10. Star Chamber and the bullion trade, 1618–20

Simon Healy

The records of the common-law courts of early modern England are notoriously difficult to use because of the paucity of evidence: the legal record offers no more than a bare summary of a case, occasionally illuminated by law reports. However, the surviving papers of Star Chamber present a different problem: lengthy bills and answers; bundles of depositions (carefully coached via leading interrogatories); but little evidence of orders or decrees, apart from the records of fines levied. This archive offers a wealth of detail, but beyond the cause papers themselves, there is often very little information about the broader context of a case.

Table 10.1. Bullion cases brought in Star Chamber by Attorney General Yelverton.

The case under consideration here is a fortunate exception to this rule, a cause célèbre of its day with ramifications far beyond the immediate charges, which yielded a great deal of information about a clandestine trade spanning two continents. Probably the largest English fraud trial of the early seventeenth century, it involved a number of London goldsmiths and 160 merchant strangers, chiefly from the United Provinces and the Spanish Netherlands, all of whom had resided in London for many years. The charges brought by Attorney General Sir Henry Yelverton in the suits he initiated in 1618–20 (see table 10.1) stated that, since the accession of King James in 1603, numerous goldsmiths had privately supplied vast quantities of gold and silver coin and bullion to the merchant strangers. The latter then smuggled them to the Low Countries, where differences in the ratio between the precious metal content of the imported specie and the local coinage allowed the merchants to make a modest profit by arbitrage.

What was the wider significance of these cases? In the first instance, they shed light on the international bullion trade of early modern Europe, which many of its beneficiaries would rather not have seen exposed to public scrutiny. Second, they illuminated the political tensions of the age: the prosecution seems to have originated with a minor courtier who aspired to a share of any fines levied, but it became a vehicle for the political ambitions of more important figures; and it is possible the crown hoped to use the case as leverage in Anglo-Dutch trade talks then taking place in London (although nothing appears to have come of this).¹ Third, the proceedings highlighted the difficulties the English legal system had in dealing with a particular type of fraud, the smuggling of goods across international borders:² the law provided for the seizure of smuggled coin and the imprisonment of offenders for up to one year, but as the coin and bullion at issue in this case had long since departed the realm, there was nothing to seize. Finally, this case illuminates the courtroom tactics of each side in this dispute, which largely remain obscure in other cases due to the loss of the procedural records: Yelverton was uncertain whether to focus his efforts against the goldsmiths or the merchant strangers until the eve of the trial in Michaelmas 1619; while the defendants managed to cast some doubts on the credibility of a number of key witnesses, and temporarily persuaded one to retract his testimony.

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Control of the coinage was one of the most ancient prerogative rights of the English crown. Two early items of legislation – the greater and lesser statutes of money – were enacted by the parliaments of Edward I, which stipulated that any smuggled coin was to be forfeit, with one-quarter of the seizure going to the informer, the rest to the crown. Foreign merchants who smuggled clipped and counterfeit coin into England were to lose their coin for a first offence, to forfeit all the goods they imported for a second offence, and for a third infraction they lost their goods and faced imprisonment. Another statute of 9 Edward III asserted that smuggling continued to be a problem, stipulating that unlicensed exports of English coin were to suffer forfeiture, while goldsmiths who melted English coin were to be imprisoned until they had paid a fine of half the value of the coin involved.³ Over the following century and a half, exchange rates became a point of international contention, particularly in relations between England and the Duchy of Burgundy.⁴ These tensions provoked a series of English statutes reiterating the ban on unlicensed export of coin: 2 Henry IV, cap. 5 ordered that merchant strangers who imported goods to England were to invest half their capital in the export of English goods, following which the crown would grant licence to export the other half in coin; while 2 Henry IV, cap. 6 barred all foreign currency from circulating in England; and 2 Henry VI, cap. 6 called for companies of foreign merchants to stand surety in Chancery that individual members would not export English coin without licence.⁵

English gold coins, the most convenient medium of exchange for international trade, attracted the attention of smugglers because of their fineness. With the exception of two notorious periods of debasement (under Edward III, and again in the 1540s), English gold contained a higher proportion of precious metal than most of its continental counterparts. This meant that if merchant strangers took payment in coin rather than bills of exchange, the proceeds would command a premium in many foreign countries. Moreover, in a country undergoing rapid debasement (such as Poland in the late 1610s), ‘Gresham’s law’⁶ – that bad money drives out the good – meant English gold was likely to attract a premium well above the value of its bullion content.⁷ For the same reason, Spanish silver was also popular with London bullion dealers.⁸

Bullion smuggling was commonplace in Elizabethan London; Exchequer records show that coin was regularly seized by customs officials, albeit usually in small quantities.⁹ A proclamation of 1587 forbade the clipping or counterfeiting of English coin, publishing a table of official weights for each denomination and arranging for the mint to supply certified balances to enable local officials to identify ‘light’ or forged coin. The wording of this proclamation implied that much of the adulteration was carried out abroad – a situation which had apparently changed little two decades later, when the judges resolved that the unlicensed export of coin and bullion was forbidden by Edward I’s statutes of money and the statutes of 9 Edward III, and 2 Henry VI, cap. 6 (discussed above); this ruling was broadcast in a fresh proclamation in 1607.¹⁰ In the following year, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, newly appointed lord treasurer, received a memorandum about bullion export. This accused the merchant strangers of paying above the mint price for Spanish silver and English gold, which they then shipped to Amsterdam and Middelburg where it was clipped or counterfeited with lower bullion content, before being returned to English merchants lying offshore at the Downs.¹¹ No immediate effort seems to have been made to tackle this problem, and the crown waived proceedings against the export of coin and bullion in the statutory pardon of 1610. This concession was short-lived, as a proclamation of 18 May 1611 renewed the prohibition of the melting and export of coin, while another of 14 May 1612 forbade the import of clipped or counterfeit coin and imposed a penalty of twice the value of the coin involved on goldsmiths who paid over the mint price for bullion or coin. The crown finally took effective action to undercut the smugglers’ profits in a proclamation of 23 November 1611, which ‘cried up’ the value of gold coinage by 10% above face value – thereafter, the mint struck the enhanced values on the face of new coin. The same proclamation also revived a clause of the 1587 proclamation allowing sellers to refuse clipped coin, and exhorted the enforcement of medieval statutes against smuggling (namely Edward I’s statutes of money, 9 Edward III and 2 Henry IV, cap. 5).¹² However, this enhancement of the gold coinage had little effect, merely inflating the sale price on the Dutch exchanges from 22s to between 24s and 24s 8d – a premium of 9% to 13.66%.¹³ A fresh proclamation against the export of coin and bullion was issued on 23 March 1615, and in May 1616 several London goldsmiths, a Dutch merchant and a Dutch ship captain, Giles Tyse, were prosecuted in Star Chamber by Attorney General Sir Francis Bacon. The case was grounded on breaches of the proclamation of 18 May 1611, forbidding the melting or export of coin, but the defendants had clearly revealed nothing, as the bill of complaint gave no details of the infringements alleged to have taken place.¹⁴

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The crown’s attack on bullion smuggling began in earnest in May and June 1618, when Attorney General Yelverton launched three separate prosecutions in Star Chamber (table 10.1), two against the London goldsmiths and a third against various Londoners and a specimen group of fifteen merchant strangers. This latter bill reserved the right to add ‘others unknown’ to the list of defendants, and in October, Yelverton asked Francis Bacon (by then Lord Verulam and lord chancellor), to issue writs of ne exeat regnum to prevent the merchant strangers from fleeing abroad. Verulam not only perceived the potential benefits of a successful prosecution, but saw that ‘it will demonstrate also that Scotland is not the leech (as some discoursers say), but the Netherlanders that suck the realm of treasure’, an outcome sure to please his royal master.¹⁵ The king immediately approved the issue of writs of ne exeat regnum; and in November, Yelverton approached the judges of Star Chamber to authorize this grant, claiming that £7 million worth of gold had been exported since James’s accession. The court issued 160 of these writs to merchant strangers under investigation, although the complaints which ensued apparently prompted their revocation in January 1619.¹⁶

How was the prosecution framed? The three bills of complaint filed in May and June 1618 were couched as informations, alleging that enormous (but entirely speculative) quantities of coin and bullion had been exchanged and smuggled abroad by the defendants – this form of indictment was standard practice among common informers, as it allowed the court to subpoena the defendants’ accounts. The bill of 20 May 1618 (against the goldsmiths) was the only one which cited specific transactions, but the four instances described did not include enough detail to have been accepted in a common-law court and were almost certainly based on hearsay. Even more curiously, while all three of the bills of complaint mentioned the existence of statutes against the adulteration and smuggling of coin, none cited a specific law that had been infringed; instead, Yelverton opted to rest his case on breaches of the proclamation of 18 May 1611. This was almost certainly because the penalties imposed by the medieval statutes applied only to seizures of coin and bullion, whereas Star Chamber, operating under different rules, could fine upon reasonable suspicion that the defendants had defied a royal proclamation.¹⁷

Who instigated this case? In October 1618, Lord Chancellor Verulam identified ‘Sir John Britton’ as the projector; but having garbled the name of Sir Henry Britton, a Catholic who already held an interest in two patents, Verulam was clearly not the promoter of this prosecution.¹⁸ Britton apparently compiled a list of those involved in the smuggling ring, which he presented to the king. This swiftly caught the eye of Sir Thomas Vavasour, knight marshal of the king’s household, then trying to sell his office, who secured a royal promise that he should be awarded the fines or forfeitures levied on ten of the defendants as a reward for his services; his presumption in securing a grant in anticipation of conviction irritated Verulam.¹⁹

Britton’s lack of experience in trade or customs administration suggests he had sought advice about how to proceed against the bullion smuggling cartel. The individual best placed to compile a list of the merchant strangers to be investigated was Lionel Cranfield, who held (among many other offices) the post of surveyor general of the customs. His clerks would have been able to cross-reference trade data to identify those who exported far less than they imported; and in the absence of proof that the profits had been invested in England, it was a reasonable assumption that the money had been sent abroad, either by bills of exchange or as specie. Cranfield’s voluminous archive contains nothing about this case, but in November 1618 he wrote to the royal favourite, George Villiers, marquess of Buckingham, complaining that, while he had attended the lords (probably meaning the treasury commission) twice about ‘the strangers’ employment and alteration of the monies’, Verulam had been dismissive of his efforts. It is worth noting that Cranfield had recently had extensive discussions with Vavasour in one of his minor roles, as a commissioner for reform of the royal household (1617–18) – so the knight marshal’s early interest in the bullion case may not have been a coincidence.²⁰

While the prosecution case against the smuggling cartel appealed to grasping courtiers, swingeing fines promised the crown a temporary respite from its financial problems. In December 1618, rumours circulated that the strangers had offered James £100,000 composition to dismiss the case, while a year later, with £143,000 of fines to spend, Verulam sent Buckingham a plan for fiscal retrenchment.²¹ Since 1610, King James’s finances had been hamstrung by his reluctance to summon parliament, and the level of ministerial corruption exposed after the fall of Lord Treasurer Suffolk in July 1618 – whose Star Chamber trial proceeded alongside that of the Dutch merchants – served to compound the king’s embarrassment.²² Meanwhile, clouds of war were gathering in the Holy Roman Empire, and from September 1619, when James’s son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, accepted election as King of Bohemia at the hands of rebels against the Habsburg claimant, Emperor Ferdinand II, England faced the prospect of becoming embroiled in a German war. Finally, with the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Dutch and the Spanish due to expire in April 1621, James can hardly have wished to provoke a serious rift with the Dutch over the merchant strangers.²³

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The vague phraseology Yelverton had employed in his bills of complaint against the goldsmiths and the merchant strangers suggests that he had little idea where to begin his investigation. At the start of Hilary term 1619 he began by examining several of the defendants and other merchant strangers who would later be added to the charge sheet. Naturally, none could recall having exported any significant quantity of coin or bullion without licence, but some attempted to explain where they had invested their profits in England: James Desmaistres (or Demetrius) pointed out that he was a London brewer, not a merchant;²⁴ Robert de la Barr claimed to spend £1,000 a year purchasing fish at Great Yarmouth and in the West Country, for export to the Netherlands; Abraham Beck ran a silkweaving business in London; Philip Burlamachi reminded the court that his banking business included among its customers the crown and the Spanish and Dutch ambassadors; Samuel de Vissher indignantly protested that he had delivered almost £100,000 of imported foreign coin and bullion to the London mint for recoining; while Giles de Butt claimed the only Spanish silver he had handled was a consignment from a wreck in Sussex, which he took to London at the behest of the local admiralty officials, whence it was forwarded to its owners, the Dutch East India Company.²⁵

On 2 and 3 March 1619 the prosecution made a breakthrough with the examination of William Noke and Henry Rowland, who had been apprenticed to the goldsmith, John Harris, at the start of James’s reign. Given a list of the merchant strangers suspected of smuggling, Noke acknowledged dealings with twenty-four of them during his service with Harris; Rowland thirty-six. Clearly citing figures from their account books, they offered a detailed breakdown of their deliveries to each merchant. Noke (having spent only three years with Harris) recorded £239,000 of coin and bullion, which he claimed was, at most, half the sum he had delivered during that time; Rowland reported the staggering sum of £1,584,000-worth of deliveries over eight years, which he claimed (most improbably) was no more than a quarter of the sums he had handled. Rowland provided separate figures for transactions during Queen Elizabeth’s reign (exempted from prosecution by James’s coronation pardon), but this still left £612,000 of transfers after March 1603, which were admissible as evidence. Both men (coached by the interrogatories) explained that they had often transacted business with their master’s clients at night or in the merchants’ own homes. They also revealed that when (as often happened) their master could not satisfy demand for gold coin from his own reserves, he had resorted to four other goldsmiths: James Feake, William Wood, Thomas Some and William Haynes. Rowland further testified that he had been present when customs officials had seized £700 in Portuguese gold hidden under the galley of a Dutch ship.²⁶

Table 10.2. Prosecution witnesses against the London goldsmiths.

Armed with this list of goldsmiths who specialized in the bullion trade, Yelverton began tracing their other former apprentices. Several of the latter, having been excluded from this lucrative trade since they acquired their freedom, proved happy to testify against their erstwhile masters (table 10.2).

Rowland, Earwood and Walley proved the most cooperative witnesses interviewed by the prosecution, providing names, dates and figures, while Noke, having moved to Northamptonshire some years earlier, was initially unable to give figures. By contrast, Peter Wright, having been warned that talking about his former master’s business affairs would breach his oath as a freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company, was studiously vague about the specifics of his former master’s trade. Yelverton advised him to seek legal advice on this point, and to consult a bishop or other minister to settle his conscience. Thomas Phelps told Sir Henry Britton it would be better for the crown to interview his former master, who could consult his own accounts; while William Lasher and Isaac Woodcock carefully avoided citing any figures in their depositions.²⁷

The detailed depositions offered by four of the witnesses furnished ample evidence that John Harris and James Feake had supplied their customers at above the mint price, and allowed the merchants to winnow out the best (i.e. least clipped) coins to purchase; activities which breached the proclamations of 18 May 1611 and 14 May 1612. However, they also explained that the goldsmiths operated on the narrowest of profit margins: while the merchant strangers, often requiring bullion to be provided quickly for a ship that was about to sail, were prepared to pay 4d to 14d in the £ (1.66% to 6%) over the odds for English gold, the goldsmiths could not afford to carry hundreds of pounds’-worth of stock on hand for long periods.²⁸ When the goldsmiths sought coin from their rivals, who knew the state of the market as well as they did, they were commonly forced to settle for a brokerage fee of 1d to 1.5d per £ (0.42% to 0.63%). On an annual turnover of bullion well into six figures, the income from brokerage alone guaranteed well over £1,000, but as margins were tight, it is clear why this clique of five goldsmiths defended its interests so vigorously.²⁹

While a partial breakthrough in the case against the goldsmiths must have pleased Yelverton, there was no prospect that Harris and Feake could have paid fines of more than a few thousand pounds, which would have had a negligible impact on the crown’s debts. Hence the significance of two other witnesses, who provided evidence relating to the bullion trade in the Low Countries, which could potentially be used against the merchant strangers. The first of these, Robert Harrison, had been apprenticed to a goldbeater in Middelburg in Zeeland in about 1601, then traded on his own account in The Hague and Delft, returning to London shortly before testifying on 10 April 1619. He confirmed that English gold was sought after by goldbeaters, because its high bullion content meant it could be alloyed with copper and beaten particularly thin. He insisted the trade had increased substantially during his time in the Netherlands, estimating that Dutch goldbeaters now consumed a weekly quota of more than 100 oz. troy weight of English gold, and he provided evidence of a Dutch skipper smuggling English gold, hidden in a barrel of tar. He also accused Martin Drussett, a stranger living in London, of smuggling bullion both ways between the English goldsmiths and the Dutch goldbeaters. Finally, in May 1619, Harrison briefly returned to the United Provinces to secure affidavits from an Amsterdam merchant and a Middelburg notary confirming that bullion smuggling from London was commonplace. The crown’s other deponent, Thomas Morley, having been recruited to the English regiment in the army of Flanders in 1605, presently resigned and took employment with Abraham Lasawe, engraver of the Antwerp mint. Morley testified that the merchant strangers in London (including five of those now being prosecuted) sent £40,000 a year in coin to the United Provinces, as their contribution to the stock of the Dutch East India Company; his source for this information was Lasawe, one of the middlemen in these transactions.³⁰

By June 1619, Yelverton believed the evidence he had gathered was sufficient to bring the case against the merchant strangers to trial, and Star Chamber spent a week hearing evidence. But on 18 June the king (having come to London on Lord Chancellor Verulam’s forecast of a cash windfall to fund his summer progress) ordered the judgement to be deferred until the start of Michaelmas term. As one newsletter writer observed, the crown’s evidence was ‘rather matter of presumption than proof’, while some of the defendants had pleaded the benefit of the pardons of 1603 and 1610.³¹ Over the summer, the crown once again attempted to undercut the smugglers’ profits with a fresh proclamation reducing the fees the Mint charged for recasting foreign coin, allowing its subjects to refuse clipped coin and reviving the 1587 project for the Mint to issue balances for troy weights to allow local officials to identify ‘light’ coin.³² It was presumably this adjustment, and the ongoing Star Chamber case, which depressed the value of sterling on the Dutch exchanges, where a Jacobus fell to 23s, (4.5% above par) in 1619.³³

While the prosecution team worked hard to gather evidence, the defendants had not stood idly by. In May 1619, Richard Carmarden, surveyor of London customs, deposed that in the early stages of the trial, Philip Burlamachi had visited him discreetly at his own house. The latter, protesting that he only exported bullion under licence – he was the crown’s chief agent on the foreign exchanges – suggested that ‘if it pleased his Majesty to pardon that [which] was past, there might be course taken for the prevention of the like hereafter’. This fits in with news circulating in December 1618 that the merchant strangers had offered the crown a composition of £100,000. If this offer was indeed made, Burlamachi would have been the ideal intermediary, being the defendant best placed to exonerate himself.³⁴

With the crown spurning an early deal with the merchant strangers, several of the defendants were seduced by the promises of Garret Day, a scrivener who had originally acted as a solicitor for Sir Henry Britton in the May 1618 case against the London goldsmiths, but who had subsequently been discharged. Seeking better pickings from the defendants, George Stampeel and Robert de Lewe offered him money to secure their discharge from the Star Chamber proceedings (presumably by testifying for the crown), but Day found a more lucrative employment when he persuaded Burlamachi, Stampeel and William Courteen that he could suborn the key prosecution witness, Henry Rowland, who had been detained in London’s Poultry Compter prison for bankruptcy in May 1619. Rowland must have been in desperate straits, as he apparently retracted his testimony for the remarkably modest sum of £3 6s, but the cause of his change of heart was quickly discovered, and at the start of Michaelmas term 1619 the conspirators, having admitted their guilt, were tried ore tenus in Star Chamber.³⁵ Day was fined £2,000, imprisoned and sentenced to the pillory, while Courteen was fined £2,000, Burlamachi 2,000 marks and Stampeel £500.³⁶

On 20 July 1619 Sir Julius Caesar took notes of a discussion, possibly between the judges of Star Chamber before they departed on their summer vacation,³⁷ about the future course of the suit against the merchant strangers. The meeting may have been called to discuss the consequences of Rowland’s recantation, but the debate ranged far wider. The testimony of the former apprentices against their masters had already persuaded the crown to indict a second tranche of merchant strangers, while four of the merchant strangers – Nicholas Jacobson, Michel de Horter, Francis Penetiere and one ‘Towne’ (perhaps Jasper Tyant?) – had agreed to turn crown’s evidence, revealing the scale of their smuggling and the names of those for whom they acted. Furthermore, two of the goldsmiths under investigation, Thomas Some and William Lasher, refused to produce their accounts, but another, William Wood, belatedly complied and provided details of sales of £120,000-worth of coin and bullion to a number of the defendants. The judges agreed that Rowland and the other former apprentices whose evidence had proved so invaluable should be re-examined, both to confirm their earlier testimony, and to reveal what they knew of the activities of the second group of defendants.³⁸

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At the start of Michaelmas term, for all the weight of evidence, Lord Chancellor Verulam worried that the case against the merchant strangers might miscarry. Chief justices Sir Henry Montagu and Sir Henry Hobart assured him of their support, but he feared that unless Attorney General Yelverton showed more aggression, the court might fail to produce the definitive verdicts and swingeing fines the crown required.³⁹ Consequently, proceedings during the autumn worked over much of the same evidence and many of the same witnesses as had been examined earlier in the year. Henry Rowland enlarged upon his earlier testimony, going out of his way to implicate Burlamachi’s business partner, Giles Vandeputt; he also gave details of his dealings in bullion in 1606–8, after he had gained his freedom and set up as a shopkeeper. William Wood submitted accounts of his dealings with the merchant strangers, while Francis Samborne and George Pigott, former servants of William Haynes – the one goldsmith under investigation against whom no evidence had yet been produced – offered testimony of Haynes’s involvement in the bullion trade. Ominously, senior members of the Goldsmiths’ Company were now prepared to take the witness stand against their colleagues: Alderman Alexander Prescott, who had sold some of the late Lord Treasurer Burghley’s plate to Harris, testified to the latter’s insatiable appetite for bullion; while Hugh Myddelton damned Harris, his neighbour in Goldsmith’s Row, with the assertion that ‘his house was as it were a Prince’s Exchequer, by reason of the continual telling of gold & silver, and venting it to the Dutchmen’. Myddelton also insisted that Henry Rowland did not have the reputation as a liar and drunkard that his enemies claimed.⁴⁰

Hearings on the smuggling case, having been delayed by the trial of the disgraced Lord Treasurer Suffolk, eventually commenced on 19 November, when the defendants’ counsel moved to have the recent re-examinations of the prosecution witnesses suppressed; Verulam persuaded the other judges to refuse this request. Yelverton dropped the charges brought against eight of the defendants (see table 10.3), but managed to convince the judges of Henry Rowland’s credibility as a witness. However, as one newsletter writer noted, while the prosecution had furnished a wealth of evidence about the vast quantity of coin and bullion supplied to the merchant strangers by the goldsmiths, the proof that these immense sums had been smuggled abroad was decidedly thin. Some of the defendants escaped conviction on the grounds that the profits derived from their imports had been invested in English land and businesses, while Peter Vanlore explained that much of his capital had been loaned out to Scottish courtiers. However, as secretary of state Sir George Calvert noted, Yelverton’s focus on depositions concerning the ready availability of English gold in the Low Countries, while no more than a circumstantial argument, eventually persuaded the court to accept the credibility of the smuggling charge.⁴¹ Thereafter, it only remained to collate the testimonies of the various goldsmiths to establish the scale of the crime. Master of the rolls Sir Julius Caesar (one of the judges) kept voluminous notes of these debates, concluding that the goldsmiths’ accounts revealed sales of £1,183,679 to the merchant strangers. There may have been some element of double counting in these figures, but as they provided only partial information about sixteen years’-worth of smuggling, the vast scale of the fraud could not be denied. Verulam was dismayed to find that Yelverton’s careless handling of depositions allowed the brewer, James Desmaistres, at whose tavern much of the smuggling had been arranged, to escape conviction. At an informal meeting with the other judges the day before the verdicts were pronounced, Verulam carefully instructed them not to dwell on the thinness of the evidence, but to focus on ensuring that the fines were proportionate to the scale of the smuggling revealed.⁴²

Table 10.3. The merchant stranger defendants.

1 Brit. Lib., Add. MS. 12497, fos. 9-10.

2 TNA, SP14/111/66—7; Brit. Lib., Add. MS. 72275, fos. 92v-3; Add. MS. 12497, fos. 31v, 63 (N.B. the sources do not all agree about the amounts of the fines).

3 TNA, E401/2431—3.

4 TNA, C66/2226, 2232, 2234, 2276.

5 Brit. Lib., Add. MS. 72275, fo. 94v.

Table 10.4. Defendants added to bill in Trinity 1619.

At the sentencing on 8 December 1619, twenty of the defendants were found guilty and fined sums between £1,500 and £20,000, amounting to £134,500 in total. They were imprisoned in the Fleet, pending payment of their fines, although four of them were swiftly released on bail. Lord Chancellor Verulam sketched plans to use this windfall to repair the crown’s tottering finances, and pronounced himself determined to ‘keep the clock on-going’ against those condemned.⁴³ In February 1620 Robert de Lewe had his stock in the East India Company seized by the crown; while Philip Jacobson, who sold stock at the same time, presumably devoted part of the proceeds to paying his fine. William Courteen, hoping that his role in brokering a match between Buckingham’s brother, Christopher Villiers, and a wealthy City heiress would elicit concessions from the favourite, was informed that, while the seizure of his goods and debts might be halted, there would be no reduction of his fine.⁴⁴ By August 1620, the Exchequer had received a total of £23,809 18s 6d (see table 10.3).

On 4 February 1620, the crown sought to capitalize further on its success by filing a fresh bill against eighty-seven merchant strangers, twelve of whom had been defendants in the earlier case. This rehearsed similar charges against the merchant strangers as the earlier bill of June 1618, but on this occasion, it explicitly reproduced the arguments of the proclamation of 23 November 1611 in basing its case upon breaches of Edward I’s statutes of money, 9 Edward III and 2 Henry IV, cap. 5. The bill also suggested the crown might only seek to enforce these statutes against breaches committed since the proclamations of 1611 – which would bar the defendants from pleading the pardons of either 1603 or 1610 in mitigation of their offences.⁴⁵ Commentators who predicted this fresh lawsuit would have a serious impact upon London’s trade were proven wrong: the Star Chamber fines of December 1619 caused much discontent among those convicted, several of whom considered emigrating; but the trade slump which affected northern Europe in 1620–1 was primarily caused by the debasement of coinage within much of the Empire and Poland. The prospects of huge profits to be made further east stripped much of northwestern Europe of its finest coin.⁴⁶

The trade crisis, perhaps in conjunction with Attorney General Yelverton’s suspension from office in June 1620, persuaded the crown to allow the Star Chamber proceedings to run out of steam. Defendants to the bill of February 1620 continued to file their answers until June 1622, but the acute domestic shortage of coin prompted the crown to avoid pressing the merchants too hard. In August and September 1620, ten of the merchant strangers had their outstanding Star Chamber fines pardoned, while Burlamachi, Vandeputt and Vanlore had their fines waived in return for an interest-free loan of £10,000 to the crown.⁴⁷ Moses Tryon, having sued his pardon in August 1620, was still facing proceedings over the crown’s seizure of one of his outstanding debts in February 1623, but neither he nor any of the eleven defendants who had not sued pardons paid any further sums into the Exchequer.⁴⁸

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What does this case tell us about the wider context of Star Chamber proceedings? The surviving papers of the court tell us a great deal about its workings, but by no means the whole story. Unlike most of the court’s caseload, bullion smuggling was a high-profile case of international significance: much of the information about this case comes from newsletters to English diplomats in Brussels and The Hague, where interest among politicians and merchants was clearly high. The political nature of the case prefigures the use of the court under Charles I, as does the scale of the fines imposed on the merchant strangers, which far exceeded most Jacobean fines, except for the £30,000 awarded against Lord Treasurer Suffolk and his wife, also in Michaelmas 1619. However, the return on the crown’s effort ultimately proved disappointing: Verulam feared in January 1620 King James ‘made bondmen (I mean, which have given bonds for their fines) … freemen’ by pardoning the offenders. The crown ultimately collected only £7,000 from the Suffolks, £23,800 from the merchant strangers, plus the £10,000 loan from Burlamachi, Vandeputt and Vanlore.⁴⁹ Here, as so often in Jacobean England, political considerations trumped the crown’s pressing need for extra revenue.

Most Star Chamber cases were founded on charges of riot or conspiracy, which were not difficult for the prosecution counsel to frame, being routine, but the proceedings against the goldsmiths and merchant strangers created significant problems. The goldsmiths around whom much of the main case of 1618–19 revolved were doubtless in breach of 9 Edward III, st. 2, § 3, for having melted English coin, but they were not wealthy enough to bear the huge fines the crown sought. The merchant strangers, by contrast, were proven to have purchased enormous quantities of coin and bullion, and the crown also made a satisfactory case that English gold was freely available in the Low Countries, but evidence of the defendants smuggling coin and bullion on board ships for export was notably lacking, despite the pressure put on the Dutch shipmaster Giles Tyse.⁵⁰ There is no evidence that the defending counsel pointed out this flaw in the crown’s case, and thus huge fines were awarded, but the fragile grounds on which this verdict rested cannot have escaped notice abroad, and this may help to explain why most of the money was never collected.

Happily for economic historians, the crown’s difficulty in finding conclusive evidence of the merchant strangers’ breach of any statute with a financial penalty clause led to the collection of a wealth of circumstantial evidence, which reveals a great deal about the international bullion trade. First, the goldsmiths and merchant strangers shared the profits of their smuggling ventures evenly. Second, the customs officials were clearly not regarded as a serious threat by the smugglers, as any reasonable prospect of interception would have led the strangers to drop the price they were prepared to offer the goldsmiths for their coin.⁵¹ Why were English merchants little involved in bullion smuggling? Because their costs in exporting domestic products were considerably less than those borne by the strangers, who were hobbled by discriminatory customs rates imposed on their exports (particularly English cloth). This led the strangers to resort to many kinds of fraud: shipping goods under the names of English factors, using hot presses to pack more cloth into a bundle than was declared for customs purposes, and the smuggling of bullion.⁵² Finally, it should be noted that (according to Caesar’s figures) the evidence accepted by Star Chamber amounted to £1.3 million. This clearly represented only a proportion of the actual value of the trade – speculation about the total ranged between three and seven million pounds over the years 1603–19; a staggering sum, which bears comparison with present-day foreign exchange frauds.