This entertainment was staged at Alderman William Cockayne’s house in Broad Street, London, on 8 June 1616, to thank the King for his support for the creation of the new King’s Company of Merchant Adventurers, which had been established in 1614 (Larkin and Hughes, 1.312–14). Cockayne (1567–1626), a member of the Eastland Company which traded with the Baltic, was the prime mover behind the new company. This supplanted the old Merchant Adventurers, and sold only dyed and dressed cloth for export, instead of the unfinished cloth exported by the earlier company. It was thought this would increase royal revenue – a matter of concern to the King after the failure of the 1614 parliament – and provide better incomes for the Clothworkers, whose members would profit from finishing (dressing and dyeing) the cloth (Beal, 2003, 249; Davis, 2002, 119–21).

The ‘great feast’ for the King and Prince Charles cost the company £3,100, of which £1,500 was expended in gold pieces given to the two principal guests in a gold basin and ewer. In return Cockayne ended the evening as a knight. According to a report by George Gerrard, part of the entertainment consisted of ‘dyers, weavers with their shuttles, and cloth-dressers, speaking by way of an interlude to grace themselves and their industry’, and this was followed by ‘certain Hamburgians, with great bellied doublets, all drunk, which spake such language as Ben Jonson put in their mouths, only for merriment’ (Masque Archive, Merch. Adv. Ent., 1). Unsurprisingly, the evening’s entertainment caused some offence amongst the foreigners living in London, and prompted Sir Noel de Caron, the ambassador of the United Provinces, to complain.

The first part of the entertainment was clearly written in praise of the Clothworkers and the members who had been instrumental in creating the new company. The attack on the Hamburgians in the second part presents more difficulties. The Hanseatic League had been rivals of the old Merchant Adventurers, but Cockayne – himself an Eastland trader – had strong connections with the German trading port, which acted as the staple town in Germany for the King’s Merchant Adventurers (ODNB). It is most likely that the ‘Hamburgians’ were supposed to represent the Dutch Merchants who were displaced by the enforced cessation of trading by the old Merchant Adventurers. Their role had been a particular object of complaint from the weavers, notably in the summer of 1615, and the Clothworkers had mounted a concerted campaign against Dutch involvements in dyeing and finishing of cloth (Grell, 1989, 23; Davies, 2003, 120–1). It is possible that the ‘Rabelaisian portrayal’ – as Bawcutt (1997), 94 puts it – of the drunken ‘great bellied’ Germans involved the kinds of mock-German or mock-Dutch used on the stage in plays such as Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599).

The Dutch reacted rapidly to the trading threat by prohibiting the import of dyed cloth (Larkin and Hughes, 1.314n.) It became clear that the new company was just as interested in exporting undressed cloth as it was in developing an indigenous dressing industry, and the trade and customs revenues declined sharply in 1615–16. By 1617, the old company had been restored (Beal, 2003, 251).

James Knowles