The Hansa Towns

by Helen Zimmern

Of course the Hanseatic League did not at once give up all for lost. They intrigued, they negotiated, they even flattered themselves with hopes of success. Then suddenly the news of Elizabeth's death broke up a congress held with this end in view. The Hanseatics at once cast glances full of hope at her successor. They trusted he might prove less inexorable. Experience had often shown them that with a change of ruler came a change of policy.

But they proved greatly mistaken. The reply received by the first embassy they addressed to James I. rudely shattered all their hopes. They resumed their intrigues at home, trying to stir up the emperor to hinder the export of wool from Germany, and to encourage the manufacture of woollen goods at home.

It was the great De Witt who wisely said that the one weak point in the German Hansa was that it was not backed by manufacturing interests. They were merely carriers and intermediaries, and this made itself felt in the days of their decline.

Negotiations, entreaties leading to nothing, and the Germans being impotent to hinder, the English soon found their way again into the empire with their persons and their goods, and once more Hamburg was the first to receive them formally and to conclude a treaty with them. This time neither the emperor nor the League protested. It is true the Steelyard in London was ultimately restored to the Germans, but the old privileges enjoyed with it were gone for ever. Nor was it, when restored, regarded any longer as the property of the Hanseatic League such as we have known it—a compact body, willing and able to defend its rights. It was rather the property of the Germans living in England, and this it remained. In 1853 the Steelyard property was sold to an English company for building purposes for the sum of £72,500, by the cities of Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg, the sole heirs of the once powerful Hanseatic League. The present Cannon Street Station stands on part of the site.

With the death of Elizabeth the history of the Hanseatic League as such practically comes to an end in England. Then followed, quickly afterwards, the Thirty Years' War, which gave the League a mortal blow, from which it never recovered.

Even before the last stroke fell, John Wheeler, a secretary of the association of Merchant Adventurers, had declared regarding the Hanseatic cities (1601), "Most of their teeth have fallen out, the rest sit but loosely in their head." His judgment was verified all too soon.

VII.

THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR KILLS THE LEAGUE.

John Wheeler's diagnosis of the condition of the League was too correct. It is true that an ostensibly official document enumerates fifty towns as forming part of the Hansa League in 1603, but we know that at the same time only fourteen had a seat and voice in the Diet and duly paid their fees. Indeed, the more we examine the internal condition of the League at this period the more we wonder, not that it fell asunder, but that it endured so long. It had become utterly disorganized and was decaying fast.