Early Elizabethan Protestant commentators did not condemn capitalism; indeed, they depended on the patronage of the merchants and financiers, as well as the aristocracy, to support the reformed cause. Moreover, they approved of modest profits from commercial practice, and many did not object to moneylending at a moderate rate of interest. However, as the moral interludes examined here amply illustrate, they were generally distrustful of the mercantile community and held it responsible for a host of social evils: the acquisitive drive for wealth, fraudulent sale of goods, usurious moneylending, racking of rents, oppression of the poor, and profligate spending habits and the crippling debt they engendered (see Bevington 1968:133-7). For the urban middle class, to whom these criticisms appear to have been addressed, the early years of Elizabeth’s reign promised great prosperity and economic growth. The recoinage of 1562 restored confidence in English currency on the international market following the disastrous debasements of the Henrician and Edwardian governments, and the Statute of Artificers the following year provided a labour code and settled disputes over wage-earning. Then in 1567 perhaps the single most important event in the economic history of Elizabeth’s reign took place: the opening in Cornhill of the ‘Great and Goodly Bourse’, renamed the Royal Exchange four years later (Wheeler 1949: 206-7). That same year, the founder of the Royal Exchange, Sir Thomas Gresham, persuaded Queen Elizabeth to pass new legislation permitting interest up to 10 per cent (the Usury Act of 1571).
Despite the growth of wealth and the strengthening of the economy, however, the central government remained conservative in its views of economic practice and suspicious of the more adventurous proposals of the rich merchants, with some administrators, namely Leicester and possibly also Sir Christopher Hatton, supporting the anti-usury campaign led by Thomas Wilson, Thomas Rogers, Robert Crowley, and others (Rosenberg 1957: 145-6). The economic interludes voice the opinion of these moralists and their patrons that the advancement of commerce did little to alleviate the suffering of the poor and dispossessed, and it only compounded social and economic problems by promoting greed and exploitation in the areas of trade and housing. Commercial success was in part responsible for the thousands of provincial labourers and foreign emigrants (the latter welcomed by the Crown in the early 1560s) who flooded into London and the larger towns looking for work, which in turn contributed to overcrowding and squalid living conditions. When the demand outstripped supply, rents for housing to let rose to unaffordable rates for poor commoners, many of whom were evicted to make room for the much-resented foreign tradesmen from France and the Low Countries. Food prices similarly rose as grain production failed to keep up with the population growth, so that it was widely believed that merchants, like landlords, used the price-rising trends to profiteer even further. And London was not the only urban centre with rapid population growth and accompanying economic woes. Norwich, for example, doubled in size between 1560 and 1580, largely as a result of a huge influx of Dutch and Walloon immigrants during the early years of Elizabeth’s reign—with an increase in poverty, too (Pound 1988: 125-6; N. Jones 1993: 254-5).
The authors of the Elizabethan economic interludes, like most commentators of the time, seem to have had little grasp of the complex interplay of forces causing price inflation, high unemployment, and other economic realities of the day. The playwrights did take the government to task for contributing to the current situation, openly challenging its legalization of interest in the Usury Act of 1571, its lax immigration policy, which encouraged foreign labourers to work in England, and the 1559 parliamentary bill authorizing the Crown’s seizure of bishops’ lands, which impoverished many parish clergy. Yet they were generally sceptical that ‘policy’ could change social conditions. Like the so-called commonwealth men of Edward VI’s reign, they perceived covetousness, ambition, and oppression ultimately as ‘spiritual’ evils, responsibility for which resided with individual sinners, not with the ‘system’.
For George Wapull’s The Tide Tarrieth No Man, commercial abuses and disorders had their origins in the base drives and desires of corrupt human nature, signified by the play’s Vice, Courage. Courage’s assistants, named Hurtful Help, Feigned Furtherance, and Painted Profit, are financial brokers and middlemen who illustrate the dangers of a cash nexus economy in which individual identity is increasingly defined in monetary terms (see Crow 1980: 316-17). Among the predatory rogues deceived by Courage and his henchmen are Greediness, a usurious moneylender and double-dealing merchant, and No-Good-Neighbourhood, a wealthy immigrant and landlord who is equally unscrupulous. Those most victimized by such economic conditions are the virtuous and the poor, exemplified in the persons of Tenant and Debtor, who get caught up in the network of intrigue engineered by Courage.
The strong sense of individual responsibility for economic conduct in these interludes and corresponding sermon literature derived in part from the Calvinist doctrine of the calling, which taught that the manner by which people pursue their divinely appointed vocations in the social order is a direct reflection of their spiritual condition. The Elizabethan preacher William Perkins, whose Treatise of Vocations, or Callings of Men (1599) was the culmination of English Calvinist ideas on the calling, distinguished between worldly and spiritual callings but concluded: ‘if thou wouldst have signes and tokens of thy election and salvation, thou must fetch them from the constant practise of thy two cal[l]ings joyntly together’ (1608: i. 734). Calvinist notions of calling and divine vocation have generated much debate among economic historians since the publication of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904, in which Weber famously asserted:
The religious valuation of restless, continuous systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means of asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism. (Weber 1930:172)
Rationalizing the profit motive in religious terms and linking economic success to divine favour were, without question, present among the Protestant middle classes from the beginning, as I asserted at the outset of this discussion.227
However, we now know the situation was more complicated. Indeed, Elizabethan Calvinist notions about calling and stewardship in the Elizabethan interludes do not challenge but reinforce traditional political opinion about social order and economic relations. Thus, in Enough Is as Good as a Feast and The Trial of Treasure, the ruling class are exhorted to fulfil God’s will in the important vocations to which they have been called, the ‘poor men & commons’ to ‘walke well in your vocation’, banishing greed and ambition in the pursuit of heavenly treasure (Wager 1920: B2v; Trial 1908: D2v). All for Money likewise teaches that the poor labouring class should accept its lowly station, even if it means a life of poverty, and that the wealthy and privileged have an obligation to practise charity towards the poor and sick (Lupton 1910: C3r). Within this scheme of things, the rapid social advancement of ambitious merchants and middle-class landlords are perceived as a threat to social stability. In The Tide Tarrieth No Man, the courtier Willing-To-Win-Worship becomes a victim of the acquisitive rogues Hurtful Help and Feigned Furtherance, who lend him money at an exorbitant rate of interest and seize his property when he is unable to pay it. Only in a society where wealth is valued above principles of morality and order can an upstart merchant advance to the level of a gentleman while the gentleman, landless and broke, descends to the lowly station of a pauper.
The chief vice which leads men to abuse their callings and jeopardize their own souls is covetousness, ‘the Londoners sinne’, as the Calvinist preacher Henry Smith describes it (1599: A2r). To the covetous merchant, what constitutes ‘enough’ changes from day to day. Smith comments: ‘whe[n] we had nothing we thought it enough if we might obtain lesse then we have: when we came to more, we thought of an other enough, so enough is alwaies to come, though too much be there already’. Covetousness, and the restless, acquisitive need to possess more, even though one has ‘enough’, is the focus of Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast. Thinking only in terms of his welfare in this lifetime, the greed-driven landlord Worldly Man justifies his accumulation of wealth on the grounds that misfortune may strike at any time and therefore one must prepare for old age by storing up riches now (A3r). This leads him to embrace the most presumptuous argument of all: he ought to be in the business of making money because it is his divinely appointed vocation (D3r). The suffering and oppression caused by his covetous practices are dramatized by three tableaux figures who recall Wapull’s lowly victims noted earlier. Tenant complains that his rent has been doubled owing to Worldly Man’s greed and to the influx of foreigners who cause prices to rise. He is joined by Servant, who complains that he is treated more like a slave than a servant, being deprived of basic needs. A third victim, Hireling, claims that Worldly Man has cheated him out of a half-year’s wages. When the three request to have their grievances redressed, they are callously turned away by the landlord and his steward. Through this behaviour, Worldly Man manifests his spiritual reprobation. Failing to respond to the sermon of the Prophet, he is visited by God’s Plague and dies impenitent and damned. If Worldly Man’s restless drive for wealth brought him to damnation, Wager implies that the government must be in some measure responsible for encouraging such behaviour through his condoning of usury. Wager’s alignment with the anti-usury campaign
Is voiced through a speech by Satan, who enters to carry off the reprobate’s corpse to hell:
How cunningly put he his mony to usury:
Yea, and that without offense of any law.
All you worldly men, that in your riches doo trust,
Be merry and jocund, build Palaces and make lust cheer: Put your money to usury, let it not lye and rust,
Occupye your selves in my lawes while ye be heer.
(G2v)
As a remedy for the restless drive for gain and status, these interludes urge every man in his calling to restrain his affection from the world, to trust in divine providence, and to practise contentation (see also Perkins 1608: i. 745; Smith 1599: Cir). Wager conveys this alternative lifestyle through the example of Worldly Man’s elect counterpart, Heavenly Man. Heavenly Man accepts his social station with providential resignation, and regards the temptations and adversities of this world as means of strengthening his faith. In contrast to Worldly Man’s deserved damnation, he is visited with Rest, who brings him joys ‘prepared for the heavenly from the beginning: | And given unto them for a rewarde of their godly living’ (Wager 1920: G3v). This last quotation, implying that Heavenly Man’s salvation is foreordained, draws attention to the most anomalous feature of Reformation religious drama as a whole. At the same time as it attempts to evangelize, to press for changes within the Church and within society, it also insists on an Augustinian view of predestination. If Heavenly Man’s salvation is predestined, ‘the worldly man will needs be a worldly man still’, we are told, since ‘it will not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone verily’ (D4v).
The sense of determinism is no less pronounced in The Trial of Treasure, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, All for Money, and Like Will to Like. In these interludes, the majority in society are perceived to be hopelessly depraved and fixed in their evil ways. Their reprobation is depicted largely in economic terms. On the other hand, only the Faithful Few practise virtue and attain salvation. The authors apparently did not see any inconsistency between the notion of predestination and their proselytizing aims. Thus, the assumption is that those who respond to the message are imbued with the necessary grace to do so, and therefore must have been elect in the first place. As Godly Admonition states at the conclusion of All for Money:
Here have you had [seen] inordinate love
Which man hath to money although it worke his wo:
But such as have any grace, this will them stirre and move
To cast their love from money and other pleasures also
For feare they dwell with the devill, their cruell and mortal foe.
(Lupton 1910: G3v; my emphasis)
World History
