ECONOMIC CHANGES 37 to unlicensed hostility against the Catholic Powers, and reprisals were pursued with far more hatred against Spaniards and Portuguese than against the lawful enemy, France. Finally, they filled administrative posts whilst carrying on their private activities; they did much hack-work for the nobles of the Privy Council, made themselves indispensable, admitted their superiors to good investments, and so acquired influence over national policy. They share with the men who urged forward the Protestant Reformation the responsibility for the breach of the Habsburg alliance and for the setting forth of England upon the path of oceanic expansion. The closing years of Henry VIII witnessed the beginning of a social upheaval as important as the new departures in maritime enterprise, and destined to combine with them in moulding the country's future. The spoliation of the Church and the rise of a new class of landowners-purchasers or grantees of monastic property-accelerated changes in the exploitation of the soil. Reduced to its elements, the position was that the standard of life in Europe was rising, and that there was consequently a greater demand for cloth and for the wools which went to make it. In some parts of England, therefore, the new landowners converted arable land into sheep pasture and evicted that part of the rural population whose labour was no longer required. At the same time there was a movement by other landowners to challenge the traditional rights of the peasants upon their manors, to break up the co-operative, open-field system of cultivation, and to re-lease the land in enclosed farms for higher rents. This enclosure movement was confined to certain districts and was not so widespread as that of the eighteenth century, but, taken with the spread of sheepfarming, it did dislodge an appreciable section of the peasantry from their inherited means of livelihood. Coincidently there occurred a fall in the value of money, in consequence of the inflow of gold and silver from America, a phenomenon which was made the excuse for much of the enclosing of land. The general result was a period of social misery and political unrest, of rapid fortune-building for the progressive and of insecurity for those of conservative temperament, of greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and of the break-down of many of the social relationships which had been adequate to a more stable condition of affairs. Between 1540 and 1560 there took place, in effect, a rehearsal in miniature of the Industrial Revolution. The French wars, the heavy Government debts, and the debasement of the coinage, all contributed to the evils of the time, causing a general complaint of the decay of the old trades upon which England's wealth was founded. Meanwhile the population was increasing, a fact which is explained by the disappearance of the static social conditions hitherto acting as a restraint upon marriage. At the opening of the Tudor period the population of England and Wales was about three millions, having remained almost stationary since the Black Death; at its close the numbers had reached four millions, and most of this increase had taken place since the dissolution of the monasteries. Consequently it appeared to contemporary thinkers that England needed not only a social reconstruction and development of internal resources, but also the discovery of new paths of commercial expansion. The former process was postponed until the reign of Elizabeth, but the latter began shortly after the death of Henry VIII, by means which have now to be considered. The friendship between Henry VIII and the Hanseatic League had caused much resentment among the Merchant Adventurers, who had never yet succeeded in their aim of monopolising the North Sea cloth trade. But Henry considered himself justified in rating naval efficiency higher than the advantage of the merchants; and the Hansa, besides selling him ships, delivered a great quantity of cordage and other stores at the opening of the war of 1544.1 The discontent of the Merchant Adventurers grew more intense in the next year, when the Emperor proclaimed an arrest of their trade in the Low Countries in retaliation for the injuries he suffered from the privateers. The Englishmen had to look idly on whilst their German rivals engrossed the trade in English cloth for the Antwerp market. But the death of Henry changed the prospects of the contending parties. Somerset and Northumberland, who ruled successively in the name of Edward VI, were men to place immediate advantage before ulterior considerations. They were hampered by enormous debts, and they looked to the wealthy Merchant Adventurers to ease the State of its burdens. The Adventurers, led by Thomas Gresham, found the money and demanded a return, nothing less than the revocation of the Hanse charters and the abolition of the privileges conferred by the treaty of 1474. They presented a long list of charges against the Germans; but the real offence was undoubtedly that of competing in the Low Countries trade. In February 1552 Northumberland revoked the Hanse privileges, and reduced the German traders to the same position as that held by other aliens. Queen Mary on her accession restored the privileges for a time; but ere long the Merchant Adventurers were renewing their complaints, and Gresham's financial genius was making itself as indispensable to the new Government as to the old. Once more the price had to be paid, and in 1555 Mary suspended the privileges, substituting certain temporary rights of trade pending a meeting to negotiate a settlement. The Hansa refused to attend and clamoured for full restitution, the temporary concessions expired, and by the summer of 1557 England and the League were in a state of war. The closing of the Baltic cut off grain supplies during a time of dearth in England and, more serious still, it cut off the supply of naval stores. Of all Mary's Navy, well-nigh as strong on paper as that of her father, there was not even a small squadron fit for the sea when Guise 1 Hist. MSS Commission, Cecil MSS, 1, 44. THE NORTH-EAST PASSAGE 39 beleaguered Calais. The cause may have been mere incompetence, but is more likely to have been an unavoidable shortage of necessaries; for fifty-five English merchantmen had that season been denied cargoes in the Baltic ports.1 In 1560 Elizabeth, on Cecil's advice, made peace with the Hansa on terms which excluded its members from the Antwerp cloth trade and abolished the absurd customs exemptions by which they had paid less than native English merchants. But still the Germans retained an advantage over other foreigners until 1579, when a new dispute caused the withdrawal of this last privilege. Finally, in 1598, the English Government seized the Steelyard, their London home, and expelled its tenants in retaliation for the Emperor's expulsion of English merchants from Germany. The critical event of this series was the treaty of 1560. By it the Merchant Adventurers secured the monopoly of sending cloth to the Netherlands and western Germany, and the way was prepared for Elizabeth's revival of the Eastland Company, which at length gained for the English a position of equality in the Baltic. The struggle with the Hansa was an indispensable preliminary to the attainment of commercial autonomy. Before accomplishing the defeat of the Hansa, the London merchants had embarked upon what was to them a novel scheme for finding new markets for English manufactures; they had formed a joint-stock company for the discovery of the North-East Passage to Asia. The inspiring brain seems to have been that of Sebastian Cabot. He had left England in 1512 and had taken service with Spain, where he rose to the rank of Pilot-Major of the realm. His knowledge of navigation and geography was great, and his own estimation of that knowledge greater still, so that when he returned to England in 1548, having rather outstayed his welcome in Spain, he was hailed as one who would restore the prosperity endangered by the economic changes of the time. Yet he was slow to evolve an acceptable scheme, and nothing came to the stage of action until the early part of 1553. By that date a Company had been formed to work on a joint stock of £6000 divided into £25 shares, and to equip an expedition to open a direct trade with Asia by the north-east. Sebastian Cabot, as the man of knowledge, was appointed governor, although actually he could have known no more than anyone else about the region to be traversed, his own early failure having been in the north-west. The Company, whose members included noblemen, politicians, courtiers and merchants, prepared three well-found ships, and entrusted the command to Sir Hugh Willoughby, a soldier, with Richard Chancellor, an experienced seaman, as his second and adviser. In May 1553, as Edward VI lay dying at Greenwich, the expedition passed down the Thames and steered for the Norwegian coast. In case of separation the fishing port of Vardö, near the North Cape, the 1 Brit. Mus., Lansdowne MSS, 170, ff. 250 seqq. farthest north-easterly point known to the men of western Europe, had been named as the rendezvous. The separation unfortunately took place, Chancellor with one ship losing sight of Willoughby with the other two in heavy weather not very long after leaving English waters. Chancellor made for Vardö and awaited his chief, but Willoughby overshot the port and sailed on eastwards, intent upon discovering the passage while the summer endured. He reached the desolate shore of Novaia Zemlia and was then forced by a leaky ship and the break-up of the weather to seek a haven in which to winter. He retraced his course westwards until he came to the inlet of Arzina on the Murman coast of Russian Lapland, and there he decided to lay up the ships and resume the voyage to Asia in the following spring. But for Willoughby and his men there was to be no spring; every one of them perished in the Arctic winter, and their vessels were afterwards found with the bodies on board. Meanwhile, Chancellor had resumed the voyage with his single ship. Keeping a more southerly course than Willoughby, he had found the entrance of the White Sea, which, as a possible passage to Cathay, it was his duty to investigate. He sailed to its southern end, where he overhauled a boatful of fishermen; and from them he understood, much to his surprise, that he was in the dominions of the Czar of Muscovy. At that date Russia was known to western Europe only by vague report. The Hansa had long maintained factories in the country, but their merchants had been jealous in excluding strangers and preventing any leakage of information. Their line of entry had been from the Baltic coast, to which Russia did not yet extend, inwards to Novgorod and Moscow, and by Chancellor's discovery their monopoly was now completely outflanked. For Chancellor realised the possibilities of his find. He laid up his ship at the fishing port of Archangel, a Russian outpost then of recent foundation, and travelled overland to Moscow. There he saw the czar, Ivan the Terrible, assumed the position of England's accredited envoy, and negotiated a grant of trading privileges to be exercised by the White Sea route. Ivan was glad to open up a new route to the western Powers and to free himself from the economic tyranny which the Hanse monopoly had entailed. In the summer of 1554 Chancellor returned to Archangel and thence sailed to England, where his news gave great satisfaction. He had heard nothing of Willoughby's fate, and it was at first hoped that that officer had pushed on to the yet happier discovery of the Asiatic passage. For the present the Company had to exploit the Russian trade, and it did so by despatching Chancellor with a new expedition in 1555. It was then that Willoughby's end was learned from Russian fishermen, and his log and other papers recovered. In the same year the Company received a charter of incorporation from Philip and Mary, with the monopoly of the new trades it was opening up. Its official THE MUSCOVY COMPANY 41 title was that of "The Merchants Adventurers of England for the discovery of lands, territories, etc., unknown", but from force of circumstance it was soon popularly called the Muscovy Company. It carried on a thriving business in Russia in its early years, obtaining certain products for which England had been hitherto dependent upon the Hansa, and marketing English cloth and other manufactures. But this active trade was set off by heavy losses of shipping in the wild northern seas-Chancellor was himself drowned on his second return from Archangel-and by the difficulty of controlling employees in a distant land. The Company regarded Russia as a stepping-stone to Asia, and in 1557 Anthony Jenkinson, its most brilliant servant after Chancellor's death, set out to achieve the discovery by land. He went down the Volga to the Caspian Sea, and thence eastward to Bokhara. He was on an ancient trade route to China, but conditions had deteriorated since Marco Polo had followed it three centuries before. There was now no great Mongol emperor enforcing peace throughout Asia, and the anarchy was so serious an obstacle that Jenkinson had to return. His discoveries did, however, result in the establishment of a trade with Persia. But it was abandoned in 1580, when a Turkish invasion threw Persia into confusion. The Muscovy Company was not only the first joint-stock corporation chartered by an English Government, and so a means of gaining experience in new methods of exploitation, but also the first English Company to gain direct contact with any part of Asia beyond the coasts of the Levant. It represented an attempt at peaceful expansion without challenge to Spain or Portugal, and its objects were approved by so jealous a critic as Philip II. The north-west voyages and the Levant Company of Elizabeth were the fruit of the same inspiration; but success was to come only from the bellicose efforts of the East India Company. The search for new markets has hitherto been traced in its eastward manifestations, and they have been found true to type in that they assumed the form of a strictly governed company. It is now necessary to consider the simultaneous moves to the southward and westward, wherein the individualist tradition was to show of what successes it was capable. The Guinea and Brazil voyages of the early series had ceased at the outbreak of the last French war of Henry VIII. Several of the persons concerned in them must have been living ten years later; yet a new oceanic trade sprang up under Edward VI in such a way as to suggest an independent origin, for it began with voyages to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and then extended to the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. There are, however, connecting links in the persons of James Alday, who claimed to have originated the Barbary trade, and of Thomas Wyndham, both of whom had certainly been |