same time ordered to be established; and it is promised that as soon as possible the like conveyances should be settled for the Oxford and Bristol road, and also for that leading through Colchester and Norwich. The rates of postage are fixed at two-pence the single letter for any distance under eighty miles; four-pence up to a hundred and forty miles; six-pence for any longer distance; eight-pence to any place in Scotland. It is ordered that no other messengers nor foot-posts shall carry any letters, but those alone which shall be employed by the king's postmaster-general, unless to places to which the king's posts do not go, with the exception of common known carriers, or messengers particularly sent on purpose, or persons carrying a letter for a friend. The mode of conveyance contemplated in this scheme was by persons riding on horseback, which indeed continued to be the general system of our post-office down to within the last fifty years: the proclamation directs that two-pence-halfpenny per mile shall be paid on the roads to the several post-masters for every single horse carrying the letters. We may observe that if this post established by Charles I. actually made out the distance between London and Edinburgh in three days, it was a quicker conveyance than the public were possessed of a century later. "The conveyance of post-letters," says Giles Jacob, in the second edition of his Law Dictionary, published in 1732, "extends to every considerable market-town, and is so expeditious that every twenty-four hours the post goes six score miles." But at the rate appointed in Charles's proclamation the post between Edinburgh and London must have gone fully seven score miles in the twentyfour hours. It is believed, however, that the project was not fully carried into effect. Witherings, who was now inland as well as foreign postmaster, was superseded in 1640 for abuses in the execu tion of both his offices; and they were sequestered into the hands of Philip Burlamachy, to be exercised henceforth under the care and oversight of the king's principal secretary of state. From that date, therefore, the Post-Office may be considered as a public establishment. The continued growth of London affords another proof of the advancing condition of the national commerce, industry, and wealth. Repeated proclamations were published both by James and Charles, as they had been by Elizabeth, with the view of checking the further increase of the capital, which all forcibly attest how irresistibly the evil, as they imagined it to be, made head against their most strenuous efforts. One proclamation of Charles, in 1630, forbade the erecting of any houses or new foundations in London, Westminster, or within three miles of any of the gates of London or of the palace of Westminster; and also the entertaining of additional inmates in houses already existing, "which," says his majesty, "would multiply the inhabitants to such an excessive number that they could neither be governed nor fed." Another measure, repeatedly adopted by both these kings, was to order all mere visitors to the capital to leave it and go back to their homes in the country. In 1617 a proclamation by King James strictly commanded all noblemen, knights, and gentlemen, who had mansion-houses in the country, to depart within twenty days, with their wives and families, out of the city and suburbs of London, and to return to their several habitations in the country, there to continue and abide until the end of the summer vacation, "to perform the duties and charge of their several places and service; and likewise, by house-keeping, to be a comfort unto their neighbours, in order to renew and revive the laudable custom of hospitality in their respective counties." None were to be allowed to remain, before the beginning of the civil wars St. Giles's, except those having urgent business, to be signified | dangerous to all that pass those ways."* But to, and approved by, the privy council. Again, 1622, in one proclamation he commanded all noblemen and gentlemen, having seats in the country, forthwith to go home to celebrate the feast of Christmas, and to keep hospitality in their several counties,-" which," said he, "is now the more needful, as this is a time of scarcity and dearth ;" and, in a second, he enjoined the persons thus relegated to the country to remain there till his further pleasure should be known, adding, that the order should be held to include widows of distinction, and that all such lords and gentlemen as had law-business to bring them up to London should leave their wives and children in the country. Of many proclamations of the same kind issued by Charles we shall notice only one, of the year 1632, in which his majesty argues that, by the nobility and gentry residing in London with their families, a great part of their money and substance was drawn away from the several counties whence it arose, "and spent in the city on excess of apparel, provided from foreign parts, to the enriching of other nations, and the unnecessary consumption of a great part of the treasure of this realm, and in other vain delights and expenses, even to the wasting of their estates." The practice, it is added, also drew great numbers of loose and idle people to London and Westminster, which thereby were not so easily governed as formerly; besides that the poor-rates were increased, and the price of provisions enhanced. Much of all this wisdom of our ancestors is sufficiently absurd; but in regard to the point last touched upon here, it is but fair to remember, that, from the difficulties of conveyance between one part of the country and another, any extraordinary accumulation of people upon one spot was in those days reasonably regarded with more alarm, for the pressure it might occasion upon the local provisionmarket, than it would be now, when the whole kingdom is in a manner but one market. no doubt, the right way to treat the inconvenience was, as with all such mere economic tendencies, to leave it to correct itself. Still, Howel, in his Londinopolis, published in 1657, observes that the union of the two crowns of England and Scotland, by the accession of James in 1603, conduced not a little to unite also the two cities of London and. Westminster, which were once above a mile asunder; "for," says he, "the Scots, greatly multiplying here, nestled themselves about the court; so that the Strand, from the mud walls and thatched cottages, acquired that perfection of buildings it now possesses." Some years after James's accession, however, we find St. Giles's in-the-Fields still spoken of, in an act of parliament for paving it, as a town separate from the capital: it and the lane called Drury Lane, leading from it to the Strand, are described in the act as "of late years, by occasion of the continual road there, and often carriages, become deep, foul, and names of the older streets about Covent Garden," the New River, by which the greater part of the metropolis is still supplied with water, was, after three years' labour, brought into the reservoir at Clerkenwell, by the enterprising and publicspirited projector, Mr. Hugh Middleton, citizen and goldsmith of London, who was thereupon knighted by King James. One of the patents granted by King Charles in 1630 was for the conveying of certain springs of water into London and Westminster from within a mile and a half of Hodsdon in Hertfordshire, after the plan of a projector named Michael Parker. This scheme, however, does not appear to have taken effect, and it only deserves notice from the circumstance that, to defray their expenses,-a considerable item of which was to be a payment of 4000l. a-year into the king's exchequer-the royal grant gave the undertakers "a special licence to erect and publish a lottery or lotteries," "according," it is added, "to the course of other lotteries heretofore used or practised." Lotteries had been for more than half a century before this occasionally resorted to by the government for raising money for particular purposes; the earliest on record, it is said, having occurred in the year 1569, when 20,000l. was raised for the repair of certain harbours by the sale of 40,000 tickets at ten shillings each, the prizes being articles of plate. Another lottery was drawn under the sanction of public authority in the reign of James I., to defray the expenses attending certain of the early settlements in America. The commercial history of the remainder of the present period will not detain us long. The trade and industry of the country in all their branches suffered of necessity considerable depression during the continuance of the war; but after the re-establishment of tranquillity and a settled government, great pains were taken by the parliament and by Cromwell to bring about their revival, and, on the whole, with very considerable success. We shall first enumerate the few facts requiring notice in the history of the several great chartered companies. In 1643 a number of the proprietors of the East India Company were at length induced to subscribe a new stock, but only to the inadequate amount of 105,000l. Great part of this money was soon after lost in various ways; and for some years the trade could scarcely be said to be carried on at all. It is worthy of remark, however, that it was during this period the company acquired two of its most important possessions, the town of Madraspatnam, or Madras, long the seat of their supreme government in India, and still the capital of one of the presidencies, which was ceded to them by the sovereign of the country in 1643; and the island of St. Helena, of which they took possession in 1651, on its abandonment by the Dutch. Meanwhile, in 1649, a subscription for a new stock had been opened; but, although encouraged by the parliament, it proceeded slowly, and by the following year had only produced about 192,000. With a small part of this they soon after engaged in the Guinea trade, a charter to carry on which for five years they obtained from the parliament in 1651. In 1654, on the conclusion of peace with Holland, commissioners from both parties were appointed to settle the claims brought by the English and Dutch companies against each other for depredations and other injuries committed before the war; when the English gave in an acccount of 2,795,9907. 19s., which the Dutch met by one of 2,919,861l. 3s. 6d. ; but, in the end, the commissioners decided that a sum of 85,000l. should be paid by the Dutch, besides about 3,600l. to the heirs of certain of the sufferers of Amboyna,—an award for which the English Company was probably as much indebted to the humbled condition of the United Provinces at the moment as to the clear justice of the case. For some years longer, however, the company's trade could hardly be said to exist. Any private adventurer who chose to fit out a ship for India was connived at by the government in violating their privileges, so that the company, as a body, carried on what little trade they did merely for the sake of preventing their charter from being abrogated on the pretext that they made no use of it, and in the hope of better times. It is said, too, that in the scramble for the Indian trade which now ensued, at once inundating India with the manufactures of England and England with the produce of India,—the interlopers in general made as scanty profits as the company, so that at last most of them joined in urging upon the government the re-establishment of the old exclusive system. Their so acting, however, is not decisive as to the absolute failure of the experiment of a free-trade that had thus been tried, inasmuch as their proposition was avowedly made with the view of becoming themselves members of the company when it should be set up again with a new stock and a new charter. Still it is probable that commercial enterprise was not yet sufficiently advanced in England to have enabled the country to carry on the Indian trade successfully by the mere efforts of individuals against the powerful rivalry of the Dutch and Portuguese monopolies. At last, in October, 1657, a new charter was granted to the company for seven years, after they had actually, in despair of obtaining the protection of the government, put up bills in the Royal Exchange in the preceding January, offering their property and their privileges, such as they were, for sale. On this a new stock of about 370,000l. was raised, which immediately placed the affairs of the company in a flourishing condition, and enabled it to carry on the trade with a spirit and success which continued without interruption or abatement till the Restoration. A short paragraph from the annalist of our Indian commerce, whom we have chiefly followed in this summary, will explain the state of its establishments abroad at the close of the present period. "In the infancy of the company's commerce, Bantam was the chief factory, to which all the others were subordinate; and so they con tinued till the year 1638 or 1639, when Surat became the chief establishment, and the factories of Bantam, Fort St. George (or Madras), Hooghly in Bengal, and those in Persia, were made subordinate to it. In the year 1660 the company sent out orders to give up the inland factories of Agra and Amadavad, as also Mocha in the Red Sea, and Bussorah at the head of the Persian Gulf. Their port of Gombroon being of doubtful utility, it was referred to further consideration whether it should be kept up or abandoned. It was determined to retain Carwar, Calavella, Rajapore, and Scindy as long as the customs in Persia should continue to be paid; and these factories were made subordinate to Surat. The factories on the coast of Coromandel and in the Bay of Bengal were put under one agent at Fort St. George (or Madras), who was directed to use his best endeavours to obtain a settlement in Ceylon."* The trade in woollens with the Netherlands and Germany, carried on, as heretofore, by the Company of Merchant Adventurers, continued in a very prosperous condition during all the time of the Commonwealth. In 1647 the company removed their comptoir, or foreign residence, from Delft to Dort, and here they remained, notwithstanding repeated invitations from the magistrates of Bruges to return to that city, in which they had originally fixed themselves, till about the year 1651, when they began to remove to Hamburgh, which soon after became the sole staple for the English woollen trade. An ordinance of the Lords and Commons, in 1643, granted a new and more ample charter to the Levant Company, "which," said the ordinance, "beside the building and maintaining of divers great ships, and the venting of kerseys, sayes, perpetuanos, and several other commodities, hath been found very serviceable to this state, by advancing navigation and transporting into foreign parts, for several years together, above 20,000 broad-cloths, besides other commodities, dyed and dressed in their full manufacture." Among the productions of the East soon after this imported in considerable quantities by the Levant Company, was coffee. It is said that coffee was first introduced into England in 1652 by a Turkey merchant of the name of Edwards, who had brought home with him a Greek servant accustomed to make it, and whom he set up in a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, on the spot where the Virginia Coffee-house now stands. The valuable privileges of the Russian Company were taken from them by the czar a short time before King Charles's death, on the pretence that certain members of the company had taken an active part on the side of what the czar considered a rebellion against their lawful sovereign; but it appears that whatever resentment may have been entertained gaainst them on that account was at least very dexterously taken advantage of by the Dutch, who seized the opportunity of bargaining for a share of the Archangel trade on condition of paying a duty Macpherson, Hist. of European Com. with India, 123, of fifteen per cent. on all exports and imports. For some years after this the English trade to Russia seems to have been almost suspended; nor did a sort of embassy, sent to the czar, or emperor as he styled him, by Cromwell in 1654, succeed in obtaining more than some very petty concessions. We shall have to notice some further negotiations which took place upon this subject in the next period. Till the year 1641 the only produce of the Island of Barbadoes consisted of very bad tobacco and a little cotton and ginger; but in that year some of the planters procured a few sugar-canes from Fernambuc in Brazil, which throve so well, that, after a season or two, a small ingenio, or mill for the manufacture of sugar, was set up in the island. Yet in 1647, when Ligon, the author of the History of Barbadoes,' who gives this account, arrived in the island, although there were then many sugar-works set up, the people were still ignorant of the true manner of planting, the time of cutting the canes, and other particulars in the art of cultivating the plant. All these deficiencies, however, were soon got over; the business of sugar-making was carried on every year to a greater and greater extent; and many large fortunes were amassed by the planters in a wonderfully short time. The author of a pamphlet entitled 'Trade Revived,' published in 1659, speaks of Barbadoes as "having given to many men of low degree exceeding vast fortunes, equal to noblemen." He adds, that "upwards of a hundred sail of ships there yearly find employment, by carrying goods and passengers thither, and bringing thence other commodities; whereby seamen are bred and custom increased, our commodities vended, and many thousands employed therein, and in refining sugar therefrom, which we formerly had from other countries." Till this extended cultivation of sugar in Barbadoes, all of that article consumed in England had been obtained from the Portuguese territory of Brazil. Nor were the English in Barbadoes long in imitating their Portuguese rivals on the southern continent of America in another branch of trade which has darkened the history of the rearing of the sugar-cane wherever it has spread over those regions, the importation of negroes from the opposite coast of Africa. The rapid increase, again, of the population of this and our other West Indian settlements thus produced soon created a large demand for necessaries of all kinds from England. While the trade, however, between the mother-country and her colonies was still only growing up to this state, an ordinance of the Lords and Commons, in 1646, although acknowledging in the preamble that the several plantations of Virginia, Bermuda, Barbadoes, and other places of America, had been very beneficial to the kingdom by the increase of navigation and of the customs arising from the import of the commodities of their growth, and thereupon continuing for three years longer the exemption from all duties except the new duty of excise which home produce and manufactures carried out to these plantations had hitherto enjoyed, imposed, for the first time, the important restriction that "none in any of the ports of the said plantations do suffer any ship or vessel to lade any goods of the growth of the plantations, and carry them to foreign parts, except in English bottoms, under forfeiture of the before-named exemption from customs." We shall presently find this principle carried out to its full extent in a subsequent much more memorable measure of the Rump parliament. Meanwhile, during the dissensions that raged at home, and after the triumph of the parliamentary cause, great numbers of the royalists had sought refuge in Virginia, Barbadoes, and the other West India settlements; so that the white population of these dependencies was in general fiercely opposed to the new government, and they might be said to be in a state of rebellion after all the rest of the empire had been reduced to submission and quiet. Barbadoes, indeed, had actually received Lord Willoughby as governor under a commission from Charles II., then in Holland, and had proclaimed Charles as king. It was in these circumstances that the English parliament, in 1651, with the view of punishing at once the people of the colonies, and the Dutch, who had hitherto enjoyed the greater part of the carrying-trade between the West Indies and Europe, passed their famous Navigation Act, declaring that no merchandize either of Asia, Africa, or America, except only such as should be imported directly from the place of its growth or manufacture in Europe, should be imported into England, Ireland, or any of the plantations in any but English-built ships, belonging either to English or English-plantation subjects, navigated by English commanders, and having at least threefourths of the sailors Englishmen. It was also further enacted that no goods of the growth, production, or manufacture of any country in Europe should be imported into Great Britain except in British ships, or in such ships as were the real property of the people of the country or place in which the goods were produced, or from which they could only be, or most usually were, exported. Upon this law, which was re-enacted after the Restoration, and which down to our own day has been generally regarded and upheld as the palladium of our commerce, and the maritime Magna Charta of England, we shall only at present observe that one of its first consequences was undoubtedly the war with Holland which broke out the year after it was passed. It is admitted also, we may add, by a writer who ranks among its most zealous eulogists, that it "occasioned at first loud complaints, that though our people had not shipping enough to import from all parts whatever they wanted, they were nevertheless, by this law, debarred receiving due supplies of merchandise from other nations, who only could, and till then did, import them."* The Barbadians were at length, VOL. III. • Anderson, ii. 416. not without much difficulty, compelled to surrender their island to the parliamentary forces under Sir George Ayscue, in March, 1652; but, even after this, they continued, notwithstanding the prohibitory act, to keep up a considerable intercourse with the Dutch, which was connived at by the government. The wealth and importance of Barbadoes, however, were considerably reduced by Cromwell's conquest, in 1656, of Jamaica, to which many of the planters soon after removed, induced principally by the greater cheapness of land in that island. The legal rate of interest on money had continued to be ten per cent., as fixed by the act of 1571,* till, in 1624, it was reduced to eight per cent. by the statute 21 Jac. I. c. 17,-which, after authorizing this rate, drolly adds the proviso, "that no words in this law contained shall be construed or expounded to allow the practice of usury in point of religion or conscience!" The rate of interest continued to be eight per cent. till 1651, when it was further reduced by the parliament to six per cent., at which point it remained fixed for the rest of the present period. Some years before this time a regular trade in the lending of money had sprung up, of which Anderson gives the following account from a rare and curious pamphlet, entitled The Mystery of the Newfashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers discovered,' printed in 1676. For some time the usual place in which the London merchants kept their cash had been the Royal Mint in the Tower. But the despotic act of Charles I. in seizing, a few months before the meeting of the Long Parliament, a sum of 200,000l. which was lodged here, under the name of a loan, having destroyed the security of that place of deposit, it then became customary, we are told, though the statement seems a strange one, for merchants and traders to intrust their cash to the keeping of their clerks and apprentices, until the breaking out of the civil war, when the said clerks and apprentices fell into the habit of running away from their masters and going to the army so that, at last, about the year 1645, commercial men first began to place their cash in the hands of goldsmiths; until which time, it is stated, the business of the goldsmiths of London consisted merely in buying and selling plate and foreign coins of gold and silver, in melting and culling these articles, in coining some at the Mint, and in supplying with the rest the refiners, plate-makers, and merchants, according to the variations of the price. "This new banking business," the account proceeds, soon grew very considerable. It happened in those times of civil commotion, that the parliament, out of the plate, and from the old coin brought into the Mint, coined seven millions into half-crowns; and there being no mills then in use at the Mint, this new money was of very unequal weight, sometimes two-pence and threepence difference in an ounce; and most of it was, it seems, heavier than it ought to have been in See vol. ii. p. 783. 4 B |