Free The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl

does not on the whole get a good press, and this book will not do much to rehabilitate him. But one thing is clear - he was a brilliant craftsman and designer. The head-dresses that issued from his workshop were fit for a queen - a cheesy metaphor, but literally true in 1604, when Queen Anne’s purchases of some Mountjoy creations are recorded in her accounts.
     
    One also applauds the Mountjoys’ success in the fashion world because of the pressures and obstacles they faced as ‘strangers’ setting up business in London. In late-Elizabethan London you might hear the same resentments towards immigrants that are expressed today - they took houses and jobs away from the local population; they were flooding in so numerously that they threatened ‘our way of life’; they did not attempt to integrate. ‘They are a commonwealth within themselves,’ complained a group of petitioning Londoners in 1571. ‘They keep themselves severed from us in church, in government, in trade, in language and marriage.’ 28
    For the government the tide of immigration brought a mix of problems and benefits. The Tudor authorities’ primary instinct was control - to keep tabs on this potentially destabilizing influx. The immigrant censuses or returns are an expression of this: there were at least ten drawn up in London between 1562 and 1593. There were also proposals for a ‘free-hosting’ scheme, with local citizens made officially responsible for foreigners in a neighbourhood. ‘Strangers ought not to take any lodgings or houses within the city,’ it was argued, ‘but to abide at the tables of freehosts, and to dwell in noe other place but with the said hostes to be assigned.’ But the government was also conscious of the benefits brought by the immigrants - primarily, their specialist industrial and handicraft skills, and also their money. Among the penalties of the resident foreigner was a double rate of taxation, and to this burden were added other petty tariffs and imposts.
    Particularly vocal in their resentment were London’s businessmen and traders, who felt their livelihoods threatened by the new competition. They organized petitions and lobbied in Parliament for protection. They were ‘greeved at’ the ‘great number of . . . straungers settled here amongst us’, and especially at two groups of them, ‘marchants’ and ‘handycraftesmen’. Christopher Mountjoy was a skilled craftsman, and he is sometimes described as a merchant (not least in his will, which is a self-description), so these complaints, which echo on more or less unchanged for decades, precisely concern him:
    They [strangers] ought not to sell any merchaundizes by retayle. Contrary heerunto many of their merchaunts are retaylers also, keep shoppes inward, and private chambers, and therein sell by whole sale and retayle, send to everyman’s house, serve chapmen, send to fayres, and utter their commodities many other ways . . .
    They ought to imploy the money taken for the commodities of their countryes upon the commodyties of this kingdome, which they do not, for whereas they have halfe the trade of this kingdome in importe they imploy not a twentieth part thereof, but transport the money or make it over by exchange . . .
    They ought not to buy and sell merchandizes one to another, which they do freely amongst themselves, and . . . have ingrossed almost all the new draperie into their hands . . .
     
    This indicates the conflict - on one hand, the government’s half-hearted protectionism, with its restraints and regulations not properly enforced; on the other, a thriving black economy based on the high-quality workmanship which was the Huguenots’ trademark, and which found a ready market among the consuming classes of Elizabethan London. 29
    There were many such petitions, never effectively addressed, and in 1593 anti-alien feeling was dangerously rekindled. It was a time of plague and war - the long-running conflict in the Low Countries, the renewed