CHAPTER VI.
THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION UNDER JAMES I., CHARLES I., AND THE COMMONWEALTH.
Manufactures and Commerce—Trade under the Stuarts—English Commerce and Dutch Competition—The East India Company—Vicissitudes of its Early History—Rival Companies—The American Colonies and West Indies—Growth of London—National Revenue—Extravagance of the Stuarts—Invention of the Title of Baronet—Illegal Monopolies—Cost of Government—Money and Coinage—Agriculture and Gardening—Dramatists of the Period—Shakespeare and his Contemporaries—Poets of the Occult School—Herbert, Herrick, Quarles—A Wealth of Poetry—Prose-Writers—Bacon's "Novum Organum"—Milton's Prose Works—Hales, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, and other Theological Writers—Harrington's "Oceana"—Sir Thomas Browne—Historians and Chroniclers—First Newspapers—Harvey's Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood—Napier's Invention of Logarithms—Music—Painting, Engraving, and Sculpture—Architecture—Manners and Customs—Sports and Pastimes—Furniture and Domestic Embellishment—Costumes—Arms and Armour—Condition of the People.
In the reigns of James and Charles England neither maintained the reputation of her navy acquired under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, nor made great progress in foreign commerce. The character of James was too timid for maritime or any other war, and when he was forced into action it was only to show his weakness. He put to death the greatest naval captain of his time, Raleigh, who, if well employed by him, might have made him as much respected at sea as was Elizabeth. Nevertheless, he built ten ships of war, and for some years spent thirty-six thousand pounds annually on the navy. The largest ship which had yet been built in England was built by him, but it was only of fourteen hundred tons. As for commerce, he was too much engaged in theological disputations, in persecution of Papists, in wrangling with his Parliaments, and in following his hawks and hounds, to think of it, and consequently grievous complaints of the decay of trade were heard every session. The Dutch were fast engrossing both the commerce and the carrying trade of England. During James's reign they traded to England with six hundred ships, and the English traded to Holland with sixty.
The naval affairs of Charles were quite as inglorious as those of his father. As James beheaded the best admiral of England, so Charles chose for his the very worst in Europe, and the disgrace of Buckingham's expedition to the Isle of Rhé was the consequence. Charles's contests with his Parliaments, which terminated only with his life, destroyed all chance of his promotion of naval ascendency, and of the cultivation of commerce. All this was wonderfully changed by the vigorous spirits of the Commonwealth. The victories of Blake, by which the naval greatness of Holland and Spain was almost annihilated, raised the reputation of the British arms at sea as well as on land to the first place in the civilised world. St. John was no sooner despatched by Parliament to the Hague as ambassador, than, perceiving the immense advantage which Holland obtained from being the great carriers of Europe, he drew and got passed the celebrated Navigation Act, which—providing that no produce of Africa, Asia, or America, nor of any English colony should be imported into England except in English ships, and that the manufactures or merchandise of no country in Europe should be imported except in English ships, or the ships of the nation where they were produced—at once transferred an enormous maritime business to England.
Sir Walter Raleigh, in a treatise on the comparative commerce of England and Holland, endeavoured to draw the attention of James I. to the vast benefits that the Dutch were obtaining from our neglect. He showed that whenever there was a time of scarcity in England, instead of sending out our ships and supplying ourselves, we allowed the Dutch to pour in goods, and reap the advantage of the high prices; and he declared that in a year and a half they had taken from Bristol, Southampton, and Exeter alone, two hundred thousand pounds, which our merchants might as well have had. He reminded the king that the most productive fisheries in the world were on the British coasts, yet that the Dutch and people of the Hanse Towns came and supplied all Europe with their fish to the amount of two million pounds annually, whilst the English could scarcely be said to have any trade at all in it. The Dutch, he said, sent yearly a thousand ships laden with wine and salt, obtained in France and Spain, to the north of Europe, whilst we, with superior advantages, sent none. He pointed out equally striking facts of their enterprise in the timber trade, having no timber themselves; that our trade with Russia, which used to employ a large number of ships, had fallen off to almost nothing, whilst that of the Dutch had marvellously increased. What, he observed, was still more lamentable, we allowed them to draw the chief profit and credit even from our own manufactures, for we sent our woollen goods, to the amount of eighty thousand pieces, abroad undyed, and the Dutch and others dyed them and reshipped them to Spain, Portugal, and other countries as Flemish baizes, besides netting a profit of four hundred thousand pounds annually at our expense. Had James attended to the wise suggestions of Raleigh, instead of destroying him, and listening to such minions as Rochester and Buckingham, our commerce would have shown a very different aspect.
It is true that some years afterwards James tried to secure the profit pointed out by Raleigh from dyed cloths; but instead of first encouraging the dyeing of such cloths here, so as to enable the merchants to carry them to the markets in the South on equal or superior terms to the Dutch, he suddenly passed an Act prohibiting the export of any undyed cloths. This the Dutch met by an Act prohibiting the import of any dyed cloths into Holland; and the English not producing an equal dye to the Dutch, thus lost both markets, to the great confusion of trade; and this mischief was only gradually overcome by our merchants beginning to dye their yarn, so as to have no undyed cloth to export, and by improving their dyes.
During the reign of James commercial enterprise showed itself in the exertions of various chartered companies trading to distant parts of the world. The East India Company was established in the reign of Elizabeth, the first charter being granted by her in 1600. James was wise enough to renew it, and it went on with various success, ultimately so little in his time that at his death it was still a doubtful speculation; but under such a monarch it could not hope for real encouragement. In its very commencement he granted a charter to a rival company to trade to China, Japan, and other countries in the Indian seas, in direct violation of the East India Company's charter, which so disgusted that Company, as nearly to have caused them to relinquish their aim. In 1614 they obtained a charter from the Great Mogul to establish a factory at Surat, and the same year they obtained a similar charter from the Emperor of Japan. In 1615 Sir Thomas Roe went as ambassador from England to the Great Mogul, and resided at his court for four years. By this time the Company had extensively spread its settlements. It had factories at Acheen, Zambee, and Tekoa, in Sumatra; at Surat, Ahmedabad, Agra, Ajmere, and Burampore in the Mogul's territories; at Firando, in Japan; at Bantam, Batavia, and Japara, in Java; and others in Borneo, the Banda Isles, Malacca, Siam, and Celebes; and at Masulipatam and Petapoli, on the Coromandel coast; and at Calicut, the original settlement of the Portuguese on the coast of Malabar. Their affairs were, in fact, extremely flourishing, and their stock sold at 203 per cent.; but this prosperity awoke the jealousy of the Dutch, who carried on a most profitable trade with Java and the Spice Islands, and, in spite of a treaty concluded between the two nations in 1619, the Dutch Governor-General attacked and took from the Company the island of Pulo Rangoon. This was only the beginning of their envious malice, for in 1623 they committed the notorious massacre of the English Company at Amboyna, and drove the English out of all the Spice Islands. Had this occurred in Cromwell's days, they would soon have paid a severe retribution; but James was just then anxious to secure the aid of the Dutch in restoring his son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, and these atrocities were quietly smoothed over, and left unavenged. The consequence was, that the affairs of the Company fell into a most depressed condition, and though in 1616, when their stock was worth 200 per cent., they had raised a new stock of one million six hundred and twenty-nine thousand and forty pounds, which was taken by nine hundred and fifty-four individuals, principally of the higher aristocracy, at the close of James's reign the stock had fallen to half its value.
Charles was not a more far-sighted or a juster patron of the India Company than his father. In 1631 they managed to raise a new stock of four hundred and twenty thousand pounds, but whilst they were struggling with the hostilities of their rivals, the Dutch and Portuguese, the king perpetrated precisely the same injury on them that his father had done, by granting a charter to another company, which embroiled them with the Mogul and the Chinese, causing the English to be entirely expelled from China, and injuring the India Company to a vast extent. The Civil War in England then prevented the attention of the Government from being directed to the affairs of this great Company. At the end of Charles's reign the Company's affairs were at the worst, and its trade appeared extinct. In 1649, however, Parliament encouraged the raising of new stock, which was done with extreme difficulty, and only amounted to one hundred and ninety-two thousand pounds. But in 1654, Parliament having humbled the Dutch, compelled them to pay a balance of damages of eighty-five thousand pounds and three thousand six hundred pounds to the heirs of the murdered men at Amboyna. It required years, however, to revive the prosperity of the Company, and it was only in 1657 that, obtaining a new charter from the Protector, and raising a new stock of three hundred and seventy thousand pounds, it sprang again into vigour and traded successfully till the Restoration.