Civic Performance

Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London

J. Caitlin Finlayson, Amrita Sen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315392684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London brings together a group of essays from across multiple fields of study that examine the socio-cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pageantry in sixteenth and seventeenth-century London.

This collection engages with modern interest in the spectacle and historical performances of pageantry and entertainments, including royal entries, progresses, coronation ceremonies, Lord Mayor's Shows, and processions. Through a discussion of the extant texts, visual records, archival material, and emerging projects in the digital humanities, the chapters elucidate the forms in which the period itself recorded its public rituals, pageantry, and ephemeral entertainments. The diversity of approaches contained in these chapters reflects the collaborative nature of pageantry and civic entertainments, as well as the broad socio-cultural resonances of this form of drama, and in doing so offers a study that is multi-faceted and wide-ranging, much like civic performance itself.

Ideal for scholars of Early Modern global politics, economics, and culture; literary and performance studies; print culture; and the digital humanities, Civic Performance casts a new lens on street pageantry and entertainments in the historically and culturally significant locus of Early Modern London.

Part I

Civic to global

1 ‘To the Honour of our Nation abroad’

The merchant as adventurer in civic pageantry

Tracey Hill

The pageantry associated with the installation of the chief officer of the city of London in the early modern period might have been expected in an unproblematic way to glamorise and praise the mercantile endeavours that underpinned the wealth of the city’s oligarchs, and to trumpet their ever wider global reach. In fact, the figure of the venturing merchant, his motives, destinations, and achievements, works as a focal point – on a very public stage – for the articulation of a moment of mixed fortunes for the city and its constituent bodies. This chapter’s underlying approach to the Shows suggests that they are at times an expression of conflicting civic interests and echoes that of Richard Rowland (2010, pp. 304–305), whose important book on Thomas Heywood challenges the notion that mayoral pageantry uniformly ‘sought to occlude social difference [and] resolve political tensions … [in order to] overcome any forces, internal or external, that might disrupt the vision of London as a cohesive community’. Starting with an overview of the major civic figures of the period, and then moving on to the Lord Mayor’s Show, I explore the interrelationships between pageantry and the early modern trading companies as well as how and to what effect these merchants, and the various trading companies of the early mid-seventeenth century with which they were associated, were represented in mayoral inaugurations.

In terms of longevity and impact, probably the most significant of the trading companies established in the early modern period was the East India Company.¹ The East India Company was founded in 1599, granted its first royal charter in 1600, and its initial voyage to the Indies took place early in 1601. Similar corporate initiatives both preceded and succeeded the East India Company: the Muscovy Company, for instance, had come into being in the mid-sixteenth century, the Levant (then Turkey) Company in 1581, and the Merchant Adventurers’ Company had been in existence for many years by 1599; the French Company, established in 1611, was one of those set up subsequently to the East India Company. Naturally, the large majority of the richest and most powerful city merchants were chief members of the early seventeenth-century overseas trading companies. These men tended simultaneously to hold the top jobs in the civic hierarchy, which is where overseas trading and civic pageantry came into visible proximity. Indeed, the congruence between the mayoralty and trading companies reached its peak in the first three decades of the seventeenth century when the Shows were at their zenith.

Three of the leading governors of the East India Company during this period were Thomas Smith, Maurice Abbot, and Christopher Clitherow, the latter two of whom were Lord Mayors before or after their governorships. The Lord Mayors for 1609 (Thomas Campbell), 1606 (John Watts), and 1639 (Henry Garway) were also governors of the East India Company; William Cockayne (1619) was a founding director. Maurice Abbot (Lord Mayor in 1638) was a member of the 1613 East India Company conference that was held to negotiate with the Dutch over a possible merger of the Dutch and English East India Companies (Ogborn 2008, p. 111). He was deputy governor from 1615–1624 before becoming governor of the East India Company from 1624–1638. Clitherow (1635) succeeded him in the same fashion, as deputy governor from 1624–1635 and then governor from 1638–1641.² The latter had been a member of and investor in the East India Company since its inception; indeed, the only contemporary trading company that he was not involved in was the Merchant Adventurers. Other important East India Company personnel held the city’s highest position too. As well as being a member of the Virginia Company, the Levant Company, the North-West Passage Company, and the Spanish Company, Hugh Hammersley (1627) was a prominent East India Company member who invested £600 in its 1607 voyage.³ John Spencer (1594) invested £750 in the same venture, one of the largest sums contributed (Barbour 2009, p. 27). Richard Deane (1628), George Whitmore (1631), and Thomas Middleton (1613) had all been original subscribers to the East India Company in 1599; Middleton was also an East India Company committee member who had invested in a number of privateering voyages in the late sixteenth century (Smith 2016, p. 50). Leonard Holliday (1605) was the most significant financier of the East India Company’s first voyage; John Swinnerton (1612) was also an investor, as were Thomas Hayes (1614), John Leman (1616), George Bowles (1617), and Francis Barkham (1621). Other East India Company investors included John Gore (1624), James Campbell (Clitherow’s son-in-law, son of the 1609 Lord Mayor Thomas Campbell and himself Lord Mayor in 1629), and other members of the powerful Cockayne and Middleton families.⁴ Outside of the East India Company, James Pemberton (1611), John Jolles (1615), and Francis Jones, the ill-fated Lord Mayor in 1620–1621 who failed to complete his term of office, were all shareholders in other trading companies, while Richard Saltonstall (1597) was a governor of the Merchant Adventurers. Thomas Smith, who established and led the East India Company as well as being involved in the Levant Company and the Muscovy Company for a number of years, did not serve as Lord Mayor but did take civic office as sheriff. In short, more than half of those in mayoral office between 1600–1643 also performed significant roles in the East India Company and/or other overseas trading companies.

Clearly, then, as Edmond Smith (2016, p. 21) argues, ‘EIC members were … part of a social network within the organisation, but they were also part of a wide variety of other communities in early modern London through different institutions, activities, and relationships’. The end result of these interrelationships is that, as Richmond Barbour (2003, p. 89) remarks, ‘the consistency of mayoral investment in overseas expeditions is striking and significant’. It worked both ways, of course; as Robert Brenner (1993, p. 74) comments, the merchants’ ‘great wealth routinely provided them with the opportunity for magistracy’.⁵ Since the Shows were the chief vehicle for the public celebration of the city’s oligarchs, one might expect them to have depicted these merchants and their trading endeavours in idealistic and glowing colours. The reality was rather more complex. Theodore Leinwand (1982, p. 141) refers to the ‘mercantilist mythos’ inherent in mayoral pageantry of the period, but, as I will show, the rhetoric of the Shows was as likely to obscure as much as to celebrate the economic imperatives and realities behind early Stuart trading ventures. Civic pageantry did not entirely refrain from depicting the dangers inherent in such voyages overseas, but the Shows often stressed the generalised risk of overseas venturing as a means by which the alleged heroism of the merchant could be underlined. The overseas trading companies are present in mayoral pageantry to an extent, but in a cautious, vague, and sometimes even disingenuous way. It is the ancient livery companies, the actual commissioners of civic pageantry, which are at the heart of these productions, not the (relatively) new trading companies.⁶ The interests of these two varieties of corporate body were not necessarily in synch in this period, given the ways in which the newer companies could tread on the toes of the ancient companies, which is another reason why the treatment of overseas trading and the merchant adventuring companies is less than straightforward in the mayoral Shows (I return to this point below). In any case, the East India Company, for one, had its own means of disseminating a positive public image in response to critiques that its monopoly was harming the domestic economy.⁷ In the face of wider concerns about the threat that large-scale corporate venturing and a profit-seeking mindset might pose to national boundaries, to monarchical power, and to distinctions of social rank, the 1620s were especially significant for the growth of economic theories and defences of a mercantile economy, which began to be promulgated to a wider public via print and, in a circumscribed way, through the mayoral Show. Such an agenda was hardly likely to dwell on the risks of trade.

Relatedly, how much of the city merchants’ actual trading activities is manifest in mayoral pageantry? The answer is surprisingly little, on the whole. As Barbour (2003, pp. 75–79) has argued, engagement with London’s ‘global economy’ in King James’s 1604 accession entry is more prolonged – and more topical – than it tends to be in the Shows. Occasionally the Lord Mayors’ corporate connections are vaunted. Heywood, in particular, tends to elaborate on all the ways in which the new mayor is involved in the various trading companies and as Rowland (2010, p. 346) has noted, his account of their affiliations is generally ‘absolutely current’.⁸ Thus Maurice Abbot (1638) is described accurately as ‘free of the Turkey, Italian, French, Spanish, [and] Muscovy [companies], and … late Governour of the East Indy-Company’ (Heywood 1638, sig. A4r). (As Heywood implies, Abbot’s governorship of the East India Company had come to an end only shortly before his mayoral term of office commenced, which was also the case with Henry Garway in 1639.) Similarly, the preamble to the 1639 Show Londini Status Pacatus demonstrates considerable familiarity with Garway’s personal history, from his travels as a young man through to his more recent trading links with ‘the Low Countries, France, Spaine, Italy, Venice, East India … Greene-land, Muscovy and Turkey’ (ibid. 1639, sig. A2v). Heywood also notes that Garway is ‘at this present Governour’ of the trading companies associated with the last three. Of Garway’s financial involvement in these ‘honorable Societies’, however, Heywood only says that he has a ‘generall negotiation in all kinds of Merchandise’ (ibid., sig. B4v). In Londini Sinus Salutis, however, Heywood makes no effort at all to tailor the Show’s content to its recipient. Although Clitherow’s profile seems eminently suited to the kind of list of civic affiliations one finds elsewhere in Heywood’s Shows, they are absent here. Apart from one very unconvincing reference to Clitherow as a ‘scholar’, and a generically conventional acknowledgement in the text’s preamble that ‘time, and [Clitherow’s] Merit have call’d [him] to this Office and Honor’, he is almost completely absent from the text (ibid. 1635, sig. A3r).⁹

Of course, trade in very general terms is central to the Jacobean and (especially) the Caroline Shows. Not for nothing is the book of Heywood’s 1633 production for Ralph Freeman from the Clothworkers’ Company entitled Londini Emporia, or Londons Mercatura. As the central motif of that year’s Show, merchandise is given a lengthy introduction in the accompanying text although its contemporary forms are underplayed. From ancient times, Heywood (1633, sig. A3r) claims, ‘Aduenture and Industry’ have discovered ‘unknowne Countries’ and established amity with ‘forreigne Princes’. By tracing ‘Aduenture and Industry’ back to antiquity, Heywood utilises a consistent tactic in mayoral pageantry, which is to underplay current issues. As J. Caitlin Finlayson (2010, p. 845) has argued, in this text Heywood connects ‘Mercatura with classical mythology’ and in so doing he ‘romanticises the origins of the livery companies’. I would add that Heywood also, more implicitly, does the same for the trading companies. Anthony Munday’s approach in Chrysanaleia is also typical in this regard: here the Fishmongers are described in purely historical terms as ‘worthy Merchants in those reuerend and authentique times’. ‘[L]eauing their matter of Commerce and Merchandise’, as Munday (1616, sig. B1r) puts it, the Show explicitly disregards the Company’s present-day forms of trade in favour of ‘ayming at their true Hierogliphical impresse for the dayes intended honour’. In other words, the trade in fishing becomes simply an ‘emblem’ or metaphor for the purposes of the Show.

Pageant poets also attempted to link mercantile and spiritual endeavours. The city merchants’ mission, according to Heywood, also includes converting ‘barbarous Nations to humane gentlenesse and courtesie’, erecting ‘braue and goodly structures’ and founding ‘great and famous Cities’ (1633, sig. A3r).¹⁰ Only incidentally, it seems, has trade moved ‘usefull commodities’ from ‘forreigne Climats’ in the interests of the enrichment of the domestic sphere. Primarily, for Heywood as for his predecessors like Munday and Thomas Middleton, the mayoral Show is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Civic to global
• PART II: Material encounters
• PART III: Methodologies for re-viewing performance
• Index