CHAPTER XII

THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH

THE Commercial policy of Henry VII. had been directed to the extension of European trade, and the direct entry of English traders into the European markets. This object

Shipping and the Navigation Acts.

had provided a sufficient motive for State intervention to encourage shipping, although there were not wanting in the next reign those who, like Cardinal Wolsey, regarded Navigation Acts as checks upon trade. The defence of the Tudor Navigation Acts turns on the question how far they served for the development of a marine necessary to the expansion of the commerce of an island people, and to the development of national power. Would natural causes have sufficed without an artificial assistance which necessarily, in the first instance, acted as a check on the volume of commerce ? It may be rash to give a positive answer to that question as concerns the early Tudor period. But by the reign of Elizabeth, the seafaring impulse had become so powerful that it could dispense with protective inducements. It was no longer doubtful that English shipping, left to itself, could compete successfully with trade rivals. The immense development of maritime power in Elizabeth's reign owed nothing to Navigation Acts, though we may hesitate to make the same statement with regard to the earlier development which made the Elizabethan development possible. Thirst for adventure and greed of gain combined to give the seafaring life an unprecedented attraction, whether it drew mariners like Davis and Frobisher to explore the frozen and barren regions of the North, or led Hawkins and Drake to fill their ships with the spoils of Spanish galleons and the Spanish Main.

The development of sea-power, however, was by no means withdrawn from the department of State policy. In spite of the uncomplimentary pictures which are occasion- The Royal ally drawn to impress us with the parsimony of a Navy. government which almost succeeded in paralysing the English resistance to the Spanish Armada, the royal navy, under Elizabeth, was rendered extremely efficient, though it was never supposed to be anything more than a section of England's fighting fleet. An effective fighting fleet was the outcome of a great mercantile marine. Burleigh encouraged shipbuilding by bounties; he was careful of the preservation of timber so that there might be no waste of shipbuilding material. He encouraged the fisheries as the great nursery for seamen by ordinances insisting on the observance of fishdays, and the eating of fish in Lent. He was inclined to encourage all legitimate commercial ventures and exploring expeditions, though he looked askance on the semi-piratical rovers who preyed on Spanish commerce, and himself refused to profit by their doings. These scruples were not shared by Burleigh's royal mistress or by his colleagues; and if the government did not officially approve the buccaneering methods by which English sea-power was developed, nearly every one in the government had an unofficial finger in them.

The development of sea-power, rather by the encouragement of private enterprise on the part of the State than by direct control, was a leading feature of Lord Elizabethan policy. The second principle of Burleigh. Mercantilism, which requires the accumulation of treasure by the State, is not so prominently a guiding principle; but Burleigh has left evidence in his own handwriting of his adherence to the doctrine of the Balance of Trade. Having laid it down that the value of imports must not exceed the value of exports because the difference must be paid in treasure, he argued therefrom that the purchase of unnecessary foreign commodities is to be discouraged. The wine trade is particularly reprehensible because wine is not only a luxury but an injurious luxury; morally for obvious

reasons, and economically because it diminishes the healthy production of grain for the brewing of ale and beer. This, of course, is in addition to the fact that the French sell wine but do not buy English goods; and France is consequently enriched in the long-run by the treasure which England, by another sort of commerce, has extracted from Spain and the Low Countries. England would be the better without the wine at any price, but she is so much the worse because she has actually bartered silver and gold for it. These views are expressed in condemnation of an Act of 1559, which comes under the category of Navigation Acts because it was intended to give English shipping a preference in the wine trade; but the Act had the further object of increasing the importation of wine, because it differentiated between English and foreign shipping, not by raising the duties against the imports in foreign vessels, but by lowering the duties on what was imported in English vessels. What Burleigh protests against is the anticipated increase in the importation of wine, not the idea otherwise urged against Navigation Acts that the restriction to English bottoms tended to increase prices and diminish the volume of trade.

New
Commercial

It was remarked that the Hansards were finally deprived of their special privileges in the reign of Edward vi. The last remnant of the right by which they were differentiated from other aliens was ended in Companies. 1578, in effect as a penalty for their persistent antagonism to the English Merchant Adventurers just displayed at Hamburg. The English had by this time learnt thoroughly the advantage of seeking their own market and pushing their own way, instead of depending on the foreign companies in England. The analogy of the Merchant Adventurers was followed in the formation of new companies for trading in the new markets which the English opened for themselves. At the same time that the last blow was struck at the Hansards in England, the Eastland or Prussian Company was chartered for carrying on the Baltic trade. Prussia, it must be remembered, at this time meant the remote district on the south

eastern shores of the Baltic, which ultimately gave its name to the kingdom developed out of the German Electorate of Brandenburg, to which it happened to be attached. In 1581 the Levant Company was formed for trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, where it competed successfully with the Venetians. At an earlier stage the Muscovy Company had been incorporated, in consequence of the intercourse inaugurated by Chancellor's expedition in 1553. The Muscovy Company worked its way across Russia and tapped the Persian trade, while the Levant Company penetrated to the Persian Gulf, and so even as far as the Portuguese station of Goa on the west coast of India. Finally, on the last day of 1600, the East India Company received its charter, whence there issued subsequently developments more startling than from any other trading association in the history of the world. The story of the great activity and expansion of the trading companies must be told in another chapter.

Colonisation, the second great form of expansion, was hardly initiated in the reign of Elizabeth except in the shape of the plantation of Englishmen on Irish estates, Colonising confiscated either on the ground that the occupiers in Ireland. could show no title valid in English law, or by way of penalty for disaffection and rebellion. This colonisation of Ireland, chiefly by gentlemen of Devon, both in Ulster and in the south, was the real beginning of the establishment of the ascendency of an alien Protestant minority, which was so fruitful of evil in the later history of Ireland.

The idea of colonisation in the New World presented itself to the visionary Humphrey Gilbert, and appealed to the more practical imagination of his half-brother, Gilbert Walter Ralegh, who dreamed of founding a and Ralegh. new England beyond the seas. Their conception was different from that of the Spaniard, for whom America was a huge estate of the Crown whence much gold and silver might be extracted for the service of the Crown, and incidentally for the enrichment of the Spanish garrison. The colony, as conceived by Ralegh, was what the English colonies did

subsequently develop into, a permanent settlement of Englishmen on the soil. As yet, however, the commercial possibilities were not recognised. There were swifter ways of making money than by the slow process of wringing it from forests and prairies where there were no gold-mines. Capitalists were not yet ready to combine for the purposes of such an enterprise. Gilbert first, and Ralegh after him, obtained patents from the Crown conveying rights over vast unappropriated regions, but otherwise the matter was left to their individual enthusiasm. Gilbert perished at sea. Ralegh planted a settlement to which year after year he sent out ships and men, but usually to find only that their predecessors had perished. The task was too great for any man

undertake, successfully, single-handed. Nevertheless, Ralegh's efforts prepared the way for colonial expansion under the Stuarts, when Spanish colonies and Spanish Plate Fleets could no longer be treated as a prey by Englishmen in haste to grow rich.

New Industries and Monopolies.

The State, then, did practically nothing to encourage colonisation, but it was zealous in the development of industries. The system of monopolies, which was liable to gross abuses, and was very severely condemned at the end of the reign and in the time of the Stuarts, was introduced with the object of establishing new forms of production and improved methods. Exclusive rights of production and sale were granted, because the risk and cost of creating the new industries were too great to be undertaken without this security; besides which, in some cases, powers had to be granted to patentees analogous to the power of compulsory land purchase for the making of railways in modern times. The principle is the same as that applied in the case of the mercantile companies, whose charters gave them exclusive trading rights, because under existing conditions the risks involved in organising the trade entitled the organisers to the profits thereof, lest others should thence step in and reap where they had sown.

The monopolies, it is to be observed, were granted in the