Part III

‘MERCHANT ADVENTURERS OF ENGLAND’

And surely if ever since the beginning of the world any enterprise have deserved great praise as a thing achieved by men of heroical virtue, doubtless there was never any more worthy commendation and admiration than is that which our nation have attempted by the north seas to discover the mighty and rich empire of Cathay ...

RICHARD EDEN, The Decades of the New World¹

 

 

Forty-Six

On the voyage home made by Richard Chancellor and his men there was not, at least, the anxious uncertainty about their destination which had weighed on each individual during the outward trip. There was only the desperate hope that they would reach it, to see family and friends again, and to tell remarkable tales – not of Oriental spices, silks and gems, but of a cold, northern kingdom, and of a great emperor, of Russia, not of Tartary, holding court amid the snow.

No record was kept, or has survived, of the return journey to match those of the outgoing voyage which took the Edward to Russia. Whatever struggles they had, with wind and weather, did not prevent them from reaching home and left no trace in the historical record. Anxious to depart once the ice cleared, it took them perhaps a couple of months and it was midsummer – late July or early August – when they reached England.²

One thing is known. Many years later, in the mid-1580s, an old merchant named Henry Lane wrote a letter from his home in Kent to a prominent city man called William Sanderson. Lane had worked from an early date for the company set up under Sebastian Cabot. Although he did not take part in the initial exploration of 1553, he did sail on the second voyage, to work in Russia as an agent, and he came to know Richard Chancellor well. In his letter Lane responded to a request for a summary of the main events of England’s north-eastern discovery, and he went to some trouble over it.

Evidently Sanderson had told him that he was planning to publish a more general account, and Lane thought the cause worthwhile. He was apologetic. Some of his paperwork, he said, he had lent out, and he was unable to retrieve it. But he had sat and reread his old letters, he told Sanderson, ‘to content one that meaneth to pleasure many’.

Lane told Sanderson how the Edward Bonaventure had safely wintered at St Nicholas while their erstwhile companions confronted the ‘extreme cold’ and tried, unsuccessfully, to see the season out in a river estuary that they had discovered on ‘a desert coast in Lappia’. The following year, he noted, the Edward had returned to London, and it was then that the ship had been ‘robbed homewards by Flemings’.³

Somewhere in the North Sea, the Edward was attacked by pirates.

Piracy was one of the perennial hazards of seagoing life in sixteenth-century Europe, as familiar and unremarkable as the storms and foul weather with which the crew were already acquainted. Some years later the company lamented ‘their great losses sustained at the seas by pirates and otherwise’.⁴ This incident was little enough thought of that it attracted no comment that has survived prior to the throwaway remark in Henry Lane’s letter more than thirty years later.⁵

The ships of the expedition had evaded any confrontation with pirates thus far. On the outward journey they had sailed as far as the northern Norwegian coast, until they were out of range of most other European vessels, as a group of three ships, which made them a much less vulnerable target. When she returned, however, the Edward was alone. She sailed back into the busy trading waters of northern Europe as a tempting prey for the numerous pirate vessels which concealed themselves in coves, or sailed from foreign ports with the tacit support of local and even central government officials.

Lane wrote that the pirates were Flemings, and Flanders (the coastal region of modern Belgium) was probably where the ship and perhaps many of its crew originated. But pirate vessels were like most merchantmen: they employed any crew that they could, and there was a great deal of ‘wandering abroad’ among those who manned ships.⁶ In 1551 the Imperial ambassador in England reported home that the English had ‘seized three vessels from Scottish pirates’. As well, presumably, as Scots, he noted that they had found on board ‘Englishmen, Flemings and Frenchmen’ – a sign that the make-up of merchant or pirate crews was governed by self-interest and by no means necessarily followed the contours of patriotism or of international war and diplomacy.⁷ In any case, the flag under which the ship flew was no certain guide to origin. Flags were switched often enough for tactical reasons to disguise identity.

In general the boundaries between merchant, privateer and pirate were flexible and vague. A ship carrying goods might seize those of a smaller, ill-protected vessel if the opportunity arose and its captain was so minded. The weapons with which any cautious merchantman was defended were a standing invitation to aggression, and neither captains nor their crew were coy about increasing their profit margins in this way the general economic level of seafaring men as a class was too low; they were, as the famous pirate turned naval captain Sir Henry Mainwaring later put it, ‘so generally necessitous and discontented’.⁸ In time of war common enough between European states, which grappled incessantly for supremacy – pirates were of great value to central governments, adopting the flag with a patriotism that was not entirely bogus to plunder the vessels of enemy ships and neutrals alike.

This, indeed, was the central conundrum for naval officials. On the one hand they wanted to rid the seas of pirates, and Acts were passed and treaties signed to clamp down upon the problem. But on the other hand pirate captains were often the very men – brave, determined and remorseless – that the country needed if they were to fight a war at sea.⁹ ‘Letters of marque’, as official permissions were known, were issued willingly to captains who had access to vessels and who were prepared to direct their aggression at the ships of an enemy country.

During the wars with France and Scotland during the 1540s, English naval ships and privateers were barely distinguished. Sir Hugh Willoughby himself had taken charge of one of the ships loitering off the Scottish coast looking for victims. During the later struggles with Spain during Elizabeth’s time, such privateers flourished and were openly encouraged.¹⁰ Outright piracy, moreover, was fostered by the willingness both of local and central officials to take bribes for turning a blind eye.

Thomas Seymour, the Lord Admiral when Cabot arrived back in England, was accused of just such corruption. He had, it was alleged, ‘maintained, aided, and comforted sundry pirates, and taken to his own use the goods piratously taken against the laws’.¹¹

The Edward, while she now sailed alone, was unusually well defended. The expedition had enjoyed widespread support from merchants and government alike and as such was much better equipped with artillery and weapons than most merchant vessels would have been.

Once the hostile advance was spotted it was first Chancellor, the captain, but then the master gunner, Robert Stanton, along with his mate and the two other gunners, who led the ship’s defences. Other crew members rushed to follow their instructions.

Simple numbers of men, of course, were a significant protection, not only in terms of the use of guns but also in terms of fighting at close quarters in the event that pirates attempted to board. Under-manning of merchant vessels by ship-owners anxious to cut their costs and so maximise their profits often presented pirates with easy pickings. ‘Overslack manning’, as it was later put, was a ‘perilous and foolish thrift’.¹² But on this occasion the Flemish pirates must have been confronted by a more resilient and determined defence than they bargained for.

No doubt Chancellor’s first response was to try to escape unwanted attention. Frantic efforts would have been made to remain upwind of the pursuing vessel, so that the gap could only be closed by tacking laboriously.¹³ But the attacking ship was probably smaller, nimbler and faster through the water, with large numbers of men on board motivated by the fact that payment would only come from a division of spoils. Clearly the pirates did manage to board. Grappling hooks were hurled across into the Edwards rigging to pull and hold it at close quarters, while men scrambled across onto its deck and the defenders used long pikes to try to prevent them. Gradually, over subsequent decades, as the artillery power of naval vessels increased, the importance of boarding as a means of seizing control of an enemy ship declined. Fighting ships preferred to remain clear and to destroy their opponents by bombardment, as Drake’s English ships did when confronted by the larger fleet of the Spanish Armada. But for pirates, of course, boarding remained fundamental: there was no other way for the goods and wealth of a merchant vessel to be seized.

Since substantial losses of goods or men are not mentioned in the records that survive, it seems probable that a deal was done. The most valuable commodities that the Edward was conveying on its route home in 1554, of course, were the knowledge acquired of the northern route and of the potential trade with Moscow, as well as the hard-learned expertise in oceanic navigation which Richard Chancellor, almost alone among his countrymen, possessed. All the time that he sailed with them, Chancellor was passing on his enthusiasm and knowledge to those who went with him. It was not worth putting all this in jeopardy, and to avoid large-scale loss of life or injury on either side some merchandise was handed over. The Edward probably still had on board some of the fine English cloths with which the company had packed the ship, and with these they would have been willing to part.

Attitudes were altered by the fact that, unusually for an English vessel of the time, the merchants were sailing not with goods that they owned but as representatives of a company. This wider organisation was willing enough at this stage to shoulder minor losses in return for information which could prove lucrative in the future.

 

 

Forty-Seven

For the men of the Edward, their first sighting of the coastline of the land of their birth was an emotional moment – no less so than the moment of leaving it behind had been almost exactly a year before. From the southern bulge of the Scandinavian peninsula the Edward set a course south-south-west, leaving the Norwegian shore before she passed too close to Bergen, where the rival Hanseatic traders had their northern base. But, as ever, the crew were at the mercy of the wind.

Perhaps they saw Shetland, or the coast of Scotland, and followed the land south, or perhaps they headed directly for the eastern flank of England. The temptation to pause at one of their country’s eastern ports may have been too much to resist; one assumes that this was the case given that the expedition organised by the same backers the following year was explicitly ordered not to do so, lest an opportunity for private trading arise, but to make directly on its return for the Thames estuary and the port of London.¹

If they did drop anchor in eastern England, word of the Edwards safe return from its great voyage of exploration, and of its discovery of a new route to the empire of the Russian Tsar, may have reached the capital before the ship itself. The news could have been sent overland deliberately, as Cabot had requested, in the hands of a crew member or of another messenger from the port who could ride alone and unladen on horseback on roads which, unlike in Russia, improved in summer, and without the need to confront winds which might be unfavourable. Even if not, Chancellor’s vessel would have been sighted in the estuary of the Thames, and word would then have been carried quickly to Cabot and the leading men of the company before the Edward itself could drop anchor in its home waters east of London.

Was there definitely only one ship? What, if anything, had Chancellor and his men said about the fate of the other two? Anticipation at the prospect of hearing the men’s news must have mingled with trepidation at learning the fate of their fellow sailors.

On its return to the Thames, the Edward floated towards London on the incoming tide, exploiting any favourable wind with a small expanse of sail. As it neared the capital smaller craft approached, and excited exchanges were shouted across the water. Each day, as the tide turned, anchor was weighed, and the men came ashore to pass on their news to the inhabitants of Thames-side communities. Londoners were forewarned, and thronged to the bank to watch the ship heave into view on Limehouse Reach.

Reaction in the capital to the return of Chancellor and his crew was effusive. The men naturally relished their hero status, recounting stories of their journey and of their experiences in Russia – of the plunging temperatures and unremitting darkness, and of life among the people of the far north. There were countless questions about the terrible storm which had separated the expedition ships, and of the men’s last sighting of Sir Hugh Willoughby, Cornelius Durforth and the men of the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia.

There was no need to embellish. The truth was gripping enough. In huddled groups Londoners joined in speculation about their fate. These crews too, of course, had friends and expectant families in London, hungry for news and watching on painfully as the men of the Edward milked the acclaim and showed off the goods they had brought back.²

Richard Chancellor had returned to England now after a year’s absence. Any sea voyage at the time was dangerous, but this one – confronting unknown hazards from both people and climate in the far north – was certainly more so than most. He knew that he could easily not have returned, and indeed his was the only one of three ships yet to have done so.

For all the guesswork, in truth no one in England yet knew the fate of the other two.

There were many people whom Chancellor was relieved and emotional to see again, but none more so, surely, than the two sons he had had to leave behind and who were already without their mother. It had been their future, as well as his own and that of his crew, that had played on his mind at difficult moments.

From what we can gather he was a caring and conscientious man weighed down, at times, by anxiety. No record of their reunion survives, but little imagination is required.

 

 

Forty-Eight

As the Edward had swept up the Thames with the tide on the last stretch of its passage back to London, one old man waited anxiously among the excited crowd of family, friends and general onlookers.

Sebastian Cabot watched the leading members of the crew climb first into the ship’s boat, recognising and then greeting each man as he stepped ashore. His most enthusiastic welcome, though, was reserved for the ship’s captain, Richard Chancellor. This was the young man he had taken under his wing, talked to for hours about his own experiences sailing to the Americas, and to whom he had imparted all the wisdom accrued through a long lifetime of organising and taking part in voyages on the open ocean. This was the man who had impressed him so much that in spite of quite limited experience he had made him the Pilot Major of his new northern exploration. Both were relieved to see the other man again, still alive: Chancellor in spite of the long and dangerous journey he had undertaken, Cabot in spite of his age, both men in spite of the shadow of death which hovered, ever present, in sixteenth-century England.

They talked a little, amid the general noise and commotion, then met later and spoke again, at length and in private. Cabot’s interest was intense as Chancellor described the terrible storm which had made it impossible, in spite of their efforts, to remain together as a fleet of three ships. He listened as Chancellor told of his fruitless wait at Wardhouse for Willoughby and the other two ships, of the Scots who had tried to persuade him to abandon the voyage, and of the Edwards descent towards a great inland sea where they anchored by the mouth of a wide river delta, near a monastery that was Christian, though of a heretical persuasion.

Much would have been familiar to Cabot, and reminded him of his own explorations, with his father and then in command, along the north-western coast of America decades previously. But this was very different country – an area of the world of which he had no first-hand experience, and of which the vagueness of his map confessed an almost total ignorance.¹

The old man was perhaps surprised, as the crew themselves had been surprised, to learn that they had reached Russia and could travel from where they were by sled – many miles, but quickly and smoothly across the snow and ice – to Moscow, its emperor’s capital. Existing accounts of the preparations contain no suggestion that Cabot or the other English merchants and organisers involved had expected their crews to reach Russia by travelling this far north. They knew of it, vaguely, as a country that could be reached by travelling east from the European mainland, a great distance through the vast realms of Poland and Lithuania. It was most often referred to as Muscovy and its leader as the Duke, since the imperial status Ivan now claimed had not been acknowledged or accepted.

Cabot must have been disappointed, when he first heard the outcome of the voyage, at the lack of progress towards the ultimate destination he had set – Cathay and the equatorial spice islands, from which boundless wealth was anticipated.

For the English, the rich empires of the East seemed as far away as ever. Plainly, it would not be as easy as some had hoped to reach them by this north-easterly course, or the Russian communities on the White Sea would have known how to do it; but at the same time, the route’s existence had not been disproved, and further efforts would need to be made.

At the same time, the voyage did have something to show for it: there was the tantalising possibility of a regular and direct English trade with Russia by this northern route. Cabot, who had explored in unknown waters and encountered unknown civilisations himself, listened, enthralled, as Chancellor described his journey to the Russian court and the several months he had spent in Moscow, in winter, as an honoured guest of the Tsar. There was much that was similar to what he himself had known – the extreme cold and the ice, the unfamiliar people – but much too that was quite different. People wore furs, certainly, to protect against the elements. But they were not, like the tribes of Cabot’s experience, dressed in the skins of bears or large cats purely to intimidate strangers. They did not swim out to ships in the sea in a quest for human flesh to eat. Chancellor recognised that what he had experienced was unique, and that it needed to be told and to be recorded in a more permanent way. Since ‘it was my chance’, as he later wrote, ‘to fall with the North parts of Russia before I came towards Moscovia’, he would declare his knowledge.²

The two men talked at length about the possibility of a trading relationship between England and Russia, which had opened up in Chancellor’s discussions with Ivan. A meeting was arranged at which all of the company’s leading men could discuss the voyage’s outcome, and a decision be made about their next step.

 

 

Forty-Nine

There was another man with whom Chancellor’s reunion was unusually joyful: Sir Henry Sidney, whose household the young sailor had been a part of, who had feared to lose him, but who had recognised his extraordinary talents and recommended him passionately to the London merchant company when they were choosing men to lead their pioneering expedition.

During the first half of 1554 Sidney had been on an unusual and important voyage of his own. He had landed back on the English coast, at Southampton, on 20 July, and it was a month later before he reached London. There is no way of being certain whether it was he or Chancellor who returned to the capital first. Probably it was Chancellor, but either way it cannot have been long before the two men were reunited.

By then, of course, Chancellor was well aware what a tumultuous series of events had rocked England since his departure: the premature death of the Protestant King Edward, the attempt to follow Edward’s will in placing Jane Grey on the throne as his successor, the acceptance of the Catholic Mary as rightful Queen, the repeal by Parliament of Edward’s religious reforms and the serious but unsuccessful rebellion against Mary when word spread of her intended Spanish marriage.

Chancellor and his crew must have been almost as interested and inquisitive as those to whom they spoke. They had travelled to a country of which nothing was known, and some of them had been entertained at the court of a great emperor. But they had also returned to a country much changed from the one with which they were familiar.

Whatever Chancellor had gleaned from other Englishmen, there is no doubt that his patron Sidney knew more than most. He had been uncomfortably close to the action.

Sidney had been at the heart of King Edward’s circle. He had shared the boy King’s education and many of his ideas. He had been with him, and was deeply affected, when he died. Long afterwards he still talked of England’s misfortune, and of his own ‘still felt grief’, at Edward’s death in his arms.¹

He had been closely allied to the late John Dudley, his father-in-law, who had supported Cabot and this voyage of discovery, but whose fall had been so sudden and unlamented in the wider political class. Dudley’s sons, Sidney’s brothers-in-law, had also been implicated in the plot to establish Jane Grey. One of them, indeed – Guildford – had married Jane and accompanied her to the block. Three others remained incarcerated in the Tower, along with their father. They etched their father’s name and emblem, along with a short poem, on the wall of the room in which they were held.² The eldest, John Dudley junior, had been tutored by John Dee, who later praised him fulsomely. When he was released that autumn he came to stay with his sister at the house that Sir Henry Sidney had recently inherited from his father, Penshurst in Sussex; but he was so weakened and ill that he died only days later.³

Sir Henry had been one of the witnesses of Edward’s will as the King lay dying. It was his wife, Mary Dudley, who had carried word of Edward’s death to her sister-in-law, Jane Grey, and travelled with her to Syon House – the estate, on the grounds of a former abbey, acquired by her father John Dudley, where Jane was offered the crown. When Queen Mary secured the throne in Jane’s place Sir Henry must have fretted anxiously about his position. But he had been careful. He had not been directly implicated in the campaign against her, two of his sisters were favoured ladies of Queen Mary, and fortunately the new Queen was not inclined towards wholesale retribution.

While John Dudley and his closest relatives could not escape punishment, Sidney was able to detach himself from the catastrophe now visited upon his wife’s family. He was, perhaps, as he later regretted, ‘neither liking nor liked as I had been’. But in July Mary granted him a pardon, while his ownership of his father’s lands was confirmed. He was granted further properties in addition, as well as the sinecure post of Royal Otter Hunter.⁴ In November, Sidney’s wife gave birth to a son who would go on to become a revered courtier, soldier and poet.

His parents christened him Philip: a calculated act of homage to the man who had become King of England, and who stood as the child’s godfather.

Sidney had been quick to demonstrate his loyalty to Mary. Fluent in French and Italian, he made a useful envoy – just as he had done for King Edward.

Philip’s proposed visit to England, in the winter of 1553, had come to nothing, but in March the following year a ceremony of betrothal was held in England attended by a Habsburg representative. Shortly afterwards a mission departed for Spain to secure Philip’s signature on a marriage treaty, and to escort him north. It was led by John Russell, the Earl of Bedford – a man who had not only been a stalwart of Edward VI’s regime, but who had been actively involved in funding and supporting Cabot’s 1553 expedition. With him went Sir Henry Sidney, and the fate of the exploratory voyage must have been a frequent topic of conversation between the two men.⁵

On 13 July the party set sail from Spain with a strong wind at their backs and on a rough sea. Many of them were feeling sick when, only four days later, they spotted the shores of England.⁶ Most of the soldiers who accompanied their leader never disembarked. Word quickly reached Philip from his father that the French had seized important Habsburg forts.⁷ He personally could remain in England, Philip was instructed, but money and armed men should be sent on. Philip himself landed on 20 July, with a group of English nobles who had rowed out to meet him and with Sidney and other members of the English party who had travelled back with him from Spain.

An elaborate welcome was put on by members of Mary’s court. Artillery fired a salute. The insignia of the Order of the Garter was presented to Philip before he came ashore. Royal horse guards, dressed in Spanish livery, paraded in a guard of honour on the jetty. Musicians played, and a splendid white horse was presented to Philip. The weather, meanwhile, provided a typically depressing welcome of its own. For several days the rain poured down and the cloak intended to protect Philip’s fine clothes proved insufficient to the task.⁸

From Southampton the party proceeded to Winchester, where Mary was nervously awaiting her husband-to-be. In Wolvesey Castle, the home of Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, they kissed on the lips, the traditional English greeting for persons of equivalent rank, even strangers. Philip kissed not only his fiancée this way, but Mary’s ladies in waiting too. Some of his Spanish attendants were surprised and not, in general, impressed. One of Philip’s men wrote home that of the women close to Mary there were ‘few attractive and many ugly ones’.⁹

On 25 July Mary and Philip were married in Winchester Cathedral, a religious building which, like so many others in the land, bore the scars of recent ideological battles. There were gaps or splintered wood where images had been removed or impulsively broken off.¹⁰ Here, and across the country, craftsmen were suddenly overworked making repairs.

It was 18 August by the time that Queen Mary and her new husband made the formal procession from the south bank into the capital, across London Bridge, where the putrid heads of those executed for their part in Wyatt’s rebellion the previous winter had to be removed.¹¹

After the evangelical Protestantism of Edward VI, England now had a Catholic King to go with its Catholic Queen – albeit one who, though granted the title of king by Parliament, was never crowned in his own right and whose independent authority was strictly limited. On coins now in circulation the heads of both Philip and Mary appeared, with a single crown suspended between them to indicate that they reigned together.

Men like Sir Henry Sidney, meanwhile, had tactfully ridden out the changes. Whatever his inner beliefs, he adopted the policy of Sebastian Cabot – a man he knew – and affected to support the culture in which he was immersed. By the time that Chancellor returned, Sir Henry had proved himself a loyal supporter of the new regime, for all his proximity to the old. No doubt he encouraged the young and Protestant pilot to follow his example.

 

 

Fifty

Strictly speaking the group of traders behind the voyage was not yet a company. A royal licence had authorised the expedition, but the formal document of incorporation, which would unite the men in a legal body, had not arrived. In law they were not yet entitled, as was clearly vital for a trading body, ‘to implead and to be impleaded, to answer and to be answered, to defend and to be defended’.¹ Nor, officially, were they permitted to meet.

A charter had been expected from Edward VI before the initial departure, and an assurance that the matter was in hand had been provided. The permission to impress men had referred to the group as a company.² The merchants knew that their ambition was looked upon favourably. Important individuals at court had signed up to the venture; John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, himself had helped to bring Cabot over from Spain and supported him in England; and the men had always been aware of what was referred to later as the ‘gracious encouragement, and right good liking’ for the venture of the young King. But the onset of Edward’s last illness had intervened.³

Edward was still alive when they left, but was clearly very ill, however gladly men leapt to hail every slight improvement. The three ships could not wait. As a later act of incorporation noted, Edward had died ‘before the finishing and sealing of his most ample and gracious letters of privileges promised to the said Subjects’.⁴ Plainly, however, the merchant group regarded themselves as a company nevertheless.

The support of men in high places had given them reason to do so, and the grant of the charter was merely a formality. When Sebastian Cabot wrote his book of instructions in the spring of 1553 for the ‘intended voyage for Cathay’, he styled himself ‘governor of the mystery and company’. Now, of course, the situation had changed. Edward had died, and John Dudley, the de facto ruler of England, had been executed.

Mary’s priorities lay in allaying England’s fraught religious situation, and why would her new husband Philip, a Spaniard, wish to back a group whose ambition was to further an English challenge to the trades of Spain and Portugal?

Nevertheless, Philip was preoccupied during the second half of 1554: he had just come to England, not speaking the language, and the Habsburg Empire was at war with France. It had been made clear, furthermore, that in his island kingdom he would be allowed only a secondary role: when the royal couple crossed London Bridge into the capital together for the first time, it was Mary who rode on the right, the position of precedence.⁵ And she was naturally anxious, after the upheavals to which her rule had already been subjected, to win the support of her leading subjects, many of whom were either enthused by or directly involved in Cabot’s scheme.

The occasion when the ‘mystery and company’ met as a body, after Chancellor’s return, is not recorded. Clearly, though, there was much that needed to be discussed, both with the Pilot Major and with the other leading merchants and gentlemen who had sailed on the Edward. It was vital for the company board to understand, as far as was possible, the events of the voyage and to come to a decision about their next step.

Probably, the meeting took place before the company was legally incorporated, and so permitted, officially, to meet as a group. But if so, an exception was granted.

The atmosphere among the leading organisers was tense. In general terms, of course, they were aware of the outcome of the voyage. They would have discussed it at some length among themselves.

For all the major events taking place in England that summer, the regime, and Londoners in general, had for a few days talked of little else. The voyage had been a major departure in every sense; and the story of Willoughby’s disappearance made it all the more dramatic and intriguing. Now, however, there was an opportunity for organisers and backers to hear directly from the key protagonists, and to settle important matters of company policy.

The ‘principal doers’ were there: Sebastian Cabot, the old navigator who had inspired the enterprise, as well as leading merchants and governors of the city like Sir George Barne and Sir William Garrard. Some of those eminent men who had lent the venture their backing, and who had survived the change of regime, may have been there too: near-contemporaries, for instance, of Cabot, like William Paulet, the Marquis of Winchester, who found that his religious convictions shifted conveniently to match those of his monarch, or his friend John Russell, the Earl of Bedford, who had led the English embassy to escort King Philip back to England.

Also present were many of those already chosen as consuls and assistants, though they had not yet been officially confirmed in the roles: the former Lord Mayors Sir John Gresham and Sir Andrew Judde, for instance, or Sir John Yorke. Along with Chancellor, furthermore, other leading men who had sailed on the Edward must have attended to support their captain and to develop what he said. The board would have wanted to speak, for instance, to the head or ‘cape’ merchant, George Burton, to his colleague John Hasse (who would write a report on possible English trade with Russia), and the gentleman James Dallaber who had also travelled with Chancellor to Moscow.

Even assuming that some were unable to attend, there must have been upwards of thirty men present. It was a noisy room, full of opinionated people. One important matter was the fate of the leading individuals who were not present: of the expedition’s leader, Sir Hugh Willoughby, and all those on two of the three ships that the group had provided. This, perhaps, was dealt with first.

There was little that Chancellor could say, of course, other than to confess his ignorance. He told the story again, for the benefit of any who had not heard it, of the onset of terrible weather as the party lay off Senja island, and of the Edwards desperate but futile attempts to remain in touch with the admiral. He described, too, how his men had sailed on to the Wardhouse as agreed, and waited there anxiously for the space of a week, praying every day that the sails of the Bona Esperanza or the Bona Confidentia would break the horizon.

The promise of Ivan IV was described and read out. Should Willoughby and his men arrive, at length, on Russian shores, they would be ‘well entertained’. To contemplate what had become of them was dispiriting, because there was obviously a good chance that they had fallen on misfortune. But until more was known, there remained some room for optimism. Perhaps they had sailed on, missed the White Sea entrance (as indeed they had) and found a passage as intended to warmer, wealthier lands from whence they had not yet been able to return.

The main matter on the agenda, meanwhile, was to report what Chancellor had discovered, and did know. He had to admit, of course, that in terms of its stated aim the voyage had been an outright failure. Considerable wealth and effort had been expended, and thus far at least only one of the three ships had returned, knowing nothing of any possible access to the wealth of the East. But Cabot had made clear at the outset that there was also a more general motivation for the enterprise: to explore the world and to uncover opportunities which might not have been anticipated.

In any realms they touched at along their route, the crews were to learn what they could, of customs and trading possibilities. Knowledge was always useful, or at least one never knew when it would be. A culture needed to be fostered in which all such encounters and explorations were carefully recorded for posterity, and this was an ethos that Chancellor had absorbed wholeheartedly. He wrote his own account of the voyage, sending it to his ‘singular good Uncle’, Christopher Frothingham, enjoining him modestly to ‘read and correct; for great is the defect’. He expressed his earnest hope to return to Russia and to have a chance to study its society and customs further: with his discussion of its religion, he concluded, ‘I make an end, trusting hereafter to know it better’. He also talked at length to Clement Adams, who set down the story of the voyage again, in a more stylised form.

Anyone with a mind to attempt the exploration of strange countries, Chancellor wrote at the start of his narrative, must bear this imperative to record their experiences in mind. Not only should they seek to understand what commodities a region produced, they needed to write their newly acquired knowledge down. Only by doing so, and by creating a culture where this was the norm, would they ‘encourage others to the like travail’.⁶

From the White Sea, as Chancellor now told the company members, access had been obtained to Russia by a northerly route previously unknown to the English. Its Tsar had granted permission to the English to return regularly this way to trade, competing with rivals they knew well – like the Hanseatic merchants – but through a different channel and on preferential terms.

In a sense there was only an easy decision to be made. The condition of established English trades in Europe was not good. A new route, offering a new source of commodities to sell in England and Europe, and a new market for English goods, had been opened up. But only one: there was no range of commercial options on the table.

It is true that certain new trades were being explored simultaneously in northern and western Africa, and that often the same merchants were investors. But these were traditional routes into which the English were attempting to muscle. They were well known, and they involved battling, often literally, against the usual European competition. This was different. Here the English might be able to out-compete their commercial rivals and to avoid physical confrontation in doing so. The verdict was clear.

The company should continue to explore further east by this northern route, to see if it was possible, after all, to get through to Cathay as had been hoped. Enquiries should continue to be made about the Bona Confidentia, the Bona Esperanza and their crews. But in the meantime a trade with Russia should be actively developed and pursued.

In the course of this meeting, the merchant John Hasse, who had sailed with Chancellor and travelled with him to Moscow, was questioned in depth by senior company figures about the opportunities that existed in Russia. As soon as a resolution had been made, perhaps at this formal meeting, he was asked to write down all that he knew in a practical handbook for future traders. Certainly by the time that Hasse duly wrote a short guide that year, a clear decision had been taken. There was no uncertainty: he put his knowledge down, he wrote, so that ‘the merchants of that new adventure may the better understand how the wealth of that new frequented trade will arise’.⁷

He listed in detail all of the information he had recorded in notebooks about coins, weights and other measures. This was an age before any international standardisation existed, and it was a perpetual problem for merchants to be sure how much of a commodity they were buying. ‘You must consider’, Hasse cautioned, ‘that their great weight is not full with ours; for I take not their great pound to be full thirteen ounces, but above twelve I think it be.’ At Wardhouse, he noted, dry fish was sold according to the ‘basemere’ as used in Russia, but that this quantity was further broken up into four different measures – the mark pound, the great pound, the wee pound and the ship pound – which were all distinct. The same complexity applied equally to other dimensions:

As [the Russians] have two sorts of weights, so they have also two sorts of measures, wherewith they measure cloth, both linen and woollen. They call the one an areshine, and the other a locut. The areshine I take to be as much as the Flanders ell, and their locut half an English yard ... They have also a measure wherewith they do mete their corn, which they call a set-forth, and the half of that an osmine. This set-forth I take to be three bushels of London measure. And as for their drink measure, they call it a spanne, which is much like a bucket; and of that I never saw any true rate, but that some was greater than other some.⁸

It was confusing stuff, but vitally important. Without this sort of knowledge a merchant, or a merchant company, could not calculate the profits to be made on any given transaction.

Other factors would affect this too: not least the tolls or customs applied to English merchants. These were never consistent. States treated them as tools of foreign policy, to be bargained with and lobbied for. Merchants of different nationality paid different rates, and in Russia, as Hasse noted, they were higher for Turks and Armenians than they were for the Dutch (that is, the Germans of the Hanse towns) who had recently negotiated, and paid for, an exemption.

The English had not yet signed a formal treaty, but Ivan IV had held out to Chancellor, for his own reasons, the possibility of toll-free trade – and this was a subject of intense scrutiny when the company met. Ivan’s written response to Edward VI was studied and discussed. In return for negotiation with one of His Majesty’s Council, English merchants, Ivan promised, could have ‘free mart with all free liberties through my whole dominions with all kinds of wares, to come and go at their pleasure, without any let, damage, or impediment, according to this our letter, our word, and our seal ...’⁹

Hasse then addressed another key question which, again, was significant only on the assumption that trade was to go ahead: the future location of an English ‘standing house’, or base, in the country. Some men, he said, would insist on Moscow, because that was the capital and the location of the court. While he could understand the logic, his own view was that this would only make it more expensive, and that the disadvantages outweighed the advantages: ‘the charge there’, he wrote, ‘would be so great by cravers and expenses that the moiety [half] of the profit would be wholly consumed’. Other cities offered a preferable location. ‘The town of Vologda, Hasse argued, ‘is meetest [best] for our merchants.’ It was near enough to the capital that merchants could spend the winter there, paying their respects to the Tsar and his court. It was also conveniently situated, as most large Russian towns were, on a river, and was connected to a regular network of trade with all the country’s other major towns.

In any case, this was not a question that needed to be decided immediately. What did was the basic question which had already been resolved of whether to pursue the commercial link with Moscow. No hint survives that any were opposed.

Now it was vital to move fast. The privileges promised by Ivan needed to be formally confirmed. Word quickly spread, inevitably, to other courts, of the route taken by Cabot’s men and of the outcome achieved. One Spaniard who was a member of Philip’s council in England wrote in 1555 to his lord in Castile, of how the English had discovered ‘new Indies’:

A ship went from England to the northern regions with merchandise, under an English captain named Ricardo. Adverse weather drove him to an unknown port, in a large and spacious country, which appeared fertile and very rich, and which had not been discovered till then, and therefore was not in the charts, nor marked in el mappa mundi. He found that it was inhabited, and by people who were Christians, and governed by a valorous prince called Ivan, who, learning what they were, gave them very Christian treatment.¹⁰

The Spanish themselves were unlikely to seek to get in on a trade with Russia, but the Netherlands, of course – far more conveniently situated – was a part of the Habsburg dominions. Suspicions were quickly raised about Ivan’s motivation for the preferential treatment he was offering to the English. Efforts could be expected to nullify any English advantage and to hinder this new trade.

Another voyage needed to be organised, quickly.

 

 

Fifty-One

During the winter of 1554 to 1555 urgent preparations began. With checks and maintenance work the Edward Bonaventure could sail again, but in the absence of its two companion vessels, at least one more ship needed to be obtained.

This time, given the need to move quickly, it was probably not commissioned to be newly built, but either had sailed before or was chosen from those already largely complete at the dockyard. More was known, of course, about its immediate destination: to sail to Russia and back through northern waters did not require a hull that was lined to defy a warm-water worm.

If the new ship had a name already, it was tactfully now rechristened: this time the Edward would be partnered by the Philip and Mary.

The atmosphere in England that winter was tense and uncertain. There was no repeat of the outright rebellion which had broken out a year previously. Mary’s legitimacy was accepted, and though the Spanish marriage had inflamed national feeling, Philip’s role as King was severely circumscribed. Nevertheless, mutual animosity remained.

Many of the Spaniards in England disliked the English. They found them ‘white, pink and quarrelsome’ and disdained their tendency to eat, drink and ‘think of nothing else’. ‘We are in an excellent land,’ one wrote, ‘but among the worst people in the world.’ The Imperial ambassador, meanwhile, lamented the extent to which the English hated foreigners, believing they were going to be ‘enslaved’. ‘The slightest altercation’, he suggested, ‘might be enough to bring about a very dangerous situation.’ Meanwhile one of Philip’s own entourage observed that the English hated the Spaniards ‘worse than they hate the Devil’. ‘They rob us’, he wrote, ‘in town and on the road.’ It was not for nothing that the Spanish walked the streets of Westminster and London in fear of abuse and violence.¹

If Spanish influence was not bad enough for the xenophobic English, it was while Chancellor and his crew were in England, at the end of November 1554, that Parliament approved Mary’s dearest desire: a formal reconciliation with Rome. It was a prominent investor in Sebastian Cabot’s company, Henry Fitzalan, the Earl of Arundel, who escorted the Pope’s English legate, Cardinal Pole, to the Palace of Westminster. There, by the ‘apostolic authority’ accorded him by Pope Julius III, Pole told the assembled monarchs, Lords and Commons:

We ... do absolve & deliver you, and every of you with the whole Realm and the Dominions thereof, from all Heresy and Schism ... & also we do restore you again, unto the unity of our Mother the holy Church: as in our Letters more plainly it shall appear: In the name of the father, of the son, and of the holy Ghost.²

This renewed allegiance to a foreign authority, more than the revival of Catholic ritual, aroused bitter resentment among the English.

In addition, outstanding questions remained which contributed to lasting tension. One such concerned the swathes of property which had formerly belonged to the Church but which had passed, under Henry VIII and his son Edward, into private hands.

Much of the wealth seized by the state, of course, had simply been spent – on warfare in particular. Private owners now claimed rightful possession. Many of them were prominent men, like the Earl of Arundel himself. They had transferred their allegiance, without fuss, from Edward to Mary. They had supported most of her religious goals. But they had accumulated substantial ex-monastic estates, and these, so far as Cardinal Pole was concerned, were ‘God’s property’ which had been ‘grabbed’.³

At the same time Catholics like Mary worried about the lasting impact of heretical belief and practice. Churches which had hosted heretical services, as all those must be deemed which were conducted using Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book, were tainted. Until they were ritually purified, they could not be used for righteous, godly worship.

Worse still was the presence beneath churchyards and churches themselves of the buried bodies of men and women who had followed Edwardian practice. These were heretics, who polluted the entire fabric of the Church. Canon law decreed that their remains must be dug up, removed and burned. But this, as can be imagined, was a sensitive matter.

The world in which Chancellor and his companions had grown up had turned on its head.

Under Henry VIII, and particularly under Edward, traditional Christian worship had been violently condemned. As Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer had reminded Englishmen of God’s commandment against ‘that most detestable sin of idolatry’, and decried what he called the ‘fantasy of ceremonies, pilgrimage, purgatory, saints, images, works and such like, as hath these three or four hundred years been corruptly taught’.⁴

The walls of churches were whitewashed, to expunge the colourful paintings of saints and biblical figures which had long adorned them. At ceremonies in London and elsewhere images of long-revered saints were publicly demeaned and burned.⁵ This was the England the men of the Edward had sailed away from in 1553, and its imprint on their way of thinking is evident in their horrified reaction to the veneration of saints that they encountered in Russia.

The country to which they returned had undergone a volte-face and in public, at least, men who valued their liberty turned with it. Under Mary’s ultimate authority, evangelicals were no longer free to denounce the practices of traditional religion. Protestant intellectuals, like King Edward’s former tutor, Sir John Cheke, fled to the Continent. With another he was betrayed and arrested in May 1556, ‘clapped into a cart, their legs, arms and bodies tied with halters to the body of the cart, and so carried to the seaside’. He escaped burning only by making a humiliating recantation.⁶

Craftsmen were overworked restoring the very statues, shrines and other church ornaments which during Edward’s reign had been desecrated and destroyed. Attempts were made to revive the cults of numerous saints, whose followings varied from the near-universal to the narrowly local, and who had stood, or knelt, in niches in church walls, shrouded by curtains and honoured with candles (‘lights’, as they were known), much as in Orthodox Russia.⁷ But it was now seventeen or eighteen years since the Protestant assault on such idolatry had begun and it was not easy to return England to the way it had been.

Another piece of the fabric of traditional Christianity consisted of those distinctively dressed men and women who had taken a vow to dedicate their lives to the contemplation of Christ. In pre-Reformation England, just as in Spain and in Orthodox Russia, the religious orders were a part of the landscape. During the later years of Henry VIII’s reign, in the second half of the 1530s, monasteries, friaries and nunneries had come under a sudden and devastating assault, which then widened, a decade later, under his son. Like images of saints, men and women in habits had disappeared from the English landscape in which Chancellor and his crew grew up, and their prevalence in Russia seemed symptomatic, now, of an alien culture.

Attempts to re-establish religious houses in England were deeply problematic. After all, the buildings, along with their land and wealth, had been seized and sold off – often to powerful individuals. Many monks, friars or nuns had accepted Crown pensions and would need to be absolved before they could revive their former vows. The English had grown unused to the sight of men and women dressed in the distinctive habits of monastic devotion. Spanish monks who came to England as part of Philip’s entourage felt nervous about wearing them in public. Some did return, though, to their former communal life, particularly exiles who did not require absolution for an acceptance of the dissolution. The London diarist Henry Machyn watched a procession through the capital ‘after the old fashion’, which included monks in their habits.⁸

In general London remained marked by the enforced disappearance of a significant element of its population. The Venetian ambassador lamented in Mary’s time that ‘the city is much disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of churches and monasteries belonging heretofore to friars and nuns’.⁹ Nevertheless, the Observant Franciscans re-established the friary they had maintained adjacent to Greenwich Palace, on level ground ‘where the game of ball used to be played’.¹⁰ Twenty-five friars were reinstalled there in the spring of 1555, and their number grew over the coming months. The house had strong emotional resonance for Mary. It was in this Franciscan church that her parents had married, in which she herself had been christened, and in which her mother, Catherine of Aragon, had risen in the small hours to attend services by candlelight. That autumn the Venetian ambassador wrote of Mary’s impatience to return to her monastery at Greenwich, ‘in which she delights marvellously’.¹¹

At St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield on the city’s north-western periphery, the Dominicans were quick to re-establish a community.¹² And it was here, adjacent to this site, that burnings of those who refused to conform to the renewed Catholic order in England began in London. In January 1555 the medieval heresy laws were re-enacted by Parliament.¹³ Once again heretics were to pay the ultimate penalty: death and, as was assumed, a limitless suffering in hell.

On 4 February John Rogers, a man who had been chaplain to English merchants in Antwerp and who persisted in denying the Christian character of the Church of Rome, became the first of more than one hundred people in London alone to be burned at the stake. He was comforted and acclaimed by the common people of the capital, who demonstrated a residual attachment to holy relics by collecting pieces of his charred and still-smoking remains in parcels of paper.¹⁴

Four days later a second Protestant, Laurence Saunders, was burned for his beliefs and over subsequent months the fires were continually replenished.

 

 

Fifty-Two

In February 1555 the formal approval finally arrived for which those involved in Cabot’s venture had been waiting. A charter of incorporation from King Philip and Queen Mary made them officially a company.

The monarchs were keen, the charter read, ‘to animate, advance, further and nourish them in their said godly, honest, and good purpose, and, as we hope, profitable adventure’. From henceforth, the group would be ‘one body and perpetual fellowship and communality of themselves, both in deed and in name’ – permitted, legally, to meet, to hold property and to make charges or answer for itself in court.¹

Had Edward VI not sickened and died unexpectedly, this official authorisation would have been granted without any knowledge of how the initial venture to the north-east would fare. Would it sail, as hoped, to Cathay and the rich islands of the East, or would it be frustrated entirely by frozen seas in the north? Now, of course, a major exploration had been conducted. While a passage to the East remained elusive, a route to a fascinating new civilisation had been established. Much had already been achieved, and much more, with God’s help, was to come.

The charter provided a full list of members of the company. There were just over two hundred of them, a slight decrease on the original subscription of 240, partly due to mortality, and partly perhaps due to the failure to discover an instantly lucrative passage to the Orient. John Dudley, of course, was at least one example of a leading backer who had died in the interim – victim of the political instability which immediately followed King Edward’s demise.

The majority of the members were London merchants, though one at least was based in Bristol. There were government officials connected with the financial markets, customs or foreign trade.² And there were also senior peers and members of the Council – men of a pedigree that had never invested in comparable trading ventures in the past. The charter alluded to the involvement in 1553 of ‘our right trusty, right faithful, and well-beloved Councillors, William Marquis of Winchester Lord high Treasurer of this our Realm of England, Henry Earl of Arundel, Lord Steward of our household, John Earl of Bedford Lord keeper of our privy Seal, William Earl of Pembroke, William Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord high Admiral of our said Realm of England, &c’. They had acted in a private capacity, providing ships, rigging and furnishing them at ‘their own adventure, costs and charges’.

All were among the charter members two years later, and with this sort of lobbying power it was scarcely surprising that the joint monarchs, as they put it, ‘inclined to the petition’, or that pressure was applied to ensure the application was processed quickly. Names were listed in order of precedence. After twenty-seven, which constituted the court interest, there were thirteen city aldermen, then eleven ‘Esquires’, headed by Sebastian Cabot, eight gentlemen, and lastly all other members.³

Among them were at least two women.⁴ Elizabeth Wilford, nee Gale, was the daughter of a merchant who was linked to Sir George Barne and she had married another, Nicholas Wilford, who had traded in Spain, became a significant exporter of cloth, an MP and a governor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which had survived the dissolution and whose ownership had passed to the city of London.⁵ They were Londoners. Her father-in-law had been a city alderman and they lived in the house she inherited close to the Thames in Billingsgate. When an epidemic of the sweating sickness swept the capital in 1551, her husband became ill and quickly died (one of 800 left dead, according to Henry Machyn, by a disease which struck the young, the old, the poor and ‘great rich men and women’ alike).⁶ As well as being the mother of eleven children, Elizabeth maintained her late husband’s commercial interests, and she was the only woman to invest in her own right when Cabot’s voyage was organised. Katherine Lomnour, meanwhile, had been married to Richard Wigmour, a subscriber to the voyage of 1553 who died later that summer. She married again, to Edmund Lomnour, and together they maintained her first husband’s investment.⁷

The constitution of the company was formally recognised. Sebastian Cabot, ‘the chiefest setter forth of this journey or voyage’, was proclaimed governor for life. After his death which, given his age, could not lie far in the future, an election could be held annually, for one or two men to fill the role on a rotational basis. Elections would also be held in conjunction every year for four ‘consuls’ and twenty-four ‘assistants’ – ‘the most sad, discreet, and honest persons of the said fellowship’ – to act as the company’s board.

In all these respects, of course, the charter merely formalised an existing situation. Government approval was taken for granted, given the degree of involvement by senior men. Men had already been appointed to these positions, and the first holders of the offices were now named. They included, as consuls, Sir George Barne, Sir William Garrard, Anthony Hussey and John Southcote, who were judged the ‘most expert and skilful’ of the twenty-eight.

Fifteen of them would constitute a quorum, provided this number included at least two of the consuls, or three if a governor was not present. Together, this board was entitled to meet and to make binding decisions, including judgements regarding ‘the good order or rule’ of company merchants where disputes or bad behaviour demanded them. They could impose penalties on any employee – ‘by fines, forfeitures, & imprisonments’ – for offences which concerned the company. They were free to act ‘as the quality of the offence requireth, according to their good discretions’. The only proviso was that company rules did not clash with the law of the land, or with treaties, or with other agreements England had entered into with other states.

The discovery of the northern route to Russia was acknowledged. It had pleased Almighty God, the charter declared, to bring one of the three ships to the dominions of ‘Lord John [Ivan] Basilivich, Emperor of all Russia’ – who had not only received the men graciously but had permitted them to trade freely in his lands. At the same time, however, the company’s continued interest in exploring and trading more widely was recognised. It was entitled, the charter affirmed, to discover, and trade with, ‘whatsoever Isle, Islands, countries, regions, provinces, creeks, arms of the sea, rivers & streams, as well of Gentiles, as of any other Emperor, king, prince, governor or Lord whatsoever ... and in whatsoever part of the world they be situated’. The only proviso was that any such lands should have been unknown, to Englishmen, prior to the recent expedition.

If any part of these newly discovered lands should lie ‘Northwards, North-eastwards, or North-westwards’, moreover, so that a plausible claim could be advanced that they did not come under the existing division of the world between the Spanish and Portuguese, then a right could be claimed not only over fellow Englishmen but over all other newcomers. In this case, the company was licensed to resist any encroachment into their trades, and ‘to do their best in their defence’.⁸

The company could represent the country. It could, the royal charter decreed, ‘rear, plant, erect, and fasten our banners, standards, flags, and Ensigns in whatsoever city, town, village, castle, Isle, or mainland, which shall be by them newly found’. Where Cabot had been careful in his instructions to inculcate the respect and tactful conduct towards other cultures which might foster trade, a way was here left open to the more violent and assertive approach which would also come to characterise English (or British) imperialism.

Where the Spanish or Portuguese states, however, did their own dirty work, the company could carry it out as a proxy. Indeed, the government seemed rather to hope that it would. The charter confirmed that the company: ‘shall and may subdue, possess, and occupy, all manner [of] cities, towns, Isles, and mainlands of infidelity, which is or shall be by them, or any of them newly found or descried, as our vassals and subjects ...’

Just as importantly, as far as the merchants were concerned, they could not only claim a right for the English but could also assert a monopoly over their co-nationals. In an era when to forge new trades in previously unknown regions of the world was a dangerous and expensive exercise, a monopoly, rather like a modern patent, was the expected reward.

Any such new discoveries, the charter affirmed, ‘shall not be visited, frequented, nor [haunted] by any our subjects, other than of the said company and fellowship, and their successors without express licence, agreement and consent’, upon pain of forfeiture of both the ships and all they contained, the proceeds to be split between the company and the Crown.

Along with the charter came use, for the company, of an official seal. A three-masted ship, conspicuously armed, breasted the waves under full sail, below the Tudor rose and the lion of England. It was surrounded by the company’s motto: refugium nostrum in deo est – God is our refuge.⁹

 

 

Fifty-Three

As arrangements were quickly made by the board for a second voyage, there was no disagreement about its command. Richard Chancellor, deputy to Willoughby last time, was rewarded for his success. There was no coincidence, it was recognised, that the ship captained by the man with by far the greatest skills in terms of the science of navigation had reached the safety of a Russian port, and returned. Chancellor was nominated to lead the second expedition, as its ‘grand pilot’.

This time a sailor, rather than a gentleman, would take charge. John Buckland and John Howlet would be masters of the two ships, Buckland having been mate to Stephen Borough in 1553, while John Robbins would act as pilot on the Philip and Mary.¹

On 1 May 1555, the ‘governor, consuls, assistants, and whole company’ met together once more in London – legally, this time – to agree on the instructions that would be issued to the men. No doubt Cabot, as governor, in conjunction with the consuls and assistants, had already drawn up a new draft to be put to the wider membership, discussed and approved. The previous ordinances remained in effect, however, ‘to be in all respects observed’.² This time, now that an initial exploration had been made and the radical organisation of the company established, the role of the leading merchants was evidently uppermost, and the instructions bear their stamp.

The appointment was confirmed at the meeting of two men who would act as the company’s resident agents in Russia. Richard Gray and George Killingworth were not charter members who had made an investment, but were employees of the company. They were given authority to sell or to barter English goods, and to buy Russian ones, according to their judgement, ‘as occasion and benefit of the company shall require’. They could buy on credit, ‘as good opportunity and occasion shall serve’, with authority to commit the company to future payment. And they, together with Chancellor, were tasked to travel once more to the court of Tsar Ivan in Moscow, where they were to hand over letters from King Philip and Queen Mary written in Greek, Polish, and Italian, as well as presents from the company, prior to seeking the grant of further privileges.

Gray, Killingworth and those others who worked with them were to keep always in mind how important this voyage was. They would be the first men to set up a regular trade between England and Russia. Precedents would be set which it would be impossible to revoke or revise: ‘the first precedent shall be a perpetual precedent for ever’, the company’s new instructions for this first deliberate trading mission to Moscow reminded them, ‘and therefore all circumspection is to be used’. Many in England, from the Queen and the Lords of the Council downwards, had high expectations, and these were ‘not to be frustrated’.

It was vital, both that no offence was given, by bad behaviour or by ignorance of local custom, and that poor bargains were not struck which it would be difficult later to renegotiate. Agents employed by the company were urged to read and reread the information which now existed, written down by men like Chancellor and John Hasse, to ensure that no law – religious or otherwise – was infringed. Diligent study should be made of the subtleties with which the Russians did business, so that the best possible deals were struck. Familiarity was expected with Russian ‘dispositions, laws, manners, customs, uses, tolls, carriages, coins, weights, numbers, measures, wares, merchandises, commodities and incommodities, the one to be accepted and embraced, the other to be rejected and utterly abandoned’.

With the knowledge that had now been acquired, ignorance was no excuse.

For the first time in an English trading organisation, employees needed to bear in mind the profitability not just of personal transactions but of the company as a whole.

They needed to account, when they were calculating potential gains, for ‘the notable charges that the company have defrayed in advancing this voyage; and the great charges that they sustain daily in wages, victuals, and other things, all which must be requited by the wise handling of this voyage’. In everything they did, moreover, careful accounts should be kept and daily decisions recorded. At the end of every month all transactions should be ‘brought into perfect order into the ledger or memorial’.

Meanwhile a third merchant, John Brooke, was appointed as the company resident on the northern tip of Scandinavia, at the Wardhouse, where it was hoped also to operate a profitable trade by bartering cloth, meal, salt or beer for fish or train oil. Brooke would not travel to Russia, but would be deposited en route, while one of the two ships, the Philip and Mary, either waited there with him until the Edward returned, or sailed directly back to England after completing its commerce.

Chancellor and the other leading men could take such decisions on their arrival, after conferring with the governor of the castle and the local inhabitants. Brooke was to spend his time there fruitfully, as other agents of the company would be only too pleased to advise. He was to discover all he could about the wares of the region, establishing, for instance, which varieties of fish were available when, and how it would be best to transport them back to England: piled in bulk in the hold, or preserved in casks.

He was to be cautious about what he believed: quicker to ‘be trusted’, as his instruction ran, ‘than to trust’. And again the company was anxious to ensure that none of its sailors made trouble or infringed local laws: ‘The company to be quiet, void of all quarrelling, fighting, or vexation; abstain from all excess of drinking as much as may be, and in all to use and behave themselves as to quiet merchants doth and ought to appertain.’

The merchants involved were anxious that an active trade be established sooner rather than later. Substantial losses had been sustained last time around: two ships had not come back at all, and the third had been robbed on its return. For all the obvious importance of Chancellor and other leading men travelling to Moscow to discuss matters further with the Tsar, the company specified that both the Edward and the Philip and Mary were to sail back to England that same year rather than wintering in Russia. They should bring with them what goods from Russia or Wardhouse they could obtain, along with all possible advice about the English goods to be packed for sale in Russia the following year.

Continued thought and enquiry should be given to the company’s wider remit. Their charter had authorised them to trade exclusively in all lands newly discovered which could be reached sailing north, north-west or north-east, and it was imperative that this potential was maximised while the royal licence lasted.

The company’s original ambition, with its dream of spices, silks and gold, had not been forgotten. ‘It is to be had in mind’, the instructions of 1555 advised, ‘that you use all ways and means possible to learn how men may pass from Russia, either by land or by sea, to Cathaia.’ Further knowledge should be garnered wherever it was possible to do so, ‘by conferring with the learned or well-travelled persons, either natural or foreign, such as have travelled from the north to the south’. Perhaps an English path to the East could still be discovered.

Enquiry should also be made, of course, regarding the fate of the two ships of the first expedition, of which nothing had since been heard. There was a sound business reason for doing so: these were expensive ships, packed with valuable goods (in the days before any kind of insurance policy) and it was possible of course that they had landed at other and perhaps richer lands. But there was also a genuine human bond, and a regret that men they had known well had been lost, like numerous others before them, to the hazards of seaborne adventure. If the agents learned of the ships’ arrival in any place employees could get to, the company instructed, then men should be despatched to find out how the crew were, to take care of any material requirements:

... and to embrace, accept, and entreat them as our dear and well-beloved brethren of this our society to their rejoicing and comfort, advertising Sir Hugh Willoughby and others of our carefulness of them and their long absence, with our desire to hear of them, with all other things done in their absence for their commodity, no less than if they had been present.³

Finally, all the ‘servants of the fellowship’ who were to travel on the second voyage were required to swear an oath. A Bible was solemnly produced, and the room hushed to hear each man repeat the text read out to him. Again, the company’s primary concern was to prevent the private trade which had long preoccupied merchants unused to working for others. Each man promised not to indulge in any activity for his own benefit, and not to know, without reporting it, of any such trade being conducted by his colleagues.

‘You shall prosecute and do’, the words were gravely recited, ‘all that which in you lieth for the good renown, commodity, benefit, and profit of the said fellowship.’

As the meeting proceeded, and particularly as the men grew quiet to hear one man speak, the sound of celebrations could be heard in the city outside. Church bells rang, while noisy processions wove their way through the city streets. It was May Day, a traditional holiday in England – but in 1555 the festivities in London were swelled by a further, impromptu outpouring of relief.

Since the previous October, word had spread that Queen Mary was pregnant. Those who had doubted that Mary could produce an heir at her advanced age, including many Spaniards who had strongly disapproved of the match for Philip, had been proved wrong. Mary might recently have turned thirty-nine, but, God willing, the offspring who could provide the dynasty and the country with the stability it craved was at last to be born. ‘There is no doubt that the Queen is with child,’ the Imperial ambassador had reported, ‘for her stomach clearly shows it.’⁴

By the terms of the marriage, an heir would not inherit Spain, which was reserved for Philip’s existing son, Don Carlos. Nevertheless he (preferably) or she would unite England with the Habsburg dominion in the Low Countries, creating a more powerful European state. For the time being, England and Spain did share a ruler, although Philip remained somewhat aloof from English affairs, and much as many in England despised the situation, writers like Richard Eden tripped over themselves to eulogise their Spanish King and Spain’s imperialistic endeavours. In their ‘merciful wars against these naked people’, he affirmed, the Spaniards had ‘shown a good example to all Christian nations to follow’.⁵

In April the Queen had travelled downriver to her palace at Hampton Court. There a private chamber, richly decorated and with numerous fireplaces to keep it warm, equipped with the lavish paraphernalia deemed necessary for a royal baby, had been prepared in which she could lie in. Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth, was released from the house arrest under which she had been held since the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt and summoned to court as a witness to the birth.⁶

Then, on the last evening of the month, a rumour reached London and quickly circulated that the hoped-for son had been born. Mary, like her namesake and spiritual guardian, had given birth to a boy who could be a saviour, to his country if not to mankind. The news was eagerly embraced by the city authorities. At their command, bells were rung, processions organised and services of celebration held. Around bonfires and at street parties men and women exchanged accounts, from unimpeachable sources, of the child’s great beauty. Sir Henry Sidney had been appointed to sail again, as a formal envoy: to take the happy news of an heir to Philip’s uncle, Ferdinand, brother of his father Charles V and the so-called ‘King of the Romans’.⁷

Sadly, however, it was not true. No child, Londoners confided to each other late on May Day afternoon, had been born.

At Hampton Court male experts, increasingly, were permitted within the sanctum of Mary’s chamber as the Queen sought advice and reassurance about her condition. She yearned for a baby, as the surest sign that God favoured her cause – as, to her at least, He had always seemed to do. Her stomach had swollen, her breasts leaked milk and her periods ceased. Those close to Mary continued to reassure her as she clung, anxious and tearful, to her prayer book within her chamber. Within a month or two, they promised, her pregnancy would come to term.

As Chancellor set sail down the Thames once more, this time knowing, at least, his intended destination, none in London was certain what the outcome would be. Everything, the Venetian ambassador wrote, was ‘in suspense, and dependent on the result of this delivery’.

But already there were those, and her husband was one of them, who suspected that the English Queen was not pregnant at all, and never had been.⁸

 

 

Fifty-Four

As the Edward and the Philip and Mary rowed and then sailed downriver from London, all on board, and all otherwise connected with the company, were anxious as before to make use of the northern summer while it lasted.

This time the crew knew where they were going. There was not the same fear of the unknown. The Venetian ambassador remarked that the ships departed ‘with greater hope of prosperous navigation out and home than the last time’.¹ But the pressure remained. The company’s senior merchants had issued instructions to the ship’s captains to make it to Russia and back in a single season.

The outward voyage was an easier one, without the dramatic weather which struck the first expedition as it sailed along the northern Norwegian coast. The men had the benefit of experience; and the Philip and Mary sailed only as far as Wardhouse, rounding the North Cape and dropping anchor to unload its goods and to take on others before it returned to England. The Edward paused there too, to allow Richard Chancellor to discuss plans with John Brooke and the other senior English merchants. Then, with the coming of a favourable wind, she sailed on alone, south-east towards the White Sea.

As they traced the bleak coast of Lapland at a safe distance they passed the gulf of the River Varzina, where Willoughby and his crew – though Chancellor did not yet know it – had arrived, and died, some eighteen months previously.

It was shortly after their arrival in the mouth of the Dvina that the painful news of the discovery, late the previous spring, of the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia, was passed to Richard Chancellor and his men.² News of the grim discovery travelled back to England with the crew of the Edward when the ship returned from Russia for the second time.

Soon after they arrived, in the autumn, the fate of Willoughby and his men dominated the conversation on the streets of London, as the sailors milked the limelight by relating the tales they had been told. In November that year the Venetian ambassador in England, Giovanni Michiel, reported back to his government that the mariners who had recently returned from the second voyage to Russia were telling graphic stories about the discovery of the corpses on board two of the first three ships.³ Any hopes still harboured by the company merchants, or by the friends and families of Willoughby, Durforth and those who had journeyed with them, that they had sailed on beyond Russia and discovered a passage to rich lands beyond, were suddenly and tragically shattered.

In Russia, word of the discovery had travelled quickly to Ivan’s court in Moscow. The Tsar himself was loyal to the promise he had made to Richard Chancellor. He treated Willoughby and his men well in death, as he had never had the chance to do in life. Orders were immediately sent to his appointed governor in the Dvina province, Prince Semen Ivanovich Mikulinsky-Punkov, as well as to elected officials in the region like Feofan Makarov, to have the two English ships sailed to Kholmogory where they could be kept secure until Chancellor returned from Moscow.⁴ Henry Lane wrote years later that George Killingworth, the merchant chosen to be the company’s first agent in the Russian capital, had sent a man to inspect the ships, ‘with the dead bodies of Sir Hugh Willoughby, and his people’.

A large part of the food supplies and the goods which the ships had contained, Lane wrote, ‘were recovered and saved’.⁵ The ‘effects and merchandise’, Michiel likewise reported at the time, had been found ‘all intact in the hands of the natives’, by which he presumably meant the Lapps. Mistakenly, he thought that the two ships had been sailed back to England with their goods that year, in 1555, though in reality there were not enough crew members on the Edward to sail two additional ships on the difficult voyage home. They had to wait until additional men could be brought the following year. Perhaps, though, some valuable goods were retrieved which were not considered saleable commodities in Russia, and these were shipped back to London that year.

 

 

Fifty-Five

Some months later, in November 1555, one of the men who was to work for the company as an agent in Russia sent a long letter back to England from the Russian capital.

At that time of year, any communication via the northern route had been closed off by the advance of the winter ice. Instead the letter was carried overland to the Baltic, for conveyance to England, by a merchant from Poland. The trader in question, whether Polish or a Baltic Hanseatic merchant, would not have looked favourably on the arrival of the English company. It is unlikely that he made a willing courier. But, as George Killingworth noted, he carried the letter at the commandment of the Tsar’s secretary and probably felt that he had no option.

The English were anxious to establish regular communication with Moscow through the Baltic so as to be able to send messages to their representatives in Russia at all times of the year, and Killingworth reported that he had sent word to contacts in Danzig. Letters from London sent this way, he had instructed, should be attached to anything for the Tsar’s secretary, who seemed well disposed to the English and could be relied upon to pass on correspondence.

Killingworth’s letter provides information about what happened after the Edward arrived back at the mouth of the Dvina.

Without the delays that had affected Chancellor and his men in the autumn of 1553, as they waited for permission to travel to the capital, the English merchants were able to make quick progress from the northern town of Kholmogory towards Moscow. As a result it was significantly earlier in the year when they did so, and the River Dvina, a ‘great inland highway’, remained unfrozen and open for water transport.¹ The English merchandise – a variety of goods that the merchants planned to try selling in Moscow and elsewhere – was loaded into the long, narrow boats which were used in Russia for river transport.

Years later Stephen Borough’s son described how goods were ‘discharged & laden into doshniks, that is, barks of the country’, before by ‘continual sailing, rowing, setting with poles, or drawing of men’, depending on the conditions of the wind and the river, they travelled south. The river from Kholmogory ran, as an English ambassador later wrote, ‘pleasant between high hills of either side’. For long stretches there was nothing but ‘a wilderness of high fir trees, and other wood’, but interspersed within were ‘pretty villages’ which, before winter smothered the landscape, seemed ‘well-situated for pasture, arable land, wood, and water’.

First they travelled to the mouth of the Sukhona, a tributary of the Dvina, and then up this waterway as far as the city of Vologda, a journey of about 600 miles in total.² All who had travelled onward from St Nicholas remained in good health, Killingworth reported, ‘save only William, our cook, [who] as we came from [Kholmogory] fell into the river out of the boat and was drowned’.

Without something to grab onto immediately, his chances of recovery were poor. Though not unknown, the ability to swim was little valued in Tudor England. Contact with the New World had meant increased awareness of others who could; but it remained sufficiently unusual for Cabot, who had spent much time in America, to have felt the need in his original instructions to warn of attacks by people that could swim. Even those who made a living on ships rarely learned the skill. Sometimes they were even superstitiously determined not to do so. Falling into the water, as a result, was all too frequently fatal.³

On 11 September the party reached Vologda, the city which had struck the English favourably during their first visit, as John Hasse, who does not seem to have been among the merchant contingent in 1555, had written in his report.

Hasse, no doubt, had formed his opinion in discussion with Chancellor among others, and certainly his advice was taken to heart, for at Vologda, as he had recommended, the English company planned to establish a trading station. Initial attempts to market their goods were not particularly successful. ‘We laid all our wares up’, Killingworth reported, but ‘sold very little’, though they did decline some offers on the grounds that they did not yet know their market and that most of the Russian merchants had not yet arrived.

There, at the end of September, the party planned to divide. Seven would remain. These included Richard Gray, who was to be the company agent in Vologda, along with Arthur Edwards, John Sedgewicke and Richard Johnson, all of whom had sailed on the Edward in 1553, as well as three others: Thomas Hattery, Christopher Hudson and Richard Good.⁴ Five, meanwhile, would continue their journey overland to Moscow.

There was Chancellor, of course, as overall Captain of the expedition, Killingworth himself who was to act as the company agent in the Russian capital, as well as Henry Lane, Edward Price and Robert Best. Of these five, only Richard Chancellor had certainly been to Moscow, and to the Kremlin, before. Edward Price may have sailed to Russia on the Edward Bonaventure in 1553 if, as some have assumed, the Edward Pacie listed among the ship’s crew was actually also Edward Price; but if so he was probably a teenager beginning his naval career and would have been unlikely to have travelled to Moscow. Henry Lane had not, but was already a reliable company servant and was promoted, within a couple of years, to be one of its agents in Russia. Robert Best had not either, but he too was a useful man to have in the party. He was physically imposing, described afterwards as a ‘strong willing Englishman’.⁵ When he was later put forward as the merchants’ champion for a trial by combat, his potential Russian opponent declined the opportunity to fight. And there was more to him than brawn, because he was also gifted at languages. He had already begun to pick up the Russian tongue. Within months, remarkably, he was sufficiently fluent to be employed by the company as an interpreter – albeit there was not an abundance of alternative candidates.⁶

The weather may have been unusually warm. Certainly Killingworth wrote that this was the case two months later: ‘men say’, he reported, ‘that these three hundred years was never so warm weather in this country at this time of the year’. Either way, it was too early to travel on to Moscow by sled, and they had not yet had the painful experience of attempting to travel long distances in Russia overland before the ground had frozen hard. Heedless, they loaded a portion of their wares into wagons, including the gifts that they had brought with them to present to Ivan.

Among these gifts were bags of sugar, still a great luxury in sixteenth-century Europe, particularly away from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, though production in the New World was increasing supply. They also had fine Spanish sweet wine. But the wheels, weighed down, sank into the mud and they made little progress before abandoning the attempt in frustration. ‘The way’, Killingworth wrote, was so deep that we were fain to turn back and leave [the goods] still at Vologda till the frost.’

Instead the five Englishmen hired post horses, along with guides, and they rode ahead until on 4 October they reached Moscow. Initially they were lodged in what they described as a ‘simple house’, small, wooden and bare of comforts. After Ivan’s secretary had sent for them, however, greeted them warmly at the Kremlin and taken from them the letter for Ivan they had brought from Queen Mary and King Philip, the Englishmen’s accommodation was upgraded. The Tsar, they were told, had commanded that they be well looked after.

Soon afterwards an imperial official arrived with two different types of mead, a pair of chickens and an assurance that no payment would be required for their more comfortable house. From then on a delivery arrived every two days: eight more chickens, additional supplies of mead and some Russian currency to cover any expenses. There was also a ‘poor fellow’ who was ordered to clean their house and to perform any tasks that they might require.

On the 9th a messenger called at their house. He told the men to be ready to meet the Tsar on the following day. He also returned the royal letter from Philip and Mary, which had been carefully studied and translated, so that they could deliver it to Ivan themselves.

 

 

Fifty-Six

On 10 November the five Englishmen were given a formal welcome at the Tsar’s court. They were brought to the Kremlin and, like the leading men of 1553, were led through a great chamber filled with cupboards of silverware to another in which around a hundred men, richly dressed, were seated on benches. They were ‘ancient grave personages’, as Henry Lane wrote later, dressed ‘all in long garments of sundry colours, gold, tissue, baldakin, and violet ... with caps, jewels, and chains’. The Englishmen again assumed them to be courtiers, but as Lane recalled, they later learned that they were actually ordinary inhabitants of Moscow, dressed by the royal wardrobe, ‘waiting and wearing this apparel for the time, and so to restore it’.¹

They came then to the audience chamber of the Tsar. In ‘a large room floored with carpets’ sat another hundred men, genuine courtiers this time, and more elaborately dressed still. As Chancellor and his four companions entered all rose to their feet, with the sole exception of Ivan himself, who remained seated on his throne.

In turn the Englishmen paid the Tsar their respects, bowing and kissing his hand. As Chancellor stepped forward he presented to the Tsar’s secretary the letter he had brought from his monarchs. King Edward, he informed the Russians regretfully, had, though young, died in the interim. The secretary and Ivan himself affected to read the letter.

In it, Philip and Mary – though primarily Mary – gave thanks to the Tsar for his initial generous reception of Richard Chancellor, ‘governor and great Captain’ of the Edward Bonaventure, which by the grace of God and ‘the good conduct of the said Chancellor’ had managed to arrive in the northern parts of his ‘Empire of Russia’. She had heard, she said, how Ivan had ‘entertained and banqueted them with all humanity and gentleness’, and she gratefully acknowledged his promise to permit English merchants and ambassadors free access to his realm. ‘We cannot’, she wrote, ‘but much commend your princely favour and goodness’, and she begged him to ‘continue the same benevolence toward them’.

Mary urged Ivan to appoint commissaries to negotiate with Chancellor, Killingworth and Gray (though Gray, of course, had remained in Vologda), and to confirm the liberties and privileges’ required by the English merchants. The same rights and freedoms, she promised him, would be extended to any Russian merchants who wished to travel to England.²

Ivan could not have missed the letter’s implication of major religious change in England. When Mary spoke of her ‘most dear and entirely beloved late brother’, it was with the added entreaty: ‘whose soul God pardon’. Russians were well aware of the fierce disputes which for decades had burned, often literally, in the lands of central and western Europe – though to them the beliefs of Protestants and Roman Catholics were equally heretical. Where Edward had thought best to mention God alone, since he did not know for whom he was writing, Mary concluded with an invocation of the Trinity: ‘thus right high, right Excellent, and right mighty, Almighty God the Father, the Son and the holy Ghost have you in his blessed keeping’.

This was a formulation which Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic could accept, since all three major Christian communities affirmed the Trinity. Nevertheless, it called to mind the major rift between Orthodox and Western Christians which, as Mary well knew, occurred over the procession of the Holy Spirit from either the Father alone, as the Orthodox had it, or from the Father and the Son, as Christians in the West insisted.³

If a deliberate dig was understood by Ivan and his councillors, no reference, certainly, was made. Speeches and responses were made through interpreters, at which Ivan, as was customary, asked after the health of the English Queen, whom he called his cousin. Having remained seated on his throne up to this point, the Tsar rose to his feet as a mark of respect, Lane remembered, whenever the King and Queen of England were mentioned. He then concluded the formal conversation, in the usual way, by inviting the men to dinner.

After a short wait, the five Englishmen dined in Ivan’s presence from gold platters. Again, cupboards displayed the fine royal collection of plate – some of the vessels as big as washbowls or ‘kilderkins’ (small barrels). The Tsar was [sat] bare headed, his crown and rich cap standing upon a pinnacle [close] by’. Ivan’s metropolitan was next to him, as were members of his family and chief Tartar nobles, though none were close enough to invade his royal space.

The Englishmen were led to a table of honour in the middle of the room, not far from the Tsar himself. The Russians referred to them as ‘Ghosti Carabelski’ – that is, the strangers or merchants who came by ship. At periodic intervals, Killingworth and Lane agreed, ‘his grace sent us meat and drink from his own table’, including ‘sundry drinks of purified mead, made of fine white and clarified honey’. As they delivered these offerings, the ‘Lords and Gentlemen’ serving pronounced the Englishmen’s Christian names: ‘viz. Richard, George, Henry, Arthur’.⁴

At the end of the meal each went individually to receive a cup of drink from Ivan directly. As Killingworth went up, Lane remembered, Ivan ‘took into his hand Master George Killingworth’s beard, which reached over the table’. The Tsar let it run through his hand in evident admiration, as well he might. The relevant statistics were well imprinted on the memory of Henry Lane. The growth, he attested years later, was ‘not only thick, broad, and yellow coloured, but in length five foot and two inches of assize’.

Shaving, in Russia, was frowned upon for mature men, and while the relatively young are sometimes portrayed with hairless faces, clerics and senior councillors are invariably not.

Among clerics, moreover, the practice was fiercely condemned for its purported association with wealth, spiritual and moral laxness and even with sodomy. For a man to have smooth cheeks, like a woman’s, was regarded as a dangerous incentive, and this was a crime for which it was feared that the whole community would pay the penalty, just as Sodom had done in biblical times.

Four years earlier, in fact, the matter had been one of those gravely discussed at a great Church council which Ivan had attended, and it was with a smile and a knowing wink, therefore, that the Tsar passed the end of Killingworth’s beard to the metropolitan sitting close to him. For the cleric it was no laughing matter. He remained deeply serious, and was duly impressed. He seemed, Lane thought, to bless the beard. And he uttered a simple Russian phrase which the Englishmen could understand. ‘This’, he said, ‘is God’s gift.’⁵

Later that night, lest they feel empty, or dry, high-ranking men arrived at their house with additional supplies of dressed meat, wine and mead.

 

 

Fifty-Seven

While in Moscow, the English met some Italian merchants, Italians being among those Europeans who had maintained regular contact with Moscow since the days when their architects had been summoned by Ivan’s grandfather to design important buildings in the Kremlin. These men warned the English to be on their guard. Be careful, they were told, that the detailed trading privileges they expected were not distorted when they were translated into the Russian language. Perhaps they were motivated by bad experience, perhaps purely by an anxiety to sow distrust.

Chancellor made this concern known to his hosts. In response, Ivan urged the Englishmen to write down what they expected, for him to see. He also asked them to note what type of goods they anticipated bringing to Russia. For Ivan, the terms on which the English merchants traded were not now his primary concern, and probably he was ingenuous enough.

We can’t be certain what was on the list the Englishmen provided, though a wide range of cloth goods no doubt was foremost.¹ In the ships the company sent less than two years later, there were carefully wrapped and protected packages of cloths – cottons, kerseys, watchets, in all manner of colours: scarlet, violet, blue, red, green, ginger and yellow, though the interest of English merchants in the techniques and materials that foreigners used for dying remained strong. ‘Send us for proof’, the governors wrote, ‘a quantity of such earth, herbs, or what thing soever it be, that the Russians do [use to] dye and colour any kind of cloth linen or woollen, Leather or any other thing withal: and also part of that which the Tartars and Turks do bring thither, and how it must be used in dying and colouring.’ There were also nine barrels of pewter goods, made by a man called Thomas Hasel.² This wasn’t a complete list, though; the four ships sent that year would have carried much more.

Some years later Richard Hakluyt produced a detailed catalogue for another man who had sailed as a boy with Chancellor in 1553, and who also went on to trade and explore in Russia. By this time English manufactures had diversified, but the list remains relevant and interesting. Among those ‘things to be carried with you’, to show off English commodities, Hakluyt included a wide variety of goods with names which recorded places of early manufacture as well as dyes, fabrics and styles of cloth.

There were kerseys ‘of all orient colours’: coarse cloths which were an English export staple, made originally in the Suffolk village of Kersey. There were red woollen cloths called Frizadoes. There were Says, Bristol Friezes, Spanish blankets and Rashes – all styles and types of cloth. There were Worsteds made from yarn whose name derived from the Norfolk village of Worstead. There were silk garters and taffeta hats, as well as a wide variety of goods made of leather or pewter.³

The samples the English crew had brought with them were sent to Ivan, on his request, so that he could inspect them. After an anxious wait he sent a favourable response, and concurred with Queen Mary’s suggestion that the English merchants should meet with their Moscow counterparts. With the Tsar’s encouragement a conference was duly arranged, and took place in the office of Ivan’s secretary.

A larger range of samples, Chancellor and his merchants assured their Russian counterparts, would have to wait until the first sleds arrived from Vologda.

Guarantees regarding prices would also need to wait: both until the goods themselves could be displayed, and until assurances were obtained regarding Russian weights and measures, which seemed to vary so much from place to place. The sleds bearing the English goods did presumably arrive soon afterwards, though the unseasonably warm weather delayed them longer than might have been expected.

At the time of writing, Killingworth noted, he had just received a letter from his colleague Christopher Hudson, who was bringing some of them, and who had made it as far as the city of Yaroslavl’ in the forested and gently rolling plain between Vologda and Moscow. Winter, however, had not set in as hard as Hudson had thought and he had been forced to wait. Nor was he the only one struggling in the slushy conditions. Hudson wrote in his letter that he had earlier entrusted part of the Tsar’s present with a gentleman at Vologda, who had agreed to take it to the capital. Unfortunately the runners of this man’s sled had become stuck, causing the whole contraption to capsize. In the crash, he reported, ‘the butt of Hollock [that is, the Spanish wine] was lost, which made us all very sorry’.

The English and Russian merchants also discussed, along with Ivan’s officials, where the English should base their trading operation. The matter was left open, though both Kholmogory and Vologda were thought likely possibilities: probably, Killingworth thought, ‘we shall have need of one house at [Kholmogory] and another at Vologda. This at least would give the English a chance to test the water. ‘And thus’, he wrote, ‘may we continue three or four years, and in this space we shall know the country and the merchants, and which way to save ourselves best, and where to plant our houses, and where to seek for wares.’ He was optimistic that they would soon obtain the written privileges they hoped for – but did not go into detail regarding company plans in what was an insecure communication sent via a rival merchant. In any case, he did not need to: ‘you know’, he wrote, ‘what I mean’.

In the meantime, Killingworth assured the directors in London that he would continue to explore the country. As soon as his companions had departed to sail back to England, he told them, ‘I do intend to go to Novgorod and Plesco ... and such wares as are there I trust to buy part’.⁴ The company, he said, should have another ship ready to depart in April from the coast of England. ‘Fear you not,’ he reassured his employers, ‘we will do that may be done, if God send us health.’ He concluded his letter with a send-off which then, as now, justified any gaps or imperfections and testified to his dedication on the company’s behalf: ‘Written in haste, by yours to command, George Killingworth, Draper.’

Negotiation was slower than it might have been because of Ivan’s personal authority. ‘All matters pass his judgement,’ Anthony Jenkinson observed soon afterwards, ‘be they never so small.’⁵ His attention was also, that winter, elsewhere.

Although he invested in trade himself, Ivan always considered purely commercial matters as inferior to the business of war and government. ‘We know that Merchants’ matters are to be heard,’ he later told Jenkinson, ‘for that they are the stay of our Princely treasures: But first Princes’ affairs are to be established, and then Merchants’.’⁶ In the autumn of 1555 he was particularly distracted, and this delayed any response to the English requests. ‘His grace is so troubled with preparations to wars’, Killingworth reported, ‘that as yet we have no answer.’

The year before Chancellor’s first visit, after years of unrest on his south-eastern border, Ivan’s forces had conquered the khanate of Kazan – which obstructed possible trade flowing from Russia to the Middle East via the Caspian Sea. (In the market square outside the Kremlin, building work continued on the Cathedral of the Holy Veil – St Basil’s, as it would become known – which was created to celebrate this victory.) Since then, major revolts had had to be suppressed. Muslims were evicted from the city of Kazan itself, and Russian Orthodox colonists moved in to take their place. That year, furthermore, in 1555 an army under the Khan of the Crimea had invaded Russia and come close to winning a significant victory.⁷

Now Derbysh-Ali, the man installed with Russian help as Khan of Astrakhan – another successor state of the Mongol horde near the southern outflow of the River Volga into the Caspian – had turned against his backers.⁸ With the help of the Turks, who had a strong interest in preventing Russia emerging as a major power in Central Asia and the Middle East, he had attacked Russian troops in the region where the Don and Volga rivers drew close to one another before parting once more. Here too outright conquest seemed the only course of action.

The decisive campaign which would make Ivan the direct ruler over Astrakhan as well as Kazan, reinforcing his claim to imperial status (and furthering the development of Russia as a multicultural, multi-ethnic state, in spite of Ivan’s religiosity) would take place the following year, and preparations were already under way. In the snow-covered fields outside Moscow the new streltsy musketeer units, which had made an impact in Kazan, were mustered for action once more, as were the Russian cavalry, steam rising in the cold air from the flanks and mouths of many thousands of horses.

Ivan himself prepared to travel south with his army in the early spring, as Richard Chancellor and those members of the English party who were not remaining in Russia made their way back to the White Sea to meet the returning English ships.

When Chancellor took his leave and departed Moscow, he took with him the formal charter of privileges for which their company had hoped. Hakluyt records what he claims to be a translation of the document. Some historians have felt that the rights it enshrines are too good to be true, and that what it actually represents are the rights requested by the company from the Tsar (which he had urged the Englishmen to write down).

Given Ivan’s delight at the English arrival for non-mercantile reasons, and the great favour he showed the Muscovy Company for some while afterwards, this alone may not be a cause for doubt. Subsequent privileges, certainly authentic, are scarcely less favourable. Elements like the hymn to trade and its promotion of amity between nations do certainly echo the text of Edward’s original letter. Other phrases sound less like an English draft, though they could have been. ‘Upon the contemplation, the document declares, ‘of the gracious letters, directed from the right high, right excellent, and right mighty Queen Mary’

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a Russian historian who worked in the English archives professed to have found an English translation of the original document, and published these terms in Russian, though the manuscript he found has never subsequently been traced.⁹ There are significant differences between the two versions. Only the one provided by Hakluyt offers the company’s chief agent authority over all Englishmen in Russia. The alternative version, meanwhile, is alone in specifying that a house in Moscow, ‘not far from the market place’, is to be provided to the company tax-free, and that the English merchants should also have the right to buy houses in Vologda and Kholmogory and to build a warehouse ‘where they find a suitable wharf for their goods’.

Fundamentally, though, both versions of the document show that the company obtained what it most wanted. It could trade freely throughout Russia, not just in Moscow or on the White Sea coast, entirely free of tolls and duties. It would have an effective monopoly of English trade in the country, while full legal protection of property and person would be guaranteed by the Tsar.¹⁰

While Chancellor and his compatriots had been in Moscow this time, the Edward had not waited in the White Sea but sailed back to London. In the early summer of 1556 she returned, with the Philip and Mary, bringing both further English goods for the company agents to sell and also a large number of additional sailors.

These men were on board in order to bring the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia back to England. The two ill-fated ships were due now to return to London, three years after their initial departure. Among the cargo the small fleet was to take home was the dead body of Sir Hugh Willoughby.¹¹

With the crew of the Edward was the elder of Richard Chancellor’s two sons, who had reached his early teens. His father had taken care that he was well educated, and he was old enough now to be apprenticed as a junior sailor – the first step in any career at sea. He hoped to follow in his father’s illustrious footsteps.¹²

Further instructions had been provided by the company board. Primarily, though, these were practical guidelines, intended as a permanent rule book, for pursers in particular, who were in charge of the goods transported on company voyages. Once again they demonstrate the self-interested behaviour that was expected of sailors and merchants not used to company employment.

Repeatedly the purser was urged to take measures against the private conveyance of goods or people on board company ships. A register should be taken to ensure that no stranger passed ‘under the cloak and colour of some mariner’. Careful inventories should be kept of company equipment on board ship, and company goods. Goods should be registered as they were loaded and unloaded. The purser was to keep a diligent watch over all his colleagues, no matter what their status, and was not, evidently, to think much of making friends:

... ashore, and likewise aboard, you shall spy, and search as secretly as you may, to learn and know what bargaining, buying, and selling there is with the master and mariners of the ship, and the Russians, or with the company’s servants there; and that which you shall perceive and learn you shall keep a note thereof in your book, secretly to yourself, which you shall open and disclose at your coming home, to the governors and the assistants ... You shall need always to have Argus’ eyes, to spy their secret packing and conveyance, as well on land as aboard the ship ...

Along with that of the company hierarchy in London, the only good opinion he should seek was that of God, whose approval would work to everyone’s advantage.

‘See that you forget not daily in all the voyage, both morning and evening, to call the company within board to prayer,’ he was reminded. By doing so, you shall please God, and the voyage will have the better success thereby and the company prosper the better’.

 

 

Fifty-Eight

On 20 July 1556, the four ships departed from St Nicholas.¹ There was the Philip and Mary, and with it sailed all of the ships from the original expedition organised by Cabot three years earlier: the Edward Bonaventure, the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia. It was a strange experience for the officers and crew who were given the task of manning the last two, knowing the fate of the Englishmen who had sailed in them, and died in them, just over two years previously.

On one of the ships, it has been claimed, the body of Sir Hugh Willoughby was loaded. Even in a coffin the smell of decomposition would have been strong, now that the temperature had lifted above freezing for a second summer. If he was to be returned to England for a proper Christian burial, the rite would now have been Catholic, not Protestant as he might have expected.

Also packed into the holds of the ships were quantities of merchandise bought in Russia for the company to sell in England: wax, train oil, tallow, furs, felts, yarn ‘and such-like’. On board the Edward alone there were goods worth £20,000 (worth around £5 million today), some of which were owned not by the company but by a party of Russians who joined the English merchants and crew and who were anxious to take the opportunity to make a profit. On the Bona Esperanza £6,000 worth of goods were carried, while it is known that the Philip and Mary shipped over £4,000 worth of wax, entered in the London customs accounts on arrival in the name of Sebastian Cabot.²

Embarking with Chancellor and his crew was a Russian aristocrat named Osip (or Joseph, as the English called him) Napea: an important man who was governor of the city of Vologda and its surrounding region, and who had been charged by Ivan with leading an embassy to the English court.

With him, and carefully packed into the hold, he brought gifts for King Philip and Queen Mary. There were fine skins and furs, including ‘twenty entire sables exceeding beautiful with teeth, ears, and claws’, and skins so rich and rare they were worn only by the Emperor’. He also brought four live sables, each with its own collar and chain, and a white gyrfalcon – a bird which was rare and difficult to catch and which had, in consequence, often been considered exclusively royal and a suitable gift for one monarch to bestow upon another. It was the greatest of the falcon family, used to catch large wild birds such as geese, swans or herons. It travelled now with ‘a drum of silver, the hoops gilt, used for a lure to call the said hawk’.

Travelling with Napea on the Edward, with Chancellor as grand pilot and John Buckland as master, were sixteen other Russians. Nine of them, whose names Hakluyt provides, went purely to attend upon the ambassador and to provide him with an entourage appropriate to his standing. The Englishman Robert Best had travelled with this party from Vologda as their interpreter.³ The other Russians on the Edward were presumably merchants.

Ten more, meanwhile, were among the twenty-four men who embarked from St Nicholas on the Bona Esperanza. Among them was Feofan Makarov, the ‘elected’ chief magistrate of Kholmogory, who had dealt with the English since their first arrival in 1553.

Many, if not all, of the Russians who boarded the English ships had never sailed on the open sea before.

Initially the voyage proceeded according to plan. ‘God sending you a fair wind’, the instructions of 1556 had predicted optimistically, ‘to make speed and away’ And so, at first, He did. The ships, the company clerk John Incent later reported, came ‘in good order into the seas’.

After rounding the North Cape safely the flotilla passed the Lofoten island chain, and sailed down much of the western coast of Norway. Then – suddenly – the weather deteriorated. The skies darkened. The wind picked up. In Sebastian Cabot’s first book of instructions an understandable emphasis had been placed upon the ships of the company remaining together, but since the events of the first voyage, this was even more the case. Such good intentions, though, counted for little against the vagaries of the elements. Once again conditions became impossible. ‘By contrary winds and extreme tempest of weather’, Incent wrote, the ships were ‘severed the one from the other’.

Again Chancellor’s remarkable seamanship was apparent, as the Edward alone escaped being driven helplessly by the wind towards the Norwegian coast. The other three ships, the Philip and Mary, the Bona Confidentia and the Bona Esperanza, disappeared from view into a large gulf known to the English as ‘Drenton Water’, near the city of Trondheim (Drontheim, or Drenton), where shelter might be sought from the strong winds which now, as often, battered the western Scandinavian seaboard.

Once again Chancellor had the experience of watching his fellow ships vanish into the mist as the waves thundered across his decks, off this fragmented coast. He and the mariners on the Edward looked on aghast as, before they passed entirely from view, the ill-fated Confidentia was hurled headlong into rocks which reared up from the water. There was nothing anyone could do to help. The ship immediately foundered, and all on board were thrown or dragged down to their deaths.

The Bona Esperanza, with its deputation of Russian merchants, was assumed to have sought shelter within the gulf and to have wintered there on the Norwegian coast. It too, however, was damaged and sunk by the weather before it reached safety. What exactly became of it was never discovered. The ship on which Sir Hugh Willoughby and all his men had died in the early months of 1554 disappeared without trace, claiming further lives – including that of Feofan Makarov, the senior official in Kholmogory, who had little thought to meet his end in a shipwreck off southern Norway. ‘Of the Bona [Esperanza]’, Incent wrote in May 1557, ‘no word nor knowledge was had at this present day’. ‘As yet we have no news of her’, the company informed their agents in Russia in the same month. But they were not hopeful. ‘We fear’, they wrote, that ‘it is wrong with her’.⁴

Neither the Bona Esperanza nor the Bona Confidentia, feared lost in 1554, then rediscovered the following year, was ever to make it back to London. After two years spent wintering on the coast of Lapland they may not have been in a seaworthy condition. They were not designed, as were the smaller boats of the Russian north, to be pushed upwards by a freezing sea and so to avoid the intense pressure that ice could impart. Becoming ‘as is supposed, unstaunch’, as Henry Lane later wrote, they sunk ‘in foul weather, and wrought seas’. As well as their English crews, they took with them into the waves those Russian merchants and servants of the ambassador who had been chosen to sail in them.⁵

The Philip and Mary, at least, did manage to reach a safe harbour within the gulf. No word of her reached London for some months, and she too had been given up for lost when, in mid-April the following year, she appeared suddenly in the Thames estuary. ‘The Philip and Mary arrived here ten days past,’ the company wrote in relief to its agents; ‘she wintered in Norway.’

Under the captaincy of Chancellor and Buckland, the Edward did manage to remain at sea even as the waves and the gales threw and pummelled her. But she was blown badly off-course, and even after the storm had abated, unfavourable winds continued to defy her attempts to make progress back towards England. For months, Incent wrote, she traversed the sea before eventually finding her way onto a remote strip of coastal Aberdeenshire.

Here, on 10 November, she dropped anchor in a harbour at Pitsligo, on the south-eastern corner of the Moray Firth. To the English, of course, Scotland was a foreign country; and this, though not the Highlands, where the authority even of the Scottish government barely ran, was a long way from its capital in Edinburgh.

Chancellor and his men had reached, even so, the island mass that they called home and they must have felt that they were now close at last.

The danger from the elements and from the seasons was not over. Winter was quickly setting in. The Englishmen had descended from higher latitudes, but the weather in northern Scotland was bad enough. Pitsligo Bay, where they lay at anchor, was only a shallow inlet on a flat, rocky coastline which lay exposed to the North Sea.

As the sky grew black again and another storm swept in, the men were forced once more to lie prone below deck, praying that the anchor lines would hold, as their ship was violently thrown by the water. In their darkened cages the martens ran and fell frantically and the hawk flapped its wings in terror, unable to find a perch that did not reel and plunge. Above the noise of the wind the sharp crack could barely be heard as the rope which secured the ship’s anchor snapped or broke loose under the strain.

There were shouts of panic from on deck as crewmen on watch realised what had happened, but there was little that could be done. The wind blew hard towards the shore and high, foaming waves crashed in the same direction, beating the ship before them. Chancellor and Buckland yelled instructions through the noise of the storm as the crew tried desperately to steer the Edward towards the safety of the open sea, but they could not manage it. A sudden jolt hurled men to the deck, immediately followed by a hideous, tearing crash as they hit the rocks close to the shore. A hole was ripped in the wooden ship’s flank and water rushed in, causing the Edward to lean dangerously.

Unable to save his ship, Chancellor ordered that its small boat be launched on which he could try to protect the ambassador by getting him, along with some of his train, to shore. Their faces wet with spray and riven with fear, Napea himself and seven other Russian attendants managed to climb, or fall, into the boat alongside Chancellor, Buckland and a few other Englishmen. As they cast off, the Edward was dashed once more into the rocks, ‘where she broke and split in pieces’.

With oars and poles the men tried frantically to drive their boat towards a beach where they could land, but their light craft was thrown more easily still by the water and there was little they could do to guide it. Like driftwood they rode and plunged through the foam, as the dreadful noise of the wind and the sea screamed in their ears. Already, by early afternoon, the sky was blackening further as night fell, and the men struggled to make out the shoreline.

Suddenly, just as they began to get near, a great wave flipped their boat over and they were plunged into the water, flailing and gasping desperately for breath. Napea himself was lucky. He was thrown by the waves onto a sandy stretch of shore where he was able, perhaps with help, to scramble to safety.

A few more occupants of the boat, ‘by God’s preservation and special favour’, were spared. Among them were the captain, John Buckland, and Robert Best, the rugged Englishman who had remained with the ambassador to act as his interpreter. Cold, bruised and shaken, they were ‘with much difficulty saved’. In their different ways, they gave thanks to a God they believed had chosen them, for His own inscrutable purposes, to survive.

Others were less fortunate. A number of the Russians who were sailing at sea for the first time died. The majority of the English officers and crew who had remained on the Edward as it splintered and broke up were dragged beneath the water and also drowned, if they were not first dashed against the rocks. Richard Chancellor, the grand pilot who had led his country’s first great exploratory trading venture, who had embraced a scientific mode of thought and study which still seems startlingly modern, and who combined this intellectual leaning with practical seamanship and with loyalty and bravery towards those who sailed with him, was also drowned.

Among the crew who died with him was a young boy who was sailing for the first time as an apprentice on a long-distance voyage: Chancellor’s son, the elder of the two boys their father had worried to leave behind in 1553. Like other young men on board, and like so many in a dangerous profession, he was killed before he had a chance to learn his family trade. We do not even know his name.

A letter written by the company to its agents still in Russia lamented the ‘heavy news of the loss of the said good ship and goods at [Pitsligo] in Scotland, with the death of Richard Chancellor and his Boy’.⁶ Nicholas, Richard’s younger son who had stayed behind, had already lost his mother. He was now bereaved too of the father who had been such an influence in his life, as well as his elder brother, and was left alone.

 

 

Fifty-Nine

On 6 December 1556, nearly a month after it happened, news of the wreck of the Edward on the Scottish coast arrived by urgent letter in London, along with letters and papers that had been saved and which were of little interest to the local Scots. Leading members of the company read and reread the information with dismay. It was then that they certainly knew, Incent wrote, ‘of the loss of their pilot, men, goods, and ship’.

In most such incidents, the attentions of the local community were barely less to be feared than the actions of wind and waves. Wrecking is a myth, but a small society living on the edge of subsistence was quick to seize on what seemed a providential opportunity, and a ship packed with valuable commodities, beached or broken open on a rocky coast, was certainly this. Surviving goods belonging to the company, and to the Russian ambassadorial party, were taken, and so too was anything else of value – the artillery, weapons, ammunition, food supplies, chains, ropes, sails, or any part of the furniture and equipment of the ship. No official response could arrive fast enough to intervene. ‘All [the Ambassador’s] goods and ours ...’, the company lamented to its agents in Russia, ‘were lost and pilfered away by the Scots.’¹

Efforts to decipher the trading records and letters rescued from the Edward proved unavailing. To the governors’ regret, they were ‘so sore spoiled and broken with water’ that ‘we cannot make our reckoning by them’.² Richard Chancellor’s own account of his further time in Russia, and the logbook he must have kept of the voyages, were lost, along with the man himself who, more than any other individual, represented the company’s hope for establishing a lucrative English commerce beyond the traditional channels.

About such vagaries of fate nothing could be done. No insurance policy existed. There was ‘no remedy but patience’, the company wrote, ‘and to pray to God to send us better fortune hereafter’.

The leading men in London knew, all the same, that there were a few survivors, including the ambassador from Russia himself, and that their transport to London needed to be arranged. Relations between the English and Scottish governments were tense and unfriendly, but not (for now) actively belligerent. In December 1556 letters from Queen Mary were carried north by representatives of the company to her counterpart, the widowed Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise.

In Edinburgh the Englishmen were favourably received, and there they met Napea and those others, like the captain John Buckland and the interpreter Robert Best, who had escaped the wreck. Efforts to retrieve goods and furniture from the Scottish population in Pitsligo proved largely unavailing. Even an order from the government in Edinburgh to return stolen material met only sullen silence and denial.

Gradually, ‘after a long time’ and after ‘great labours, pains, and charges’, insignificant offerings began to appear. ‘Diverse small parcels of wax, and other small trifling things of no value’ were handed in ‘by the poorer sort of the Scots.’ But the more substantial, expensive items remained elusive: the ‘jewels, rich apparel, presents, gold, silver, costly furs, and such-like, were conveyed away, concealed, and utterly embezzled’.

In frustration, the ambassador complained to the Scottish government, surprised at the difficulty a monarch could have in making her will felt in a small country. At his request, numerous inhabitants of Pitsligo were summoned to the court at Edinburgh. Some further items did slowly appear as a result, but Napea grew exasperated, disillusioned and anxious to leave. Representatives of the English company were left to pursue the return of the goods, though largely for form’s sake; the quantity saved, as leading members later admitted, would ‘scant pay the charges for the recovering of it’.

Napea himself, meanwhile, was escorted across the border into England and then along the Old North Road to London. Outside the capital the party was met by a large delegation of merchants, formally dressed ‘in coats of fine cloth bordered with velvet and with fringe of silk and chains of gold’.³ Entertainments were arranged and sports laid on for the ambassador’s interest, including men on horseback, with large packs of dogs, hunting a fox in the traditional, aristocratic manner.

The party continued to swell, with lavishly dressed groups arriving to meet them on behalf of both the civic government and the English Queen.

 

 

Sixty

At the city gates Napea was welcomed by the Lord Mayor, accompanied by all his aldermen in their ceremonial scarlet clothing, and together the unwieldy group pressed through the narrow city streets – cobbled but smelling richly of the human and animal waste piled and smeared across the stones in every corner.

Everywhere the noise was so great that men in the party found it hard to converse, though the Russians were naturally intrigued. Above the general tumult of the city – the yells and cries, the coach wheels on hard stone, the whinnies, grunts and squawks of animals – inquisitive men, women and children cheered and shouted as they glimpsed the man they called the ‘Duke of Muscovy’. Increasingly, the streets were densely packed, as migrants pressed into the city in search of work. Down side streets and alleys buildings leaned across, high over the road, almost touching the building opposite. Vastly more people – perhaps 90,000 – were congregated here than in other settlements in the land. And for many this ceremonial procession was the centre of attention. With Londoners ‘running plentifully on all sides’, it was hard for the embassy to progress.

Napea himself, in his ‘garment of tissue embroidered with pearls and stones’, was sandwiched by the Lord Mayor on one side and by the young but conservative Viscount Montagu (in favour with the Catholic Mary) on the other. Pushing forward in front of them, making a path through the crowd, were ‘a great number of merchants and notable personages’, while they were followed by ‘a large troop of servants and apprentices’, along with the hundreds of others who already made up the party. Among them were the nine Russian attendants who had survived the shipwreck of the Edward with Napea, wearing the splendid clothes they had been given since their own possessions had been lost: ‘coarse cloth of gold down to the calf of the leg (like gowns) and high coping capes’.¹

Napea was escorted to a fine house in Fenchurch Street, in the east of the city, which belonged to John Dymocke, a leading member of the company. Two rooms were done up for the ambassador’s use, ‘richly hung and decked over and above the gallant furniture of the whole house’. At the order of the Privy Council, a lavish ‘bed of estate’ was delivered for Napea to use, along with other furniture and hangings. The government also sent to the royal jewel house, requesting the loan of two pairs of ‘great silver pots’, to adorn an ‘ample and rich cupboard of plate of all sorts’.² Presents awaited him from Queen Mary: samples of the finest cloths, of gold, velvet and damask, with which Napea declared himself well pleased. Even the nightcap provided for him was ‘set with pearls and stones’.³

There was no denying the unusual enthusiasm of the welcome Napea received in the capital. The like of it, the company later assured its agents, ‘have not been seen nor shown here of a long time to any Ambassador’.⁴ The London merchants, the Venetian envoy reported, ‘greatly favour the Muscovite, because they expect through his medium to enrich themselves, by commencing a trade in those parts’. Greater honour, he commented, ‘could not be done to the greatest sovereign’.⁵

From the outset Napea was kept busy by frequent visits, from city aldermen and senior merchants of the company, though he was not immediately able to visit the court.

The public backing Mary had received at the time of her coronation had collapsed. Numerous heretics had remained steadfast to the end, refusing to recant their views, and were often acclaimed rather than vilified by the crowds who gathered to watch them burn. In 1556 the Venetian ambassador had written of ‘the ill-will of the majority of the population here’ on account of religion. One conspiracy was quashed in the spring of 1556, but fears of another remained.

The Queen herself was depressed and anxious. Looking wan and old beyond her years, she waited, at times rather desperately, for the return of her husband, King Philip, who was campaigning in Flanders – though Parliament refused to contemplate her dream that he should be crowned in his own right.⁶ In his ‘beautiful lodging’ Napea waited and entertained civic dignitaries, until word arrived that in the late afternoon of 20 March King Philip had returned. On the 23rd there was a great celebration in London as Mary and her husband, with a column of their nobles and retainers, rode through the capital.

Then finally, two days later, the Russian ambassador was rowed upriver with a party of great merchants to pay his formal respects to the joint monarchs at Westminster Palace.⁷ Here Napea was on more familiar terrain. He was led into a richly decorated chamber where Philip and Mary waited, seated on twin thrones, beneath cloths of estate. He delivered Ivan’s greeting, his speech in Russian being translated into both English and Spanish, since King Philip had not learned English.

This audience was purely formal. Two days later, Napea was paid a secret visit at his lodging by two royal Councillors – the diplomat (and Bishop of Ely) Thomas Thirlby, and the suave and adroitly non-committal Sir William Petre, an investor in the Muscovy Company, who managed to serve Henry, Edward, Mary and then Elizabeth, with an intervening declaration of loyalty to Jane Grey, without ever suffering imprisonment or disgrace.

This was the negotiation which Ivan IV had been angling for ever since the English had first arrived at his northern shore. To his frustration, his early suggestion to Richard Chancellor that King Edward send a member of his Privy Council to talk with him had not been taken up. But by sending Napea to England, a high-level diplomatic discussion was made possible. Now, finally, Napea could raise Ivan’s particular interest regarding the new northern sea route to England: not the exchange of trade goods, but the supply of materials and skilled individuals to assist in his conflicts both with the Muslim khans to his south and with the European states to his west and north-west.

This, certainly, is what agitated certain European courts, as their diplomats and spies sent back anxious letters about the visit of the Russian ambassador. Few worried that England had discovered a bountiful new source of wealth. Russia was not Cathay, and few believed it was. The fear was rather the other way around: that Russia might thereby have discovered a means of obtaining financial, commercial and military support that she had hitherto been denied.

In Moscow, from the start, Polish and other merchants were ordered to disrupt relations between the Tsar and the English. In July 1555, almost three months after the company’s second voyage had left London, the Venetian ambassador in England reported an attempt by his Polish counterpart to influence the English government – who received, or thought he had, the assurance for which he asked:

... it having been promised him that for the future not only should this new Muscovite navigation not be permitted, but be forbidden under heavy penalties, the exportation hence to those parts of any sort of arms or military engine, in order that the Duke of Muscovy, who is always at war with his King, may not be able to avail himself of such instruments against him, which would have been much to his detriment.⁸

This promise, plainly, was disingenuous. Only a few months earlier Queen Mary had issued the charter of incorporation for which the company had been waiting, explicitly permitting trade with Muscovy as with other realms, and making no conditions about the nature of goods which could be exported.

With Napea’s visit to London, concern grew among foreign observers who never doubted the Russian’s intentions. ‘There is now here an ambassador from the Muscovites’, reported the new Venetian ambassador on 3 April, ‘who demands a loan of ammunition and artillery, his lord being at war.’ Immediately, he reported, a response had been provoked: ‘another ambassador arrived from the King of Sweden, to prevent the grant of this demand, protesting that it would cause a rupture between his King and this Crown’.⁹

Whatever assurances were given to the representatives of other nations, the noises made to Napea himself, in his conversation with Thirlby and Petre, seem to have been wholly positive. In the formal letter to Ivan which the ambassador took back with him from Philip and Mary, no explicit reference was made to the supply of munitions. But it did state that all of Ivan’s requests had been granted, and assured him that English ‘artificers’ – those skilled, for instance, in the manufacture of ships or guns – would be free to travel to Russia.¹⁰

From those states on the Baltic which feared that England might support Russia, a serious pre-emptive threat to English ships was anticipated, and one, evidently, had been promised. The instructions issued to the ships which took Napea back to Russia in the spring of 1557 cautioned against stopping at the Wardhouse, lest any:

... treachery, invasion, or other peril of molestation be done or procured to be attempted to our ships by any kings, princes, or companies, that do dislike this new found trade by seas to Russia, or would let & hinder the same: whereof no small boast hath been made: which giveth occasion of more circumspection and diligence.¹¹

The following spring a company employee named Thomas Alcock was imprisoned in Poland en route home by land from Russia. His possessions were seized and searched, his money taken, and he was questioned at length about the goods his company had supplied to Russia. ‘Thousands of ordnance’, it was charged, had been shipped, ‘as also of harnesses, swords, with other munitions of war, artificers, copper, with many other things’. Alcock denied it, but his claim that the only thing of military value provided was some outmoded chain mail was given little credence. Ambassadors from Danzig, Lübeck, Hamburg and Liefland (Livonia) united to persuade the Polish King to lead a naval expedition to prevent company ships sailing from England in future.¹²

Under Queen Mary, however, as well as under her successor Elizabeth, Tsar Ivan had found in England a willing source of military goods and expertise. Further entreaties from the Emperor (now Charles V’s brother, Ferdinand) soon afterwards about the ‘calamity’ of allowing Russia to conquer the Livonian Confederation, dominated by a branch of the German ‘Teutonic Knights’, and which formed ‘a sort of bulwark’ for European states, were ignored.¹³

When Livonia did duly fall to Ivan soon afterwards, the English ambassador in Antwerp reported the word among the princes of Germany. They put it down entirely, he wrote, to ‘the furniture of ammunition which the English sent to the Russians’.¹⁴

What general picture of England did Napea take back to the Russian court?

Perhaps the climate struck him as preferable. The winter in England (or in Scotland for that matter) was certainly nothing like it was in Russia, and he stayed long enough for early spring to bring a moderate temperature. In a report written the same month that Napea departed, the retiring ambassador from Venice, Giovanni Michiel, acclaimed the country’s ‘very temperate climate’. But this was no Eden, and Napea certainly had the chance to see as much.

Persistent wet weather – ‘the greatest rain and floods that ever was seen in England’ – had led to crop failures for the two preceding years, and with them came starvation and disease, a sign, for later writers, that God disapproved of the government’s Catholic policies.¹⁵ Widespread ‘spotted’ or ‘great burning fevers’, caused by famine or typhus, weakened immunity, and later that summer, and again the following year, an influenza epidemic took a terrible toll. Across the country from 1556 the rising death rate is reflected in a vast increase in the proving of wills.¹⁶

In England, Napea found a society scarcely less governed and shaped than was Russia by the Christian religion. It was practised here in a slightly different form, but the Russian attended numerous services and diplomatically declared his approval. He visited the revived monastery at Westminster Abbey to hear Mass, to dine with the abbot and to visit the tomb there of Edward the Confessor.¹⁷ He took part in the celebrations and religious services for St George’s Day (a saint whom, as a Russian, he revered no less than the English). He was in London over the Easter period, at a time when a return to old-fashioned devotional practices was encouraged, while other traditions continued, such as the series of public sermons given in the capital. On Easter Monday, some 20,000 people, including the Lord Mayor and the city aldermen, were said to have attended the ‘sermon of old custom’ at St Mary Spital, and Napea, very likely, was an honoured guest.

His impression could scarcely have been of a much less violent society. While he was resident in London not only were five heretics burned to death outside the city walls, watched by a great (and largely sympathetic) crowd, but eight ‘felons’ were hanged at Tyburn on 6 April, while on the same day seven men suffered the traditional penalty for piracy, hanged ‘at the low watermark at Wapping ... for robbing on the sea’, their corpses left suspended to be washed over by the incoming tide. Richard Chancellor, it should be remembered, had been struck by the relative clemency of the penal system in Russia. During Napea’s final weeks in London a man named Thomas Stafford landed in the north, seized Scarborough Castle and proclaimed a rebellion against Mary’s rule. On 30 April his capture was announced in London, and men of the city talked, no doubt, of little else. It was a few weeks after Napea left that he was beheaded on Tower Hill, quartered and hanged from a cart, ‘and so’, the diarist Henry Machyn jotted routinely, ‘to Newgate to boil’.¹⁸

Preparations for war, moreover, were in evidence for Napea to see, just as they had been for Chancellor in Moscow a year earlier. For some time rumours of a new conflict with France had been gaining ground. Back in November 1555 the Venetian ambassador had reported that noblemen were cautiously stockpiling ‘tents, pavilions, and similar military requisites’.¹⁹ As the struggle between France and the Habsburg territories of Mary’s husband Philip escalated, the royal couple exerted pressure on a reluctant English Council to get involved. In the early months of 1557 ships were refitted, and troops were mustered, under standards which combined the symbols of England and Castile.²⁰ While Napea was in London furious exchanges were taking place between Mary and her obstinate Councillors, who insisted that England was in no fit state to embark on a land war.

It was a month after Napea left when the war was finally declared which would lead to the demoralising loss of the last of England’s territories on the European mainland: Calais.²¹

There was much about England, then, that was familiar, or at least readily comprehensible, to the visiting Russian. Among significant differences, though, was the nature of the city in which he temporarily resided. He might not have told Ivan as much, but the English capital plainly cherished its independence far more than Moscow did, and life there revolved much less around the monarch. The Venetian ambassador’s report in May 1557 noted the way in which elected city aldermen ruled London ‘almost like a Republic, neither the King nor his ministers interfering in any way’, while the nobility ‘all live in the country remote from the city’.²²

The Russian ambassador was treated to a great deal of hospitality in the city which involved neither the monarchs nor the court. Merchants and aldermen came to call on him, and he was invited to dine with the Mayor and at ‘diverse worshipful men’s houses’. They showed him the sights of London. Some of them – ‘the King’s Palace and house, the Churches of Westminster and Paul’s, the Tower’ – would have seemed familiar enough in their basic purpose, while others, like the Guild Hall, or the Drapers’ Hall, spoke of a civic, independent life which barely existed in Moscow.²³

Merchants of the Muscovy Company continued to treat Napea lavishly throughout his stay. When he left, it was at Draper’s Hall – home, prior to his fall from grace, of Thomas Cromwell – that they laid on a parting dinner for him. By the flickering light of countless candles, a cup of wine was raised and drunk to him on behalf of the company. An offer was made to cover all the expenses he had incurred since his ship was wrecked on the Scottish coast: ‘a testimony and witness of their good hearts, zeal, and tenderness towards him and his country’.

In private, though, the merchants of the Muscovy Company had grown less than enamoured of their guest. Having liked him at first, they came to find him secretive and untrustworthy. A letter sent by the company’s leading men to their agents in Russia declared that they did ‘not find the Ambassador now at the last so conformable to reason as we had thought we should’. He is, they wrote, ‘very mistrustful, and thinks every man will beguile him’. Assumptions were made about Russians in general, and instructions were modified accordingly:

... you had need to take heed how you have to do with him or with any such, and to make your bargains plain, and to set them down in writing. For they be subtle people, and do not always speak the truth, and think other men to be like themselves. Therefore we would have none of them to send any goods in our ships at any time, nor none to come as passengers, unless the Emperor do make a bargain with you ... for his own person.²⁴

 

 

Sixty-One

On I May, as the city reeled and drank to mark the traditional May Day celebration, Thomas Thirlby and Sir William Petre, the Councillors who had visited Napea before, called again at his Fenchurch Street lodging. A week earlier Napea had taken his formal leave of Philip and Mary, but Thirlby and Petre brought with them formal letters from the King and Queen addressed to Tsar Ivan, ‘very tenderly and friendly written’, with the Great Seal of England attached. They also brought gifts, both for Napea personally and for his Tsar. Attendants conveyed them in a cart, exciting curious looks and shouts as it wheeled through the city streets.

To Napea was presented a heavy golden chain, a silver basin and ewer and some gilt flagons and pots. For Ivan, meanwhile, were brought fine samples of cloth, an ornate breastplate ‘covered with crimson velvet and gilt nails’, and a pair of lions.

With Richard Chancellor’s death, it was Anthony Jenkinson who this time took charge of a fleet of four different ships. Again, rather desperately, the company urged them to remain together. If mist or bad weather made it hard to see, the admiral should ‘make sound and noise by drum, trumpet, horn, gun or otherwise or means, that the ships may come as nigh together, as by safety and good order they may.

Instructions were issued on 3 May 1557, witnessed and signed at a meeting of the company hierarchy on the same day. Most of the prominent men were there. But, for perhaps the first time, one central figure in the company was not present. Sebastian Cabot had still been actively involved – even joining in the dancing, and declaring his wish to travel too – when ships departed from London in 1556. By February 1557, however, when Anthony Hussey had succeeded him as governor, Cabot was clearly too ill or frail to fulfil his duties. No mention of him is made in the accounts of official celebrations during the time of Osip Napea coming to London.

We don’t know where Cabot was living during his final months, but the scientist and translator Richard Eden, who had helped to promote the cause of commercial exploration in which Cabot had played such a prominent part, travelled to visit him as he lay mortally ill.

To the last, it seems, the old man was claiming mysterious knowledge that was uniquely his own. Drawing Eden close, he whispered that God had granted him a revelation. Now, he said, he understood the secret to a problem which had perplexed the finest minds of the time: that of measuring longitude at sea. Like others, Cabot had long thought it might be solved using the phenomenon of the variation of the compass. He was determined not to be foiled by old age – and dreamed, still, increasingly divorced from reality, of the ground-breaking discovery which would enshrine his name.¹

Eden, no doubt, expressed appropriate interest and amazement. After the years that they had worked together, though, he knew Cabot well. He understood that this was just the fabrication of someone disposed to make himself the centre of attention. Cabot had done it for so long that by now he probably deceived himself. Even so, Eden plainly admired and liked the old man enormously, or he would scarcely have travelled now to pay his respects.

The encounter stayed with him. Many years later, he remembered it in the preface of one of his translations:

Sebastian Cabot on his death-bed told me that he had the knowledge thereof [of longitude by variation] by divine revelation, yet so that he might not teach any man. But I think that the good old man in that extreme age somewhat doted, and had not, yet even in the article of death, utterly shaken off all worldly vainglory.²

In March that year Cabot drew his quarterly pension in person, but by May this had been re-granted jointly to him and another man, suggesting that, though alive, he was no longer well enough to do so. In June and September it was drawn on his behalf, but by December, when it was not, the man who founded and inspired the venture from which the company trading with Russia had sprung must have died.³

 

 

Sixty-Two

After the fêting of Ivan IV’s ambassador in London, the merchants of the Muscovy Company had managed to establish a new and regular trade through the seas of the north-east. But they had not achieved their original aim: to reach Cathay. For many, for some time, this motivation remained.

In 1555 the new company agents had been instructed to ‘use all ways and means possible to learn how men may pass from Russia, either by land or by sea to Cathay’. And men who travelled further in search of it reported talk of a country ‘civil & unspeakably rich’.¹

In 1556, the year before Napea visited London and while Cabot still lived, Stephen Borough had embarked on a smaller boat, a ‘pinnace’, tasked with sailing north-east once more before pushing further beyond the White Sea in search of the fabled passage – along a coast which would begin to descend, as Robert Thorne and John Dee had confidently asserted, towards the warmth and wealth of the East. Failing that, the River Ob, emptying into the northern seas, might provide access to the inland regions of the Khan’s great empire.

Borough, who had sailed in 1553 as Richard Chancellor’s second-in-command, had departed from London on board the Serchthrift in the late spring. With the two larger ships of that year’s voyage, carrying additional men to bring home the ill-fated vessels of Willoughby and Durforth, he had cast anchor at Gravesend. There, on 27 April 1556, Cabot, the venerable head of the company, had come on board the pinnace with a party of gentlemen and women. The old man had lost none of his passionate enthusiasm for further exploration and discovery: it was this, after all, rather than regular commercial activity, which had been his life and which was in his blood.

Having ‘viewed our Pinnace’, Borough wrote, ‘and tasted of such cheer as we could make them aboard’, the party had disembarked, handing the sailors generous tips as they did so. Poor men and women of the local community, meanwhile, had gathered at the water’s edge to watch, and to these, as they clambered back onto dry land, ‘the good old Gentleman Master Cabot’ had given generous alms. As he did so he had asked them to pray, ‘for the good fortune, and prosperous success of the Serchthrift’.

Later the company had gathered at a nearby inn, the ‘Sign of the Christopher’, named in honour of a saint revered by travellers for his assistance to those who attempted to cross hazardous waters. There they had banqueted and had drunk toasts to Borough and his companions. They ‘made me, and them that were in the company’, Borough recalled, ‘great cheer’. Musicians had been summoned and dancing had begun, and before long younger men were gesturing to Cabot himself, seated, half-dreaming at the table, to join in.

In the headiness of the moment, the old man had been overcome. ‘For very joy that he had to see the towardness of our intended discovery,’ Borough recalled, ‘he entered into the dance himself, amongst the rest of the young and lusty company.’ Then, as night drew on, he and his friends had taken their leave, wishing the explorers good fortune and ‘commending us to the governance of almighty God’.

Borough must have known then that, one way or another, he was unlikely to see Cabot again.

With his small crew of ten men, which included himself and his younger brother William, Borough crossed the North Sea on the Edward Bonaventure, their pinnace roped behind. After passing the North Cape they transferred to the Serchthrift, inching their way through thick mists, until a muffled blast of ordinance from the Edward signalled farewell.

Along the coast of Lapland they encountered fleets of Russian fishing boats, some of whose men they befriended – obtaining bread, oatmeal and dried fish in return for simple manufactured goods. One captain, named Gabriel, showed them ‘very much friendship’. He was heading east in search of walrus and salmon and kept the Englishmen company, providing invaluable help. He struck the sails of his faster boat to wait for them, warned them of dangerous shallows, and guided them to shelter when a storm threatened. He also brought a young Samoyed man aboard, with an offering of four geese, whose clothing, as Borough noted, was ‘strange unto us’. Later, with another Russian, he went onshore to be shown a pile of Samoyed idols which appalled him: bloodied with sacrifice, and ‘the worst ... work that ever I saw’.

Over subsequent weeks Borough sailed north-east, through the same Arctic waters that Sir Hugh Willoughby and his men had traversed three years earlier, but keeping careful track, this time, of their location. In the pinnace they were able to pass through shallows that would have been impossible in larger ships, causing the Englishmen to ‘thank God that our ship did draw so little water’. Even so, they soon found that their way was hampered by ‘great and terrible abundance of ice’. Huge sheets and blocks floated menacingly, accumulating, often, into a ‘monstrous heap’ that the sailors mistook at first for land.

Day after day strong winds blew, freezing rain and snow fell or thick enveloping mists descended, so that ‘we were not able to see a cable’s length about us’. Ropes encrusted and glistening with ice were fed through frozen hands. The mariners, Henry Lane later recalled, had to shovel snow from the pinnace in August.² One night a dreadful storm developed, worse than any they had encountered, though (as Borough wrote) they ‘had endured many storms since we came out of England’. It seemed ‘wonderful’, he noted, ‘that our bark was able to brook such monstrous & terrible seas’. On one occasion a great whale emerged suddenly from the water so close to the boat that they could have cut him with their swords: ‘There was as much above water of his back as the breadth of our pinnace, and at his falling down, he made such a terrible noise in the water, that a man would greatly have marvelled except he had known the cause of it ...’. Knowing nothing of whales, the sailors shrank back in terror, not daring to assault this monster ‘for fear he should have overthrown our ship’. Borough got his men to yell in unison from the side of the boat, until ‘with the cry that we made he departed from us’. ‘God be thanked,’ Borough wrote, ‘we were quietly delivered of him.’³

Borough was fastidious about recording his location and surroundings. His journal shows that he was a man in the mould of his former captain, Richard Chancellor, and that he had imbibed the strictures of their patron, Sebastian Cabot, about the importance of written records.

From the position of the sun, he took numerous measurements of their latitude, taking a small skiff ashore for this purpose whenever he could. He gave regular readings of the water depth, and used the wax-covered weight on his lead and line to take samples of the seabed, detailing the ‘sand’, ‘broken winkle shells’, ‘soft black ooze’ or ‘tough ooze-like clay’ that he brought to the surface. He carefully described the tides in relation to the position of the moon in the sky, or the ‘sandy hills’ of the shore when they were visible. And he recorded the curious phenomenon of ‘the variation of the Compass’. All of it was information which would be of great help to subsequent sailors, and Borough’s brother, William, with Stephen on the voyage now, would use it later to create a chart of these northern waters.

Eventually, though, by late August, signs of the advancing year became evident. ‘The nights waxed dark,’ Borough wrote, ‘and the winter began to draw on with his storms.’ He decided to return, with ‘the first best wind that God should send’, back to the shelter of St Nicholas. The following spring, he resolved, they could push further on towards the mouth of the Ob which might take them, if the coastal route would not, to the fabled realm of Cathay. But urgent word from London ordered him instead to search westwards, for the ships which, unbeknownst to Borough, had gone missing on their return to England the previous autumn.

He did not find them. From a ‘Dutch-man’ who had been at Trondheim, however, he heard that the Philip and Mary had wintered there, while the Confidentia was lost. He had, the Dutchman confessed, ‘bought her sails for his ship’.⁴ In the meantime, various factors deprived the search north-eastward of its immediate urgency.

For one thing, Borough had seen enough on his first expedition in the Serchthrift to be sure that it would not prove easy. For another, the death of Cabot in 1557 had removed one of the exploration’s most influential advocates. Word had now reached the company in London, meanwhile, of the Tsar’s successful conquest of the khanates on his southern borders, giving Russia secure access for the first time overland to the Caspian Sea.

A safe and preferable land route, it now seemed, might exist. Company merchants could use this to intercept the trade with Cathay and the East, before it was either interrupted by the Turks or claimed by southern Europeans who had dominated the western end of the ‘silk road’ at England’s expense.

Anthony Jenkinson, like Chancellor, was not only a skilled navigator but possessed the character and self-possession to deal with kings and emperors. In his bearing, Eden commented, he seemed ‘more like an Ambassador sent from any Prince or Emperor, than from a company of merchant men’.⁵

He did not find the overland route easy. The southern khanates were devastated by warfare, famine and plague. Unburied bodies lay in heaps. Access to China was difficult and would, he was told, take another nine months. Incessant and continual wars’ in these ‘brutal and wild countries’, he was sorry to report, made it impossible at present to get through.⁶

He tried instead to develop a lasting trade in Persia, by a route which seemed to offer great promise for the English merchants. But Persia’s on-and-off warfare with the Turks obstructed the route, and for the company hopes were continually raised and then frustrated.⁷

 

 

Sixty-Three

All the time, though, in Russia itself commerce was actively developed. Between 1555 and at least 1560 voyages were organised annually, and they remained frequent for decades thereafter. The company felt its way, always anxious for information, discovering which Russian products would sell at a profit in England, and vice versa.

In 1558 Russia conquered the Baltic port of Narva, providing another potential entry point for English merchants, though the company’s claim that its monopoly applied here too was disputed.

The letter sent back to Russia in 1557 referred to wax, tallow, train oil, hemp and flax as the Russian wares which in England were ‘most vendible’.

Wax in particular was an early focus: much in demand in England, not least by the government, which used it to seal letters and documents. Chancellor had spoken after his first voyage of the ‘cakes of wax’ to be found at Novgorod, Vologda, Plesco and elsewhere. Word of Russia’s abundance had been further spread by the translations of Richard Eden. Russia’s ‘chief harvest’, he wrote, ‘consists of honey and wax’, which were ‘of small price’ in Russia.¹ The region was so ‘replenished with fruitful bees’ that great swarms were seen in the wild, ‘hanging on the boughs of trees’. ‘We would you bought as much Wax principally as you may get,’ the agents were instructed: ‘for if there be in that country so great quantity, as we be informed there is, it will be the best commodity we may have.’

Tallow – made from animal fat, and used, like wax, for candles – was even more profitable, provided it was ‘well purified’ and so did not go off.² (Some of it, the board complained early on, had arrived ‘very evil, black, soft and putrefied’.)³ In 1560 the governors urged that they could sell a great deal more in England than was sent, and suggested their agents be willing to pay more: ‘for we do most good in it’.⁴ Train oil, too, made by the White Sea ‘where our ships came in’, was readily marketable for lamps and candles. Fill ‘all such Butts and Hogsheads as may be found to serve’, the governors instructed in 1557. But its resale value fluctuated. Three years later the company was lukewarm: ‘the price’, they noted, ‘is not here so good as it was’. The oil was also prone to leaking if the casks were ill made, and caused terrible damage to other goods when it did, not least to the furs for which a cold region like Muscovy was also renowned.

‘The north parts of Russia’, Chancellor had confirmed to the company board, yield very rare and precious skins.’ Animals, as Eden wrote, were hunted in winter, when ‘their hair is then thicker’.⁵ A skinner was sent from England to cast an eye over what was available and to judge what would sell well, and profitably. Chancellor had noted that the sables available in Russia were ‘worn about the necks of our noblewomen and ladies’. But the experienced merchants on the company board urged that unless such expensive furs were of very good quality, they should be rejected in favour of others like marten or mink, which could be bought at a reasonable price and sold to a large market.⁶

There was certainly, in some quarters, a moral hostility to the importation of luxury goods, which led to what seemed a damaging loss of bullion, and to the distribution of such wares beyond the echelons who traditionally sported them. Many feared that the ‘excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares’ would promote ‘the manifest decay of the whole realm’. So-called ‘sumptuary’ laws placed strict and increasing limits on the goods (and clothes in particular) permitted to certain classes of people, so that ‘there may be a difference of estates known by their apparel after the commendable custom in times past’.

The company noted a 1559 proclamation which limited the wearing of sables to earls and those ‘of superior degrees’, along with viscounts and barons in their doublets and sleeveless coats. Unlawful garments were to be handed in.⁷ There should not, the company sent word the following year, be ‘great provision of any rich Furs’. A proclamation in England meant ‘they will not be so commonly worn here as they have been with noble men’.⁸ But this was testimony too to the appearance of a commercial mindset that was strikingly modern: the view that it was more profitable to ship cheaper goods which would appeal to a large market than luxuries which could interest only a narrow upper class. Rich furs were desired in ‘no great plenty’. They were ‘not every man’s money’.

Tar and hemp were also good products in Russia, as were masts – cut from the vast, thick Russian forests – but it was quickly decided that the profits they would yield if brought to England in their raw form would not justify the expense of shipping. Instead, rope-makers were sent out to Russia. A rope-walk was constructed in Kholmogory, and native Russians were employed for the less skilled tasks.⁹ Already, the advantages of manufacturing in a less developed economy (cheaper labour and a closer proximity to raw materials) were apparent. Five Russians, the company agent Richard Gray reckoned, would not cost as much as one Englishman sent to Russia, and they could certainly do the work of three.¹⁰

The first ropes were made not from hemp but from flax, which was also widely available, but they were quickly deemed inferior. As soon as they became wet, the governors complained, ‘they will rot and moulder away like moss’. Good, well-tarred, hempen ropes, however, could be provided to both the English and European markets at prices which undercut the supply from the Baltic. Before long, the English navy was a substantial customer. In the 1580s over a quarter of its total expenses were for rope bought from the Muscovy Company.¹¹

Needless to say, not all attempts to market Russian goods in England, or English goods in Russia, proved a success. In London the company could barely suppress its annoyance at the repeated shipping of seal skins. What, it demanded to know, were the agents playing at? ‘We much marvel what you mean to buy Seal skins and tan them. All that you have sent in times past lie here unsold, and will yield no money.’¹²

Like other organisations of the time, the company prepared for the future by taking on apprentices. Ten young men who had worked for them in London were quickly sent out to Russia, to learn the language and become familiar with Russian culture and commerce. The agents were told to appoint them to whatever work seemed best suited, and to keep a vigilant eye on their progress and conduct.¹³

Younger boys, meanwhile, were taken on and given work experience in London. One, too young to be sent abroad among the first wave, was educated and looked after with more attention than most. He was an orphan, deprived of all his immediate family. His mother had died early. Both his brother and his father had drowned at sea. When, some years later, he was sent out to Russia, a letter to the agents mentioned that he had for years been an apprentice to the company in London. ‘Our mind’, the board declared, ‘is he should be set about such business as he is most fit for: he has been kept at writing school long: he hath his Algorithm, and has understanding of keeping of books of reckonings.’¹⁴

The boy was called Nicholas, and he was Richard Chancellor’s only surviving son. He had been particularly well nurtured and educated under the company’s supervision in part, no doubt, because they hoped that he would follow in his father’s illustrious footsteps. It was felt, too, that this was the least they should do for the orphan of the company servant and member to whom they all owed so much.

For many years afterwards Nicholas served the company as a merchant and purser, as well as sailing on other long-distance voyages (like those made by Sir Martin Frobisher to the north-west). He was never, perhaps inevitably, the outstanding man his father had been – but he took part in a subsequent attempt to find a north-east passage in 1580. Using sails, and oars when necessary, he battled with his companions against the ‘extremity of ice’ which hampered their progress and threatened, more than once, to trap them entirely. Like others before they were deceived into thinking that layers of arctic fog to their north were islands.¹⁵ In spite of largely favourable winds, Chancellor wrote, which should have taken them beyond the northernmost land ‘according to the estimate of those that gave us instructions of this said voyage’, their difficulties only increased. The further they progressed towards what they assumed must be the open ocean, leading southward to Cathay, ‘the thicker we find the ice, and small hope of a clear sea.’¹⁶

Nicholas Chancellor was lucky, at least, as his father, in 1556, had not been. He was on board the one ship (of two) which returned from the attempt safely, though winter was well set in by the time that they did so, and it was Christmas Day when his ship reached the mouth of the Thames.

The geography of the route, of course, was – as Stephen Borough, Nicholas Chancellor and others learned by experience – much less favourable in reality than men like John Dee had speculated.

Hopes remained, and were not abandoned until the early seventeenth century. Not until the nineteenth century did anyone succeed in navigating a ‘passage’, which was never viable commercially.¹⁷ Nor did the River Ob allow access to sixteenth-century Ming dynasty China, though its major tributary the Irtysh does just cross the north-western border of modern China. Men had simply not appreciated the distances involved.

In Russia, though, in its first decade of operation, the English company established a substantial operation. It sold English goods, and bought Russian, all year round, with the focus being the annual arrival of ships from England at the White Sea. The substantial losses the company sustained in its very early years, caused by the wreck of ships with their goods, entailed calls for further investment by shareholders. Important members like Sir William Cecil made a careful note of each payment as it was made. But in the longer term there was reason for optimism that the company’s ‘business and traffic may take good success’.¹⁸

‘Of an hard beginning’, the company wrote, ‘we trust God will send us a good ending.’¹⁹ They were referring to teething problems for the rope-makers in Kholmogory, but the sentiment applied equally to the business in general.

 

 

Sixty-Four

For a time things only got harder. In England, 1558 was yet another year of change and unrest.

It began badly, when a large French army besieged and quickly took Calais, the final English territory in Continental Europe, whose loss was a grave blow to English pride. Henry Machyn jotted in his diary that it was ‘the heaviest tidings to London and to England that ever was heard of’.¹ It reverberated also, for more pragmatic reasons, in the city’s merchant community. Wool exports had been superseded by cloth as the country’s economic mainstay, but nevertheless the loss of the ‘Staple’, as the old wool exchange in Calais was called, was very damaging. Queen Mary’s already profound unpopularity with the political class deepened further.

At the end of January, Mary was sure once again that she was pregnant with an heir. She wrote in a letter to her husband that this consoled her for the loss of Calais, and he replied in accord. In March, as was customary for a noblewoman anticipating childbirth, she made her will, which included legacies for the restored religious houses (including her beloved Observant Franciscans at Greenwich). Few this time, however, shared her conviction, and the matter was kept quiet. Her own husband was doubtful. Embroiled in conflict on the European mainland, he sent a close ally to report back. By the late spring it was clear that she was again sadly deluded.

In the country at large the summer brought only further suffering. The harvest was bad once more. Mary’s religious policy continued to be severe. Eleven were burned at Smithfield in June and some twenty more suffered the same fate before the year was out. The sickness which had tormented England in recent years returned and this time inflicted more devastation than ever. A new form of influenza affected almost half the country and caused the worst death rates of the sixteenth century, hitting the upper classes with particular venom, starting from the top.²

Mary’s health was already bad. She suffered from chronic headaches and fevers. When she caught this virus in August, it sent her into a further decline. By the late autumn it was feared that she would not survive, and by mid-November she was accorded the last rites. On 17 November, early in the morning, she heard Mass in her privy chamber and soon afterwards she died.

England’s first Queen Regnant had reigned for only a little over five years, to be followed by its second.

After accepting that she would not, in spite of all her fervent prayers and hopes, bear a child, Mary had been obliged to acknowledge that her successor would be the half-sister she bitterly resented. But it hurt.

In the presence of Elizabeth, this ‘illegitimate child of a criminal’, the retiring Venetian ambassador had written the previous year, ‘it was as if [Mary] were in the presence of the affronts and ignominious treatment which she was subjected to on account of [Elizabeth’s] mother [Anne Boleyn]’. With her own failure to produce an heir, moreover, she felt ‘the eyes and hearts of the nation already fixed on this lady as successor to the Crown’. In public, the same ambassador wrote, Mary ‘dissembles her hatred and anger as much as she can’, but there was no hiding her feelings towards this half-sister who, if not beautiful, was tall and elegant where she was short, and who was proud, with fine eyes and a fine mind.³

In desperation, Mary had asked her sister not to alter the re-established Catholic religion, but she knew the request was in vain. If Elizabeth adopted the outward show of a Catholic, Mary realised that this was a front. In her will she could not bring herself to name Elizabeth, referring to her simply as ‘my next heir and Successor’. When Mary’s coffin was lowered into a vault at Westminster Abbey, the senior officers of her household snapped their white staves of office and threw them on top. The royal heralds then proclaimed Elizabeth as Queen.⁴

Two-thirds of Mary’s Council were promptly removed, including all of the prominent Catholics. ‘That Woman’, as a Spaniard in England described Elizabeth to Mary’s bereaved husband, ordered immediate changes in a Protestant direction. Once again the Lord’s Prayer was said in English not in Latin. Her half-brother Edward VI’s Book of Common Prayer was revived, albeit in a slightly modified and more conservative form. The lesser clergy were substantially untouched, but bishops were purged and replaced. Most of the ardent Protestants who had fled to mainland Europe on Mary’s accession, and who had absorbed further radical ideas from reformers there, now returned.

In London church bells rang, while bonfires and street parties welcomed a new Queen, and a new direction.⁵ Elizabeth herself might not have been dogmatic. There was, she said, only one Jesus Christ and the rest was a dispute over trifles. But she was an affirmed Protestant, and in the course of the next few decades it was this faith which finally established itself at the core of the English make-up.

One returning exile, John Foxe, condemned Mary vehemently and helped to establish the black reputation which has survived, only somewhat lightened, to this day. Her zealotry does not appeal to the modern mind, for all that she could also be loving and courageous, and though many of her enemies were equally zealous in another direction. Foxe wrote that he doubted any reign either in England or elsewhere had provided such good evidence of ‘God’s wrath and displeasure’.

A few years later, with any knowledge of events in Russia, he might have altered his opinion. If Mary was bloody, Ivan, truly, became terrible.

 

 

Sixty-Five

The terms that the company secured from Ivan IV were very favourable. To be granted a complete exemption from tariffs both into and within Russia, and a monopoly of the new northern trade route via the White Sea, gave them a significant competitive advantage. Ivan, however, had his own reasons for this beneficent treatment. Increasingly, he felt besieged by enemies, both on his borders and within his state. Everywhere he sniffed betrayal.

Over the winter which bridged the latter end of 1564 and the beginning of 1565, his dread of conspiracy and treason led Ivan to launch a prolonged campaign of terror which has appalled and puzzled historians ever since.

From a newly fortified monastery distant from Moscow, Ivan declared his absolute and divinely inspired authority both to distribute mercy and to inflict punishment. ‘He who resists power’, he declared, ‘resists God.’

His justice was wielded, he said, with the sanction of heaven. Those he judged to have evil intentions should expect only ‘fierceness and torment’.¹ When he returned to his capital in February his eyes were dim and haunted, while his thick hair and long beard had fallen out. Most historians attribute his intense paranoia to mental illness. He rejected his entire existing government and carved out an alternate, parallel state for ‘his chosen side of his people’, as the baffling development was described by English company men.² From this territory all those of high rank considered suspect were expelled, and a new and militant cadre was installed in their place.

The rule of these oprichniki – ‘children of darkness’, as some called them – was arbitrary and cruel. They carried long brooms to symbolise the sweeping of ‘everything superfluous out of the land’. They wore black cloaks and rode black horses with the severed head of a dog dangling at their bridles.³ They carried out the arrests and cruel executions not only of eminent men but of their entire families, including babies and young children, responding to anonymous denunciations which Ivan encouraged with the installation of a special letter box, ‘box 200’, at his court. In a pattern which would be repeated in subsequent terrors down the ages, men were denounced, and savagely and sadistically killed, in turn.⁴

In vain did nobles and princes protest that ‘no Christian ruler had the right to treat human beings like animals’. Thousands died, while many more were stripped, often literally, and cast into exile.⁵ Throughout the late 1560s the executions continued. When the English diplomat Thomas Randolph arrived in Russia in the autumn of 1568, he reported that Ivan had recently ‘beheaded no small number of his nobility’. In his official report he was reserved, but in private letters he confessed he could not wait to fulfil his mission and to depart, ‘the sooner to be out of his country where heads go so fast to the pot’.⁶

As if the ‘miserable state of the country’ caused by Ivan’s policies was not enough, in 1571 a Tartar army took advantage of the absence of most Russian troops on campaign in the Baltic to descend on Moscow. When they set fire to the capital, high winds fanned the flames to a fury and the wooden city was devastated. Not one house, Anthony Jenkinson reported, was left standing. The residence occupied by the English merchants in Moscow was burned to the ground and most of the men who sought refuge in its cellar died.

In the city at large, few inhabitants escaped. Some were incinerated to powder. The bodies of countless others, as well as of horses, filled the streets. Two months would not be enough, wrote one English survivor, to clear the corpses. It was, Jenkinson could only conclude, ‘a just punishment of God for such a wicked nation’. Sodom and Gomorrah, a fellow Englishman agreed, had not disappeared so quickly.⁷

‘I pray God’, wrote another, less righteously, ‘I never see the like again.’

For the English merchants, not surprisingly, this whole period was dreadfully unstable. The northern region in which they traded was brought within Ivan’s alternate, personal state. Vologda, with its company station, was taken over, while all its well-born men and their families were expelled. On the road from Vologda to Kholmogory Ivan built a new fortress: a remote refuge in the north which increasingly became his base. English artisans were employed to strengthen its fortifications and to build the ships on which Ivan could escape, if necessary, via the White Sea. The Tsar protected the houses and activities of the English company, but the country was in turmoil. Men who accompanied Randolph found ‘the estate of the Company to stand very evil’.⁸

Added to the chaos in Russia was a violently changeable attitude on Ivan’s part towards the company itself. He had always hoped that a close political relationship with England would follow on from the mercantile one, and indeed it was unrealistic of the English merchants to expect a monopoly and favourable privileges without there being a political price. In his increasingly paranoid state, Ivan became desperate for allies. Through Englishmen like Jenkinson and Randolph who came to Moscow, and Russian ambassadors who were sent to England, he sought a formal alliance, by which enemies of Russia would automatically become enemies of England and vice versa. He even made a secret, bewildering request for asylum in England should he need to flee his realm, which was granted, and he offered similar sanctuary for Elizabeth, though she insisted she would not require it.

Elizabeth was careful to avoid the tight military alliance that Ivan wanted. Too many enemies or potential enemies of Russia were rulers with whom she wished to be on good terms. She would support, he was told, his ‘just causes’, while she retained the right to judge the justness of any particular cause. English ambassadors were told to focus on securing privileges for the company while they skirted around his desire for political terms.

Ivan flew into a rage. These men, he complained, were sent only to deal with ‘merchant’s affairs’, rather than with ‘our highness’ affairs’. All countries acknowledged, he insisted, that ‘princes’ affaires should be first ended, and only after that to seek a gain’.⁹ The means of retaliation was at hand: he could cancel the privileges granted to the English company, and did so. More than once English ambassadors succeeded in having favourable terms reinstated, but Ivan expected a political alliance to follow, and when it did not he revoked them again, lambasting Elizabeth for governing ‘like a maid’, while really it was ‘boorish merchants’ who were in charge.

Anxious to placate Ivan without contracting damaging obligations, company ships evidently did deliver arms to Russia, as the Tsar’s enemies in central and eastern Europe feared and alleged. Categorical evidence has not survived. But English letters to Ivan referred pointedly to the fact that he had been supplied with goods that ‘her Majesty does not suffer to be transported forth of her realm to no other prince of the world’.¹⁰ This statement did not refer to cloth.

Through all of these difficulties, trade continued, and it was profitable enough, or at least potentially profitable enough, to be worth the perseverance.

Already, by the mid-156os, the company, or ‘fellowship’, was expanding its pool of investors: with some exaggeration perhaps, it then claimed to have ‘above 400 persons’ as shareholders.¹¹ Ten years later, one enthusiastic company merchant declared that with more stability and ‘an assured amity’ between the two nations, England and Russia, there would be ‘a trade of merchandise of such importance for the benefit of England as never has been by any one trade’.

Certainly the new commerce opened up by the exploratory voyage of 1553 did not reap the kind of vast profits Cabot and his consortium of London merchants had dreamed about. For all the perennial promise of the Persian trade, accessed via Russia from the north, the company did not find a new and safe sea route to tropical islands, where the sun baked precious metals and stones in the soil while markets were stacked high with valuable silks and spices.

Richard Chancellor and his men did dine with a great emperor, from goblets and plates of gold, just as they had hoped they would do in Cathay. But the ground outside was thick with snow and most of the country was poor. The commodities they shipped home were more mundane: hemp or flax, oils from animals, or wax from bees.

The trade could make money, when ships with their goods were not lost. But it did not create instant fortunes, as had some of the Spanish or Portuguese voyages to the Americas or the East. Even so, its impact on English history is difficult to overstate.

 

 

Sixty-Six

In practical terms, the voyage of 1553 had opened up an important new route at a difficult time, when trade, as Thomas Edge later wrote, was ‘waxing cold and in decay’.¹

English commerce with Russia didn’t rival the traditional routes to mainland Europe in terms of the quantities shipped. Most of those who invested in the Muscovy Company had other, more important commercial interests elsewhere. Substantial early losses cost them ships (initially often built by the company at great expense), goods and important individuals with skills and experience which were rare and hard to replace.

All the same, England entered into a significant trading relationship with a state that was less advanced, economically, than itself: the sort of relationship on which an empire would later be built.

Where cloth sold to the traditional markets of mainland Europe still went in a crude, undyed form, ready to be coloured and finished by skilled artisans on the Continent, to the more primitive Russian market it could be sold fully dressed – a significant spur to England’s young manufacturing sector. This prompted the company to research products and techniques used elsewhere for dyeing. How did they do it in Persia? How in Russia? How elsewhere? Gradually, in response to this demand, a sophisticated finishing industry was developed.

By building up a significant rope-making business in Russia, moreover, near an abundant supply of the necessary raw materials, the company was able to take advantage of lower costs and to undercut other supplies. These, being in foreign hands, were of less economic benefit to England, and were dangerously unreliable in a time of conflict.

The novel way in which the Muscovy Company was set up led not only career merchants but other, more rarefied elements of society to participate. The joint stock nature of the business allowed men to invest without playing any active role – behaviour that had not been possible for members of earlier, regulated companies. It also capitalised, literally, on major changes in Tudor England which had left disposable income in the hands of a wider middle class, who flaunted their wealth, at times, and frittered it on luxuries, but who were also prepared to invest it.

The Muscovy Company was pioneering. Regardless of its profits, it was successful in that it inspired others to emulate its example – eating, often, into its business as they did so. Suddenly joint stock enterprises became relatively commonplace. The company’s constitution was imitated by the so-called Company of Cathay which was set up (in the teeth of opposition from the Muscovy Company, which believed its own right was infringed) to look for a north-west passage, and under whose aegis Martin Frobisher launched his ultimately fatal attempts to find an alternative route to Asia. It was imitated too by the Eastland Company, which was established in 1579 to develop trade with Scandinavia and the Baltic. Two years later the Levant Company established a trade, on similar lines, with the eastern Mediterranean, forging a route to Turkey, Syria and Persia which supplanted the vulnerable commerce attempted for so long by the traders to Russia. At the end of December 1600, as Queen Elizabeth’s long reign drew towards its end, a charter was granted to another, similar joint stock operation. Over time it grew and became particularly successful. Popularly, it soon became known as the East India Company.

In the trade of these chartered companies – granted monopolies by a crown which took an interest but was happy to leave such work to its private citizens – lay the practical and intellectual origins of the English and then the British Empire.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century ideas emerged, in embryonic form, which developed and established themselves at the heart of the imperial agenda. They were various and influenced by differing regional circumstances as well as by the political and cultural climate in England. Some seem now more admirable than others.

Sir Walter Raleigh believed in the importance of trade as the means by which England could become rich and powerful. But he was schooled in the Atlantic struggle with Spain, in particular, and favoured what he called ‘forcible trade’, backed by an aggressive navy and the acquisition of colonies and imperial territory: the sort of domination of primitive but resource-rich lands on which the Spanish Empire had been built. Countless others shared his approach, just as Sir Hugh Willoughby had done, after his battles with the French. This buccaneering spirit burgeoned in the reign of Elizabeth, and it reverberated down the ages. Many supported the establishment of an empire of settlement as well as trade. Even a writer like Richard Hakluyt, who generally favoured peaceful enterprise, hoped exploratory expeditions would use suitable regions in the north of Asia or America as dumping grounds for what he called ‘the offals of our people’.²

The geographer and polymath John Dee, on the other hand, who advised the Muscovy Company on their explorations to the north-east, developed a vision of England at the centre of a peaceful web of trade, not looking to impose itself by force. It would make for the ‘Honourable Renown of this Island Empire’. And over it a navy would police the seas ‘in the most decent, peaceable, and friendly manner’.³ Dee was certainly atypical. Some of his ideas were perplexing for most people, both at the time and later. But there is no doubt that trade to the East, which eschewed the undeveloped lands and relatively primitive civilisations of the American continent in favour of societies in Asia that were often rich and sophisticated, did foster a different, less confrontational approach. Sailing north-east, of course, also meant avoiding direct competition with the Spanish or the Portuguese on established routes. There might have been occasional threats from Swedes or Poles, but by and large there was not the same need to fight. It was not that the men as a group were better or more principled; often enough they were the same people. But the circumstances and the context were different.

Sebastian Cabot, the organiser and inspiration behind the 1553 expedition, plainly leant more towards Dee’s view than to Raleigh’s. Most of his own exploration had been to the west, to the new lands of the Americas, north and south, and his own career was not unchequered. But in the handbook which he wrote for the voyage that he initiated and oversaw as an old man, we hear a voice which is warm, contemplative and wise. He knew there was a limit to how much he could dictate. He was too old. He would not be there, and could not guess what problems or challenges might arise. ‘Of things uncertain’, he wrote, ‘no certain rules may or can be given.’ Misconduct by members of the crew was to some extent inevitable; and when it arose, it was to be ‘chastened charitably with brotherly love’. Nevertheless, he had learned lessons from his own long experience which he was anxious to impart.

From other evidence it seems that humility was not always Cabot’s strong point, but in this text – almost the only one in which his authentic voice survives – he comes across with dignity and restraint. Richard Hakluyt praised these ‘excellent orders and instructions’, and to this day they seem sensible and almost unobjectionable.

Cabot put his faith in knowledge which was accrued by first-hand experience of the world and then carefully recorded. He understood, as Francis Bacon would later observe, that knowledge was power.

The English could use it to create wealth, through trade, and this wealth in turn would raise England to the front rank of maritime nations. In pursuit of this greater awareness, men should listen, and observe, and not thrust themselves forward. He urged a practice entirely at variance with the Catholic zealotry he had witnessed in Spain: matters of religious faith and ritual should be kept under wraps. Sailors should seem, rather, ‘to bear with such laws, and rites, as the place has, where you shall arrive’. In general the inhabitants of every region were to be treated ‘with all gentleness, and courtesy’, and shown ‘no point or sign of rigour and hostility’.

Only his advice to get foreigners drunk as a means of obtaining information might now raise a disapproving eyebrow, though not because it was not sensible enough. In any case, any person who did come on board, voluntarily, was to be ‘well entertained, used, and apparelled’, and treated ‘without violence or force’, while women were not to be solicited or mistreated. This wasn’t just common humanity. (‘Consider you that they also are men’, declared the letter signed by Edward VI, but drafted perhaps by Cabot or one who knew him well.) It also made mercantile sense, as the best means of encouraging others to show an interest in, and a lack of hostility towards, the English merchants. The reaction of Russians on the shores of the White Sea, well treated by Richard Chancellor, amply justified Cabot’s advice.

Trade, always – a hard-nosed desire for profit – was the venture’s predominant aim. It was a search both for new sources of supply and for new markets. Certainly Cabot and the other leading members of the company allowed themselves to imagine the vast returns achieved by the Iberians. They saw, as Clement Adams wrote, ‘that the wealth of the Spaniards and Portuguese, by the discovery and search of new trades and countries, was marvellously increased’ and they wistfully supposed ‘the same to be a course and means for them also to obtain the like’. Cabot, in his instructions, seems to have anticipated the discovery of ‘jewel, stone, pearls, precious metals’. People collecting such gold or stones along the seashore should be carefully approached and observed, he advised, in pinnaces from which enchanting music was played and sung.⁴

Unlike these imagined, innocent natives, the men and women encountered on the shores of the White Sea extracted salt, or caught and clubbed seals, rather than panning for gold. But no sense of disappointment survives at what Russia had to offer. Certainly, the hope did not die that a route might be found to Cathay. Still – train oil or wax could be traded for a profit just like cloves or pearls, and the business was energetically pursued.

In the longer term, Spanish Imperial affluence did not endure. Bullion might pay for the adornment of individuals. It might even pay the salary of armies. But it offered no lasting national advance, no impetus to manufacture: the gold and silver fell on Spain like rain and it drained away. Russia, however, was a good market for manufactured English cloth which could be exchanged for raw materials. This secured the industry and encouraged its advance.

In England, organised mercantile exploration began in 1553.

Had all three ships that year been lost, there would probably have been no sequel – not, at least, in the short term. The arguments for a venture to the north-east would have seemed discredited. As it was, a body of opinion among merchants in London had been dubious about putting money into a scheme some experts gave little chance of achieving its goal. Had it failed, such mutterings would have become impossible to dampen.

One ship, though, did make it into the White Sea. It established a new trading relationship with Russia which meant that, even though the expedition had failed in its primary aim, it could overall be deemed a success. And it made, as a result, a huge impact on the course of English history. All of this was owed substantially to one man.

It was Sebastian Cabot who had inspired the voyage and set its parameters. But he was too old now for adventurous travel into the unknown. He needed someone who reminded him of his younger self. It had been made clear to him, moreover, that the English government wanted to foster a genuine culture of trade and exploration, and to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign merchants and foreign sailors. On previous long-distance voyages England had employed experts from abroad as pilots and navigators. This time the temptation was reduced, since no Portuguese or Frenchman could claim to know the north-eastern route as they did, say, the sea journeys to west Africa or south America. More importantly, though, if there was to be a shift in the national culture, it needed to be led by an Englishman: a man who could combine, for almost the first time in the country’s history, the practical experience of a sailor with the academic gifts of a ‘cosmographer’ and a mathematician. English sea captains, in days gone by, had often not been literate. Now they wanted a scientist.

For years, Cabot had held a senior post in Spain’s transatlantic empire. He had been responsible for examining and granting qualifications to young pilots. He knew what he was looking for. On his return to England he had been heartened to find a number of talented and ambitious young pilots and mariners, the first shoots of a significant shift in the maritime culture. One of them, though, stood head and shoulders above the rest. In the shape of a young man brought up in his old seafaring community of Bristol, inspired as a child – one can guess – by stories and memories of his own famous exploits sailing west into the Atlantic, Cabot found what he wanted.

Richard Chancellor impressed all who knew him: from the nobleman in whose household he had lived, to the great mathematician and geographer who worked with him to prepare charts for the voyage, which listed the positions of the sun and the stars. Richard Eden, who knew him well, hailed the ‘excellent young man Richard Chancellor no less learned in all mathematical sciences than an expert pilot’.⁵ His talents and reputation created a buzz of excitement among the London merchants who worked with Cabot to organise the venture. On their hands, it seemed, was a man who could make a difference. With the possible exception of Cabot himself – who for most of his career had lived and worked in Spain – Chancellor was the first Englishman to master the techniques of ocean-going navigation, by which the Spanish and the Portuguese had tamed the vast stretches of water separating themselves from the distant Indies.

Chancellor embraced what now seems a modern and scientific way of thinking, which gradually took root in England during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Like his mentor, he believed that assertions should be supported by evidence from the senses: that observation, as Cabot had put it, was the ‘most certain Master of all worldly knowledge’. Whether it was the regions of the world where human habitation was possible, or the thickness of the walls of the Kremlin, both men believed that personal experience – not hearsay, or ancient authority, or reason cocooned from the world – was what counted. It was a fundamental mental shift, and was the bedrock on which the modern scientific revolution has been built. As it has been put, ‘experiment came to seem preferable to miracle, evidence to belief, change itself to the status quo’.⁶

This general philosophy applied in exploration just as it applied to learning about how the world, or indeed the universe, worked. Commerce, and science, advanced together. It is enough to recall that John Dee, the scholar who stands astride a line dividing the medieval and modern worlds, paid fulsome tribute late in life to a man he still fondly remembered as the ‘incomparable Richard Chancellor’.

With the help of Stephen Borough, his second-in-command on the Edward Bonaventure – a man in the same mould, who built on Chancellor’s achievement – the new route to the north-east was meticulously recorded and mapped. In what was the first great age of English map-making, people in Tudor England had come to understand that accurate knowledge of the world, recorded in maps, would lay the foundations for political and commercial power. For the first time geography was put on a scientific footing, and once again the voyage of 1553 was a decisive turning point. By inspiring further exploration, it helped to inculcate this new empirical mode of thought. A little later it was Francis Bacon, again, who noticed the crucial connection: the ‘proficiency in navigation and discoveries’ which by then was apparent, he wrote, ‘may plant also an expectation of the further proficiency and augmentation of all sciences’.

It was Chancellor who led the way, and who should today be remembered much more than he is. Dee was an admirer and a friend, rather than an impartial witness. He greatly missed the man he called his ‘dearly beloved Richard Chancellor’. But he was right, all the same, that this was someone ‘worthy of eternal good fame and grateful memory. Tragically, Chancellor died while still young, attempting, successfully, to save the life of an important passenger with whom he had been entrusted. Francis Godwin, the Bishop of Hereford, spoke truly when he said that the company’s loss of a ship and its goods was ‘a Trifle, compar’d to that of Richard Chancellor, worthy of Immortal Memory’.⁷ Had he not died when he did, he would surely have gone on to greater achievements and to greater renown. Where he led, others, like Sir Martin Frobisher or Sir Francis Drake, more famous and more celebrated, followed.

It was Richard Chancellor, wrote a man who had known him, who was ‘the odd [by which he meant outstanding] man of his Time, for matters touching the Sea’.⁸ He might perhaps have added that the matters he touched extended further, from the sea onto dry land – to the hearts and minds of many of those who knew him, and to those of many more who did not.