1

WAXING COLD AND IN DECAY

THE STORY BEGINS with sheep.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, there were 11 million sheep throughout England, outnumbering human beings by around four to one.¹ They grazed everywhere—on the tiny tracts of land rented by peasant farmers as well as on the great estates of noblemen, bishops, and abbots. Their ubiquity was attributable to one factor: the age-old importance of wool to the English economy.

The hardy English sheep had long flourished in the cold northerly climate, grazing on land that was, as one contemporary put it, “so fruitful that if overnight a wand or rod be laid upon it, by the morning it shall be covered with grass of that night’s growth.”² In these conditions, they grew a golden fleece of fine, dense fibers that could—once sheared, carded, fulled, tucked, and dried—be spun into a wonderfully warm and weatherproof cloth.³

As early as the twelfth century, raw English wool was exported to the Low Countries, then the epicenter of Europe’s clothmaking industry, and textile makers there considered it to be the finest in Europe.^* In 1343, King Edward III granted a group of merchants a monopoly on the trade of raw wool with the textile merchants of the Low Countries that transformed the way the business was done.⁴ In return for the royal monopoly, the king exacted an export duty that covered a significant portion of the royal budget. Also, soon after, he fixed the official market for the wool trade, known as the “staple,” in the port town of Calais, on France’s northern coast, which he had recently captured as a trophy of war. There, the merchants, who were incorporated as the Company of the Staple and known simply as the Staplers, conducted their trading activities with foreign merchants. For some time, the Staplers’ monopoly ensured that they prospered most from England’s greatest natural resource.^†

But in commerce, nothing stands still: over the next fifty years, the trade in raw wool steadily declined as woven cloth grew in popularity—significantly because the export duty on woven cloth was lower than on raw wool.⁵ The cloth dealers now followed the precedent set by the Staplers. In 1407, they founded the Company of Merchant Adventurers and received a royal monopoly for the export of woven cloth to Europe.

The Merchant Adventurers purchased their cloth from regional suppliers who transported it to London’s Blackwell Hall, a converted medieval mansion that stood adjacent to the Guildhall at the heart of London’s commercial district. Most of the cloth was unfinished—the dyeing and other refining activities were undertaken by textile workers in foreign markets. The classic English product was the broadcloth—a sheet thirty yards long and made from as many as sixty fleeces. Typically woven in East Anglia as well as the West Country counties of Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Somerset, it was popular in the cool-climate countries of northern Europe. Another cloth, the kersey—a smaller, cheaper cloth, woven from short-stapled wool, fulled less extensively and woven to be lighter, and produced in narrower measures—was favored in warmer climates to the south.

English cloth was popular beyond the Low Countries. Venice, Florence, Lucca, and the other city republics of the Italian peninsula were eager purchasers of English cloth. So, too, were Spanish traders, who bought it and then shipped it across the Atlantic to their colonies in the West Indies and other parts of the New World. Meanwhile, merchants from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) on the Adriatic coast distributed English cloth across the Ottoman empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, including swaths of what we know today as Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula.

By the mid-1500s, almost everyone in England was involved with, benefited from, or was affected by England’s dominant industry. In a speech before Parliament, Sir Edward Coke, one of England’s most prominent judges, later remarked that if one were to “divide our native commodities into ten parts… nine arise from the sheep’s back.”⁶

Many of England’s leading families built their livelihoods, fortunes, estates, and, in the long run, their legacies, on the cloth trade. One prosperous merchant etched an encomium in a window of his home:

I praise God and ever shall…

It is the sheep hath paid for all!⁷

AMONG THE MOST successful of these families were the Greshams, who originally hailed from Norfolk on England’s blustery North Sea coast and who initially prospered as purveyors of hats made from worsted, the cloth named after the local village of Worstead. Then, in the first half of the 1500s, three Gresham brothers—William, Richard, and John—rose to become prominent members of the Worshipful Company of Mercers, the most powerful guild of merchants. They specialized in the import of textiles: linen, fustian, and, above all, silk.⁸

Over time, the Gresham brothers gained renown across Europe—trading with the Low Countries, Spain, and the Levant—and they came to exert an extraordinary influence over the commercial fortunes of London and, indeed, of England.^* At various times, they served as masters or wardens of the Mercers. Also, William became governor—chief executive—of the Merchant Adventurers, while Richard and John each served as Lord Mayor of London. The mayoralty was the pinnacle of achievement for any London merchant. As one contemporary noted, there is “no public officer of any city in Europe that may compare in port and countenance” with the Lord Mayor of London.⁹ Both brothers were knighted for their service as mayor.

The Greshams’ success, built on their unquestioned business acumen, was greatly aided by the growing dominance of London as England’s commercial capital. In the early years of the sixteenth century, London had been rivaled in commercial importance by several “outports,” commercial and trading centers on England’s south, southwest, and northeast coasts, including Bristol, Hull, Newcastle, Plymouth, and Southampton. But as the export of unfinished cloth grew, London’s relative proximity and easy access to Antwerp, the staple, or primary trading center, for England’s unfinished cloth, gave the city and its merchants, including the Greshams, an advantage over the outports.

Antwerp was northern Europe’s greatest entrepôt—a hub for the trading of goods from around the world. Situated near the mouth of the Scheldt river, which rises in France and flows through what is now Belgium and into the North Sea, Antwerp was ideally located to serve as a commercial thoroughfare for the transport and trade of goods throughout Europe. As a nineteenth-century historian wrote, “It was no uncommon sight to see two or three thousand vessels at one time in the Scheldt, laden with merchandise from every quarter of the globe.”¹⁰ Here, German merchants traded silver and copper from the mines of central Europe, Venetian merchants displayed silks from the Levant and beyond, and Portuguese merchants, fast displacing Venetians as carriers of luxury goods from the East, arrayed their spices. The Greshams and other ambitious English merchants brought their unfinished cloth to market in Antwerp, exchanging it for the luxury products prized by England’s wealthiest citizens.

A cosmopolitan metropolis of some 100,000 inhabitants—including William Gresham, who resided in the English community there—the city was a melting pot of cultures and a gabble of languages. While out and about in Antwerp, noted one observer, it was not unusual to meet “a lady who could converse in five, six, or even seven different languages.”¹¹ With so many merchants conducting business and with so much money flowing in and out of the city, Antwerp soon became the financial capital of Europe—and its richest city. Emperors and kings came from across the continent to raise their loans and discharge their debts. Merchants, flush with cash, became bankers. Germans, such as the Fuggers, were preeminent among these, tapping into their networks of merchant-factors with capital to invest and offering a variety of financial mechanisms such as bills of exchange to manage and maintain their accounts. Some English merchants—the Greshams, in particular—became bankers, too.

In the 1540s, when London’s trade with Antwerp was booming, Thomas Gresham, Richard’s son, emerged as the leader of the next generation. In a portrait dated 1544, when he was twenty-six years old, newly married, and recently admitted to the Worshipful Company of Mercers, Thomas poses in an unadorned black coat with white collar and sleeves, his face characterized by a regal nose, eyes of great clarity, and a modest ginger-colored beard. The impression is of a person both equable and resolute, poised to spend his life—as Greshams before him had—in service to his crown and country.

But even as the Greshams prospered, it was becoming clear that not everyone was benefiting from England’s trade boom. A few who had the foresight to look deeply into the matter could see that, on the contrary, England was on the cusp of a great crisis: the cloth trade was faltering, the English presence in Antwerp was threatened, the crown was mired in debt, people were homeless and unemployed, towns were ravaged, and disease raged.

One of the most perceptive analysts of the English situation was a very different sort of character than any of the Greshams—a courtier, a former Cambridge professor, a man with no commercial interests: the brilliant intellectual Sir Thomas Smith.

IN THE SUMMER of 1549, Smith, one of England’s two secretaries of state and a member of King Edward’s Privy Council—essentially his cabinet of chief ministers and closest advisers—escaped London and the burdens of court. He repaired to Eton College, where he served as provost, a position that brought him an additional salary and the advantage of a fine country retreat. Eton was, and still is, one of England’s grandest secondary schools. It is situated some twenty miles west of London, on the banks of the Thames and within sight of Windsor Castle, the mightiest of the royal residences.

Smith was deeply concerned about what he called “the miserable estate, our commonwealth.” He had tried assiduously to explain his reasoning and make the case for reforms to Edward Seymour, who was the uncle of the boy-king Edward VI and wielded great state power as effectively regent with the grand title of Lord Protector.¹² But Smith had been ignored by Seymour and, feeling aggrieved, retired from court to spend some time at Eton. Over the course of the long summer months, Smith tried to get the frustration out of his system by putting his ideas down in writing. The resulting work, A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, is now considered one of the most powerful social and economic tracts of the sixteenth century.

Like the Gresham family, the Smith family was rooted in the cloth industry. They were not cloth merchants, however, but sheep farmers, based in Walden in the county of Essex, fifty miles northeast of London. But Thomas was not destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Showing early prowess as a scholar, he won a place at Queens’ College in Cambridge at the age of thirteen. At first, he struggled financially, and came near to abandoning his studies. In the end, however, he persisted, achieved distinction, and, by the age of thirty, he had become not only the first Regius Professor of Civil Law but also the vice-chancellor of the university. But this, it seems, was not enough for him. In February 1547, at the age of thirty-three, Smith relinquished a university career and accepted an invitation to enter Seymour’s service. A little over a year later, he was named Secretary of State.¹³ It was a meteoric rise.

Smith’s Discourse manifested his deep understanding of England’s travails and expressed his urgent desire to overcome them. The book is written as a dialogue, a popular literary device of the day, in which a husbandman (farmer), a knight, a merchant, a capper (artisan), and, most prominently, a doctor—who clearly speaks for Smith—engage in an extended debate on what ails England. Smith begins by enumerating England’s many ills, the most alarming of which, according to the doctor, is the matter of wealth disparity. Although rich landowners, with their large flocks of sheep, and successful cloth merchants such as the Gresham family were making large profits, not everyone in England was prospering in the boom times.

“Poverty reigns everywhere,” Smith declared.

One of the root causes of the problem, he wrote, was inflation. Indeed, prices had risen by 50 percent in the first four decades of the sixteenth century, and they continued to rise, especially on goods that were scarce in the realm and were often imported—notably silk, wine, spices, paper, and glass of all kinds. “Every man finds himself grieved” by the rising prices, he wrote.¹⁴

Smith blamed the inflationary spiral on Henry VIII, who spent recklessly on foreign wars and an extravagant lifestyle and plunged the crown into debt. When Henry could no longer raise sufficient money from taxes, loans, and the sale of monastic land, he turned to financial chicanery: currency manipulation. This involved debasing the coinage by reducing the amount of silver in every coin. Although the crown could spend less on silver, the value of the coins plunged and prices were driven even higher. This was a disaster for everyone. In his Discourse, Smith called for an end to this abuse.

Also, Smith identified another factor that he saw as deleterious to the realm: the practice of “land enclosure.” England’s open lands—the island was a rural patchwork of vast fields and manorial estates—had long done double duty. Generally, arable land was tilled by one owner or tenant, but after the harvest or during an off-season, it was available to everyone and was typically employed for the grazing of sheep.¹⁵

For landowners who sought relief from the damaging effects of inflation, the temptation was to convert some or all of their arable land into pasture for their own animals to graze exclusively. This involved enclosing their fields with wooden fences, rows of stones and mounds of earth, or hedges—and thereby removing them from common use. Such enclosure made good economic sense for the landowners. Wool for cloth was in high demand, and the cost of grazing sheep was considerably less than the cost of growing grain or corn. Thomas Tusser, an old Etonian Norfolk farmer, reckoned that enclosure made land three times more profitable than when it was made available to everyone.¹⁶ But the effects on local communities could be disastrous. Smith noted that a plot of land that once employed one or two hundred people would, after enclosure, serve only the owner and a few shepherds.¹⁷ Without employment—or even land to grow food or graze small flocks—entire villages were abandoned.

The practice of enclosure was not new. In the fourteenth century, England, like much of Europe, was devastated by the Black Death—an epidemic of bubonic plague that obliterated nearly half the population.¹⁸ With so few laborers available to farm the land, landowners were forced to enclose their property and turn it into pasture for sheep and other animals.

Of course, some unscrupulous landowners took advantage—even as the population started to rise again—and over the years, the crown had sought to curb the most flagrant abuses: two acts of Parliament, in 1489 and 1515, were introduced to limit or regulate the practice of land enclosure, but they had little effect. By the 1540s, when the practice spiked, the Privy Council, led by Edward Seymour, made another attempt to tackle the problem, issuing a royal proclamation that condemned the “unlawful converting of arable land to pastures.” A commission for the “redress of enclosures” was established and charged with conducting an inquiry into those who had been transgressors or violators of the anti-enclosure statutes already on the books.

But government intervention had failed before, and as Smith wrote in his Discourse, there was little reason to think that it would work now, particularly as it was the avarice of landowners that underlay the recent practice and this seemed unlikely to change. And so, unless they could find a way to solve the problem, the king and his court could expect to face mounting social unrest. It was no surprise, Smith wrote, that given “hunger is a bitter thing to bear,” the impoverished majority “murmur against them that have plenty.”¹⁹

His observation was prescient. As he penned these words, the country was on the brink of rebellion. About 150 miles away, in the Gresham family’s home county of Norfolk, and just north of Smith’s own home county of Essex, the people were preparing to do a great deal more than just murmur about their discontent.

IN THE FIRST week of July 1549, a crowd of villagers gathered at the local chapel of the village of Wymondham to attend a pageant, an all-day festival of “processions and interludes.”²⁰ Emotions ran high because the beloved building was scheduled for demolition as part of Edward’s dissolution of church properties—a euphemism for smashing and looting—begun by his father, Henry VIII. In 1534, the king had proclaimed himself supreme leader of the church of England, broken from the Pope and the Catholic Church in Rome, and soon set about stripping ancient monasteries of their treasure, lands, and influence. Between 1538 and 1540, more than two hundred monastic buildings—housing more than 8,000 monks, nuns, and canons (a clergyman or clerk)—were suppressed, their riches seized by the crown and their property sold to raise cash.²¹

Wymondham’s churchgoers dearly wished to save the chapel, but their ability to do so against the decree of the king seemed doubtful, if not impossible. As the festival played on, a group of townspeople banded together and marched to nearby Morley, where they began “throwing down” fences erected by landowners there. The fences—and the sheep they enclosed—were, if nothing else, a symbol of the favor shown to the wealthy men who grazed the sheep and whose interests were placed above those of the majority of the local and larger population.

Throwing down the enclosures at Morley did not fully quell the anger of the Wymondham people, and it discontented others. One of these, a significant landowner called Sir John Flowerdew—a lawyer, whose son was a close friend of Thomas Gresham and who lived in the nearby village of Hethersett—was angry that some of his fences had been removed. Seeking a twisted kind of revenge, he offered money to anyone who would be willing to have a go at the enclosures of another local landowner, a man named Robert Kett.²²

A band of about six men took Flowerdew up on his offer. It is unlikely, however, that they saw Kett as the enemy: he was a local citizen, an ardent supporter of the church, and a tanner by trade. Although a man of rising prosperity, holding property worth about £670, he was no grand figure.²³ So, before dismantling his enclosures, the men entreated Kett to return the land to public use. They spoke, they assured him, not just on their own account, or for Flowerdew, but for the “weal of the Commonalty.”

Kett made no attempt to turn them away or defend his enclosures. He did not even defend his right to have them. Instead, he declared his sympathy with the protestors, revealing that “he felt deeply their own misery.” The “nobility and gentry,” he said, possessed a “power so excessive, avarice so great, and cruelty of every kind so unheard of” that it had to be restrained.

As if to convince the protestors, Kett marched with them into his field, helped remove his enclosures, and then participated in throwing down those in the fields of other landowners in the county. In doing so, he quickly emerged as the rebels’ leader. As word of the action spread, the handful of Wymondham men grew into a watershed of protestors, at first trickling and then cascading across the fields and pastures and woodlands of Norfolk, destroying hedges and ransacking villages as they went, until they pooled into a great, raging body—estimated to have reached 20,000 at its peak—on Mousehold Heath, an open area on the outskirts of Norwich, the capital of the county of Norfolk.

From there, where they made camp and established a kind of headquarters, Kett’s rebels expanded their activities across large parts of Norfolk. Within days, the small Wymondham protest turned into a prolonged combination of revolt, crusade, campout, and riot. The rebels seized control of Norwich and scoured the countryside for food, slaughtering and devouring 20,000 sheep in the process. They captured members of the local gentry—the few who had not fled their estates—and held them hostage in the woods.

While enclosures were a tangible symbol of the rebels’ plight and an easy target for their anger and aggression, Kett and his men knew their removal alone would not restore the England they had once known. So, in their wooded haven at Mousehold Heath, they drew up a petition of twenty-two grievances to be presented to King Edward. It was a laundry list of complaints. One grievance directly addressed the issue of land enclosure, others railed against high and rising prices as well as exorbitant and unregulated rents, and yet others called for revisions to fishing rights, greater standardization of weights and measures used in trade, and questioned the duties of priests.

The rebels made it clear that, despite their grievances, they were loyal supporters of the king, and their only goal was to achieve justice and, again, to “deliver the common-wealth.”²⁴ But Edward Seymour, as regent to the boy-king, saw Kett’s action as a serious threat to the sovereignty of the king and the peace of the nation. He ordered William Parr, the Marquis of Northampton, to lead a royal force against the rebels. Extraordinarily, Kett’s men rebuffed the attack.²⁵

A second royal force was mounted. This time, Seymour, taking no chances, gave command to his long-standing friend and ally on the Privy Council, the dashing forty-five-year-old John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Dudley was typical of yet another class caught up in England’s crisis. Neither a merchant like Gresham nor an intellectual like Smith, Dudley was an aristocrat and a man of action who had won a fine reputation as, among other things, a tournament jouster. John’s father, Edmund, had been a close adviser of Henry VII but was executed on trumped-up charges of treason when Henry VIII acceded to the throne. Without a father, John was sent to be raised in the household of one of the king’s favorite soldier-courtiers, and he was quickly marked out for great things, receiving a knighthood at the age of nineteen after distinguishing himself on the battlefield against France. Seymour was knighted at about the same time, and the two became companions at arms. Over the next twenty years, Dudley emerged as one of Henry’s stalwart supporters, and benefited from gifts of land and offices. In 1543, he joined the Privy Council as Lord Admiral, responsible for England’s naval activities. After Henry’s death, he was granted the earldom of Warwick by Edward, and over the course of his reign, the boy-king came to think of the earl as a mentor—even a father figure.²⁶

Called into action after Kett’s unlikely victory, Dudley assembled a much larger force than William Parr had put together. With six thousand foot soldiers and fifteen hundred cavalry—including fourteen hundred mercenary soldiers from Germany and Italy—he rode toward Norwich. As he approached Kett’s encampment, he stopped for the night at the home of Thomas Gresham, whose family estate, Intwood Hall, lay just three miles south of Norwich.²⁷

The next morning, Dudley set out to engage the Mousehold rebels. But before he unleashed his forces, he sent two emissaries into the rebel camp in an attempt to persuade Kett to surrender and offer them leniency if they did so.²⁸ It was a notable display of compassion that seems out of character for a commander sent out to quash an act he saw as rebellion. His efforts failed, however. Kett distrusted Dudley and his promises and refused to back down.

Given Kett’s unbending response, Dudley had little choice but to order an attack by his royal force. The result was mass slaughter. Kett’s ragtag army was no match for Dudley’s mercenary soldiers. In a single August day, some thirty-five hundred rebels were killed at a place called Dussin’s Dale.²⁹ Kett, seeing that the cause was lost, fled. When his followers saw him abandoning the battlefield, they too lost heart, and at last surrendered.

The next morning, most of the leaders were rounded up and hanged. In the following weeks, Dudley presided over court proceedings, after which many more of the Mousehold rebels were executed, some in gruesome fashion: “first their privy parts are cut off, then their bowels pulled out alive, and cast into the fire, then their head is cut off, and their body quartered: the head set upon a pole, and fixed on the tops of the Towers of the City, the rest of the body bestowed upon several places, and set up to the terror of others.”³⁰ Eventually, Kett himself was captured, tried, found guilty, and hanged in chains from the top of Norwich Castle.³¹

The punishment meted out to the rebels did not satisfy some of the local gentry, who demanded even greater action. Dudley retorted, “There must be measure kept,” even in punishment. Was there, he pleaded, no place for “humble petition” or even “pardon and mercie?”³² His apparent sympathy may be telling, but he would have known the potential danger that Kett’s rebellion posed to the kingdom. Uprisings were taking place across the country—in neighboring Suffolk, as well as in Cornwall and Devon. The motives varied and overlapped—sheep and enclosures, taxes and subsidies, new religious strictures, laws concerning vagrancy and treason. But at their heart there was a continuing and growing disgust with the avarice of the nobility and gentry, the 2 percent who governed the 98 percent of yeomen and husbandmen, artisans and apprentices.³³

KETT’S REBELLION SHOOK England to its foundations. Some feared that the country might even descend into civil war. In the febrile atmosphere at court, Seymour started to lose the confidence of the Privy Council, and Dudley, the hero of the hour, emerged as the most powerful royal adviser. It helped that he had not fully disbanded his fighting force and, within a couple of months of suppressing Kett’s rebellion, he staged a coup d’état, arresting Seymour, becoming the effective regent, and assuming the title of Lord President.

In his new role, Dudley’s tasks were nothing less than to restore confidence in Edward’s reign, rescue England from economic calamity, and resolve the damaging social divisions that were being exposed by land enclosure. His job was made immeasurably harder with an abrupt and seemingly catastrophic collapse in demand for cloth from mainland Europe. In 1550, as he took over from Seymour, the cloth trade was buoyant, and total exports numbered 132,767 cloths, as lengths of fabric were called. But in 1551 this slumped to 112,710 cloths, falling to 84,968 the following year.³⁴ At a time when the monarchy was already heavily in debt, the decline in demand seemed to rule out any hope that royal loans could be paid back with customs revenue from the cloth trade. As one merchant reflected, some years later, England’s economy was “waxing cold and in decay.”³⁵

The situation was made worse by another development. In 1549, as Smith wrote his Discourse, Antwerp collapsed as a center for Europe’s spice trade. For fifty years, Portuguese merchants had used the Flemish port as its staple, trading spices there for German silver. But now the king of Portugal, João III, had decided that, with sufficient silver pouring into Lisbon from Spanish silver mines in America, he did not need to trade in Antwerp.³⁶ This disruption left English merchants facing a double hit: the decline of their export business in cloth and the loss of their import business in spices and associated luxuries from Asia.

To help sort out this complex crisis, Dudley called on a number of friends and associates to advise him. These included the merchant Thomas Gresham as well as several scholars, many associated with Cambridge University, including Thomas Smith, Richard Eden, Clement Adams, John Dee, and Ralph Robinson, most of whom were in their late twenties and early thirties. But even with this talented group of advisers, it is doubtful that Dudley would have made much progress without the active involvement and influence of a government administrator of genius, William Cecil, Dudley’s right-hand man and, officially, Secretary of State.

Like Gresham and Smith, Cecil also grew up with the sights and sounds of the sheep, wool, and cloth business. Born in 1520, the son of a minor royal servant and local landowner, he was raised in Stamford, a market town in Lincolnshire, one of the centers of the cloth industry: as early as the thirteenth century, merchants from Venice and Lucca were travelling to Stamford to buy scarlet and halberget, a richly textured cloth.³⁷ After attending local schools, Cecil went to St. John’s College in Cambridge, founded by Edward VI’s great-grandmother. There, from the age of fourteen, he was taught by Thomas Smith and John Cheke, a renowned Greek scholar. Young Cecil was among the first generation to follow the “new learning” introduced to Cambridge by the Renaissance scholar Desiderus Erasmus. This promoted Greek as a way of accessing the rediscovered writings of philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, Ptolemy, and Euclid—and, as a result, new subjects such as astronomy, arithmetic, and cosmology.³⁸

At the age of nineteen, Cecil advanced to Gray’s Inn, the grandest of the four Inns of Court, situated beyond London’s old Roman wall. Today, Gray’s Inn is one of the professional associations where barristers have their chambers and practice as advocates in the nearby law courts. But in Cecil’s day, it was seen as a kind of finishing school for young aristocrats who needed to understand enough about legal documents to manage their estates or for future royal administrators who would be involved in keeping the statute books. There, in an atmosphere very different from the cloistered world of Cambridge, Cecil was able to connect with leading figures at court and in commerce.

He soon followed Smith into royal service, almost certainly through the good offices of John Cheke, whose sister he had married and who had left Cambridge to tutor Edward VI. Initially, he served Edward Seymour, and he was briefly imprisoned when Dudley made his move for power. Unlike Smith, however, who lost his place at court, Cecil, displaying the remarkable political dexterity that would become his trademark, managed to extricate himself from the Tower of London and quickly secured Smith’s old job as Secretary of State.

Now, as Cecil pondered how best to advise Dudley and address England’s crisis, he may well have considered the ideas of his former tutor. Although Thomas Smith did not publish his Discourse in the summer of 1549, he did share it with Cecil. Knowing how potentially explosive his views were, he had urged Cecil not to distribute the treatise. Keep it “between us two,” he pleaded.³⁹

Nevertheless, Cecil may well have promoted some of Smith’s recommendations. And, as it turned out, there were others in this constellation of merchants, intellectuals, courtiers, and government officials who shared Smith’s perspective—notably the thirty-three-year-old businessman Thomas Gresham. He was invited to appear before the king and Privy Council to offer his opinion about the most effective way—with the “least charge”—that his majesty might “grow out of debt.”⁴⁰ As he later recalled, he argued persuasively that a program of reforms was needed.⁴¹

This program, which included a revaluation of the coinage that Dudley soon put into effect, featured an initiative to give English merchants greater control over English exports by reducing the influence of the powerful German merchants then resident in London. Ever since the 1470s, merchants from Lubeck, Danzig, and other market towns on the Baltic—which formed a commercial confederation known as the Hanseatic League—had enjoyed significant trading privileges in England, thanks to their usefulness in supplying the royal navy with timber, hemp, and other essentials. By the late 1540s, they were handling around 35 percent of England’s cloth exports.⁴² This, according to Gresham, was a key cause of the cloth crisis, “the chiefest point of the undoing” of the realm. Gresham urged Dudley “to overthrow the Steelyard,” the enclave on the banks of the Thames where the Hanse merchants were headquartered—and Dudley did precisely that. In February 1552, the foreign merchants’ privileges were withdrawn, and as a result England’s merchants managed to capture a greater share of the country’s cloth trade.⁴³

With these measures, Dudley was able to address some of the causes of England’s economic crisis. Yet many of England’s political, intellectual, and business leaders felt strongly that something more—and something different—needed to be done to prevent England from falling into decay once again. As Clement Adams, one of Cecil’s coterie of Cambridge-educated protégés, put it, many people “perceived” there was not sufficient demand for “the commodities and wares of England” from people in the countries nearest to them.⁴⁴

The situation had to be remedied. But how?