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CHAPTER 2 Gerard de Malynes: Institutio Mercatoris Christiani Gerard de Malynes (›. 1586–1626) was a slightly older contemporary of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616). A merchant , an autodidact, and a part-time spy, his was a mercantile career shaped by the cutthroat nature of Elizabethan commerce. But when his ‹rst two books, A Treatise of the Canker of England’s Commonwealth and St. George for England, allegorically described, appeared on the scene in 1601, they bemoaned the ruinous effects of usury and the international moneymarket on England’s moral ‹ber and socioeconomic fabric. A voracious reader who sampled every school of thought his age had to offer, he remained at heart an Aristotelian in spite of his real attraction to elements of both Baconian and Paracelsian thought. His work provides a baseline both for seventeenth-century economic thinking and for those con›icts within its intellectual inheritance that forged a new social as well as a new physical science. Malynes tells us that his family originally came from Lancashire, though he himself was born in Antwerp.1 Exactly when he was born is not known. Referring to a commission on which he served in 1600–1601, Malynes remarked on his “owne knowledge concerning assayes . . . observed and knowne above fortie yeares, my father also having beene a Mint-master.”2 Taking this to mean knowledge he had picked up growing up in such a household, we would arrive at a birth year around 1560, but if the “above fortie yeares” experience dates from his apprenticeship (perhaps under his own father), a birth year closer to the midcentury mark emerges. The earliest extant references to his presence in England concern his membership in the Dutch Church in London, where, in 1586, one “Geraertt de Malines” promised twenty shillings per year to a Church fund “for the support of selected students of their congregation at Cambridge University and elsewhere.”3 But his family may have returned to England as early as 1561, when his father’s profession would have made him in demand during a major recoinage effort undertaken in that year.4 Following in his father’s professional footsteps, Gerard de Malynes the 26 assay master served on a government commission on foreign exchange in 1600.5 His ‹rst book (A Canker of England’s Commonwealth) may have been, in essence, that commission’s report.6 If so, Malynes was distinctly disappointed with its results as “there ensued but an alteration in the valuation of gold concerning the proportion, with some small reformation concerning the Standard: but in Exchanges nothing was effected.”7 His private affairs were equally unsuccessful. At one point in his Lex Mercatoria, Malynes commented on the dangers of partnership by agency (or acting as a “factor” for another).8 This was the closest he came to describing a tangled case in which he himself was involved in 1592. Three Amsterdam merchants, Hans Hongar, Pieter van Moucheron, and Filippo Georgio (originally a Portuguese), gave Gerard de Malynes and Guillam Vermuyden £28,065 to bid on the cargo of the Madre de Dios, a captured Spanish ship. Since Malynes was competing with a group led by Alderman Garroway of London, he thought it wise to enlist the aid of Sir Horatio Palavicino (whose court connections were far better than those of Malynes) in securing the deal.When Hongar claimed to have received goods worth only £20,000, the resulting lawsuits went as high as the Lord Treasurer, the Privy Council, and the Barons of the Exchequer before their ‹nal dismissal in 1610. After trying every legal trick he could, Malynes ended up spending a total of about three years in prison (while he carried on his affairs by proxy).9 Malynes also occasionally took on diplomatic work that might more properly be characterized as espionage. A letter of October 26, 1596, survives from “Garrett de Malynes” to Robert Cecil about the extraction of some diplomatic letters sent to the governor of “Calis” and the possibility of a peace treaty, although nothing seems to have come of the scheme.10 Early in 1598, “Gherard de Malines” and Robert Bromley chartered a ship called the Experience from John Basadonna for a voyage that ended in recriminations: the English crew members were taken off in Naples and sent to forced labor in the galleys, Malynes and Bromley claimed the goods already purchased as Spanish spoils, and Basadonna complained to Essex that the voyage should be resumed and the...

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