The importance of this intercourse with the continent, which fortunately the variations in the laws of the land were unable to check, gave prominence in the community to the English merchant. He is already in the fourteenth century, and has been ever since, one of the main supports of the State. While the numerous applications of Edward III to Lombard bankers for ready money are well known, it is sometimes overlooked how often he had recourse to English merchants, who supplied him with that without which his archers’ bows would have remained unstrung. The advice and goodwill of the {244} whole class of merchants could not be safely ignored; therefore their attendance was constantly requested at Westminster to discuss money and other State matters. Some families among them rose to eminence, like the De la Poles of Hull, who became earls of Suffolk with descendants destined to die at Agincourt, to be checked by Joan of Arc at Orleans, to be made dukes, and to be impeached for high treason. It was, too, the time of “thrice Lord Mayor of London”[329] Dick, afterwards Sir Richard Whittington, who, if we trust the legend, did not entertain the same feeling as the above-mentioned pedlars for cats. Another man of the same sort a little later was the famous William Canynge, of Bristol, who made a large fortune there in trading with foreign countries. One of his ships was called the Mary Redcliffe, a name as well as his own since associated with the memory of the Bristol boy-poet, Thomas Chatterton.
The feeling that the king of England should be le Roi de la Mier goes on increasing. The “Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,” a sort of consular report, written however in verse, about 1436, is quite positive:
“Kepte (keep) than the see about in specialle,
Whiche of England is the rounde walle;
As thoughe England were lykened to a cité,
And the walle enviroun were the see.
Kepe than the see that is the walle of Englond,
And than is Englonde kepte by Goddes sonde (decision).”[330]
And those traditions having been continued, Montesquieu was able to write, in his “Esprit des Lois”: “Other nations have made the interests of commerce yield to political interests. England has always made her political interests yield to her commercial ones. {245}
“This is the people in the world that has best known how to avail itself of these three great things: religion, commerce, and liberty.”[331]