—an article that has now long ceased to be found among the exports from that country. To Portugal and Andalusia twenty ships were sent for wines, sugar, fruits, and West India drugs; to Bordeaux, sixty ships and barks for wines; to Hamburgh and Middleburgh thirty-five vessels, all belonging to the Company of Merchant Adventurers; to Dantzic, Koningsberg, &c., about thirty,—namely, six from London, six from Ipswich, and the rest from Hull, Lynn, and Newcastle; to Norway, five. The Greenland whale-fishery employed fourteen ships; the Iceland fishery, one hundred and twenty ships and barks. Only one hundred and twenty small ships were engaged, according to this writer, in the Newfoundland fishery; but another authority states that this very year there were at Newfoundland two hundred and fifty English ships, the burden of which, in all, amounted to 15,000 tons.[12] The Newcastle coal-trade employed alone four hundred vessels; namely, two hundred for the supply of London, and as many more for the rest of England. "And, besides our own ships," says our author, "hither, even to the mine's mouth, come all our neighboring nations with their ships continually, employing their own shipping and mariners. ....The French sail hither in whole fleets of fifty sail together; serving all their ports of Picardy, Normandy, Bretagne, &c., even as far as Rochelle and Bordeaux. And the ships of Bremen, Embden, Holland, and Zealand supply those of Flanders, &c., whose shipping is not great, with our coals." Besides all these, there were the ships belonging to the East India Company, which, if they were not as yet very numerous, were some of them the largest merchantmen of the kingdom. Sir Dudley Digges, in a treatise entitled "The Defence of Trade," published this same year, in reply to the author of "The Trade's Increase," who had attacked the company, gives a list of all the ships they had employed from their first establishment, which he makes to have been twenty-four in number; of which one was of 1293 tons burden, one of 1100, one of 1060, one of 900, one of 800, and the rest of from 600 to 150.
According to a return made to an order of the privy council, in 1614, the entire value of the exports from England to all parts of the world, for the preceding year, was 2,090,640l. 11s. 8d. ; and that of the imports, 2,141,283l. 17s. 10p. In order, however, to make it appear that the balance of trade was at this time favourable, the account adds to the value of the exports 86,794l. 16s. 2d. for custom on the goods; 10,000l. for the impost paid outwards on woollen goods, tin, lead, and pewter; and 300,000l. for the merchants' gains, freight, and other petty charges: in this way making out an appparent balance of the exports over the imports, or, as it is phrased, "a balance gained this year to the nation " of 346,283l. 17s. 10d. In 1622, according to another account which has been preserved, the total amount of exportations, including therein the custom at 5 per cent, on such goods as paid poundage, the imposts on bays, tin, lead, and pewter, and the merchants' profit of 15 per cent., together with freight and petty charges, was 2,320,436l. 12s. 10d.; while the total value of the imports, including 91,059l. 11s. 7d. of customs dues, and 100,000l. for line run-goods, &c., was 2,619.315l.[13] This state of matters, according to the universally prevalent notion of the time, indicated a balance lost to the country that year by its foreign commerce of 298,878l. 7s. 2d. But, in truth, a comparison of the two accounts, supposing them to be tolerably correct, only proves that the trade of the country, on the whole, had rather increased than diminished in the course of the nine years which they embrace. It appears that in 1613 the exports and imports, taken together, amounted in value to 4,628,586l.; and in 1622 to 4,939,751l. The highest of these sums may be about the twentieth part of the united value of our present exports and imports.
The great staple of the kingdom still continued to be the trade in wool and in woollen cloths. But, although the English wool was finer, and held in higher estimation than that of any other country, the imperfect manner in which the processes of dressing and dyeing the cloth were performed had long been matter of regret with all who took an interest in the prosperity of our commerce and manufactures. We have already noticed Raleigh's representations upon that subject. At length an effort was made to remedy the evil, which, if strong measures were always the most successful in such cases, could hardly have failed to accomplish its professed purpose. In 1608 James issued a proclamation absoutely prohibiting any undyed cloths to be sent beyond seas even by the Company of Merchant Adventurers, whose charter expressly empowered them to export such cloths, of which, indeed, their trade in all probability mostly consisted. At the same time he granted to Alderman Cockayne a patent giving him the exclusive right of dyeing and dressing all woollen cloths. But the States of Holland and the German cities immediately met these proceedings by prohibiting the importation of all English dyed cloths. "Thus," says Anderson, "was commerce thrown into confusion, Cockayne being disabled from selling his cloth anywhere but at home; beside that his cloths were worse done, and yet were dearer, than those finished in Holland. There was a very great clamour, therefore, raised against this new project by the weavers now employed, &c., so that the king was obliged to permit the exportation of a limited quantity of white cloths; and a few years after, in the year 1615, for quieting the people, he found himself under the necessity of annulling Cockayne's patent, and restoring that of the Merchant Adventurers." The prohibition by the Dutch and Germans, however, of the importation of English woollens dyed in the cloth had, in the mean time, set the clothiers of England upon the new method of dyeing the wool before weaving it, and thus producing the kind of fabric called medley-cloth, formed from threads of different colours. This discovery is assigned to the year 1613. Either from the effects of the derangement occasioned by Cockayne's patent, or from other causes, the woollen trade a few years after this date appears to have fallen into a declining state. In 1622 a commission was issued by the king to a number of noblemen and gentlemen, directing them to inquire into the causes of the decay, and the best means of effecting the revival, both of this and other branches of the national commerce and industry; in which his majesty declares that both the complaints of his subjects at home, and the information he received from his ministers abroad, had assured him that the cloth of the kingdom had of late years wanted that estimation and vent in foreign parts which it formerly had; that the wools of the kingdom were fallen much from their wonted values; and that trade in general was so far out of frame that the merchants and clothiers were greatly discouraged; so that great numbers of people employed by and dependant on them wanted work, farmers wanted the usual means of paying their rents, landlords failed to receive their former incomes, and the crown also suffered by the diminution of the customs and other duties. The remainder of the paper enumerates the points to be more particularly inquired into, and suggests some remedies that might, it was thought, deserve consideration. The commissioners were directed, among other things, to find out what had occasioned the fall in the price of wool; what would be the most effective course to take in order to prevent the exportation of wool and woollen yarn, fuller's-earth, and wood ashes; how to remedy the present unusual scarcity of money, &c. They were also to consider if it might not be behoveful to put in execution the laws still in force which obliged merchant-strangers to lay out the proceeds of the merchandise imported by them on the native commodities of the realm. The commission goes on to complain that the merchants trading into the Eastland countries (that is, the countries lying along the south shores of the Baltic) had neglected of late to bring back corn as they had been formerly wont; and also that, instead of loading their ships, as formerly, with great quantities of undressed hemp and flax, which set great numbers of the people of this kingdom to work in dressing the same and converting it into linen cloth, they now imported hemp and flax ready dressed, and that for the most part by strangers. Much treasure, it is afterwards affirmed, was yearly spent for linen cloth imported from abroad at a high price. It is certain that, before the close of this reign, the Dutch had begun successfully to compete with the English weavers in the manufacture of the finer kinds of woollen cloth, a branch in which this country had till now stood unrivalled. In 1624 a statement was given in to the parliament, by which it appeared that 26,500 pieces of fine woollens had been that year manufactured in Holland; whereupon the House of Commons resolved, first, "That the Merchant Adventurers' Company setting imposts upon our cloths is a grievance, and ought not to be continued; and that all other merchants promiscuously, as yell as that company, may transport everywhere northern and western dozens, kerseys, and new draperies:" secondly, "That other merchants beside the Merchant Adventurers' Company may freely trade with dyed and dressed cloths, and all sorts of coloured cloths, into Germany and the Low Countries." This was certainly the true way of restoring the trade, and of securing to the English weavers something better than even that exclusive possession of the manufacture of the finer fabrics, which was now irrecoverably lost.
According to the author of "The Trade's Increase," the commerce of England with Spain and Portugal had fallen to so low a state, in consequence of the long wars with those countries in Elizabeth's time, that when he published his work, in 1615, it scarcely employed five hundred seamen. An attempt was made in 1618 to revive the trade to the coast of Guinea by the chartering of a company with the exclusive privilege of carrying it on; but the only result was, that the company and the private adventurers, whose former freedom was invaded by the charter, became involved in such disputes as soon ruined both; so that the trade was for some years abandoned altogether. Considerable annoyance was experienced by our commerce in the south of Europe in the course of this reign from the pirates of the Barbary coast. About the year 1616 the fleet of these corsairs is stated to have consisted of forty sail of tall ships, that carrying the admiral being of 500 tons burden; with this force they struck terror all along the Spanish coasts, dividing it into two squadrons, with one of which they blocked up the port of Malaga, while with the other they cruised between Lisbon and Seville. In 1620 the king commissioned Sir Robert Maunsell, vice-admiral of England, to lead a fleet, composed partly of some royal ships, partly of others belonging to private individuals, against the pirates; but nothing appears to have been done in consequence. The next year, however, Maunsell actually proceeded to Algiers with an armament consisting of eight ships, four of them carrying forty cannon each, besides twelve armed merchantmen, the whole having on board a force of nearly 2700 men. But, after making an attempt to burn the ships in the mole, which did not succeed, it was deemed prudent to return home, under the conviction that nothing further could be done. It is said that the corsairs, as soon as Maunsell had turned his back, picked up nearly forty good English ships, and infested the Spanish coasts with greater fury than ever. Two years after we find complaints made both by foreign powers and by English merchants, that sundry subjects of England were in the habit of supplying the rovers of Algiers and Tunis with ammunition, military weapons, and provisions, whereby they were enabled to disturb our own commerce as well as that of other Christian nations; on which James issued a proclamation strictly prohibiting all his subjects from offending for the future in that sort.
We have sketched in the preceding Chapter the history of the several attempts which were made, in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, to effect settlements in the newly discovered world of North America, principally by Sir Walter Raleigh and his relations, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Richard Grenville, and which all terminated so unsuccessfully or disastrously. A considerable intercourse had, however, been kept up with the Indians on the coasts of Virginia and the more northern part of the American continent by the merchants both of London and Bristol, who found it very profitable to purchase their furs and skins with beads, knives, combs, and other such trinkets or articles of little value, ever since a Captain Gosnold, in the year 1602, had for the first time made the voyage to those parts by a direct course, without sailing round about to the West Indies and through the Gulf of Florida, as had always been done by preceding navigators. At length, in 1606, James chartered two companies, the first called that of the London Adventurers, or South Virginia Company, who were authorised to plant all the American coast comprehended between the 34th and 41st degrees of north latitude, or the country which afterwards formed the provinces of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina; the second called the Company of Plymouth Adventurers, to whom was assigned all the territory to the north of this as far as to the 45th degree of latitude, including the modern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the New England States. The London Company that same year sent out a hundred settles in two ships, who founded, about three miles from the mouth of the Powhatan (now called James River), the present town, still known by its original name, of James Town, in Virginia. In 1610 this company obtained a second charter, incorporating them anew by the name of the Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia, and empowering them to grant lands to the adventurers and planters, to appoint a resident council, to place and displace officers, &c.—in short, granting them all the powers of self-government. In 1612 a settlement was formed on the Bermuda, or Somers Isles, by a company of persons, to whom the king granted a charter after they had purchased the islands from the Virginian Company, who claimed the dominion of them in consequence of their having been discovered, as was supposed, by two of their captains, Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, who were shipwrecked on one of them in the course of a voyage to Virginia in 1609, and lived there for nine months, though they had been really visited a hundred years before by Bermuda, a Spanish navigator. In 1616, Sir Walter Raleigh, released from his long confinement in the Tower, received from James his commission to undertake the voyage to Guiana, in South America, which the gallant adventurer entered upon in the spring of the following year, and the fatal issue of which is well known. Raleigh, setting sail on the 28th of March, 1617, in command of a fleet of fourteen vessels, did not reach the coast of Guiana till the 13th of November; he returned to England in June 1618, after having lost his eldest son in fighting with the Spaniards, and having been foiled in all his attempts; was immediately on his landing arrested and thrown again into the Tower; and was brought to the block on the 19th of October following. Meanwhile, although the colony in Virginia went on increasing, and began, after many disappointments, to promise some return to the outlay of the adventurers, they had enough to do in defending their possessions against enemies and rival claimants on all sides of them. Besides the contests in which they were involved with the aboriginal inhabitants, they found themselves called upon to take measures for driving away both a number of Frenchmen who had crossed the St. Lawrence and settled in Acadia (the present Nova Scotia), and in the country now forming the New England States; and also a body of Dutch colonists who had built the town of New Amsterdam (the present New York) and the port of Orange (now Albany), in what they called the country of New Netherlands; for as yet all the eastern coast of the American continent, from the 34th to the 45th parallels of latitude, was considered as belonging either to southern or northern Virginia, and as, therefore, included in the grants to the two companies. Both the French and the Dutch were dislodged in 1618 by the English governor, Sir Samuel Argal; but the Dutch soon returned, and eventually made good their position. Many attempts had been made to establish English settlements in the northern parts of this territory; but it was not till the year 1620 that the first plantation was made which actually took root and became permanent, at a place called Plymouth, the country around which soon after received the name of New England from the Prince of Wales (afterwards Charles I.). About the same time, also, a grant of the island of Barbadoes, which had been taken possession of for the King of England by an English ship returning from Guinea in 1605, was obtained from James by his lord treasurer, Lord Leigh, afterwards Earl of Marlborough, for himself and his heirs in perpetuity; and, under his sanction, a settlement was made upon it, and the town of James Town founded, in 1624, by a colony sent out at the expense of Sir William Courteen, or Courten, an opulent and spirited merchant of London. Various schemes had also been entertained and some of them in part carried into effect, though they all failed in the end, for establishing English colonies in the island of Newfoundland, and on the eastern coast of South America. But, even at the close of this reign, the parent colony of Virginia was still far from being in a satisfactory state, or holding out a complete assurance of stability and ultimate success. One of the last acts of James's government was to commission a number of noblemen and gentlemen to make inquiry into the condition of that colony: the courses taken for settling which, his majesty declares, had not had the good effect intended—a previous commission having reported that most of the persons sent thither had either died by sickness and famine, or been massacred by the natives; and that such as still survived were in lamentable necessity and want; notwithstanding all which, however, the commissioners conceived the country to be both fruitful and healthful, and that, if industry were used, it would produce many good staple commodities, though, by the neglect of the governors and managers, it had as yet produced few or none.
There was one commodity now beginning to be raised in Virginia, their cultivation of which would hardly contribute to recommend the settlers to James's favour. A considerable portion of his majesty's literary fame rested upon his singular treatise entitled "A Counterblast to Tobacco," in which he assails the use of that herb with every form of pedantic invective. Not satisfied with this grand display of declamatory pyrotechnics, he issued, besides, in the course of his reign, a succession of royal proclamations in denunciation of tobacco, some of which are almost as tempestuous as his book. In 1604, while as yet all the tobacco imported came from the Spanish West Indies, he took it upon him, without the consent of parliament, to raise the duty upon it from twopence to six shillings and tenpence a pound, with the professed object of preventing the enormous inconveniences proceeding, as he declared, from the great quantity of the article daily brought into the realm. "Tobacco," says the commission directed upon this occasion to the lord-treasurer, "being a drug of late years found out, and brought from foreign parts in small quantities, was taken and used by the better sort, both then and now, only as physic to preserve health; but it is now at this day, through evil custom and the toleration thereof, excessively taken by a number of riotous and disorderly persons of mean and base condition, who do spend most of their time in that idle vanity, to the evil example and corrupting of others, and also do consume the wages which many of them get by their labour, not caring at what price they buy that drug: by which the health of a great number of our people is impaired, and their bodies weakened and made unfit for labour." In his "Counterblast" he affirms that some gentlemen bestowed three, some four hundred pounds a-year "upon this precious stink;" an estimate in which the royal pen must surely be understood to be running on in poetic numbers. When the Virginian colonists began to cultivate tobacco, James complained that they made so much as to overstock the market; and in 1619 he issued a proclamation commanding that the production of it should not exceed the rate of a hundred weight for each individual planter. In this regulation, however, his majesty appears to have had an eye to the interests of the royal revenue as well as to the health of his people; for he at the same time confines the right of importing the commodity to such persons as he should license for that purpose; in other words, he takes the monopoly of it into his own hands, and avows it to be his object to raise its price. In a proclamation of the next year enforcing this restriction upon the cultivation of the plant, which had not been strictly attended to, he again inveighs against the use of tobacco, as "tending to a general and new corruption of men's bodies and manners." Nevertheless he holds it, "of the two, more tolerable that the same should be imported, amongst many other vanities and superfluities which come from beyond seas, than to be permitted to be planted here within this realm, thereby to abuse and misemploy the soil of this fruitful kingdom." At length, in the last year of his reign, on the petition of the House of Commons, James consented to prohibit the importation of all tobacco except such as should be of the growth of the English plantations; but this he professed to do without any abatement of his old and well-known aversion to the useless and pernicious weed, and solely because he had been often and earnestly importuned to that effect by many of his loving subjects, planters and adventurers in Virginia and the Somers Isles, on the ground that those colonies were but yet in their infancy, and could not be brought to maturity unless he should be pleased for a time to tolerate their planting and vending of tobacco. The proclamation also strictly prohibited the introduction of any tobacco from Scotland or Ireland; but it appears, from many more proclamations that were issued in the course of the next reign, absolutely forbidding the cultivation of the herb in any of the home dominions of the crown, that it continued to be raised in large quantities for a long time after this in England itself, as well as in both those countries.
The march both of colonization and of commerce appears to have been considerably accelerated during the space that elapsed from the accession of Charles I. to the breaking out of the war between the king and parliament. In the first year of his reign, Charles, on the ground that such a colony was not best managed by an incorporated company, "consisting of a multitude of persons of various dispositions, amongst whom affairs of the greatest moment are ruled by a majority of votes," ordained by a proclamation that the government of Virginia should henceforth depend immediately on himself, and be administered by a governor and resident council appointed by the crown and acting in subordination to the privy council at home. In making this change, Charles treated the charter of the Virginia Company as having been annulled by his father; and James, indeed, in his proclamation of the preceding year, already quoted, declares that, having by the advice of his privy council resolved to alter the charters of the said company as to points of government, and the treasurer and company not submitting thereto, "the said charters are now avoided by a quo warranto." Charles, however, in his proclamation does not rest the right of the crown altogether upon this revocation; he broadly advances the principle that these colonies, and, by implication, all others founded or occupied by English subjects, were essentially a portion of the dominion of the mother country:—"considering, also," are his words, " that we hold those territories of Virginia and the Somers Isles, as also that of New England, lately planted, with the limits thereof, to be a part of our royal empire." It is said that by this time the Virginian companies had expended a capital of not less than 200,000l., from which they had as yet derived but a very inadequate return, so that many of the original adventurers, thoroughly weary of the speculation, had sold their shares for what they would bring. The failure of their expectations, however, did not check other attempts of the same kind. Almost all the West India islands not previously settled upon were taken possession of and colonized within a few years from this date. In 1627 an English and a French company divided the island of St. Christophers between them; and the next year the English added to the territory in their occupation the neighbouring small isle of Nevis, and also sent off a detachment of their body to Barbuda, as they likewise did others in subsequent years to Montserrat and Antigua. Meanwhile, in 1629, Charles confirmed a former grant to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, and to his heirs for ever, of all the Caribbee Islands, as they were called, including both those that have just been mentioned and also Barbadoes, with regard to which an arrangement had been made with the former grantee, the Earl of Marlborough. That same year he granted in perpetuity to Sir Robert Heath and his heirs all the Bahama or Lucaya Isles, together with what was then called the Province of Carolana on the Continent of North America, being the immense region now forming the States of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and the southern part of Louisiana. This vast territory was afterwards conveyed by Heath to the Earl of Arundel, who had planted some parts of it before the civil wars at home interrupted his operations. The Bahama Islands are also believed to have been begun to be planted about this time. In 1632 a part of what had till now been considered as the territory of Virginia was granted by Charles to be held in free and common soccage by Lord Baltimore, his majesty at the same time giving it the name of Maryland, in honour of the queen. Lord Baltimore was a Roman Catholic; and Maryland, which began to be colonized within two years from the date of the charter, afterwards formed the main refuge of the persons of that religion who were driven by the severity of the penal laws from England, greatly to the perturbation and rage of their puritan neighbours in Virginia, who made several attempts to drive the idolaters from a soil which, besides its having been thus desecrated, they regarded as rightfully belonging to their own colony. And in 1641, after the failure of a similar attempt made some years before, an English colony was settled, at the expense of Lord Willoughby, in Surinam, on the southern continent of America,—the Guiana the dream of whose gold mines lured on Raleigh to his fatal expedition.
The course of the growth and extension of the foreign commerce of the country during this interval is marked by few incidents requiring to be specially recorded, but the general results show that the progress made must have been considerable. An account of the height to which the trade of England had arrived in 1638 is given by Lewes Roberts in his work entitled " The Merchant's Map of Commerce," published at London in that year; and a summary of what is most material in his statements, with a few additional notices from other sources, will be sufficient for our present purpose. Roberts, a native of the principality, is almost as eloquent in some passages as his countryman Fluellin; but even his flourishes have their value as expressing something of the high tone and bearing which English merchants now assumed, lie enters upon his description all but overwhelmed by the magnitude to which the commerce of his country had attained, scarcely allowing himself to hope that it can long continue of the same extent, and almost afraid to advert to anything apparently so extravagant, and merely within the limits of possibility, as the notion that it should ever become greater than it was. "When I survey," he exclaims, "every kingdom and great city of the world, and every petty port and creek of the same, and find in each of these some English prying after the trade and commerce thereof,...I am easily brought to imagine that either this great traffic of England is at its full perfection, or that it aims higher than can hitherto by my weak sight be either seen or discerned. I must confess England breeds in its own womb the principal supporters of its present splendour, and nourisheth with its own milk the commodities that give both lustre and life to the continuance of this trade, which I pray may neither ever decay, nor yet have the least diminution. But England being naturally seated in another corner of the world, and herein bending under the weight of too ponderous a burden, cannot possibly always and for ever find a vent for all those commodities that are seen to be daily imported and brought within the compass of so narrow a circuit; unless there can be by the policy and government of the state a mean found out to make this island either the common emporium and staple of all Europe, or at leastwise of all these our neighboring northern regions."[14] He then proceeds to observe that English commerce was formerly confined to the export of the staple merchandise of the country, "such as arc cloths, lead, tin, some new late draperies, and other English real and royal commodities," and to the import from foreign parts of mere supplies for ourselves; but that "the late great traffic of this island hath been such that it hath not only proved a bountiful mother to the inhabitants, but also a courteous nurse to the adjoining neighbours;" so that whatever trade they had lost we had gained, and they now obtained a large portion of what they consumed of the produce of distant parts of the world through the medium of England.[15] Thus England, he proceeds, had fallen into the traffic with India, Arabia, and Persia, which was formerly enjoyed by Venice, and now furnished that very city plenteously with the rich commodities of these eastern countries. London also supplied the place of Venice to the rest of Italy. To France England still brought the excellent commodities of Constantinople, Alexandria, Aleppo, and the rest of the Turkish dominions, the French having almost lost their own trade with those parts. Nay, to the Turks themselves England now conveyed the precious spices of India, after their own merchants had ceased to carry on that trade. "Will you," continues our author, "view Muscovia, survey Sweden, look upon Denmark, peruse the East Country and those other colder regions; there shall you find the English to have been; the inhabitants, from the prince to the peasant, wear English woollen livery, feed in English pewter, sauce with English Indian spices, and send to their enemies sad English leaden messengers of death. Will you behold the Netherlands, whose eyes and hearts envy England's traffic, yet they must perforce confess, that, for all their great boasts, they are indebted to London for most of their Syria commodities, besides what of other wares else they have of English growth. Will you see France, and travel it from Marselia to Calais, though they stand least in need of us, yet they cannot last long without our commodities. And for Spain, if you pry therein from the prince's palace to the poor man's cottage, he will voto a Dios [vow to God] there is no clothing comparable to the English bay, nor pheasant excelling a seasonable English red herringI" So ambitious a burst of rhetoric might have had a more imposing close; but the red herring serves not ill to introduce the more calm and prosaic statement of particulars to which Mr. Roberts now descends from these extensive general views.
In a letter written to King James, in support of the complaints of the Merchant Adventurers against the patent or charter granted, as mentioned in a former page, to Alderman Cockayne, the great Bacon says, "I confess I did ever think that trading in companies is most agreeable to the English nature, which wanteth that same general view of a republic which runneth in the Dutch, and serves them instead of a company." And this appears to have been the common notion of the times; whatever trade was carried on by private individuals was as yet considered to be of very secondary importance. In this feeling our author begins his enumeration with the East India Company, who, he says, trading to Persia, India, and Arabia, export to these countries our English commodities, and bring back thence "pepper, cloves, maces, nutmegs, cottons, rice, calicoes of sundry sorts, bezoar stones, aloes, borax, calamus, cassia, mirabolans, myrrh, opium, rhubarb, cinnamon, sanders, spikenard, musk, civet, tamarinds, precious stones of all sorts, as diamonds, pearls, carbuncles, emeralds, jacynths, sapphires, spinals, turques, topazes, indigo, and silks, raw and wrought into sundry fabrics, benjamin, camphire, sandal-wood, and infinite other commodities." "And, though in India and these parts," he adds, " their trade equalizeth not neither the Portugals nor the Dutch, yet in candid, fair, and merchant-like dealing, these Pagans, Mahometans, and gentiles hold them in esteem far before them, and [they] deservedly have here the epithet of far more current and square dealers. And, although for the present this trade and company do suffer under some adverse clouds, and groan under some unkind losses by the falsehood of the Netherlanders, and sad accidents at sea, yet their adventures and acts are praiseworthy, and their fair endeavours for England's honour in point of trade meriteth due commendations and just applause." The affairs of the company, in truth, had been all this reign in a very depressed state. In May, 1628, their stock had fallen to 80 per cent., or to less than two-fifths of the price at which it had sold eleven years before. At length in 1631, anew stock of 420,000l. was raised with great difficulty. But, while they were still struggling with inadequate means and with the hostility of the Dutch and Portuguese abroad, they were suddenly involved in still more serious embarrassments by a flagrant violation of their charter on the part of the king, who in December, 1635, granted a new charter to Sir William Courten and others to trade for five years to Goa, Malabar, China, and Japan. Under this authority Courten and his associates the next year fitted out and dispatched some ships on an adventure, in the course of which they became embroiled first with the Mogul, and then with the Chinese; the former of whom made reprisals upon the property of the original company, while the latter declared the English, with whom they were now brought into contact for the first time, to be the enemies of the empire, and as such to be for ever excluded from its ports. By these and other proceedings, it was estimated that this new company, whose charter was confirmed and extended by the king in 1637, had injured the old company to the amount of fully 100,000l. before it was dissolved in 1646, by which time it had also, according to their own account, occasioned a loss to Courten and his associates of above 150,000l.
The Turkey Company is the next that Roberts notices. Of this body he says, "Not yearly, but monthly, nay, almost weekly, their ships are observed to go to and fro, exporting hence the cloths of Suffolk, Gloucester, Worcester, and Coventry, dyed and dressed, kerseys of Hampshire and York, lead, tin, and a great quantity of the abovesaid India spices, indigo, and calicoes; and in return thereof import from Turkey the raw silks of Persia, Damasco, Tripoly, &c.: galls of Mosolo and Toccat; chamlcts, grograms, and mohairs of Angora; cottons and cotton-yarn of Cyprus and Smyrna, and some-times the gems of India, and drugs of Egypt and Arabia, the muscadins of Candia, the corance (currants) and oils of Zante, Cephalonia, and Morea, with sundry others." The mention of cotton by Roberts in these accounts of the exports of the East India and Turkey companies appears to have been generally overlooked; the earliest notice either of the English cotton manufacture or of the import of the raw material being commonly stated to be that found in his subsequent work, "The Treasure of Traffic," published in 1641, where it is said, "The town of Manchester, in Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarn of the Irish in great quantity, and, weaving it, return the same again into Ireland to sell. Neither doth their industry rest here; for they buy cotton-wool in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermillions, dimities, and other such stuffs, and then return it to London, where the same is vented and sold, and not seldom sent into foreign parts, who have means at far easier terms to provide themselves of the said first materials." This account implies that the cotton manufacture had already reached a point of considerable advancement, so that it must have been established for some years at the time when the "Treasure of Traffic" was written. Various old acts of parliament and other authorities, it may be observed, make mention of Manchester cottons and cotton-velvets before the seventeenth century; but it is certain that the fabrics so denominated were all really composed of sheep's wool. The manufacture of cottons, properly so called, in England cannot be traced farther back than to the period with which we are now engaged, the early part of the reign of Charles I.
The Ancient Company of the Merchant Adventurers is the third in Roberts's list. They are described as furnishing the cities of Hamburgh, Rotterdam, and others in the Netherlands with English cloth of sundry shires, and some other commodities, monthly, and as bringing back thence to England tapestries, diaper, cambrics, Hollands, lawns, hops, mather, (madder), steel, Rhenish wines, and many other manufactures, as blades, stuffs, soap, latten, wire, plates, &c. In 1634 the Company of Merchant Adventurers, whose exclusive privileges we have seen denounced by the House of Commons ten years before, had found means to induce Charles to issue a proclamation which restored their monopoly by strictly prohibiting the exportation of "any white cloths, coloured cloths, cloths dressed and dyed out of the whites, Spanish cloths, baizes, kerseys, perpetuanos, stockings, or any other English woollen commodities," to any part either of Germany or the Netherlands, except to the marts or staple towns of the company. It was alleged by their enemies that both now and on former occasions the company were indebted for the favour shown them to the new-year's gifts with which they bribed the courtiers or officers of state. It is asserted, for instance, that, in the year 1623, the lord treasurer was presented by them with two hundred broad pieces of gold, besides a piece of plate; and that other presents were also then made to the Duke of Buckingham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Keeper, the Lord President, the Secretaries of State, &c.[16] The Eastland and Muscovy (or Russian) Companies are stated to "export principally cloth, as the best commodity, as also tin, lead, with some spices of India, and other southern commodities, and to bring home ashes, clapboard, copper, deals, firs, rich furs, masts, pipe-staves, rye, timber, wainscot, wheat, fustians, iron, latten, linen, mathers, quicksilver, flax, hemp, steel, caviare, cordage, hides, honey, tar, ropes, tallow, pitch, wax, rosin, and sundry others." The exports of the French Company were cloths, kerseys, and bays of English manufacture, with galls, silks, and cottons from Turkey; their imports, buckrams, canvas, cards, glass, grain, linens, salt, claret, and white wines, woad, oils, almonds, pepper, with some silk stuffs and some other petty manufactures. England and France, however, were at this time, as they have continued to be, with little interruption, down almost to the present day, jealous rivals, when they were not open enemies, in trade as in everything else, and the commercial intercourse between them was extremely insignificant. Although Roberts here speaks of the French Company, it does not appear that the English merchants trading to France were really incorporated. The merchants trading to Spain, he proceeds to inform us, carried to that country bays, says, serges, perpetuanos, lead, tin, herrings, pilchards, salmon, Newland (Newfoundland) fish, calf-skins, with many other commodities; and brought back wines of Xeres, Malaga, Bastard, Candado, and Alicant, rosins (or resins), olives, oils, sugars, soaps, anise-seeds, licorice, soda barillia, pate (?), and sundry West India commodities. This account embraces also the trade with Portugal, for the present united under the same sovereignty with Spain; although in 1640, two years after the publication of Roberts's book, the great revolution which placed the Duke of Braganza on the Portuguese throne again separated the two countries for ever,—an event, which, by depriving Spain of the Portuguese possessions in the East Indies, compelled her to depend upon the English and Dutch for her supplies of the produce of that part of the world, and thereby opened a new and valuable field to the trade of both these nations. "The merchants of England trading into Naples, Sicilia, Genoa, Leghorn, and Venice, &c., which I term Italy, are not," says our author, "observed to have any joint society or company:" but, trading separately, they export to Italy, he tells us, "bays, says, serges, perpetuanos, kerseys, lead, tin, cloth, and many other native commodities, besides pepper, indigo, cloves, and other Indian commodities in great abundance: and for returns thence have cloths of gold and silver, satins, velvets, taffetas, plushes, tabins (?), damasks, alum, oils, glass, anise-seeds, rice, Venice gold and silver, great quantity of raw silks of sundry sorts, and divers other commodities." "And here likewise," he adds, repeating nearly the same formula with which he has wound up every preceding paragraph, "all other foreign nations give willingly place to the English, as the prime and principal merchants that either abide amongst them, or negociate with them." Of some other branches of our commerce he gives merely a naked enumeration; thinking it unnecessary "to insist upon the reliques of that famous Barbary trade," or to mention "the petty adventures of the English to Guinea and Beny (or Benin);" "neither," says he in conclusion, "need I nominate the homeland commerce of this kingdom to Scotland and Ireland; neither go about to particularise the large traffic of this island to their late plantations of Newfoundland, Somers Islands, Virginia, Barbadoes, and New England, and to other places which rightly challenge an interest in the present trade and traffic of this kingdom."
The comparative activity and prosperity of the national industry at this time is also indicated by various improvements that were now introduced. Hackney coaches are said to have made their first appearance in London in the year 1625. They were then only twenty in number for the whole of the capital and contiguous parts, and they did not ply in the streets, but were sent for by those who wanted them to the stables of certain inns, where they stood. Ten years later, however, we find the king publishing a proclamation, in which he declares that the great numbers of hackney coaches of late time seen and kept in London, Westminster, and their suburbs, and the general and promiscuous use of coaches there, were not only a great disturbance to his majesty, his dearest consort the queen, the nobility, and others of place and degree, in their passage through the streets; but the streets themselves were so pestered, and the pavements so broken up, that the common passages were hindered and made dangerous, and besides the prices of hay and provender made exceeding dear. "Wherefore," concludes the proclamation, "we expressly command and forbid that no hackney or hired coaches be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the suburbs thereof, except they be to travel at least three miles out of the same. And also that no person shall go in a coach in the said streets, except the owner of the coach shall constantly keep up four able horses for our service when required." Such an edict as this, so insolent in its tone, so arbitrary and absurd in its exactions, enables us to measure the distance between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century,—between English freedom as it existed before the civil wars and as it now exists. Two years later the first mention of the licensing of hackney coaches occurs, in a commission directed to the Marquess of Hamilton, the master of the horse, in which his majesty admits that he finds it very requisite for his nobility and gentry, as well as for foreign ambassadors, strangers, and others, that there should be a competent number of such vehicles allowed for their use; and empowers the marquess to license fifty hackney coachmen for London and Westminster, each to keep no more than twelve horses a-piece, and so many in other cities and towns of the kingdom as in his wisdom he should think to be necessary, all other persons being prohibited to keep any hackney coach to let or hire, either in London or elsewhere. In 1634, also, sedan chairs had been brought into use by Sir Sanders Duncomb, to whom the king granted the sole privilege of letting them to hire for fourteen years, the patent declaring that the streets of London and Westminster and their suburbs had been of late so much encumbered with the unnecessary multitude of coaches, that many of his majesty's subjects were thereby exposed to great danger, and the necessary use of carts and carriages for provisions was much hindered; whereas Sir Sanders had represented that in many parts beyond sea people were much carried about in covered chairs, whereby few coaches were used amongst them. If the inditer of this description of the terrors of the London streets from the crowd of coaches in the year 1634 could be brought back out of his grave, it would be amusing to see how he would look when he found himself in the midst of the torrent and tumult of Regent Street or Piccadilly in the present day. Another of the patents of the same year deserves notice,—that granting to John Day, citizen and sworn broker of London, the sole privilege of vending for fourteen years a certain weekly bill of the several rates or prices of all commodities in the principal cities of Christendom, which it seems he had printed and published for the three preceding years. The patent recites that this practice of publishing a price-current for the use of the commercial world had "never yet been brought here to that perfection answerable to other parts beyond sea;" "by which neglect," adds his majesty, "within our city of London (being one of the mother cities for trade in all Christendom) our said city is much disgraced, and our merchants hindered in their commerce and correspondence." The next year produced a more important novelty,—the first establishment of a regular, though limited, system of internal posts. James I. had originally established a post-office for the conveyance of letters to and from foreign parts; and the control and profits of this foreign post-office, which is described as for the accommodation of the English merchants, had been confirmed and continued to William Frizell and Thomas Witherings, by Charles, in 1632. But the origin of the home post-office dates only from 1635. Up to this time, his majesty observes, in a proclamation on the subject, there had been no certain intercourse between the kingdoms of England and Scotland; wherefore he now commands his postmaster of England for foreign parts to settle a running post or two, to run night and day between Edinburgh and London, to go thither and come back again in six days; and to take with them all such letters as shall be directed to any post-town in or near that road. Bye-posts are, at the same time, ordered to be connected with several places; on the main line to bring in and carry out the letters from and to Lincoln, Hull, and other towns. A similar post to Chester and Holyhead, and another to Exeter and Plymouth, are at the same time ordered to be established; and it is promised that as soon as possible the like conveyances should be settled for the Oxford and Bristol road, and also for that leading through Colchester and Norwich. The rates of postage are fixed at two-pence the single letter for any distance under eighty miles; four-pence up to a hundred and forty miles; six-pence for any longer distance; eight-pence to any place in Scotland. It is ordered that no other messengers nor foot-posts shall carry any letters, but those alone which shall be employed by the king's post-master-general, unless to places to which the king's posts do not go, with the exception of common known carriers, or messengers particularly sent on purpose, or persons carrying a letter for a friend. The mode of conveyance contemplated in this scheme was by persons riding on horseback, which indeed continued to be the general system of our post-office down to within the last fifty or sixty years; the proclamation directs that two-pence-halfpenny per mile shall be paid on the roads to the several post-masters for every single horse carrying the letters. We may observe that, if this post established by Charles I. actually made out the distance between London and Edinburgh in three days, it was a quicker conveyance than the public were possessed of a century later. "The conveyance of post-letters," says Giles Jacob, in the second edition of his Law Dictionary, published in 1732, extends to every considerable market-town, and is so expeditious that every twenty-four hours the post goes six score miles." But at the rate appointed in Charles's proclamation the post between Edinburgh and London must have gone fully seven score miles in the twenty-four hours. It is believed, however, that the project was not fully carried into effect. Witherings, who was now inland as well as foreign postmaster, was superseded in 1640 for abuses in the execution of both his offices; and they were sequestered into the hands of Philip Burlamachy, to be exercised henceforth under the care and oversight of the king's principal secretary of state. From that date, therefore, the Post-Office may be considered as a public establishment.
The continued growth of London affords another proof of the advancing condition of the national commerce, industry, and wealth. Repeated proclamations were published both by James and Charles, as they had been by Elizabeth, with the view of checking the further increase of the capital, which all forcibly attest how irresistibly the evil, as they imagined it to be, made head against their most strenuous efforts. One proclamation of Charles, in 1630, forbade the erecting of any houses or new foundations in London, Westminster, or within three miles of any of the gates of London or of the palace of Westminster; and also the entertaining of additional inmates in houses already existing, "which," says his majesty, "would multiply the inhabitants to such an excessive number that they could neither be governed nor fed." Another measure, repeatedly adopted by both these kings, was to order all mere visitors to the capital to leave it and go back to their homes in the country. In 1617 proclamation by King James strictly commanded all noblemen, knights, and gentlemen, who had mansion-houses in the country, to depart within twenty days, with their wives and families, out of the city and suburbs of London, and to return to their several habitations in the country, there to continue and abide until the end of the summer vacation, "to perform the duties and charge of their several places and service; and likewise, by house-keeping, to be a comfort unto their neighbours, in order to renew and revive the laudable custom of hospitality in their respective counties." None were to be allowed to remain, except those having urgent business, to be signified to, and approved by, the privy council. Again, in 1622, in one proclamation he commanded all noblemen and gentlemen, having seats in the country, forthwith to go home to celebrate the feast of Christmas, and to keep hospitality in their several counties,—"which" said he, "is now the more needful, as this is a time of scarcity and dearth;" and, in a second, he enjoined the persons thus relegated to the country to remain there till his further pleasure should be known, adding, that the order should be held to include widows of distinction, and that all such lords and gentlemen as had law-business to bring them up to London should leave their wives and children in the country.
Of many proclamations of the same kind issued by Charles we shall notice only one, of the year 1632, in which his majesty argues that, by the nobility and gentry residing in London with their families, a great part of their money and substance was drawn away from the several counties whence it arose, "and spent in the city on excess of apparel, provided from foreign parts, to the enriching of other nations, and the unnecessary consumption of a great part of the treasure of this realm, and in other vain delights and expenses, even to the wasting of their estates." The practice, it is added, also drew great numbers of loose and idle people to London and Westminster, which thereby were not so easily governed as formerly; besides that the poor-rates were increased, and the price of provisions enhanced. Much of all this wisdom of our ancestors is sufficiently absurd; but in regard to the point last touched upon here it is but fair to remember, that, from the difficulties of conveyance between one part of the country and another, any extraordinary accumulation of people upon one spot was in those days reasonably regarded with more alarm, for the pressure it might occasion upon the local provision-market, than it would be now, when the whole kingdom is in a manner but one market. Still, no doubt, the right way to treat the inconvenience was, as with all such mere economic tendencies, to leave it to correct itself.
Howel, in his Londinopolis, published in 1657, observes that the Union of the two crowns of England and Scotland, by the accession of James in 1603, conduced not a little to unite also the two cities of London and Westminster, which were once above a mile asunder; "for," says he, "the Scots, greatly multiplying here, nestled themselves about the court; so that the Strand, from the mud walls and thatched cottages, acquired that perfection of buildings it now possesses." Some years after James's accession, however, we find St. Giles's-in-the-Fields still spoken of, in an act of parliament for paving it, as a town separate from the capital: it and the lane called Drury Lane, leading from it to the Strand, are described in the act as "of late years, by occasion of the continual road there, and often carriages, become deep, foul, and dangerous to all that pass those ways."[17] But before the beginning of the civil wars St. Giles's, too, had been completely united to the body of the great congeries upon the outskirts of which it formerly hung apart; and a large portion of what was now known as the capital, including Clare Market, Long Acre, Bedfordbury, and the adjoining ranges of streets, stood upon the soil of the parish of St. Giles's-in-the-Fields. "The very names of the older streets about Covent Garden," observes a writer about the middle of the last century, in a passage which furnishes a curious and comprehensive retrospect of these and also of some subsequent changes, "are taken from the royal family at this time (some, indeed, in the reign of King Charles II., as Catherine Street, Duke Street, York Street, &c.), such as James Street, King Street, Charles Street, Henrietta Street, &c., all laid out by the great architect Inigo Jones, as was also the fine piazza there; although that part where stood the house and gardens of the Duke of Bedford is of a much later date, namely, in the reigns of King William and Queen Anne. Bloomsbury and the streets at the Seven Dials were built up somewhat later, as also Leicester Fields, namely, since the restoration of King Charles II., as were also almost all St. James's and St. Anne's parishes, and a great part of St. Martin's and St. Giles's. I have met with several old persons in my younger days who remembered that there was but one single house (a cake house) between the Mews Gate at Charing Cross, and St. James's Palace Gate, where now stand the stately piles of St. James's Square, Pall Mall, and other fine streets. They also remembered the west side of St. Martin's Lane to have been a quickset hedge. Yet High Holborn and Drury Lane were filled with noblemen's and gentlemen's houses almost one hundred and fifty years ago. Those fine streets on the south side of the Strand, running down to the River Thames, have all been built since the beginning of the seventeenth century, upon the sites of noblemen's houses and gardens who removed farther westward, as their names denote. Even some parts within the bars of the city of London remained unbuilt within about one hundred and fifty years past, particularly all the ground between Shoe Lane and Fewters (now Fetter) Lane, 'so called,' says Howel, in his Londinopolis, 'of Fewters (an old appellation of idle people) loitering there, as in a way leading to gardens;' which in King Charles I.'s reign, and even some of them since, have been built up into streets, lanes, &c. Several other parts of the city, it is well known, have been rendered more populous by the removal of the nobility, &c., to Westminster liberties; on the sites of whose former spacious houses and gardens whole streets, lanes, and courts have been added to the city since the death of Queen Elizabeth,"[18] In 1609, it may here be mentioned, what is called the New River, by which the greater part of the metropolis is still supplied with water, was, after three years' labour, brought into the reservoir at Clerkenwell, by the enterprising and public-spirited projector, Mr. Hugh Middleton, citizen and goldsmith of London, who was thereupon knighted by King James. One of the patents granted by King Charles in 1630 was for the conveying of certain springs of water into London and Westminster from within a mile and a half of Hodsdon in Hertfordshire, after the plan of a projector named Michael Parker. This scheme, however, does not appear to have taken effect, and it only deserves notice from the circumstance that, to defray their expenses,—a considerable item of which was to be a payment of 4000l. a-year into the king's exchequer—the royal grant gave the undertakers "a special licence to erect and publish a lottery or lotteries," "according," it is added, "to the course of other lotteries heretofore used or practised." Lotteries had been for more than half a century before this occasionally resorted to by the government for raising money for particular purposes; the earliest on record, it is said, having occurred in the year 1569, when 20,000l. was raised for the repair of certain harbours by the sale of 40,000 tickets at ten shillings each, the prizes being articles of plate. Another lottery was drawn under the sanction of public authority in the reign of James I., to defray the expenses attending certain of the early settlements in America.
The commercial history of the remainder of the present period will not detain us long. The trade and industry of the country in all their branches suffered of necessity considerable depression during the continuance of the war; but, after the re-establishment of tranquillity and a settled government, great pains were taken by the parliament and by Cromwell to bring about their revival, and, on the whole, with very considerable success.
We shall first enumerate the few facts requiring notice in the history of the several great chartered companies. In 1643 a number of the proprietors of the East India Company were at length induced to subscribe a new stock, but only to the inadequate amount of 105,000l. Great part of this money was soon after lost in various ways; and for some years the trade could scarcely be said to be carried on at all. It is worthy of remark, however, that it was during this period the company acquired two of its most important possessions, the town of Madraspatnam, or Madras, long the seat of their supreme government in India, and still the capital of one of the presidencies, which was ceded to them by the sovereign of the country in 1643; and the island of St. Helena, of which they took possession in 1651, on its abandonment by the Dutch. Meanwhile, in 1649, a subscription for a new stock had been opened; but, although encouraged by the parliament, it proceeded slowly, and by the following year had only produced about 192,000l. With a small part of this they soon after engaged in the Guinea trade, a charter to carry on which for five years they obtained from the parliament in 1651. In 1654, on the conclusion of peace with Holland, commissioners from both parties were appointed to settle the claims brought by the English and Dutch companies against each other for depredations and other injuries committed before the war; when the English gave in an account of 2,795,990l. 19s, which the Dutch met by one of 2,919,861l. 3s. 6d.; but, in the end, the commissioners decided that a sum of 85,000l. should be paid by the Dutch, besides about 3600l. to the heirs of certain of the sufferers of Amboyna,—an award for which the English Company was probably as much indebted to the humbled condition of the United Provinces at the moment as to the clear justice of the case. For some years longer, however, the company's trade could hardly be said to exist. Any private adventurer who chose to fit out a ship for India was connived at by the government in violating their privileges, so that the company, as a body, carried on what little trade they did merely for the sake of preventing their charter from being abrogated on the pretext that they made no use of it, and in the hope of better times. It is said, too, that in the scramble for the Indian trade which now ensued,—at once inundating India with the manufactures of England and England with the produce of India,—the interlopers in general made as scanty profits as the company, so that at last most of them joined in urging upon the government the re-establishment of the old exclusive system. Their so acting, however, is not decisive as to the absolute failure of the experiment of a free-trade that had thus been tried, inasmuch as their proposition was avowedly made with the view of becoming themselves members of the company when it should be set up again with a new stock and a new charter. Still it is probable that commercial enterprise was not yet sufficiently advanced in England to have enabled the country to carry on the Indian trade successfully by the mere efforts of individuals against the powerful rivalry of the Dutch and Portuguese monopolies. At last, in October, 1657, a new charter was granted to the company for seven years, after they had actually, in despair of obtaining the protection of the government, put up bills in the Royal Exchange in the preceding January, offering their property and their privileges, such as they were, for sale. On this a new stock of about 370,000l. was raised, which immediately placed the affairs of the company in a flourishing condition, and enabled it to carry on the trade with a spirit and success which continued without interruption or abatement till the Restoration. A short paragraph from the annalist of our Indian commerce, whom we have chiefly followed in this summary, will explain the state of its establishments abroad at the close of the present period. "In the infancy of the company's commerce, Bantam was the chief factory, to which all the others were subordinate; and so they continued till the year 1638 or 1639, when Surat became the chief establishment, and the factories of Bantam, Fort St. George (or Madras), Hooghly in Bengal, and those in Persia, were made subordinate to it. In the year 1660 the company sent out orders to give up the inland factories of Agra and Amadavad, as also Mocha in the Red Sea, and Bussorah at the head of the Persian Gulf. Their port of Gombroon being of doubtful utility, it was referred to further consideration whether it should be kept up or abandoned. It was determined to retain Carwar, Calavella, Rajapore, and Scindy as long as the customs in Persia should continue to be paid; and these factories were made subordinate to Surat, The factories on the coast of Coromandel and in the Bay of Bengal were put under one agent at Fort St. George (or Madras), who was directed to use his best endeavours to obtain a settlement in Ceylon."[19]
The trade in woollens with the Netherlands and Germany, carried on, as heretofore, by the company of Merchant Adventurers, continued in a very prosperous condition during all the time of the Commonwealth. In 1647 the company removed their comptoir, or foreign residence, from Delft to Dort, and here they remained, notwithstanding repeated invitations from the magistrates of Bruges to return to that city, in which they had originally fixed themselves, till about the year 1651, when they began to remove to Hamburgh, which soon after became the sole staple for the English woollen trade. An ordinance of the Lords and Commons in 1643 granted a new and more ample charter to the Levant Company, "which," said the ordinance, "beside the building and maintaining of divers great ships, and the venting of kerseys, sayes, perpetuanos, and several other commodities, hath been found very serviceable to this state, by advancing navigation and transporting into foreign parts, for several years together, above 20,000 broad-cloths, besides other commodities, dyed and dressed in their fall manufacture." Among the productions of the East soon after this imported in considerable quantities by the Levant Company, vas coffee. It is said that coffee was first introduced into England in 1652 by a Turkey merchant of the name of Edwards, who had brought home with him a Greek servant accustomed to make it, and whom he set up in a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, on the spot where the Virginia Coffee-house now stands. The valuable privileges of the Russian Company were taken from them by the czar a short time before King Charles's death, on the pretence that certain members of the company had taken an active part on the side of what the czar considered a rebellion against their lawful sovereign; but it appears that whatever resentment may have been entertained against them on that account was at least very dexterously taken advantage of by the Dutch, who seized the opportunity of bargaining for a share of the Archangel trade on condition of paying a duty of fifteen per cent, on all exports and imports. For some years after this the English trade to Russia seems to have been almost suspended; nor did a sort of embassy, sent to the czar, or emperor as he styled him, by Cromwell in 1654, succeed in obtaining more than some very petty concessions.
Till the year 1641 the only produce of the island of Barbadoes consisted of very bad tobacco and a little cotton and ginger; but in that year some of the planters procured a few sugar-canes from Fernambuc in Brazil, which throve so well, that, after a season or two, a small ingenio, or mill for the manufacture of sugar, was set up in the island. Yet in 1647. when Ligon, the author of the "History of Barbadoes," who gives this account, arrived in the island, although there were then many sugar-works set up, the people were still ignorant of the true manner of planting, the time of cutting the canes, and other particular's in the art of cultivating the plant. All these deficiencies, however, were soon got over; the business of sugar-making was carried on every year to a greater and greater extent; and many large fortunes were amassed by the planters in a wonderfully short time. The author of a pamphlet entitled "Trade Revived," published in 1659, speaks of Barbadoes as "having given to many men of low degree exceeding vast fortunes, equal to noblemen." He adds, that "upwards of a hundred sail of ships there yearly find employment, by carrying goods and passengers thither, and bringing thence other commodities; whereby seamen are bred and custom increased, our commodities vended, and many thousands employed therein, and in refining sugar therefrom, which we formerly had from other countries." Till this extended cultivation of sugar in Barbadoes, all of that article consumed in England had been obtained from the Portuguese territory of Brazil. Nor were the English in Barbadoes long in imitating their Portuguese rivals on the southern continent of America in another branch of trade which has darkened the history of the rearing of the sugar-cane wherever it has spread over those regions,—the importation of negroes from the opposite coast of Africa. The rapid increase, again, of the population of this and our other West Indian settlements thus produced soon created a large demand for necessaries of all kinds from England. While the trade, however, between the mother country and her colonies was still only growing up to this state, an ordinance of the Lords and Commons, in 1646, although acknowledging in the preamble that the several plantations of Virginia, Bermuda, Barbadoes, and other places of America had been very beneficial to the kingdom by the increase of navigation and of the customs arising from the import of the commodities of their growth, and thereupon continuing for three years longer the exemption from all duties except the new duty of excise which home produce and manufactures carried out to these plantations had hitherto enjoyed, imposed, for the first time, the important restriction that "none in any of the ports of the said plantations do suffer any ship or vessel to lade any goods of the growth of the plantations, and carry them to foreign parts, except in English bottoms, under foreiture of the before-named exemption from customs." We shall presently find this principle carried out to its full extent in a subsequent much more memorable measure of the Hump parliament. Meanwhile, during the dissensions that raged at home, and after the triumph of the parliamentary cause, great numbers of the royalists had sought refuge in Virginia, Barbadoes, and the other West India settlements; so that the white population of these dependencies was in general fiercely opposed to the new government, and they might be said to be in a state of rebellion after all the rest of the empire had been reduced to submission and quiet. Barbadoes, indeed, had actually received Lord Willoughby as governor under a commission from Charles II., then in Holland, and had proclaimed Charles as king. It was in these circumstances that the English parliament, in 1651, with the view of punishing at once the people of the colonies and the Dutch, who had hitherto enjoyed the greater part of the carrying-trade between the West Indies and Europe, passed their famous Navigation Act, declaring that no merchandise either of Asia, Africa, or America, except only such as should be imported directly from the place of its growth or manufacture in Europe, should be imported into England, Ireland, or any of the plantations in any but English-built ships, belonging either to English or English-plantation subjects, navigated by English commanders, and having at least three-fourths of the sailors Englishmen. It was also further enacted that no goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of any country in Europe should be imported into Great Britain except in British ships, or in such ships as were the real property of the people of the country or place in which the goods were produced, or from which they could only be, or most usually were, exported. Upon this law, which was re-enacted after the Restoration, and which down to our own day has been generally regarded and upheld as the palladium of our commerce, and the maritime Magna Charta of England, we shall only at present observe that one of its first consequences was undoubtedly the war with Holland which broke out the year after it was passed. It is admitted also, we may add, by a writer who ranks among its most zealous eulogists, that it "occasioned at first loud complaints that, though our people had not shipping enough to import from all parts whatever they wanted, they were nevertheless, by this law, debarred receiving due supplies of merchandise from other nations, who only could, and till then did, import them."[20] The Barbadians were at length, not without much difficulty, compelled to surrender their island to the parliamentary forces under Sir George Ayscue, in March, 1652; but, even after this, they continued, notwithstanding the prohibitory act, to keep up a considerable intercourse with the Dutch, which was connived at by the government. The wealth and importance of Barbadoes, however, were considerably reduced by Cromwell's conquest, in 1656, of Jamaica, to which many of the planters soon after removed, induced principally by the greater cheapness of land in that island.
The legal rate of interest on money had continued to be ten per cent., as fixed by the act of 1571, till, in 1624, it was reduced to eight per cent, by the statute 21 Jac. I. c. 17,—which, after authorizing this rate, drolly adds the proviso, "that no words in this law contained shall be construed or expounded to allow the practice of usury in point of religion or conscience!" The rate of interest continued to be eight per cent, till 1651, when it was further reduced by the parliament to six per cent., at which point it remained fixed for the rest of the present period. Some years before this time a regular trade in the lending of money had sprung up, of which Anderson gives the following account from a rare and curious pamphlet, entitled "The Mystery of the New-fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers discovered," printed in 1676. For some time the usual place in which the London merchants kept their cash had been the Royal Mint in the Tower. But the despotic act of Charles I. in seizing, a few months before the meeting of the Long Parliament, a sum of 200,000l, which was lodged here, under the name of a loan, having destroyed the security of that place of deposit, it then became customary, we are told, though the statement seems a strange one, for merchants and traders to intrust their cash to the keeping of their clerks and apprentices, until the breaking out of the civil war, when the said clerks and apprentices fell into the habit of running away from their masters and going to the army: so that, at last, about the year 1645, commercial men first began to place their cash in the hands of goldsmiths; until which time, it is stated, the business of the goldsmiths of London consisted merely in buying and selling plate and foreign coins of gold and silver, in melting and culling these articles, in coining some at the Mint, and in supplying with the rest the refiners, plate-makers, and merchants, according to the variations of the price. "This new banking business," the account proceeds, "soon grew very considerable. It happened in those times of civil commotion, that the parliament, out of the plate, and from the old coin brought into the Mint, coined seven millions into half-crowns; and, there being no mills then in use at the Mint, this new money was of very unequal weight, sometimes two-pence and three-pence difference in an ounce; and most of it was, it seems, heavier than it ought to have been in proportion to the value in foreign parts. Of this the goldsmiths made, naturally, the advantages usual in such cases, by picking out or culling the heaviest, and melting them down, and exporting them. It happened, also, that our gold coins were too weighty, and of these also they took the like advantage. Moreover, such merchants' servants as still kept their masters' running cash, had fallen into a way of clandestinely lending the same to the goldsmiths, at four-pence per cent, per diem (about six per cent, per annum); who, by these and such like means, were enabled to lend out great quantities of cash to necessitous merchants and others, weekly or monthly, at high interest; and also began to discount the merchants' bills at the like, or an higher rate of interest. Much about the same time they began to receive the rents of gentlemen's estates remitted to town, and to allow them and others who put cash into their hands some interest for it, if it remained but for a single month in their hands, or even a lesser time. This was a great allurement for people to put their money into their hands, which would bear interest till the day they wanted it. And they could also draw it out by one hundred pounds, or fifty pounds, &c., at a time, as they wanted it, with infinitely less trouble than if they had lent it out on either real or personal security. The consequence was, that it quickly brought a great quantity of cash into their hands; so that the chief or greatest of them were now enabled to supply Cromwell with money in advance on the revenues, as his occasions required, upon great advantages to themselves." Here we have all the principal operations of our modern banks, including even some portion of the accommodation given by the Bank of England to the government in our day, described as already in use in the middle of the seventeenth century. No banking establishment, properly so called, however, like those already existing at Amsterdam and in several of the Italian States, was begun in England during the present period, although various projects of the kind were submitted both to the public and the parliament.
In 1652 the postage of letters in England was farmed or let by the state to John Manley, Esq., for 10,000l. a-year; and four years after the whole establishment of the Post Office was subjected to a revision and placed upon a more stable foundation than heretofore. In 1652 the number of hackney coaches licensed to ply in the streets of London was raised to two hundred, and in 1654 to three hundred, the government and regulation of them being placed in the court of aldermen. The old dread of the over-increase of the capital, however, still continued to haunt the legislature of the commonwealth as much as it had formerly done the court. An edict published in 1656 declares that "the great and excessive number of houses, edifices, outhouses, and cottages erected and new-built in and about the city of London is found to be very mischievous and inconvenient, and a great annoyance and nuisance to the commonwealth." Whereupon a fine of one year's rent is imposed on all houses erected on new foundations within ten miles of the walls of London since 1620, not having four acres of freehold land attached to them; and a fine of 100l. on all such as should be erected in future. But from the operation of the act were excepted the buildings belonging to the several city hospitals; the Earl of Clare's new market (now Clare Market), which is described as just then built; the streets about Lincoln's Inn Fields, then in course of being erected; Bangor Court in Shoe Lane, then about to be built upon the site of the Bishop of Bangor's house and garden; and some other recent erections below London Bridge and on the other side of the river. These were no doubt all the chief additions that had been made to the metropolis within the last few years.
Throughout the whole of the present period both the fineness and the weight of the silver coinage continued the same as they had been fixed in the year 1601; that is to say, the pound of Mint silver contained eighteen ounces of alloy, and was coined into sixty-two shillings. Immediately after his accession, James I. directed two coinages of gold; one of pieces of ten shillings, five shillings, and two and sixpence in value,—that is, of angels, half angels, and quarter angels—from gold of 23 carats 3½ grains fine; the other of pieces of twenty shillings and the same inferior current values, that is, of sovereigns, half sovereigns, crowns, and half crowns, from gold of only 22 carats fine. This throwing into circulation of two gold coinages of different standards must, one would think, have been attended with some inconveniences. At the same time he ordered a silver coinage of crowns, half crowns, shillings, sixpences, two-pences, pence, and half-pence. All the pieces of these first coinages are distinguished from those afterwards issued by bearing the words Ang. Sco. (for England and Scotland), instead of those denoting King of Great Britain, which was the title James assumed the following year, and which he directed, by proclamation, to be thenceforth used upon all the coins. In the next coinage, the pound of gold, which had heretofore passed only for 33l. 10s., was ordered to be raised in value to 37l. 4s. 6d., the proclamation to that effect setting forth that the English gold coin had of late been exported in great quantities in consequence of its not bearing a due proportion to the silver, as in other nations. The gold coins were now directed to be, one of the value of twenty shillings, to be called the unity; one of ten shillings, to be called the double crown; one of five shillings, to be called the Britain crown; one of four shillings, to be called the thistle crown; and one of two shillings and sixpence, to be called the half-crown. The next year the value of the pound of gold was raised to 40l, 10s.; and at that rate a gold coinage was ordered of rose-rials at thirty shillings each; spur-rials at fifteen shillings; and angels at ten shillings. In 1611, in consequence of the increasing value of gold in relation to silver in the general European market of the precious metals, it was found necessary to raise, by proclamation, the value of the unity to twenty-two shillings, and that of all the other gold pieces then current in the same proportion. The next year the pound of gold coined into rose-rials, spur-rials, and angels was raised to the value of 44l. in tale; and that coined into unities, &c., to 40l. 18s. 4d. In 1619 a new gold coinage was issued, consisting of pieces of twenty shillings, ten shillings, and five shillings, which, in consequence of being impressed with the king's head surrounded by a laurel, came to be commonly known by the name of laurels. Both the twenty-shilling laurel and the unity were also popularly called broad-pieces. In this reign likewise appeared the first English copper coinage, consisting of farthings, which were issued in 1613, the private tokens of lead and brass, which shopkeepers and other dealers had long been in the habit of fabricating and using in their payments, being at the same time abolished. It was calculated that there were about three thousand retailers of victuals and small wares m and about London that thus used their own tokens; and the practice was general in all the considerable towns throughout the kingdom.
In the second year of the reign of Charles I., a pound of gold of 23 carats 3½ grains fine was directed to be accounted of the value of 44l. 10s.; and a pound of 22 carats fine of the value of 41l. "In the former reign," observes Leake, "the great quantity of silver brought into Europe upon the opening of the mines of Peru and Mexico had raised the price of gold, and caused it to be exported, so that for two years hardly any usual payments were made in gold; but, the gold, by reason of this advanced price, being brought back, there followed as great a scarcity of silver."[21] It had been the practice, too, of the goldsmiths for some years, he adds, to cull out the weightiest and best silver money, for which they would give a premium of two and sometimes three shillings on the hundred pounds, and to melt and export it. Above ten millions of pounds sterling in silver were coined from 1630 to 1643; "nevertheless, in 1632," Rushworth tells us, "there was such plenty of gold in the kingdom, and such scarcity of silver, that the drovers and farmers, who brought their cattle, sheep, and swine to be sold in Smithfield, would ordinarily make their bargain to be paid in silver and not in gold. And, besides, in this time people did ordinarily give two-pence, and sometimes more, to get twenty shillings in silver for the exchange of a twenty-shilling piece of gold, full weight. And in and about London and Westminster, as well as in other parts, most people carried gold scales in their pockets to weigh gold on all occasions,"[22] The coins struck by Charles in the early part of his reign were of the same denominations as those issued by his father. Among his schemes for raising money at this time were various projects which were set on foot for coining silver extracted from the lead-mines in different parts of England. Of these, however, the only one that turned out in any considerable degree productive was that for coining the silver yielded by the Welsh mines, for which purpose a mint was established, in 1637, at the castle of Aberystwith, in Cardiganshire. These mines ultimately yielded about a hundred pounds of silver a-week; and the mint at Aberystwith proved of considerable service to the king: during his war with the parliament. Of several other mines, the ore of which was tried by workmen brought out of Germany, those of Slaithborne in Lancashire are said to have yielded four per cent, of silver; those of Barnstaple in Devonshire and Court-Martin in Coenwall, ten per cent.; and those at Miggleswicke and Wardel, in the county of Durham, six or eight per cent. In this reign, also, was introduced, by Nicholas Briot, a native of France, the process of fabricating coins by machinery, instead of by the hammer, the only method hitherto employed. Briot, driven from France, where he had been graver general of the coin, by the intrigues of persons whose interests were opposed to his ingenious improvements, appears to have come over to England about the year 1628, and in 1633 was constituted chief engraver of coins for the mint in the Tower of London. He remained in this country till he was recalled to France by the Chancellor Seguier, about the year 1640. While he presided over the cutting of the dies for the English coinage, it was considered to be the most beautiful then known. Among other pieces of his striking is one in gold, of the weight of 8 pennyweights 18½ grains, "with the king's head," says Leake, "admirably well done, bare-headed, and the lovelock, as it was called, hanging before, which, it seems, was so disagreeable to the Roundheads (so called from the contrary extreme) that Prynne wrote a book against it, called 'The Unloveliness of Lovelocks.'" This, being dated in 1630, must have been among the earliest of Briot's productions. After the war had begun and the parliament had seized the Tower, Charles set up mints at Shrewsbury, Oxford, York, and other places, most of the money coined at which has the mint mark of the Prince of Wales's feathers, as having been struck by the workmen and instruments belonging to the establishment at Aberystwith. The greater part of it appears also to have been made, in the old-fashioned way, by the hammer, the use of the mill having been probably laid aside on Briot's departure. "The unhappy situation of the king's affairs," says Leake, "may be traced by his money, which grew worse and worse in the stamp, till at last they hardly deserve the name of a coin, seeming rather the work of a smith (as perhaps they were) than a graver, and manifest they were coined in the greatest hurry and confusion." Besides money of the common species, various other coins or tokens, which have received the name of obsidional or siege pieces, were issued on different occasions by the royalists in the course of the war. Among these were the pieces stamped at Newark in 1643 and 1646, which are in the form of a lozenge; those stamped at the siege of Carlisle in 1645, which are octangular; the Pontefract pieces, some of which are round, some octangular, some lozenge-shaped; and another sort of money, consisting merely of bits of silver-plate about an inch and a half long, with a rude representation of a castle, supposed to be that of Scarborough, stamped upon it.
In the beginning of their quarrel with the king the parliament coined both gold and silver money bearing the usual impressions, and only distinguished from that issued by the king by its having the letter P. (for Parliament) stamped upon it as a mint mark. They afterwards coined gold pieces of twenty shillings, ten shillings, and five shillings, and silver crowns, half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences, having on the obverse an antique shield with St. George's cross, encircled with a palm and a laurel branch, and circumscribed The Commonwealth of England; on the reverse, two antique shields conjoined, the first with St. George's cross as before, the other with a harp, and circumscribed God with us. Their silver two-pences, pennies, and half-pennies, have only the arms without any legend or inscription. Such coins, with a sun for the mint-mark, are found of the dates 1649, 1650, 1651, 1652, and 1653; and it is supposed that they were occasionally struck even down to the Restoration: Leake says he had seen both a twenty and a ten shilling piece of 1660, This was all hammered money; but there are likewise half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences of 1651, bearing the same stamp, and grained upon the outer edge; which is the earliest English completely milled silver coinage, the milled money of Elizabeth and Charles I. being only marked upon the flat edge. One milled half-crown of the same date has inscribed upon the rim the words, In the third year of Freedom by God's Blessing Restored; another has Truth and Peace. 1651. Petrus Blondaeus Inventor Fecit. These appear to be rival productions; the former by the regular moneyers of the Tower; the latter by a French artist, Peter Blondeau, who came over and offered his services to the committee of the council of state for the Mint in 1649, but never was employed farther than to give this specimen of his skill, although he appears to have remained in the country about three years, and was probably not well used by the government. Some copper farthings, of various impressions, were likewise coined by the parliament.
The earliest money bearing the effigies of Oliver Cromwell has the date of 1656, though it was not till the following year that he formally took upon him the royal authority in conformity with the "Petition and Advice." His coins are twenty shillings and fifty shillings pieces of gold; and crowns, half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences of silver. "They are," says Leake, "an excellent die, done by the masterly hand of Symonds (or Simon), exceeding anything of that kind that had been done since the Romans; and in like manner he appears thereon, his bust Cæsar-like, laureate, looking to the right, with whiskers, and a small tuft upon the under lip." The circumscription around the head of the Protector is Olivar. D. G. R. P. Ang. Sco. Hib. &c. Pro. On the reverse, under a royal crown, is a shield, bearing in the first and fourth quarters St. George's cross, in the second St. Andrew's cross, and in the third a harp; with the Protector's paternal arms, namely, a lion rampant, on an escutcheon in the centre; and the circumscription Pax Quaeritur Bello, with the date 1656, or 1658. There is also a copper farthing of Cromwell's, with a somewhat different device on the reverse.
To this period likewise belong a few of the Pontefract coins, or tokens, which were issued after the king's death, in the name of Charles II.
For Scotland, James I. coined sovereigns of gold, crowns, half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences of silver, and also farthings of copper. Ail these Scottish coins, however, bore names indicating a value twelve times greater than that of the corresponding English coin: thus the Scottish half-crown was called a thirty-shilling piece, the farthing a threepenny piece, &c. He also coined both silver and copper money for Ireland, of the intrinsic value of about three-quarters of the English; and called in the mixed or base money which had been issued in the time of the rebellion by Elizabeth. Among the Scotch coins of Charles I. is a sovereign or unity of gold, which is very neatly finished, and is supposed to be the production of Nicholas Briot, the mint-mark being a small B. Charles's other Scottish money consists of double crowns, crowns, and half-crowns of gold; half- crowns, shillings, sixpences, nobles or half-marks, forty-penny pieces or quarter marks, two-shilling pieces, and twenty-penny pieces of silver; and farthings, and bothwells, or bodles, of the value of the sixth part of a penny English, of copper. His only Irish coins are some of silver, issued after 1641, by appointment of the lord lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, and hence known as Ormond money. There are also some Irish halfpence and farthings of copper, of this time, bearing the figure of a king kneeling and playing on a harp, which are supposed to have been struck by the papists during their insurrection in 1642. The coins of Scotland and Ireland in the time of the Commonwealth were the same with those of England.
- ↑ Observations concerning the Trade and Commerce of England with the Dutch and other Foreign Nations.
- ↑ Macpherson's European Commerce with India, pp. 81—111.
- ↑ Munn's Discourse of Trade from England to East India, p. 17. Munn, who has developed his views more at large in his work, entitled "England's Treasure by Foreign Trade," was one of the ablest as well as earliest systematic defenders of what has since been called the Mercantile Theory of Trade.
- ↑ Collection, i. 24
- ↑ Rushworth, I. 26.
- ↑ Parl. Hist. i. 1192.
- ↑ Parl. Hist. I. 1193.
- ↑ Stat. 21 Jac. I. cap. 3.
- ↑ Histor. and Chron. Deduct. of Orig. of Com. ii. 272.
- ↑ Macpherson, Hist, of Com. ii. 230.
- ↑ Naval Tracts, 1623.
- ↑ Gerard Malynes, in his Lex Mercatoria, 1622, p. 347.
- ↑ Circle of Commerce, by Edward Misselden. Esq., 1623, p. 121.
- ↑ Map of Commerce, fol. Lon. 1638, Part ii. p. 251.
- ↑ The original is a little obscure here, apparently through some typographical error; but, from what follows, the sense of the passage appears to be as we have given it.
- ↑ These allegations are made in a treatise entitled Free Trade, by J. Parker, published in 1648.—Anderson, ii. 358.
- ↑ Stat. 3 Jac. I. c. 22 (1606).
- ↑ Anderson, Hist. of Com. ii. 390.
- ↑ Macpherson, Hist, of European Com. with India, p. 125.
- ↑ Anderson, ii. 416.
- ↑ Historical Account of English Money, p. 300.
- ↑ Collections, ii. 150.