Merchant Adventurers and Tudor Boomtime.....London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford (Allen Lane)

This fresh account of the rise of the English capital as a global metropolis never loses sight of the city’s searing inequality

Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn and Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall. Photograph: Giles Keyte/BBC/Company Productions Ltd

Inside Samuel Pepys’ favourite church, St Olave’s on Hart Street, stand monuments to aldermen, mercers, knights of the realm and directors of the East India Company. Out in the churchyard, via a gateway studded with stone skulls – “like a jail”, wrote Dickens, who renamed the place St Ghastly Grim – are the plague victims. They lie alongside “a man blackamore”, found dead in the street in 1588, and two African maidservants of a Jewish-born Portuguese physician. Interred here, too, are the scant remains of an Inuit baby, who perished within weeks of being taken from Baffin Island, Canada, by the explorer Martin Frobisher. Here, in microcosm, is Tudor London, a city of commerce, immigration, adventure, disease, celebrity, curiosity, money, power and risk. As Stephen Alford makes clear, “London was both a triumph of riches and a triumph of poverty.” This is a book about travel, trade and the rise of London as a global metropolis, but it does not neglect the churchyard.

In 1500, London was marginal and underwhelming. Paris had more people; Antwerp had bigger markets; Augsburg in Bavaria had the bankers and Florence the art. London didn’t even have a bourse. A century later, the city was booming. Her population had quadrupled and her river teemed with ships full of caviar, tobacco and silk. She had a Royal Exchange and a global reach. In Arctic waters seamen encountered islands called Cape Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland and Charing Cross, which was just south of West England. “Not an infant of the curtailed skinclipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their Prophet’s tomb at Mecca,” wrote the satirist Thomas Nashe in 1599. Such a statement could not even have been conjured at the beginning of the century.

Success was born against a backdrop of deteriorating relations with Europe, and of crushing disappointment. The Arctic islands were frozen markers of a failure to find a northern sea route to Cathay, the fabled empire of the Great Khan, who reportedly possessed Mexican quantities of bullion. English adventurers never found a way of sailing through ice, but from the first attempt to navigate a north-eastern passage in 1553 came Anglo-Russian contact and – with time and diplomacy – exclusive trading privileges for what became known as the Muscovy Company. Royally chartered and fiercely protectionist, it even claimed rights over any navigation or discovery made by “sailing [from England] northwards, northeastwards, and northwestwards, or any parts thereof”. It was England’s first joint-stock company and the model for mercantile – and eventually colonial – endeavour in the Levant, the East Indies and Virginia.

There have been many books on the merchant adventurers and still more on Tudor London, but in showing how fundamental each was to the success of the other, London’s Triumph feels very fresh. Alford, professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds, and the author of The Watchers, a deservedly acclaimed book on Elizabethan spies, is outstanding on the mercantile networks that enmeshed not only the livery companies and the court of aldermen, but also parish councils, immigrant communities and Westminster. He throws out long threads (beginning, aptly, with the merchant Thomas Wyndout) and weaves them into an exceptionally rich and variegated fabric. He picks out lovely details – the bookshop marked by the sign of the hedgehog; the grasshopper crest of the powerful Gresham family; and the sound in St Paul’s Cathedral – “like that of bees,” wrote one contemporary, “a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet”. Here was a city a stone’s throw from the countryside.

John Stow, born in London in Henry VIII’s reign, remembered fetching warm milk from a nearby farm. Thomas Cromwell stole a patch of his father’s garden. Stow’s A Survey of London is a sepia-tinted lament for the good old days and has found echoes in subsequent generations of Londoner. Others celebrated and stimulated change. Sebastian Cabot, who was Venetian by birth, Spanish by training and a Londoner by adoption, was the founder and first governor of the Muscovy Company. “It is hard to imagine London’s global ambitions getting quite the start that they did without his energy and vision,” writes Alford. Word was spread by Richard Hakluyt, whose anthology of traveller tales, The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600) might be read as a 1.76m-word national epic. For him and others in the post-Reformation landscape, this was God’s work.

London became a magnet. By the mid-century, fewer than two in 10 new freemen in the livery companies were London-born. John Isham came from Northamptonshire, made a small fortune in textiles, bought an estate in his home county and retired. His portrait confirms that he was “a man of very good stomach to his victuals”. Others sought asylum from religious persecution and civil war. Alford introduces us to some splendid names: Jan Bones, Melchior van Asse, Jacob Cool – members of the Dutch congregation of the Austin Friars, near Bishopsgate. The city called them “strangers”, queried their status and curtailed their freedoms, and yet, in its rough way, provided some kind of sanctuary.

Might all these new people, all this money and oozing self-confidence, distort London’s moral compass? That was the fear

Might all these new people, all this money and oozing self-confidence, distort London’s moral compass? That was the fear. “Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city,” a sermon began in 1577, “she heard not the voice, she received not correction, she trusted not in the Lord.” The dread, shared by playwrights and preachers, was that citizens might buckle under the lure of lucre and the challenge of change. Antonios could so easily become Shylocks and trade lapse into usury. The fictional fat cat in Thomas Wilson’s Discourse Upon Usury might pay lip service to a preacher’s denunciation of moneylending, but had no intention of abandoning “so sweet a trade for a few words of his trolling tongue”.

London was a place of searing and visible inequality. In the shadow of grand houses overcrowded tenements squatted. In 1579, there were three privies to 85 people in Tower Street – which returns us to Tower Street Ward, St Olave’s in Hart Street, the church and the yard.

One can’t imagine that the woman who abandoned her son in the Royal Exchange in 1601 gave much thought to the birth of the East India Company a few months earlier. And yet London did achieve something extraordinary in the 16th century. Her greatest asset was, and remains, her intellectual capital. Alford rightly marvels at the courage, tenacity and chutzpah of the visionaries who took on the “Meta Incognita”, the “unknown limits” of the world. Anthony Jenkinson’s name rolled off the tongues of Ivan the Terrible, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Shah of Persia. With no contacts, no training, no knowledge of the terrain nor climate, people nor language, just a spirit of enterprise, infinite patience and a consignment of unappealing kersey cloth, he managed to convince the strong men of the East that England was worth a trade deal. This might be a book for ministers to take on holiday in the summer.