9. A marine insurance fraud in the Star Chamber*
The Star Chamber dealt frequently with accusations of fraud. A slippery topic with which the common law struggled, fraud was more comfortably adjudicated before judges sitting in equity who could weigh the particular facts and look the parties in the eye.1 Fraud consequently became an important part of the Star Chamber docket, and alleging fraud was a reliable means for plaintiffs to obtain jurisdiction in that court.2
Equity bills of complaint being notoriously untrustworthy,3 however, it is quite clear that many accusations of fraud brought in the Star Chamber were false, with parties making the charge merely to obtain jurisdiction and block a suit brought elsewhere.4 And yet dishonest though they may be, the Star Chamber records provide evidence, often very detailed, of many different frauds, the existence of which may be known to historians but not necessarily well documented.5
Deliberately sinking a ship to defraud the shipowners or insurers provides an excellent example. Fraud on bottomry loans – loans made to a shipowner repayable if the ship arrived safely at its destination but forgiven if it did not – was already attested in the fourth century BCE, when an Athenian court heard the case of an attempted fraudulent scuttling,6 and it remained common in the middle ages.7 But the spread of marine insurance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made the scam even more attractive,8 as the isolation of early modern insurance markets in different cities permitted shipowners and merchants to overinsure without much risk of discovery.9 By 1717, deliberate shipwreck had become such a serious problem that the British parliament made it a capital crime.10 Despite this threatened punishment, in the eighteenth century, deliberate shipwreck was frequent enough that intentionally sunk ships acquired the name of ‘coffin ships’ and became the subject of plays and novels.11 The scam continues to be ‘prevalent and persistent’ today.12
The mechanics of the fraud are clear and did not seem to change much over time.13 The fraudster had to find an old ship worth more sunk for the insurance money than in active service; buy the cooperation of a captain; load the ship with scrap packed to look like real wares; use false bills of lading to overinsure the ship and cargo; sink the ship at a convenient location; purchase the silence of complicit or suspicious sailors; obtain a certificate of shipwreck; and collect on the insurance policy.
The fraud may have been relatively easy to accomplish, but the loss of most of the early English insurance records in the 1666 Great Fire of London means that accounts of particular cases prior to the eighteenth century are scarce. Furthermore, maritime transport was inherently dangerous, and, the evidence having gone down with the ship, insurers had difficulty proving duplicity, suggesting that suits may not have been commonly brought.14
A pair of duelling Star Chamber cases from 1613 and 1614, however, illustrate this marine insurance fraud in great detail.15 At the same time, the cases also provide an example of the complex challenges inherent in trusting court archives as evidence.16 The 1613 suit alleged the scam, but the 1614 responding suit claimed that the facts in the earlier case had been fabricated. Obviously, someone was lying, but the evidence does not permit us to be certain whether the account of the shipwreck was a story about a fraud or was itself the fraud.
Nonetheless the possibility that the story of the insurance swindle was false does not render it unfit to be evidence that this type of fraud did occur and did so in the manner asserted in the suit. Presumably, the litigation fraudster who wanted a court to take his case seriously needed to make credible claims. Alleging frauds that sounded too improbable or that the judges and lawyers would not believe took place risked getting the suit dismissed as frivolous. Consequently, the story of this 1613 case – as it can be reconstructed from the Star Chamber files and related lawsuits in the courts of Chancery and Admiralty, together with facts gleaned from archives in Italy and the Netherlands – can usefully add another chapter to the study of the Star Chamber’s docket and the long history of maritime fraud.
***
The original lawsuit, Attorney General v Goodlake, began with an information filed in June 1613 by Attorney General Henry Hobart at the relation of Dominic Bowen.17 In relator suits, private parties purchased the services of the attorney general in exchange for paying the costs of suit. If the attorney general won, the relator shared in the judgement fine.18 Bowen was a Dutch merchant who had lived in London for many years.19 He often served as the London agent for Dutch traders abroad, especially those in Amsterdam, whose interests he claimed to be defending by bringing this suit.20
According to the information, in December 1608, Roger Goodlake, a young English merchant resident in Florence, assisted Antonio and Diego Texera – who were pointedly described as being ‘of the Nation of the Jewes’ and ‘men well knowne to be forward in plotting of anie villony that might torne to the preiudice of Christians’ – in committing insurance fraud.21 Diego Texera intended to load a ship with bales and chests packed to look as if they contained rich and expensive cloth. He would then obtain insurance on the freight based on a bill of lading, identifying the goods as ‘Cloth of Gould, velvettes, Chambelettes, [and] Silks’ to be shipped from Livorno to Cadiz and Alicante in Spain. In reality, the containers held nothing but old paper and soap, so that when the ship sank, as Texera intended for it to do, his payout from the insurers would be pure profit.22
To put his plan into action, Texera needed a ship and a shipmaster willing to sacrifice it. This was where Roger Goodlake came in. Goodlake convinced an English (or possibly Irish) captain named John Povey to carry the wares on his old and leaky – and thus sacrificeable – ship,23 the Hope or Hopewell of London. Goodlake then served as an interpreter between Povey and Texera to work out the details of the deception. For a payment of 400 crowns (£100), plus £80 for his share of the ship, Povey agreed to sink the Hopewell with all its freight and return to Livorno with a certificate that Texera could send to his insurers as proof of the shipwreck.24 For his services in helping to organize the scheme, Goodlake would share in the insurance proceeds.
Working through Jeronimo Henriques, their factor in Livorno, the Texeras had their wares loaded on to the ship. Eighteen chests and thirty bales went aboard, marked in the manner in which the Texeras ‘allwaies used to marke the Bailes of their best and richest Comodities’.25 But while they laded forty-eight bales and chests, the bill of lading recorded a cargo nearly double that.26
Shortly before departing, Povey hired a crew. He intentionally sought out mariners of different nations – Italians, Portuguese, English and Dutch – so that they could not communicate effectively among themselves and discover the plot. To further the charade, Goodlake took the English boatsman, John Newton, aboard the ship and pointed out to him two cases, admonishing him to take special care to keep them safe because they contained cloth of gold. In fact, they contained trash.27
Diego Texera sent the bill of lading to his agent in Amsterdam, Duarte Fernandes, with instructions that he should obtain insurance worth £8,000 for the cargo. In Fernandes, Texera had the perfect representative. ‘One of the most important Portuguese Jewish merchants’ in Amsterdam at the time,28 he both frequently acted as a factor for foreign traders29 and did extensive business with Dutch merchants.30 Fernandes obtained underwriting from twenty-four prominent local merchants for insurance worth 3,700 Flemish pounds, equivalent to 2,220 English pounds sterling.31 The remainder of the insurance – or rather the over-insurance – came from merchants in other cities, including Genoa and Florence.32
Povey set sail on 25 December ‘purposelie to disgrace the Christian faith’.33 In addition, the Hopewell was accompanied by a ‘gundelo’34 that Diego bought to rescue the sailors when Povey sank the ship.35 Despite having a fair wind to take him to Alicante, Povey put into port on the Îles de Hyères off the coast of southeast France.36 He mumbled to his crew about needing victuals, but ended up taking on only ‘one quarter of Mutton and some duckes’ during the several days the ship remained in port.37 On the last day of the stay, Povey sent the crew ashore on some invented errands. While they were gone, he used an augur to bore a hole in the stern hull, which he stopped with a plug. That night, the Hopewell set sail once more.38
When the ship was three or four leagues (about twelve or fifteen miles) from shore, Povey secretly pulled the plug. At 2:00 am, he woke the crew with the announcement that the hull had filled with water and the ship was sinking and had to be abandoned. The crew, however, saw not even a foot of water in the ballast, the freight was still dry, and they argued they could save the ship by pumping and bring it back to shore. Povey would have none of this. He ordered the crew off the ship and on to the gondola. The boatsman John Newton’s attempts to save the wares to which Roger Goodlake had so insistently alerted him forced Povey to admit that the goods were valueless and not worth saving.39
The gondola carried the sailors to the town of Hyères on the French mainland. There Povey obtained a certificate of shipwreck, which he brought back to Diego Texera in Livorno.40 In return, he received a bill from Roger Goodlake for the £80 reimbursement for his share in the ship,41 and, in lieu of the 400 crowns owed him in payment, he was given four pieces of expensive cloth.42
Texera sent Povey’s certificate to Duarte Fernandes in Amsterdam, asking him to obtain payment on the insurance policy. The Amsterdam merchants, having heard rumours of Texera’s duplicity, refused to pay.43 Fernandes brought suit against them in the Amsterdam Chamber of Insurance in May 1610. Lacking evidence of the fraud, the merchants lost and were forced to pay out 3,700 Flemish pounds on the policy.44
The plotters, ‘haveing so closelie and cunningly behaved themselves in the managing of the said wicked and divilishe plott and practise aforesaid as that they escaped unpunished …, were so imboldned and incouraged in their said practises’ that they decided to try their scam again.45 In November 1609, they hired Christopher Webb, a mariner from Bristol who was master of the ship the Patience, another old and leaky ship,46 to carry goods from Livorno to Lisbon. Once again, they gave out that they had freighted the ship with rich goods, when in fact the packs were mostly full of trash. And once again they obtained insurance from Amsterdam, Antwerp and this time also from London. When Webb made a stop en route in Malaga, his ship was searched on suspicion of being a pirate vessel, and the Spanish searchers discovered the false-packed freight.47
What the complaint strategically neglected to mention was that Bowen obtained his information about the Patience from four members of Webb’s crew,48 who were on trial in Admiralty in 1611–12 for piracy.49 This evidence, untrustworthy though it may be since it came from men on trial for their lives, fills in many of the gaps left by the complaint’s much briefer treatment of the Patience fraud.
The most detailed testimony came from the brothers Nicholas and Thomas Dirdo, Dorsetshire gentlemen.50 The brothers, both in their early twenties at the time, explained that they had found themselves virtually penniless in Livorno after travelling over the Alps from the Netherlands. Seeking a way home, they became passengers on Webb’s ship.51 After boarding the ship a few days before it was to depart, they saw it laden with fifteen packs or chests, three of which belonged to Webb and one to Richardson, and the rest, as Webb told them, to a Portuguese merchant and a Jew.52 Thomas Dirdo testified that three of the merchant’s packs were later transferred to a Flemish ship.53 While the Dirdos never named the merchant, another witness says Webb called him ‘Trecera’.54 Only the fourth time the brothers related the story, this time in a deposition taken on behalf of the crown, did they also mention seeing a certain Goodlake come aboard to talk to Webb.55
Thomas Dirdo related that Webb said he had been in great trouble and imprisoned in Livorno. To get himself released, he made a deal with a Jew or a Portuguese.56 Their contract specified Webb would sink his ship or let it be taken by pirates in order to defraud the freight insurers.57 In return, Webb could keep the goods, which he was told were rich merchandise of great value.58
Tempting pirates was, of course, dangerous, as Thomas Dirdo would find out in later life when he and his son were captured by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery.59 But ‘feigning the capture of the ship by pirates’ was a known form of insurance fraud,60 and Webb may have planned to sell his ship and goods to a friendly English pirate in order to obtain a certificate of capture.61
After setting sail, Webb stopped for several weeks in Malaga, Spain, where his boasting about his expensive freight led the Spanish authorities to suspect he sailed a pirate ship.62 They briefly imprisoned Webb and his men while they searched the Patience. Opening four of the packs, they found brickbats, rope ends, old rugs, turbans, glass beads and four pieces of cloth of gold or silver. And yet, on these slim pickings, the Governor of Malaga supposedly decided Webb was a merchant and let him go.63 Realizing his freight was worthless and believing that if he returned to Livorno the freighters would not keep their promises,64 Webb sailed to Mamora in Barbary (now Mehdya, Morocco). Upon his arrival there, he opened the remaining packs only to find nothing of value.65 He then decided to become a pirate and spent the year 1610 hunting down Portuguese ships carrying sugar.66
In Amsterdam, the insurers got word of the ‘foul play in loading the ship’, and they again brought suit in the Amsterdam Chamber of Insurance.67 Meanwhile in London, Christopher Goodlake, a merchant and brother of Roger, had also purchased insurance worth £1,025 underwritten by twenty-two London merchants on three chests of ‘Tabines,68 Cloth of Gould, Silke stockinges, and other goodes and merchaundizes of verye greate value’ that he claimed Roger had freighted for him in the Patience.69 Advised of the discovery of the false cargo, Christopher sought payment on the policy. But the insurers refused to pay, claiming fraud by Texera and Roger Goodlake. As a consequence, in June 1610, Christopher sued the insurers in the London Assurance Chamber, the court with jurisdiction over insurance disputes.70 The commissioners of the court had resolved to give judgement in his favour, so Christopher claimed, when Dominic Bowen got involved and changed their minds.71
Bowen laid the responsibility for his intervention on his foreign principals. He explained that the Amsterdam merchants who had written Texera’s insurance policies wrote to him ‘acquaynting him with the unlawfull practizes … and advised him to take some Course of Justice here in England for the better discoveringe and punishinge of the said practizers’.72 The merchants also obtained letters from the Amsterdam town magistrates addressed to Noel de Caron, the Dutch ambassador to the English court, asking him to assist Bowen in furthering the matter and providing evidence of the fraud. And, said Bowen, when King James ‘did Cast his eye upon the said examynacions and testimonyes’, he ‘advise[d] that a Course of Justice should be helde against the said practizers for the due punishing of them’.73 This naturally led Bowen to bring the information ‘in the name of’ the attorney general in the Star Chamber.74
Both Roger Goodlake and John Povey submitted responses to Bowen’s information. Povey demurred, arguing only that the court had no jurisdiction over him because all the wrongs he stood accused of were committed outside of England and no Englishmen were harmed. Furthermore, even if the court did have jurisdiction, the events occurred before the general pardon granted in the parliament of 1610, the benefit of which he requested.75
Goodlake gave a more detailed response. While he admitted to knowing Diego Texera and doing business with him, he denied the rest of the allegations. He asserted that Texera was a Christian, not a Jew. He claimed not to know the other co-conspirators or Duarte Fernandes. He said he had nothing to do with the lading or insuring of the Hopewell, or any other part of the alleged scam. While he did not deny freighting wares on the Patience, he stated that at least four others did as well:76 Don Antonio de’ Medici, the illegitimate son and erstwhile heir of Francesco I de’ Medici, the deceased grand duke of Tuscany; the Tuscan merchant Fabio Orlandini;77 Duarte Dias, a leading merchant and Diego Texera’s brother-in-law;78 and Dinis Fernandes, who may have been Texera’s teenage nephew.79 If these were mere phantom shippers, then the scam was even larger than Bowen knew, because Dinis Fernandes obtained insurance on freight in the Patience in Amsterdam. This policy generated its own litigation in Holland.80
As sensational as the accusations were, the case apparently did not proceed beyond the pleadings. Instead, the court dismissed the lawsuit on two grounds. First, it observed that it had no jurisdiction over the claims concerning the Hopewell because all the events occurred overseas and no Englishmen suffered damages. Second, it found the complaint defective with regard to the accusations about the Patience because it did not name the specific English insurers aggrieved by the alleged scam but spoke only in general terms. The court, however, gave leave for Bowen to refile the information correctly.81
Before Bowen did so, the alleged conspirators fought back, probably with the same intention Bowen had, namely to influence the deliberations of the London Assurance Chamber. In June 1614, the new attorney general, Francis Bacon, brought suit against Bowen in the Star Chamber at the relation of Christopher Goodlake.82 In Goodlake’s version of the story, Diego Texera (acting alone) negotiated with John Povey to carry genuinely valuable freight to Spain. Diego insured the goods, Povey sailed, and the ship sank due to misfortune. The complaint pointed out that Povey and the other mariners swore to this point upon their ‘Corporall oathes uppon the holy Evangelist in dewe forme of the Lawes there used’ before the duly authorized magistrates of Hyères.83 Roger Goodlake, meanwhile, never talked to Povey about sinking the ship, and he never served as interpreter for Diego about any such matter.84
With regard to Webb and the Patience, Christopher repeated the point that Roger and Diego were only minor shippers – Roger freighting three chests and Diego five – among a larger group of other merchants ‘of greate and speciall account in Italie’.85 Christopher detailed how he had sought payment of the insurance policy after Webb made off with the goods. When the insurers denied him, he sued them in the insurance court.
Then the bill took an unexpected turn and accused Bowen of convincing Povey to lie about the Hopewell scam. In other words, the fraud was not Texera’s cheating of his insurers but rather Bowen’s fabrication of the evidence about the shipper’s alleged duplicity.
According to Goodlake, Bowen had an incentive to invent a swindle. He realized that if he could get testimony that the Hopewell was sunk by fraud, he would be rewarded by the Dutch insurers, who would not only get their money back from Diego Texera but also a premium the latter had promised if they proved his deceit.86 Bowen also saw that if he could associate Roger Goodlake with Diego in both the Hopewell and the Patience affairs, he could discredit Christopher’s suit in the London Assurance Chamber and get yet another reward from the insurers.87
In Goodlake’s version of the affair, Bowen learned that Povey was in Ireland in ‘Brace about fortie miles from Gallowaye’.88 He conspired with another Dutch merchant living in London, Walter Bollen,89 to obtain a letter from the Privy Council to the lord deputy of Ireland to apprehend Povey and depose him concerning the sinking of the ship. Armed with a warrant from the lord deputy, Bollen pretended to arrest Povey, who was in on the conspiracy, and took him to Galway, where the current and a former mayor of the town administered interrogatories to him under oath.90
A letter from the Privy Council to the lord deputy of Ireland in January 1611 confirms part of this story. The councillors wrote the lord deputy telling him they had received a ‘strange complaint’ from merchants of Amsterdam and elsewhere that Povey and ‘divers Portingales and Jews’ of Livorno or Florence had engaged in insurance fraud. Povey, ‘fearing a discovery of the fraud’, had fled England and gone to Ireland ‘in the province of Connaught, at a place called Barane [Burren] or Breaschalle [Burrishoole]’. The lords, ‘desiring to punish so notorious a fraud forged by ungodly Jews’, ordered Povey to be arrested and deposed.91
Bowen allegedly took great care in preparing his story. After ensuring Povey’s deposition was properly filed ‘under the Seale of the Lord Maior of London’ and convincing Henry Montague, the recorder of London, to arrest Roger Goodlake and keep him prisoner while the commissioners of insurance in London (of which Montague was one)92 decided the Patience affair, he also persuaded four of Webb’s men, on trial in Admiralty, to depose about the false freighting of the Patience.93
According to Goodlake’s complaint, by filing his Star Chamber information, Bowen raised questions in the minds of the commissioners of insurance. Where they had been tending towards supporting him, Goodlake said, after the commencement of Bowen’s suit, they put off giving judgement. Then in September 1613, they ordered the insurers to deposit their payment with the Assurance Chamber to be held until the Star Chamber decided the matter. In light of this, Goodlake was forced to bring his own relator suit in 1614 to obtain the intervention of the Star Chamber.94
This time Povey did not make a reply, but Bowen’s answer reaffirmed his original allegations, asserted the truth of Povey’s depositions and added a final bombshell. After the dismissal of his 1613 information, he claimed to have ‘receave[d] from the partes of Italye a Sentence Awthenticall’ showing that Diego Texera had been condemned to die for a ‘like Fact as is mencioned and Conteyned in the said Informacion exhibited into this honorable Courte Concerning the shipp called the Hopewell’ and that the captain of the same ship had been sentenced and hanged.95
As with the 1613 suit, the 1614 file lacks depositions, and no record exists of its resolution.96 But a Chancery suit brought by Christopher Goodlake in August 1614 provides a bit more information about what happened next.97 The bill rehearsed the history of the voyage of the Patience, Goodlake’s initial suit before the Assurance Chamber, and that court’s September 1613 order that if the Star Chamber dismissed Bowen’s suit, the insurers would have to pay on the policy.98 Goodlake pointed out that the Star Chamber did dismiss the suit, and yet the insurers continued to refuse to pay. Furthermore, he complained, in light of Bowen’s accusations, the insurers had pressured the commissioners, causing the latter to revoke their 1613 order and replace it with a new one in June 1614 – which probably provides the real explanation for Goodlake’s Star Chamber relator suit filed in the same month.99 The new order required the insurers to repay Goodlake only the 10% premium he had paid to them. Upon repayment, their names were to be crossed off the policy, meaning they had no further liability.100
Because Goodlake sued in Chancery before asking the insurers to repay their proportional part of the premium and be struck from the policy, they demurred. They argued that the clause of the Assurance Act of 1601 mandating that any person aggrieved by a decision of the commissioners of insurance might sue in Chancery only after he should ‘execute and satisfie the saide Sentence soe awarded’ meant that Goodlake had to accept the premium repayment and remove the names of those repaying from the policy before he could sue.101 Goodlake’s counsel, Francis Moore, pointed out the absurdity of this argument because Goodlake had not been ordered to pay anything but rather to receive payment.102 But the lord chancellor, upon reviewing the act and the parties’ pleadings, disagreed. In April 1615, he found in favour of the insurers, dismissing Goodlake’s complaint until he had abided by the requirements of the statute.103 And so the litigation apparently ended.
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While combating fraud was an important part of the Star Chamber’s jurisdiction, the concurrent suits before the London Assurance Chamber and Chancery suggest that Bowen and Goodlake were mainly using the Star Chamber in another of its principal capacities: ‘to mount a collateral attack, either to shore up or to cross’ the other proceedings.104 Perhaps because the parties did not intend for the Star Chamber suit to progress very far, their pleadings left out key information about the eventful backgrounds of Diego Texera and Roger Goodlake; information that everyone involved probably knew about.
Goodlake came from a Berkshire gentry family.105 He was apprenticed in 1597 to Richard Cockayne,106 brother of the famous London merchant, William Cockayne.107 In November 1604, Richard sent Roger as his factor on a trading voyage to Genoa in Richard’s ship the Royal Merchant, but the ship never made it to its destination. Instead, Roger and the ship’s captain, Richard Thornton, took it to Livorno, where they agreed (or were forced)108 to put the ship to the use of Grand Duke Ferdinando I of Tuscany in his war against the Turks. In late 1605, the Royal Merchant seized a great Turkish galleon and brought her back to Livorno, causing an international incident.109 The English merchants trading in Constantinople as part of the Levant Company reacted with ‘great alarm’ and expected reprisals.110
According to Richard Cockayne, the grand duke allegedly gave Goodlake the shipowner’s portion of the prize, amounting to over £16,666 (which Goodlake never passed along to Richard), and also tried to commandeer the ship and its artillery.111 By September 1607, Roger was imprisoned in Florence, perhaps because of a dispute with the duke over reoccupying the ship.112 While in prison, Roger sent a carefully worded missive to George Rook – a man useful to Henry Wotton, King James’s ambassador in Venice113 – hinting at secret dealings.114 But by the spring of 1608, Roger was back in Livorno, and the records of the Galli bank of Florence show him actively engaged in commerce.115
To complicate matters further, Roger may have been a Catholic. His mother was a recusant.116 Many of the English merchants and Irish ship captains operating in Livorno in the early seventeenth century were Catholics, as was Richard Thornton, the captain of the Royal Merchant with whom Roger had thrown in his lot.117 And most intriguingly, Roger may have been the Englishman Ruggiero Guidalao, who served as an emissary for the grand duke of Tuscany to the king of Spain during 1610 and 1611 to discuss the printing of books reforming Spanish liturgical music.118
Cockayne depicted Roger’s brother Christopher as the mastermind of the scheme to steal Cockayne’s ship, deny him a share of the prize money and ruin his good name and credit. Cockayne sued Christopher (although not Roger, probably because he was out of reach in Italy and protected by the grand duke119) and a number of other prominent London merchants in 1609 for harms caused him by the Royal Merchant affair.120 His various lawsuits trying to straighten out his credit continued until 1618.121 As some of the men who had paid into Christopher Goodlake’s insurance policy in 1609 were members of the Levant Company in 1605 and had been kept abreast of the events surrounding the Royal Merchant by their Italian agent, Thomas Mun,122 it is unlikely they were unaware of the Goodlake brothers’ questionable history when the accusations of insurance fraud later arose.
As for the other alleged co-conspirators, Antonio and Diego Texera were brothers.123 The Texera family were Portuguese New Christians who had come to Pisa from Portugal in 1594 at the behest of the grand duke of Tuscany.124 The brothers’ father Rui and brother-in-law Miguel Fernandes were prominent merchants of sugar and coral with knowledge useful to the duke about Brazil and the Atlantic trade.125 In 1595, Rui Texera and Fernandes fell afoul of the Inquisition and were imprisoned for several months in Rome on accusations of Judaizing.126 The men were of such importance to the grand duke, however, that he used his money and influence to get them released.127
Rui apparently died a Catholic,128 but Diego, around whom Bowen’s narrative centred, had uncertain ties to Judaism. Documents refer to him as Portuguese rather than as a Jew, though Webb described him as both.129 Diego’s sister was brought before the Inquisition in 1618 and 1625 for Judaizing,130 and his agent in Amsterdam, Duarte Fernandes, was a prominent Jew.131 Diego did business with Jews in Italy132 but also with Florentine bankers and English merchants.133 And like his father, he had close ties to the grand duke. In his mid-twenties, he served the duke on a sensitive diplomatic matter in Morocco involving the revolt of Mohammad esh Sheikh el Mamun of Fez.134 In return, the duke favoured Diego, using his influence to get him a larger house in Livorno135 and encouraging granducal officials to pressure the Venetian Senate to find in Diego’s favour in the latter’s lawsuit there against a Jew for debt.136
Diego also displayed an untrustworthy side. He falsely accused a fellow Portuguese of relaying sensitive information about Tuscan interests in Barbary to the Spanish crown.137 He made what a Florentine court found were untrue claims about the non-payment of a commission by certain Jews in a sale of goods plundered from a captured ship.138 In a letter about this case sent by the grand duke’s attorney general to the granducal first secretary, Diego was described as an ‘huomo molto sagace, et accorto’,139 which could be translated as a sagacious and shrewd man,140 but also, given the context, as a shrewd and cunning one. He failed to repay money he owed to his relatives, who believed he was cheating them.141 And during the litigation over the Patience in London, the unnamed agent whom Diego had sent to collect the insurance money wrote to the grand duke’s secretary to complain that for over a year he had been unable to get any payment from Diego and was consequently stuck penniless in London.142 He also made this suggestive comment, presumably referring to a trip Diego had made to England about 1605:143
Dioguo Teixeira escaped from here because of fear of certain criminal complaints against him, and it seems strange to me that a man so rich as he was and with such a high reputation and so highly respected by the great memory of the Most Serene Grand Duke Ferdinando, has been involved in things against his honor.144
And yet, while Duarte Fernandes, Diego Texera’s agent, was suspicious enough about the Patience voyage to send Ferdinando de Mercado, a Portuguese Jew from Amsterdam who lived in London, to interview one of Webb’s men in prison,145 he was still doing business with Diego in 1613.146
Diego died in Spain, sometime between 1618 and 1625.147 Thus, even if Bowen were telling the truth about the sentence of execution against Diego in 1613 or 1614, it was not carried out, possibly because Diego fled Tuscany and moved to Milan.148
This additional evidence demonstrates that Bowen had plausible conspirators with religious vulnerabilities to offer up to the court. While some of Bowen’s accusations do look questionable under scrutiny – the trailing gondola whose existence no one questioned, the lack of evidence about how the Hopewell sailors’ silence was bought, the implausibility that Webb believed his ship had been freighted with expensive wares, the fact that the Amsterdam merchants insured the second ship after the first had sunk mysteriously – many people wanted to believe Bowen’s story. By forcing the issue in the Star Chamber, Bowen ensured the English insurers had success with the London Assurance Chamber. The Dutch insurers who lost their claims in the Amsterdam Court of Insurance appealed to the High Court of Holland (the Hof van Holland) on both policies,149 and ultimately in 1620 obtained a judgement requiring Duarte Fernandes to hand over the proceeds of a judicial sale of goods belonging to Diego Texera in repayment for the insurance on the Hopewell.150
Of course, the courts and litigants may also have been willing to accept the claims for reasons other than their truth value. The English plaintiffs, for instance, were powerful merchants who were older, richer and better connected than the Goodlake brothers. In using Star Chamber case files to study fraud, we are often hampered by lack of knowledge of the background that the pleadings leave out and of the other evidence available at the time. Consequently, we quite frequently cannot be certain whether the allegations in any given suit were true or were themselves a fraud on the court designed to do no more than obtain jurisdiction over the defendant. Yet even a fabricated story may offer valid evidence about the history of fraud. A good lie, after all, falls within the boundaries of the believable and the plausible. Attorney General v Goodlake was a good lie that told what was by then already a well-worn tale of phantom wares insured and holes drilled in hulls. Such a story was unlikely to be completely unfamiliar to the members of the court, and continues to be told to the present day.
E. Kadens, ‘A marine insurance fraud in the Star Chamber’ in Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records, ed. K. Kesselring and N. Mears (London, 2021), pp. 155–174. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
* The author would like to thank Verde D’Aquino for her remarkable research in the Italian archives and translations, Gijs Drijer for checking the Dutch archives and notarial records, Oliver Finnegan for enthusiastically sending photographs of documents from The National Archives of the UK, and Sarah Whale at Hatfield House for also supplying photographs. Given the coronavirus restrictions, this chapter could not have been completed without their assistance, for which the author is very grateful. The author would also like to thank Amanda Bevan, Sabine Go, Bruce Markell and Francesca Trivellato.
1 D. Ibbetson, ‘Fraud: English common law’, in The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, ed. S. N. Katz (6 vols., 2009), iii. 101; M. Lobban, ‘Contractual fraud in law and equity, c.1750–c.1850’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, xvii (1997), 441–76, at pp. 446–8.
2 H. Mares, ‘Fraud and dishonesty in King’s Bench and Star Chamber’, American Journal of Legal History, lix (2019), 210–31, at pp. 217–18.
3 C. Churches, ‘Business at law: retrieving commercial disputes from eighteenth-century Chancery’, Historical Journal, xliii (2000), 937–54, at pp. 940, 944.
4 T. G. Barnes, ‘Star Chamber litigants and their counsel, 1596–1641’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (1978), pp. 7–28, at p. 15.
5 One example is the fraud now known in US law as a bustout. For Star Chamber examples see E. Kadens, ‘The dark side of commerce’, Cardozo Law Review, xl (2019), 1995–2027, at pp. 2004–18.
6 Demosthenes, ‘Plea of Demo against Zenothemis’, Orations Volume IV: Orations 27–40: Private Cases, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 178–97.
7 G. Rossi, Insurance in Elizabethan England: The London Code (Cambridge, 2016), p. 190 n. 131.
8 Rossi, Insurance, p. 280; G. Jackson, ‘Marine insurance frauds in Scotland, 1751–1821’, The Mariner’s Mirror, lvii (1971), 307–22, at pp. 307–8 (assuming that deliberate shipwreck to defraud insurers was an eighteenth-century development).
9 Jackson, ‘Marine insurance’, p. 316.
10 4 Geo, I, c. 12, § 3. See also, 11 Geo. I, c. 29 (1724); 43 Geo. III, c. 113 (1803).
11 A. C. Campbell, Insurance and Crime (London, 1902), pp. 39–45; A. J. Wilson, The Business of Insurance (London, 1904), pp. 113–14; C. Reade, Foul Play (London, 1869); H. Heijermans, Op hoop van zegen (1900); B. Traven, Das Totenschiff (Frankfurt am Main, 1926).
12 R. G. Bauer, ‘A short history of maritime fraud’, Tulane Maritime Law Journal, xii (1987), 11–8, at p. 12; D. M. Collins, ‘Marine insurance fraud: sinking ships in a falling market’, Malabu: Maritime Law Bulletin, ii (2011), 11–5, at p. 12.
13 Jackson, ‘Marine insurance’, p. 314 (describing a fraudulent shipwreck in nearly the same terms as occurred in the cases discussed here).
14 Jackson, ‘Marine insurance’, pp. 308, 316; Campbell, Insurance and Crime, p. 39.
15 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, Attorney General ex rel. Bowen v Goodlake, Povey & Webb, 1613; STAC 8/20/20, Attorney General ex rel. Goodlake v Bowen, Povey & Bollen, 1614.
16 R. Starn, ‘Truths in the archives’, Common Knowledge, viii (2002), 387–401, at p. 388 (‘One fundamental truth of the archives, surely, is that they are not to be trusted’).
17 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, bill of complaint, 19 June 1613.
18 E. Kadens, ‘New light on Twyne’s Case’, American Bankruptcy Law Journal, xciv (2020), 1–84, at p. 53.
19 O. P. Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642 (Leiden, 1989), p. 294. Bowen was already in London by 1601. See TNA, E 115/21/96, 17 May 1601 (certificate of residency).
20 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, answer of Dominic Bowen, 6 June 1614 (wrongly dated as 11 Jac. I, which would be 1613; Francis Bacon brought the information in the suit as attorney general, and he did not assume that office until Oct. 1613).
21 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, bill of complaint, 19 June 1613.
22 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
23 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, answer of Roger Goodlake, 28 June 1613 (referring to the Hopewell, Roger Goodlake stated in his answer that, ‘he well knewe, for the same was sometymes this defendantes vessell but finding her to be full of flawes, decayes, & Leakes, this defendant solde her away’).
24 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
25 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
26 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
27 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
28 E. M. Koen, ‘Duarte Fernandes, koopman van de portugese natie te Amsterdam’, Studia Rosenthaliana, ii (1968), 178–93, at p. 178 (‘Duarte Fernandes, een van de belangrijkste kooplieden der sefardische Joden die zich aan het einde der zestiende eeuw te Amsterdam vestigden’).
29 Koen, ‘Duarte Fernandes’, p. 186. Fernandes may have been known to Texera through Fernandes’s son Simão Henriques, who lived in Italy and knew Diego’s father and brother-in-law. Koen, ‘Duarte Fernandes’, p. 185; J. N. Novoa, ‘The many lives of two Portuguese conversos: Miguel Fernandes and Rui Teixeira in the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Rome’, Hispania Judaica Bulletin, xii (2016), 127–84, at p. 135 (both discussing Simão Enriques).
30 Koen, ‘Duarte Fernandes’, p. 187; J. V. Roitman, The Same But Different? Inter-cultural Trade and the Sephardim, 1595–1640 (Leiden, 2011), pp. 294–6.
31 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, bill of complaint, 19 June 1613. The merchants mentioned in the pleading were Dirck van Os, Barent Sweerts, Claes Andriesz, Jacques van Hanswijck and Jacques Merchijs. All of them were prominent insurers of Jewish shipments in Amsterdam. See Roitman, The Same But Different?, pp. 128, 132, 137–9, 163–4, 174–5, 203–4, 209.
32 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, answer of Roger Goodlake, 28 June 1613.
33 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, bill of complaint, 19 June 1613.
34 A gondola was at this time a small boat with a sail, used for fishing and for carrying people and cargo over short distances. See S. Bellabarba and E. Guerreri, Vele italiane della costa occidentale dal medioevo al Novecento (Milan, 2002), pp. 108, 111.
35 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, bill of complaint, 19 June 1613.
36 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
37 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
38 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
39 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
40 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
41 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
42 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, bill of complaint, 6 June 1614.
43 Their reluctance may also have been related to the sudden drop in Dutch insurance rates after the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Spanish and Dutch in Apr. 1609. J. Israel, Empires and Entrepots: Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy and the Jews, 1585–1713 (London, 1990), p. 201.
44 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, bill of complaint, 19 June 1613.
45 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
46 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 269v, deposition of Nicholas Dirdo, 19 March 1612.
47 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, 19 June 1613.
48 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, bill of complaint, 6 June 1614.
49 TNA, HCA 1/47, fos. 174v–176v, 179v–181v, 218v–220v, 259v–260v, 267r–273v. One suit in Admiralty against Webb’s men was brought by two merchants of Antwerp and Amsterdam, Guilliam van Aalst and Jacques de Letter, and the other apparently by the crown. C. M. Senior, ‘An investigation of the activities and importance of English pirates, 1603–40’ (unpublished University of Bristol PhD thesis, 1972), p. 228.
50 A. Aurejac-Davis, ‘The Dirdoe family of Gillingham, Dorset, and their capture by pirates’, Somerset and Dorset Family History Society (2016) <https://sdfhs.org/blog/the-dirdoe-family-of-gillingham-dorset-and-their-capture-by-pirates> [accessed 28 Oct. 2020].
51 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 267r, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 12 March 1612.
52 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 180r, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 17 Apr. 1611.
53 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 180r, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 17 Apr. 1611.
54 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 198v, deposition of William Stephens, 18 June 1611.
55 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 268v, deposition of Nicholas Dirdo, 19 March 1612; fo. 271v, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 19 March 1612.
56 TNA, HCA 1/47, fos. 179v–180r, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 17 Apr. 1611.
57 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 180v, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 17 Apr. 1611; fo. 198v, deposition of William Stephens, 18 June 1611; fos. 219r–220r, deposition of Matthew Hutchinson, 31 July 1611.
58 TNA, HCA 1/47, fos. 175v, deposition of Nicholas Dirdo, 23 March 1611; fo. 221r, deposition of Matthew Hutchinson, 31 July 1611.
59 TNA, SP 16/348, fo. 128, petition of Thomas Dirdo, Feb. 1637.
60 Rossi, Insurance, p. 280.
61 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 267v, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 12 March 1612.
62 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 220r, deposition of Matthew Hutchinson, 31 July 1611.
63 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 175r, deposition of Nicholas Dirdo, 23 March 1611; fos. 269r–v, 19 March 1612; fos. 180v–181r, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 17 Apr. 1611; fo. 272v, 19 March 1612; fo. 195r, deposition of Matthew Kevel, 3 June 1611.
64 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 199r, deposition of William Stephens, 18 June 1611.
65 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 180r, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 17 Apr. 1611.
66 Senior, ‘An investigation’, pp. 87–8.
67 E. M. Koen, ‘Notarial records relating to the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam up to 1639’, Studia Rosenthaliana, v (1971), 106–24, at pp. 114 n. 376, 219–45, 221 n. 434.
68 E. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1985), pp. 71–2 (tabines or tobines were silk cloths ‘embellished with lines and diamonds or rectangles formed by warp threads alternately floating over and dipping under two or more weft shoots’).
69 TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, Goodlake v Bennett, et al., bill of complaint, 12 Aug. 1614.
70 Rossi, Insurance, p. 86; TNA, STAC 8/20/20, bill of complaint, 6 June 1614.
71 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, bill of complaint, 6 June 1614.
72 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, answer of Dominic Bowen, 15 June 1614.
73 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 15 June 1614.
74 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 15 June 1614.
75 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, demurrer of John Povey, 2 Dec. 1613.
76 TNA, STAC 8/12/6, answer of Roger Goodlake, 28 June 1613.
77 M. Berti, ‘La pesca ed il commercio del corallo nel Mediterraneo e le prime “Compagnie dei coralli” di Pisa tra XVI e XVII secolo’, in La Pesca in Italia tra Età Moderna e Contemporanea. Produzione, Mercato, Consumo, ed. G. Doneddu, A. Fiori (2003), pp. 77–170, at p. 106 (naming Orlandini among the ‘attori importanti degli affari pisani e livornesi’).
78 Berti, ‘Le pesca’, at p. 125 n. 111 (calling Diego Texera and Duarta Dias merchants ‘più importanti’); Novoa, ‘The many lives’, p. 133 (identifying Dias as Diego’s brother-in-law).
79 J. N. Novoa, ‘A family of the Nação from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and beyond (1497–1640)’, in Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities, ed. Y. Kaplan (2019), pp. 22–42, at p. 34 (identifying Dinis as the son of Miguel Fernandes); Novoa, ‘The many lives’, p. 131 (mentioning baptism of Miguel’s son in 1594).
80 Koen, ‘Notarial records’, v. 114 n. 377.
81 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, answer of Dominic Bowen, 15 June 1614.
82 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, bill of complaint, 6 June 1614.
83 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614.
84 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614.
85 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614.
86 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614. For another example of this sort of promise from 1615, see E. M. Koen, ‘Notarial records relating to the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam up to 1639’, Studia Rosenthaliana, viii (1974), pp. 300–7, at p. 300 n. 841.
87 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614.
88 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614.
89 This is probably Wouter Bolle, who had worked with Bowen previously on insurance matters on behalf of one of the same Amsterdam merchants who had insured the Hopewell. Koen, ‘Notarial records’, v. 233 n. 485.
90 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614. The information named Sir Thomas Rotheram, governor of St Augustine’s fort and mayor in 1612, and Richard Martin, who was mayor in 1607. See J. Hardiman, The History of the Town and County of the Town of Galway (Dublin, 1820), p. 212.
91 Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland, of the Reign of James I, 1611–1614, ed. C. W. Russell and J. P. Prendergast (5 vols., 1872–80), iv. 236–7.
92 TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, bill of complaint, 12 Aug. 1614; G. Rossi, Insurance, p. 86.
93 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, bill of complaint, 6 June 1614.
94 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, 6 June 1614; C 2/JasI/G7/37, bill of complaint, 12 Aug. 1614.
95 TNA, STAC 8/20/20, answer of Dominic Bowen, 15 June 1614.
96 The Exchequer records contain no indication that Bowen, Goodlake or Povey were fined. See T. G. Barnes, ‘Fines in the court of Star Chamber, 1596–1641’, manuscript available at The National Archives of the UK.
97 TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, Goodlake v Bennett, et al., 1614.
98 TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, bill of complaint, 12 Aug. 1614. The bill also asserted that the policy was for £1,025 and not £1,700, as stated in the Star Chamber bill.
99 TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, bill of complaint, 12 Aug. 1614; C 2/JasI/G7/37, plea of defendants, [1614]; C 33/127, fo. 73r, 24 Oct. 1614 (Chancery order).
100 TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, bill of complaint, 12 Aug. 1614.
101 ‘An Act Concerning Matters of Assurances Amongst Merchants’, 43 Eliz. c. 12, § 3 (1601); TNA, C 2/JasI/G7/37, plea of the defendants, [1614].
102 TNA, C 33/127, fo. 73r, 24 Oct. 1614 (Chancery order).
103 TNA, C 33/127, fo. 861v, 4 Apr. 1615 (Chancery order).
104 T. G. Barnes, ‘Star Chamber litigants and their counsel, 1596–1641’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (1978), pp. 7–28, at p. 15.
105 A History of the County of Berkshire, ed. P. H. Ditchfield (4 vols., 1906–24), iv. 226; Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ed. J. J. Howard (4 vols., new ser., 1874–84), iv. 267; Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ed. J. J. Howard (5 vols., 3rd ser., 1896–1904), i. 150.
106 Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, i. 150.
107 TNA, C 78/204/6, Richard Cockayne v William Cockayne, 11 Feb. 1618 (identifying Roger Goodlake as Richard’s apprentice and William Cockayne as his brother).
108 British Library, Cotton Nero B/VII, fo. 237r, complaint of Richard Cockayne.
109 TNA, REQ 2/424/31, Cockayne v Goodlake, et al., bill of complaint, [1609]; Brit. Libr., Cotton Nero B.VII, fo. 237r; Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 1603–1607, ed. H. F. Brown (38 vols., 1864–1947), x. lviii.
110 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts: Venice, x. 320 n. 483 (10 Feb. 1606).
111 TNA, REQ 2/424/31, Cockayne v Goodlake, et al., bill of complaint, [1609]; Brit. Libr., Cotton Nero B.VII, fo. 237r–v; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 2082, unfoliated, letter from Ugolino Barisoni, 31 Dec. 1606.
112 Hatfield House Archives, Marquess of Salisbury, CP 122, fo. 58r–v, 2 Sept. 1607; Brit. Libr., Cotton Nero B.VII, fo. 238r; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 2082, unfoliated, letter from Ugolino Barisoni, 31 Dec. 1606.
113 J. W. Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (London, 1952), p. 103; L. P. Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (2 vols., 1907), ii. 478.
114 Hatfield House Archives, Marquess of Salisbury, CP 122, fos. 58r–v, 2 Sept. 1607.
115 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Fondo Galli Tassi 2100, fos. 161–162; R. de Roover, ‘Thomas Mun in Italy’, Historical Research, xxx (1957), 80–5, at p. 84 (the Galli bank ‘was patronized by the entire English colony of Pisa and Leghorn’).
116 Recusants in the Exchequer Pipe Rolls, 1581–1592, ed. T. I. McCann (Southampton, 1986), p. 69 (recording recusancy of Alice Goodlake, ‘wife of Edward Goodlake, esq., of Letcombe Regis, Berks.’ in 1586).
117 L. M. Lillie, ‘Empire, community, nation: the English merchants of Livorno, Italy and the sociability of commerce in early modernity’ (unpublished Washington University PhD thesis, 2017), pp. 9, 55, 105–6.
118 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 4941, fo. 702, 26 Oct. 1610 and fo. 788, 20 Jan. 1611.
119 Brit. Libr., Cotton Nero B.VII, fo. 237r.
120 TNA, REQ 2/424/31, Cockayne v Goodlake, et al., bill of complaint, [1609].
121 TNA, C 78/204/6, 11 Feb. 1618.
122 TNA, REQ 2/424/31, Cockayne v Goodlake, et al., bill of complaint, [1609]; C 2/JASI/G7/37, Goodlake v Bennett, et al., bill of complaint (12 Aug. 1614). The twenty-two insurers were Edward Beale, George Bennett, Thomas Bennett, Richard Champion (1605), Christopher Clitheroe, John Coghill, Henry Garraway (1600), William Gore, Lawrence Green (1605), Hugh Hamersley (1600), Thomas Havers (1605), William Haynes (1605), John Hodges, John Holloway (1605), Jeffrey Kirlie, Edward Lutterford, Giles Parslowe (1605), Thomas Simonds (1592), George Southerton, Gabriel Towerson, Edward Towerson, Robert Towerson. The dates in brackets indicate the year they joined the Levant Company, if this occurred by 1605. Spelling and Levant Company membership based on the lists at the end of volume 3 of T. K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire (3 vols., 1967).
123 Novoa, ‘The many lives’, p. 142.
124 Novoa, ‘A family of the Nação’, p. 31.
125 Novoa, ‘The many lives’, pp. 133, 136; Novoa, ‘A family of the Nação’, pp. 31–2.
126 Novoa, ‘The many lives’, pp. 132, 137.
127 Novoa, ‘The many lives’, pp. 133–4, 136.
128 Novoa, ‘A family of the Nação’, p. 33.
129 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 2999, fo. 52r, 25 Feb. 1605 (‘Tescera pur Portughese’); Mediceo del Principato 1353, unfoliated, letter to Andrea Cioli, 8 Nov. 1613 (‘signor Dioguo Teixeira Portughese’); TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 271v, deposition of Thomas Dirdo, 19 March 1612 (testifying Webb described the person who freighted the Patience as a Portuguese and a Jew).
130 Novoa, ‘The many lives’, p. 137.
131 Koen, ‘Duarte Fernandes’, p. 180.
132 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 3001, fo. 59r, 4 Apr. 1609 (debt owed to Texera by a Jew); E. Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence (Toronto 2011), pp. 111–12 (trade with Jews).
133 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Fondo Galli Tassi 2100, fo. 106, March 1607 (paying Galli bank on behalf of the English merchant Edward Turner).
134 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 4274, fos. 94r, 96r (undated c.1605–6); Mediceo del Principato 298, fo. 175r, 30 Oct. 1606; Les Sources Inédites de l’Histoire du Maroc. 1. série: Dynastie Saadienne. Archives et Bibliothèques d’Angleterre, ed. H. de Castries (3 vols., 1918–35), ii. 361 n.1 (concerning the 1605–6 voyage of Captain Pompilio Peretti, with whom Diego communicated, to Morocco).
135 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 298, fo. 22v, 21 Apr. 1603.
136 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 6038, fo. 30v, 6 March 1609; Mediceo del Principato 3001, fo. 59r, 4 Apr. 1609.
137 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 2999, fo. 52r, 25 Feb. 1605.
138 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Otto di Guardia e di Balìa del Principato 228, fo. 160r, 15 Feb. 1608; Mediceo del Principato 939, fo. 652r, 16 Feb. 1608.
139 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 939, fo. 652r, 16 Feb. 1608.
140 Goldberg, Jews and Magic, p. 112. Goldberg confused the Diego Texera of Livorno with Diego Teixeiro Sampayo, a well-known merchant in Antwerp and later Hamburg.
141 Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia Contro Ebrei e Giudaizzanti (1633–1637), ed. P. C. Ioly Zorattini (19 vols., 1980–99), i. 219, 231.
142 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 1353, unfoliated, unsigned letter to Andrea Cioli, 8 Nov. 1613.
143 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 4274, fo. 94r (undated c.1605–6) (referencing trip to England).
144 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 1353, unfoliated, unsigned letter to Andrea Cioli, 8 Nov. 1613 (‘Dioguo Teixeira s’è fuggito di costà per temenza di certe querele criminali datogli, et mi pare strano che un huomo tanto ricco che era, et di tanta reputazione, et tanto stimato dalla felic.ma memoria del ser.mo GranDuca Ferdinando deva essere incorso in cose contro l’honor suo’).
145 TNA, HCA 1/47, fo. 220v, deposition of Matthew Hutchinson, 31 July 1611. Mercado was forced to flee London after being identified as Jewish. He is attested in London as late as Jan. 1611, which might raise questions about whether it was in fact he who interviewed Matthew Hutchinson in prison, or rather someone posing as Mercado. Webb’s men did not return to England until Jan. 1611 at the earliest. E. R. Samuel, ‘Portuguese Jews in Jacobean London’, Transactions Jewish Historical Society of England, xviii (1953–5), 171–230, at pp. 181–4; M. Woolf, ‘Foreign trade of London Jews in the seventeenth century’, Transactions & Miscellanies Jewish Historical Society of England, xxiv (1970–3), 38–58, at p. 39.
146 Koen, ‘Duarte Fernandes’, p. 184.
147 Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia, i. 209, 282, 324 (indicating Diego was still alive in 1618 but had died by 1625, and that he died in Spain).
148 Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia, i. 209, 231.
149 Koen, ‘Notarial records’, v. 238 no. 513 (Patience); Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Not. Arch. 156, fo. 60v, 17 Dec. 1618 (indicating Fernandes had lost his suit in the Hof van Holland in 1616); E. M. Koen, ‘Notarial records’, relating to the Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam up to 1639’, Studia Rosenthaliana, xvi (1982), 61–84, at p. 82, no. 1999 (Hopewell).
150 Koen, ‘Notarial records’, xvi. 81–2, nos. 1997, 1999; Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Not. Arch. 156, fo. 60v, 17 Dec. 1618.