Elizabethan England is the motherland, the true historic home, of all
the different peoples who speak the sea-borne English tongue. In the
reign of Elizabeth there was only one English-speaking nation. This
nation consisted of a bare five million people, fewer than there are
to-day in London or New York. But hardly had the Great Queen died
before Englishmen began that colonizing movement which has carried
their language the whole world round and established their civilization
in every quarter of the globe. Within three centuries after Elizabeth's
day the use of English as a native speech had grown quite thirtyfold.
Within the same three centuries the number of those living under laws
and institutions derived from England had grown a hundredfold.
The England of Elizabeth was an England of great deeds, but of greater
dreams. Elizabethan literature, take it for all in all, has never been
surpassed; myriad-minded Shakespeare remains unequalled still.
Elizabethan England was indeed 'a nest of singing birds.' Prose was
often far too pedestrian for the exultant life of such a mighty
generation. As new worlds came into their expectant ken, the glowing
Elizabethans wished to fly there on the soaring wings of verse. To them
the tide of fortune was no ordinary stream but the 'white-maned, proud,
neck-arching tide' that bore adventurers to sea 'with pomp of waters
unwithstood.'
The goodly heritage that England gave her offspring overseas included
Shakespeare and the English Bible. The Authorized Version entered into
the very substance of early American life. There was a marked
difference between Episcopalian Virginia and Puritan New England. But
both took their stand on this version of the English Bible, in which
the springs of Holy Writ rejoiced to run through channels of
Elizabethan prose. It is true that Elizabeth slept with her fathers
before this book of books was printed, and that the first of the
Stuarts reigned in her stead. Nevertheless the Authorized Version is
pure Elizabethan. All its translators were Elizabethans, as their
dedication to King James, still printed with every copy, gratefully
acknowledges in its reference to 'the setting of that bright Occidental
Star, Queen Elizabeth of most happy memory.'
These words of the reverend scholars contain no empty compliment.
Elizabeth was a great sovereign and in some essential particulars, a
very great national leader. This daughter of Henry VIII and his second
wife, Anne Boleyn the debonair, was born a heretic in 1533. Her father
was then defying both Spain and the Pope. Within three years after her
birth her mother was beheaded; and by Act of Parliament Elizabeth
herself was declared illegitimate. She was fourteen when her father
died, leaving the kingdom to his three children in succession,
Elizabeth being the third. Then followed the Protestant reign of the
boy-king Edward VI, during which Elizabeth enjoyed security; then the
Catholic reign of her Spanish half-sister, 'Bloody Mary,' during which
her life hung by the merest thread.
At first, however, Mary concealed her hostility to Elizabeth because
she thought the two daughters of Henry VIII ought to appear together in
her triumphal entry into London. From one point of view—and a feminine
one at that—this was a fatal mistake on Mary's part: for never did
Elizabeth show to more advantage. She was just under twenty, while Mary
was nearly twice her age. Mary had, indeed, provided herself with one
good foil in the person of Anne of Cleves, the 'Flemish mare' whose
flat coarse face and lumbering body had disgusted King Henry thirteen
years before, when Cromwell had foisted her upon him as his fourth
wife. But with poor, fat, straw-colored Anne on one side, and
black-and-sallow, foreign-looking, man-voiced Mary on the other, the
thoroughly English Princess Elizabeth took London by storm on the spot.
Tall and majestic, she was a magnificent example of the finest
Anglo-Norman type. Always 'the glass of fashion' and then the very
'mould of form' her splendid figure looked equally well on horseback or
on foot. A little full in the eye, and with a slightly aquiline nose,
she appeared, as she really was, keenly observant and commanding.
Though these two features just prevented her from being a beauty, the
bright blue eyes and the finely chiselled nose were themselves quite
beautiful enough. Nor was she less taking to the ear than to the eye;
for, in marked contrast to gruff foreign Mary and wheezy foreign Anne,
she had a rich, clear, though rather too loud, English voice. When the
Court reined up and dismounted, Elizabeth became even more the centre
of attraction. Mary marched stiffly on. Anne plodded after. But as for
Elizabeth—perfect in dancing, riding, archery, and all the sports of
chivalry—'she trod the ling like a buck in spring, and she looked like
a lance in rest.'
When Elizabeth succeeded Mary in the autumn of 1558 she had dire need
of all she had learnt in her twenty-five years of adventurous life.
Fortunately for herself and, on the whole, most fortunately for both
England and America, she had a remarkable power of inspiring devotion
to the service of their queen and country in men of both the cool and
ardent types; and this long after her personal charms had gone.
Government, religion, finance, defence, and foreign affairs were in a
perilous state of flux, besides which they have never been more
distractingly mixed up with one another. Henry VII had saved money for
twenty-five years. His three successors had spent it lavishly for
fifty. Henry VIII had kept the Church Catholic in ritual while making
it purely national in government. The Lord Protector Somerset had made
it as Protestant as possible under Edward VI. Mary had done her best to
bring it back to the Pope. Home affairs were full of doubts and
dangers, though the great mass of the people were ready to give their
handsome young queen a fair chance and not a little favor. Foreign
affairs were worse. France was still the hereditary enemy; and the loss
of Calais under Mary had exasperated the whole English nation. Scotland
was a constant menace in the north. Spain was gradually changing from
friend to foe. The Pope was disinclined to recognize Elizabeth at all.
To understand how difficult her position was we must remember what sort
of constitution England had when the germ of the United States was
forming. The Roman Empire was one constituent whole from the emperor
down. The English-speaking peoples of to-day form constituent wholes
from the electorate up. In both cases all parts were and are in
constant relation to the whole. The case of Elizabethan England,
however, was very different. There was neither despotic unity from
above nor democratic unity from below, but a mixed and fluctuating kind
of government in which Crown, nobles, parliament, and people formed
certain parts which had to be put together for each occasion. The
accepted general idea was that the sovereign, supreme as an individual,
looked after the welfare of the country in peace and war so far as the
Crown estates permitted; but that whenever the Crown resources would
not suffice then the sovereign could call on nobles and people for
whatever the common weal required. _Noblesse oblige_. In return for the
estates or monopolies which they had acquired the nobles and favored
commoners were expected to come forward with all their resources at
every national crisis precisely as the Crown was expected to work for
the common weal at all times. When the resources of the Crown and
favored courtiers sufficed, no parliament was called; but whenever they
had to be supplemented then parliament met and voted whatever it
approved. Finally, every English freeman was required to do his own
share towards defending the country in time of need, and he was further
required to know the proper use of arms.
The great object of every European court during early modern times was
to get both the old feudal nobility and the newly promoted commoners to
revolve round the throne as round the centre of their solar system. By
sheer force of character—for the Tudors, had no overwhelming army like
the Roman emperors'—Henry VIII had succeeded wonderfully well.
Elizabeth now had to piece together what had been broken under Edward
VI and Mary. She, too, succeeded—and with the hearty goodwill of nearly
all her subjects.
Mary had left the royal treasury deeply in debt. Yet Elizabeth
succeeded in paying off all arrears and meeting new expenditure for
defence and for the court. The royal income rose. England became
immensely richer and more prosperous than ever before. Foreign trade
increased by leaps and bounds. Home industries flourished and were
stimulated by new arrivals from abroad, because England was a safe
asylum for the craftsmen whom Philip was driving from the Netherlands,
to his own great loss and his rival's gain.
English commercial life had been slowly emerging from medieval ways
throughout the fifteenth century. With the beginning of the sixteenth
the rate of emergence had greatly quickened. The soil-bound peasant who
produced enough food for his family from his thirty acres was being
gradually replaced by the well-to-do yeoman who tilled a hundred acres
and upwards. Such holdings produced a substantial surplus for the
market. This increased the national wealth, which, in its turn,
increased both home and foreign trade. The peasant merely raised a
little wheat and barley, kept a cow, and perhaps some sheep. The yeoman
or tenant farmer had sheep enough for the wool trade besides some
butter, cheese, and meat for the nearest growing town. He began to
'garnish his cupboards with pewter and his joined beds with tapestry
and silk hangings, and his tables with carpets and fine napery.' He
could even feast his neighbors and servants after shearing day with
new-fangled foreign luxuries like dates, mace, raisins, currants, and
sugar.
But Elizabethan society presented striking contrasts. In parts of
England, the practice of engrossing and enclosing holdings was
increasing, as sheep-raising became more profitable than farming. The
tenants thus dispossessed either swelled the ranks of the vagabonds who
infested the highways or sought their livelihood at sea or in London,
which provided the two best openings for adventurous young men. The
smaller provincial towns afforded them little opportunity, for there
the trades were largely in the hands of close corporations descended
from the medieval craft guilds. These were eventually to be swept away
by the general trend of business. Their dissolution had indeed already
begun; for smart village craftsmen were even then forming the new
industrial settlements from which most of the great manufacturing towns
of England have sprung. Camden the historian found Birmingham full of
ringing anvils, Sheffield 'a town of great name for the smiths
therein,' Leeds renowned for cloth, and Manchester already a sort of
cottonopolis, though the 'cottons' of those days were still made of
wool.
There was a wages question then as now. There were demands for a
minimum living wage. The influx of gold and silver from America had
sent all prices soaring. Meat became almost prohibitive for the
'submerged tenth'—there was a rapidly submerging tenth. Beef rose from
one cent a pound in the forties to four in 1588, the year of the
Armada. How would the lowest paid of craftsmen fare on twelve cents a
day, with butter at ten cents a pound? Efforts were made, again and
again, to readjust the ratio between prices and wages. But, as a rule,
prices increased much faster than wages.
All these things—the increase of surplus hands, the high cost of
living, grievances about wages and interest—tended to make the farms
and workshops of England recruiting-grounds for the sea; and the young
men would strike out for themselves as freighters, traders, privateers,
or downright pirates, lured by the dazzling chance of great and sudden
wealth.
'The gamble of it' was as potent then as now, probably more potent
still. It was an age of wild speculation accompanied by all the usual
evils that follow frenzied ways. It was also an age of monopoly. Both
monopoly and speculation sent recruits into the sea-dog ranks.
Elizabeth would grant, say, to Sir Walter Raleigh, the monopoly of
sweet wines. Raleigh would naturally want as much sweet wine imported
as England could be induced to swallow. So, too, would Elizabeth, who
got the duty. Crews would be wanted for the monopolistic ships. They
would also be wanted for 'free-trading' vessels, that is, for the ships
of the smugglers who underbid, undersold, and tried to overreach the
monopolist, who represented law, though not quite justice. But
speculation ran to greater extremes than either monopoly or smuggling.
Shakespeare's 'Putter-out of five for one' was a typical Elizabethan
speculator exploiting the riskiest form of sea-dog trade for all—and
sometimes for more than all—that it was worth. A merchant-adventurer
would pay a capitalist, say, a thousand pounds as a premium to be
forfeited if his ship should be lost, but to be repaid by the
capitalist fivefold to the merchant if it returned. Incredible as it
may seem to us, there were shrewd money-lenders always ready for this
sort of deal in life—or life-and-death—insurance: an eloquent testimony
to the risks encountered in sailing unknown seas in the midst of
well-known dangers.
Marine insurance of the regular kind was, of course, a very different
thing. It was already of immemorial age, going back certainly to
medieval and probably to very ancient times. All forms of insurance on
land are mere mushrooms by comparison. Lloyd's had not been heard of.
But there were plenty of smart Elizabethan underwriters already
practising the general principles which were to be formally adopted two
hundred years later, in 1779, at Lloyd's Coffee House. A policy taken
out on the _Tiger_ immortalized by Shakespeare would serve as a model
still. And what makes it all the more interesting is that the
Elizabethan underwriters calculated the _Tiger's_ chances at the very
spot where the association known as Lloyd's transacts its business
to-day, the Royal Exchange in London. This, in turn, brings Elizabeth
herself upon the scene; for when she visited the Exchange, which Sir
Thomas Gresham had built to let the merchants do their street work
under cover, she immediately grasped its full significance and 'caused
it by an Herald and a Trumpet to be proclaimed The Royal Exchange,' the
name it bears to-day. An Elizabethan might well be astonished by what
he would see at any modern Lloyd's. Yet he would find the same
essentials; for the British Lloyd's, like most of its foreign
imitators, is not a gigantic insurance company at all, but an
association of cautiously elected members who carry on their completely
independent private business in daily touch with each other—precisely
as Elizabethans did. Lloyd's method differs wholly from ordinary
insurance. Instead of insuring vessel and cargo with a single company
or man the owner puts his case before Lloyd's, and any member can then
write his name underneath for any reasonable part of the risk. The
modern 'underwriter,' all the world over, is the direct descendant of
the Elizabethan who wrote his name under the conditions of a given risk
at sea.
Joint-stock companies were in one sense old when Elizabethan men of
business were young. But the Elizabethans developed them enormously.
'Going shares' was doubtless prehistoric. It certainly was ancient,
medieval, and Elizabethan. But those who formerly went shares generally
knew each other and something of the business too. The favorite number
of total shares was just sixteen. There were sixteen land-shares in a
Celtic household, sixteen shares in Scottish vessels not individually
owned, sixteen shares in the theatre by which Shakespeare 'made his
pile.' But sixteenths, and even hundredths, were put out of date when
speculation on the grander scale began and the area of investment grew.
The New River Company, for supplying London with water, had only a few
shares then, as it continued to have down to our own day, when they
stood at over a thousand times par. The Ulster 'Plantation' in Ireland
was more remote and appealed to more investors and on wider
grounds—sentimental grounds, both good and bad, included. The Virginia
'Plantation' was still more remote and risky and appealed to an
ever-increasing number of the speculating public. Many an investor put
money on America in much the same way as a factory hand to-day puts
money on a horse he has never seen or has never heard of otherwise than
as something out of which a lot of easy money can be made provided luck
holds good.
The modern prospectus was also in full career under Elizabeth, who
probably had a hand in concocting some of the most important specimens.
Lord Bacon wrote one describing the advantages of the Newfoundland
fisheries in terms which no promoter of the present day could better.
Every type of prospectus was tried on the investing public, some
genuine, many doubtful, others as outrageous in their impositions on
human credulity as anything produced in our own times. The
company-promoter was abroad, in London, on 'Change, and at court. What
with royal favor, social prestige, general prosperity, the new national
eagerness to find vent for surplus commodities, and, above all, the
spirit of speculation fanned into flame by the real and fabled wonders
of America, what with all this the investing public could take its
choice of 'going the limit' in a hundred different and most alluring
ways. England was surprised at her own investing wealth. The East India
Company raised eight million dollars with ease from a thousand
shareholders and paid a first dividend of 87-1/2 per cent. Spices,
pearls, and silks came pouring into London; and English goods found
vent increasingly abroad.
Vastly expanding business opportunities of course produced the spirit
of the trust—and of very much the same sort of trust that Americans
think so ultra-modern now. Monopolies granted by the Crown and the
volcanic forces of widespread speculation prevented some of the abuses
of the trust. But there were Elizabethan trusts, for all that, though
many a promising scheme fell through. The Feltmakers' Hat Trust is a
case in point. They proposed buying up all the hats in the market so as
to oblige all dealers to depend upon one central warehouse. Of course
they issued a prospectus showing how everyone concerned would benefit
by this benevolent plan.
Ben Jonson and other playwrights were quick to seize the salient
absurdities of such an advertisement. In _The Staple of News_ Jonson
proposed a News Trust to collect all the news of the world, corner it,
classify it into authentic, apocryphal, barber's gossip, and so forth,
and then sell it, for the sole benefit of the consumer, in lengths to
suit all purchasers. In _The Devil is an Ass_ he is a little more
outspoken.
We'll take in citizens, commoners, and aldermen
To bear the charge, and blow them off again
Like so many dead flies....
This was exactly what was at that very moment being done in the case of
the Alum Trust. All the leading characters of much more modern times
were there already; Fitzdottrell, ready to sell his estates in order to
become His Grace the Duke of Drown'dland, Gilthead, the London
moneylender who 'lives by finding fools,' and My Lady Tailbush, who
pulls the social wires at court. And so the game went on, usually with
the result explained by Shakespeare's fisherman in _Pericles_:
'I marvel how the fishes live in the sea'—
'Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.'
The Newcastle coal trade grew into something very like a modern
American trust with the additional advantage of an authorized
government monopoly so long as the agreed-upon duty was paid. Then
there was the Starch Monopoly, a very profitable one because starch was
a new delight which soon enabled Elizabethan fops to wear ruffed
collars big enough to make their heads—as one irreverent satirist
exclaimed—'look like John Baptist's on a platter.'
But America? Could not America defeat the machinations of all
monopolies and other trusts? Wasn't America the land of actual gold and
silver where there was plenty of room for everyone? There soon grew up
a wild belief that you could tap America for precious metals almost as
its Indians tapped maple trees for sugar. The 'Mountains of Bright
Stones' were surely there. Peru and Mexico were nothing to these. Only
find them, and 'get-rich-quick' would be the order of the day for every
true adventurer. These mountains moved about in men's imaginations and
on prospectors' maps, always ahead of the latest pioneer, somewhere
behind the Back of Beyond. They and their glamour died hard. Even that
staid geographer of a later day, Thos. Jeffreys, added to his standard
atlas of America, in 1760, this item of information on the Far
Northwest: _Hereabouts are supposed to be the Mountains of Bright
Stones mentioned in the Map of ye Indian Ochagach._
Speculation of the wildcat kind was bad. But it was the seamy side of a
praiseworthy spirit of enterprise. Monopoly seems worse than
speculation. And so, in many ways, it was. But we must judge it by the
custom of its age. It was often unjust and generally obstructive. But
it did what neither the national government nor joint-stock companies
had yet learnt to do. Monopoly went by court favor, and its rights were
often scandalously let and sometimes sublet as well. But, on the whole,
the Queen, the court, and the country really meant business, and
monopolists had either to deliver the goods or get out. Monopolists
sold dispensations from unworkable laws, which was sometimes a good
thing and sometimes a bad. They sold licenses for indulgence in
forbidden pleasures, not often harmless. They thought out and collected
all kinds of indirect taxation and had to face all the troubles that
confront the framers of a tariff policy to-day. Most of all, however,
in a rough-and-ready way they set a sort of Civil Service going. They
served as Boards of Trade, Departments of the Interior, Customs, Inland
Revenue, and so forth. What Crown and Parliament either could not or
would not do was farmed out to monopolists. Like speculation the system
worked both ways, and frequently for evil. But, like the British
constitution, though on a lower plane, it worked.
A monopoly at home—like those which we have been considering—was
endurable because it was a working compromise that suited existing
circumstances more or less, and that could be either mended or ended as
time went on. But a general foreign monopoly—like Spain's monopoly of
America—was quite unendurable. Could Spain not only hold what she had
discovered and was exploiting but also extend her sphere of influence
over what she had not discovered? Spain said Yes. England said No. The
Spaniards looked for tribute. The English looked for trade. In
government, in religion, in business, in everything, the two great
rivals were irreconcilably opposed. Thus the lists were set; and
sea-dog battles followed.
Elizabeth was an exceedingly able woman of business and was practically
president of all the great joint-stock companies engaged in oversea
trade. Wherever a cargo could be bought or sold there went an English
ship to buy or sell it. Whenever the authorities in foreign parts tried
discrimination against English men or English goods, the English
sea-dogs growled and showed their teeth. And if the foreigners
persisted, the sea-dogs bit them.
Elizabeth was extravagant at court; but not without state motives for
at least a part of her extravagance. A brilliant court attracted the
upper classes into the orbit of the Crown while it impressed the whole
country with the sovereign's power. Courtiers favored with monopolies
had to spend their earnings when the state was threatened. And might
not the Queen's vast profusion of jewelry be turned to account at a
pinch? Elizabeth could not afford to be generous when she was young.
She grew to be stingy when she was old. But she saved the state by
sound finance as well as by arms in spite of all her pomps and
vanities. She had three thousand dresses, and gorgeous ones at that,
during the course of her reign. Her bathroom was wainscoted with
Venetian mirrors so that she could see 'nine-and-ninety' reflections of
her very comely person as she dipped and splashed or dried her royal
skin. She set a hot pace for all the votaries of dress to follow. All
kinds of fashions came in from abroad with the rush of new-found
wealth; and so, instead of being sanely beautiful, they soon became
insanely bizarre. 'An Englishman,' says Harrison, 'endeavouring to
write of our attire, gave over his travail, and only drew the picture
of a naked man, since he could find no kind of garment that could
please him any whiles together.
I am an English man and naked I stand here,
Musing in my mind what raiment I shall were;
For now I will were this, and now I will were that;
And now I will were I cannot tell what.
Except you see a dog in a doublet you shall not see any so disguised as
are my countrymen of England. Women also do far exceed the lightness of
our men. What shall I say of their galligascons to bear out their
attire and make it fit plum round?' But the wives of 'citizens and
burgesses,' like all _nouveaux riches_, were still more bizarre than
the courtiers. 'They cannot tell when or how to make an end, being
women in whom all kind of curiosity is to be seen in far greater
measure than in women of higher calling. I might name hues devised for
the nonce, ver d'oye 'twixt green and yallow, peas-porridge tawny,
popinjay blue, and the Devil-in-the-head.'
Yet all this crude absurdity, 'from the courtier to the carter,' was
the glass reflecting the constantly increasing sea-borne trade, ever
pushing farther afield under the stimulus and protection of the
sea-dogs. And the Queen took precious good care that it all paid toll
to her treasury through the customs, so that she could have more money
to build more ships. And if her courtiers did stuff their breeches out
with sawdust, she took equally good care that each fighting man among
them donned his uniform and raised his troops or fitted out his ships
when the time was ripe for action.