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The Government of Trade: Commerce, Politics, and the Courtly Art of the Restoration

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.1999.0026

1080-6547

Blair Hoxby,

Australian History and Society

The Government of Trade: Commerce, Politics, and the Courtly Art of the Restoration Blair Hoxby His business was, by Writing, to Persuade That Kings were Useless, and a Clog to Trade. —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681) When Dryden satirized Slingsby Bethel for his part in the Exclusion Crisis, he recalled the economic case that the old Commonwealthman had made for the Rump Parliament. As critics have noticed, Dryden had taken every care in Annus Mirabilis (1667) to suggest that Charles II was anything but useless and that London’s ambition of becoming the entrepôt of world trade would be realized only by showing “passive aptness” to Stuart rule. 1 That Dryden was in all probability named poet laureate for the service that Annus Mirabilis did the king and could later muster such animus against Bethel for expounding the virtues of trading republics should alert us to the high political stakes that were riding on the symbolic alignment of Charles II’s monarchy with the cause of trade. Writing in 1674, the Anglican Royalist John Evelyn saw that alignment as an important event in English history. While it was usual, he claimed, for “illustrious Nations” to judge “Traffick and Commerce incompatible with Nobless” in their early stages of development, the ancients had eventually discarded that “ill-understood Reproach.” Now, more perfectly than any previous monarch, Charles II had cultivated an ideal of noblesse that was compatible with merchandizing, and when trade was so honored by kings, “dignified by their Example and defended by their Power,” it rose to “its Ascendent.” 2 Evelyn implied that matters had been different under the early Stuarts, and in support of his view, he might have cited Sir Francis Bacon. “For merchandizing,” Bacon complained in a letter of advice addressed to James I, “it is true it was ever by the kings of this realm despised, as a thing ignoble and indign for a king.” 3 From the metaphor of theophanic advent that structured James I’s royal entry of 1604 to the [End Page 591] neo-platonic conflation of personal virtue and public benefit that resolved many Caroline masques, the early Stuart monarchy was supported by fictions of kingship that could not readily accommodate the values of economic reformers. Renaissance courtesy literature held that the Court should stand as a model for the realm, yet if it prized conspicuous expenditure, gift-exchange, and patronage rather than savings, merchandizing, and investment, if it celebrated the thaumaturgic effect of the royal presence rather than the power of calculation and industry, it could hardly serve as a mirror for merchants. To be sure, the early Stuarts’ courtly entertainments did leave some room for exchange and reflection between sovereign and merchant. While the tableaux of James I’s entry said little about the commercial conditions that a new Golden Age could be expected to bring England, the fact that the Italian and Dutch merchants sponsored arches bore witness to the importance of foreign trade to the Crown’s finances. We also know, for instance, that Ben Jonson devised two entertainments to celebrate the economic projects of courtiers in the presence of James I and that, in a less flattering gesture, the gentlemen of the Inns of Court had James Shirley include monopolists among the anti-masquers of The Triumph of Peace (1634) so that Charles I might be made to see, as Bulstrode Whitelocke recounted it, the “unfitness and ridiculousness of these Projects against the Law.” 4 Yet such moments were rarities in the artistic culture of the early Stuart Court, and their vision could not be said, in any event, to meet John Evelyn’s requirement that the king should dignify trade by his example and defend it by his power. While it would be inaccurate to interpret the reigns of the early Stuarts as a steady march toward revolution hastened by their failure to comprehend where England’s economic future lay, we shall be interested primarily in the way the Commonwealth and the restored monarchy defined themselves in relation to the early Stuarts, and for polemicists on both sides, it often proved useful to represent them as having been unresponsive to the prophets of commercial...