Visible bullets: 'Tamburlaine the Great' and Ivan the Terrible.

On 18 March 1584 Tsar Ivan IV, Emperor and Great Duke of Vladimir, Moscow and of all Russia, King of Astrakhan, King of Kazan, and King of Siberia, was carried on a throne into his treasury, where (in the account of the English emissary Sir Jerome Horsey) he called for his jewels: the lodestone of the prophet Muhammed, "without which the seas nor the bounds that circle the earth cannot be known"; the unicorn's horn encrusted with rubies and emeralds he had bought for "seventy thousand marks sterling" from the Welsh wizard David Gower; the "richest diamond of the orient," which guaranteed chastity; a sapphire that "cleared the sight, took away bloodshot, and strengthened muscles"; and an onyx that changed color in the hand of vice. Armed with these charms, he summoned the "Lapland witches" who had foretold his death, to tell them that "The day was come; he was as heart whole as ever," and that at sunset they would therefore be burned. Then he "made merry with pleasant songs as he useth to [and] called his favourite to bring his chess board." The opponent he chose was his rival, Boris Godunov; but the tsar set out his pieces confidently until he came to the king, which rolled onto the floor; whereupon "the Emperor faints and falls backward. Great outcry and stir; one sends for his physicians, another for his ghostly father. In the meantime he was strangled and stark dead."(1) Thus passed the tsar known as the Terrible: "This Heliogabalus," as Horsey reported him, who was "a right Scythian; well favoured, high forehead, shrill voice; full of ready wisdom, cruel, bloody, merciless," and whose Kremlin tomb, "guarded day and night, remains a fearful spectacle to such as pass by or hear his name spoken, who are contented to cross and bless themselves from his resurrection." But if there was jubilation in Moscow when the chancellor sarcastically announced that "the English Emperor was dead," there was consternation in London, where the Muscovy Company had built its fortune on Ivan's despotic word.(2)

The Muscovy Company was England's first joint-stock enterprise, floated in 1553 with 240 [pounds]25 shares, which members sub-divided as the market value rose during Ivan's reign to [pounds]100 by 1557 and [pounds]450 in 1572: an exponential growth of 1,800 percent.(3) The Company's success was thus the reverse of that to which the dying tsar had physically clung: the triumph of capital as an invisible power penetrating distant lands. For as Fernand Braudel explains, merchant companies were engines of a new global economy, pumping investment from an ever larger public through cycles of expanding trade. "At the top of the world of commerce, the real big business" of the Renaissance was a fourfold operation (import-and-export and purchase-and-sale) by these international monopolists; and the Muscovy Company completed a classic circuit when they sold the English navy Russian cable bought with arms shipped to the tsar.(4) Distance, volume, and demand made this semi-clandestine trade so lucrative that by the mid-1580s the Company was declaring goods worth [pounds]25,000 a year ([pounds]75,000 at market rates); but the stimulus for fresh capital on which its directors constantly called was the potential for new markets at each end of the line: in the Asian territories conquered by Ivan where, as Horsey wrote, "great traffic is maintained with all nations for the commodities which each country yields"; and in the American colonies founded on the defeat of Spain.(5) From Virginia to Persia, the Muscovy Company straddled the shipping and caravan lanes of world trade; but the hub of its activity was its warehouse in Deptford, where up to [pounds]10,000-worth of cordage was stowed. That "the fleet which defeated the Armada was rigged with Russian tackle and cable," was due to the bills and invoices that meshed in this store, where the Company's London agent was charged with executing some of the most secret orders of the state.(6) And this is significant, because from 1576 to 1599 the agent was Anthony Marlowe, long identified as a Crayford relative of Christopher Marlowe, and a cause, we may infer, of the dramatist's fatal connection with the Deptford docks.(7)

"For the silk of the Medes to come by Muscovy into England is a strange hearing," exclaimed the English ambassador in Paris, when he learned of the new passage to Asia. It was such multilateralism, Braudel suggests, that destroyed the fair and elevated the warehouse into the key instrument of exchange; and Muscovy Company records reveal its Deptford depot as the nexus of communication between London and the tsar's domains.(8) With its accumulation of intelligence and stock, this was one room where "infinite riches" were truly circumscribed in the Jew's audit that "thus trawls our fortune in by land and sea, / And thus are we on every side enrich'd."(9) According to his predecessor, Anthony Marlowe had "charge of all the business of the company," including purchase of goods reexported to Russia, and was paid a bonus of [pounds]200 a year for "executing the doings thereof quietly."(10) In 1587, when the dramatist arrived in London, such discretion was at a premium, because the stores were at the center of a gigantic fraud devised by the Company governor, George Barne, a Woolwich broker, with his brother-in-law, the spymaster, Francis Walsingham. Their scare was made possible when Ivan's successor Theodor revoked the Company's monopoly and Horsey rigged a secret deal between Godunov and his "good friends" in London. Since a turnover of a mere [pounds]13,500 was declared for 1587, we can guess that this "very cunning scheme" cost the shareholders about half their dividend; and historians surmise that because they employed Company ships, Barne and Walsingham must have colluded with Anthony, who was supposed "to prevent private trade by numbering every truss of cloth and hogshead of brimstone."(11) The agent was, in fact, himself related to both men; and their conspiracy was presumably sealed with the complicity of the local official responsible for receipt of goods into the royal household: the bailiff of the Clerk of the Greencloth, the very Richard Bull in whose offices on Deptford Strand, long mistaken for a tavern, Christopher Marlowe would eventually pay his own mysterious reckoning.(12)

Ivan's death precipitated a crisis in the Muscovy Company that had loomed since 1580, when the Turks cut the route from Russia to Persia. By 1586 its books were nominally in the red; so at the annual court shareholders moved to censure its board for "disposing of trade to the discontent of the inferior brethren, by liberality of Mr Horsey towards some of the chief dealers." The upshot, however, was that "the whole court with one assent by erecting of hands" voted to write off seventy-five percent of the debt, refloat the Company with a new share issue, and, as Barne assured Lord Burghley (a major promoter), vest control in just ten directors, to avoid future "inconvenience of forward men's opinions."(13) By crushing this shareholders' revolt, the City of London was already displaying its genius for insider dealing; and the affair reveals the restrictive practices Anthony Marlowe might have mobilized on behalf of kin. For the Muscovy Company was in reality a cartel of Kent families, linking many of the factors in Russia, such as Walsingham's step-son, Alexander Carlyle, with naval commanders like Hawkins, who married Anthony Marlowe's cousin. Anthony Marlowe's ties with Bull typified this dynastic network: Richard Bull's father had worked as Deptford Master Shipwright for his grandfather and uncle, William and Benjamin Gonson, successive Navy Treasurers; whilst Bull's employer at the Greencloth, Christopher Browne of Sayes Court, married another of Marlowe's Gonson cousins.(14) Peter Clark comments that though Kent led foreign enterprise, with gentry "busy sending home carpets and news from India," this was always managed "for the consolidation of its oligarchy," and the Justices of the Peace who invested in Russia or America shared the moral horizons of the Faversham pirate, Jack Ward, who plundered the Caribbean and Mediterranean for Queen or Sultan "with exemplary impartiality."(15) Certainly, the reflotation of the Russia Company as what critics termed ...