Liam Byrne

a full-scale constitutional revolution was in progress as the group of English leaders known as the ‘Immortal Seven’ invited James’s Dutch son-in-law (and nephew) William of Orange to intervene to restore England’s ‘ancient laws and liberties’.*12 William landed at Brixham on 5 November 1688, with a fleet four times the size of the Spanish Armada, James’s cause melted away, and the old king fled abroad.
A ‘Convention Parliament’ deemed James to have abdicated, and William was crowned in April 1689. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ was complete; it marked a new relationship between sovereign and subjects

From the eighth century, the most active traders with England were probably the Frisians of the northern Germanic coast, who bought and sold wine, timber, grain and fish from towns like London and York and, from at least the late seventh century, traded a certain amount of English cloth, known, appropriately, as Frisian.

Sir Thomas Gresham (c.1518–79); a mercer who made a fortune dealing cloth and capital in England and Antwerp; who became a mission-critical servant of the Crown; and who brought home the lessons he learned abroad to help found London’s capital market and the Stock Exchange

The greatest of them, such as Pole, Whittington and Gresham, mastered the greatest trade – textiles – served the greatest customer, the monarch, and supplied the greatest enterprise: war

And he started by taking a stake in one of the most fashionable new corporations of Stuart England: the Virginia Company

The Virginia Company was different. Indeed, it was practically unique in corporate England, because it was a company created to build a colony across the Atlantic, as it happened, a colony christened in calamity

Over the next decade, Bermuda became far and away the biggest tobacco exporter, sending 615,000 pounds of the stuff – some 25 per cent more than the Virginia colony25 and valued at £62,000, twice the price of Virginian exports.*6 The Rich family was soon among the biggest of the Bermuda tobacco barons

Yet, Rich’s interest in Bermuda was not confined to slaves and tobacco. For, as heir to one of the greatest privateering fleets in England, Rich had quickly spotted that the island was a perfect base not only for a pastoral business – but also for a piracy business, stealing from the Spanish and the Portuguese

the colossus of trading London, Sir Thomas Smythe, in the first great corporate battle of Stuart England

the period that followed, Warwick emerged as one of the key figures around the group of contemporaries called ‘the Junto’ – ‘the great contrivers and designers’ at the sharp end of the struggles, that would see the triumph of the traders over their king