Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan commonwealth: The Muscovy Company and Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611)

Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan commonwealth

Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain

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This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain.

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The crisis of British Protestantism: Church power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 Hunter Powell

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Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan commonwealth

The Muscovy Company and Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611)

Felicity Jane Stout

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Felicity Jane Stout 2015

The right of Felicity Jane Stout to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9700 3 hardback

First published 2015

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Typeset by Out of House Publishing

For my mother and father and my grandparents

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Note on style, dates and terminology

Introduction

1 An adventuring commonwealth: English mercantile and diplomatic encounters with Russia, 1553–88

2 A commonwealths-man in Russia: Giles Fletcher’s early career and embassies

3 Creating a feigned commonwealth: Fletcher’s response to Russia

4 A corrupted commonwealth: Fletcher’s representation of Russia

5 A commonwealth counselled: Russia’s resonances in late Elizabethan England

6 A controversial commonwealth: censorship, poetry and Fletcher’s later career

Conclusion. Thinking with Russia, writing English commonwealth

Select bibliography

Index

Figures

1 Table of contents from Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth (London, 1591). Reproduced by permission of the Chapter of York.

2 ‘A double care requisite in a traveller’, summary table from Robert Dallington, A Method for travel (London, 1605), sig. A3. Reproduced by permission of the University of Sheffield Library.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support, encouragement and assistance of many people and institutions. I am very grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC for their generous short-term fellowship and to the Society for Renaissance Studies, UK, who granted me a fellowship to spend time transforming my PhD thesis into a broader, more nuanced study of Giles Fletcher and the Muscovy Company. My PhD supervisor, Professor Mike Braddick, has been unswervingly encouraging and supportive, as well as very human in his perspective and advice. His constructive criticism, both during my PhD and afterwards, has helped me to develop as a historian and his continuing interest and enthusiasm in the project has encouraged me to persevere. Anthony Milton, my second PhD supervisor, has also been unfailingly supportive and has provided much assistance in the practicalities of getting the work published. I am also very grateful to the whole team at Manchester University Press for all of their efforts and to the readers who have provided extensive and insightful comments on earlier versions of this work.

Special thanks go to Gary Rivett, who has always been willing to talk through thorny historical issues. My work bears the marks of his intellectual insight, and our many discussions of early modern history have greatly enhanced my understanding of the subject. He also bravely volunteered to read parts of the work, at various stages along the way, for which I am thankful. The Early Modern Discussion Group at the University of Sheffield has been a great forum, over the years, for trying out new ideas and talking them through, as have the early modern postgraduate conferences at Keele University and the Folger Shakespeare Library seminars. I am grateful to all participants for comments made on ideas presented. The staff in the Manuscripts Room at the British Library have been very helpful, as have my doctoral advisers there, Chris Thomas and Katya Rogatchevskaia. Thanks go to Mary Robertson at the Huntington Library, who helped me find my way around the collection and provided many useful introductions. I would also like to thank Karen Begg at Queens’ College, Cambridge, Marguerite Ragnow at the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, Greg Colley at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Suzan Griffiths at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Bruce Whiteman at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the staff in the Special Collections at Sheffield University Library for their assistance in accessing Fletcher’s manuscripts and other rare printed works.

Intellectual thanks go to Cathy Shrank and Alan Bryson for their reading of my work, their discussion and pointers in the right directions. I have gained much insight and inspiration from discussions with Daniel Vitkus, Jennifer Richards, Peter Lake, Peter Mancall, Alison Sandman, Rupali Mishra, David Scott Gehring, Eric Platt and Alexandra Gajda. Pastoral thanks go to Linda Kirk for her advice and empathy.

Earlier versions of parts of this work have appeared in ‘The strange and wonderfull discoverie of Russia: Hakluyt and censorship’, in Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (eds), Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 153–63, and ‘The country is too colde, the people beastlie be: Elizabethan representations of Russia’, Literature Compass, 10:6 (2013), 483–95. I am grateful to Ashgate and Wiley-Blackwell, respectively, for permission to use this material.

The friendship, support and intellectual inspiration of Mary Davies has been invaluable over the last few years. Lars Huening and Frauke Dransfeld have been a brilliant inspiration, full of laughter and fantastic yoga and climbing mates. Stef Rhodes has always let me kip on her couch during many research trips to London, and Rachel Flemming, Sonya Bangle and Karen Cameron have helped to disentangle me from the sixteenth century and bring me back to the twenty-first on various occasions. Many thanks go to Kate Hamilton and Daniela Croll, for being courageous compañeras along the way, and to Dan Balla, for always offering a place of retreat.

My gratitude to my family cannot be expressed fully in words. My sisters, Rachel and Beth, have been warriors of kindness and patience. My brother and siblings-in-law have made me laugh and fed me often, along with my niece and nephews, Anna, Josh, Luke and Finn, who have generally been mischievous. My parents have been ever-caring and encouraging and have helped me to take breaks along the way. Most importantly, they have kept me from throwing in the towel on numerous occasions. For this I am truly grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my brilliant partner and husband, David Cunningham. He has been a bounteous fountain of hilarity, wisdom and support. He has provided perspective and relaxation during the final stages, with good food, cups of tea, much affection, humour, tree climbing and lots of hugs.

List of abbreviations

The following abbreviations apply to the primary manuscript and printed sources that have been used in this study, as well as institutions that are regularly referred to. All references have been cited in full in the first instance and abbreviated thereafter.

Note on style, dates and terminology

Spelling and punctuation has been kept as it appears in original documents, except that abbreviations are expanded and u/v, i/j and vv have been modernised. Short titles of early printed works have been given throughout. Dates are given according to the old-style calendar, but the start of the year is taken as 1 January, rather than 25 March.

In this study I have attempted, where appropriate and where possible, to use terms that people in the Elizabethan period may have been familiar with. For example, the words ‘forward’, often used to describe advanced or zealous reforming opinions, and ‘froward’, meaning refractory, ungovernable or even rebellious, can be found regularly in sixteenth-century texts. In this vein, I have used the term ‘forward Protestant’, as coined by Blair Worden in The Sound of Virtue, as ‘a term contemporaries would have understood’ to mean those who were zealous in the quest for further reformation of the church and who ‘sought the vigorous advancement of Protestantism at home and abroad’.¹ To refer to the sixteenth-century Muscovite state, I have used the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Muscovy’ interchangeably, as did the sixteenth-century Englishmen exploring and trading there. I have also regularly used the word ‘emperor’ to refer to the ruler of Muscovy, or Russia, in imitation of the title attributed to the Russian monarch (tsar) by Englishmen trading and negotiating with Ivan IV and Feodor I. The Muscovy Company accounts and royal correspondence invariably referred to the Russian ruler as ‘emperor’, as did those who were involved in direct diplomatic audiences with Ivan and Feodor. At times, I have also used the term ‘tsar’, which is a word more commonly used by scholars of Russian history to describe the rulers of Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Notes

1 B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. xxii.

Introduction

Of the Russe Common Wealth or Maner of Governement by the Russe Emperour was published in London in 1591. This was a work concerned with describing the unfamiliar land of Russia to a late sixteenth-century English audience. It was written by Giles Fletcher, the elder, who had been commissioned as Elizabeth I’s ambassador to Russia in 1588 to represent the interests of her government and of the Muscovy Company in the Muscovite court of Feodor I. This study examines the early history of the Muscovy Company, Giles Fletcher’s experiences and responses to Russia, both his diplomatic reports to Elizabeth and the privy council and his published account of Russia, as well as his later poetry. By analysing the pervasive languages of commonwealth, corruption and tyranny found in the Muscovy Company accounts of Russia and in the works of Giles Fletcher, this monograph explores how Russia was a useful tool for Elizabethans to think with when they reflected on unfamiliar lands, types of government and the changing face of kingship in the late sixteenth century. It seeks to draw together and analyse the narratives of travel, the practicalities of trade and the discourses of commonwealth and corruption that defined English encounters with unfamiliar lands to the north-east of Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The title of Fletcher’s work, Of the Russe Common Wealth, invites us to explore two significant aspects of the Elizabethan polity, which were inextricably mixed: overseas exploration and the concept of commonwealth. On the one hand, Fletcher aimed to educate his audience on the strange land of Russia on the peripheries of Christendom. On the other, his detailed exegesis of the Russian state provided an opportunity for his readers to explore conceptions of government, embodied in the idiom of ‘commonwealth’, and its renaissance antithesis – tyranny. In this sense, the study of Fletcher’s works connects us directly to two historiographies that are often separated, to the detriment of both: that of Elizabethan travel and trade literature, linked to Fletcher’s term ‘Russe’, and that of late Elizabethan political culture, epitomised by his use of the term ‘commonwealth’. These historiographies, like their subject of study, should be intimately intertwined, but have often been held and examined quite apart from each other. It is one of the aims of this work to hold both historiographies and subject matter together, in examining the works of Fletcher and the workings of the Muscovy Company. In the scholarship concerned with Elizabethan political culture, significant attention has been paid to the importance of plays, poetry and histories, as ‘mirrors for magistrates’ or points of departure for authors and audiences to discuss the domestic stresses and strains, as well as the continental-wide religious strife, so present in Elizabethan politics.¹ Although less often examined in the study of Elizabethan political culture, trade and travel accounts, diplomatic reports and treatises on the governments of foreign lands are equally important to our understanding of the workings of the Elizabethan regime, and no less revelatory of Elizabethan readers’ conceptions of government and perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of monarch and civil subject in the late sixteenth-century commonwealth.

The manuscript and printed literature of sixteenth-century Western Europe proliferates with travel accounts, mercantile advice, captivity narratives, navigational information, diplomatic reports and maps of imperfectly known and far-distant lands. In the early sixteenth-century the Spanish and Portuguese had already ‘discovered’ new lands to the far east and west of the globe. In the case of England, her new ‘discoveries’ were initially to be found in the north, with attempts to explore and navigate north-eastern and north-western passages to the fabled lands of Cathay. In fact, before the English had much contact with the East Indies, the South Seas or the Americas, they had ‘discovered’ and opened trade and diplomatic relations with Russia in the hope of gaining access to lands further east. Thus England’s ventures to find a north-eastern passage, the subsequent ‘discoverie of Russia’ and the later exploration of a route to Persia, via Muscovy and the Caspian Sea, were all significant success stories in the emerging stages of English exploration beyond familiar ports and destinations.² In the 1550s the Italian collector and editor Giovanni Battista Ramusio included in his Delle navigationi et viaggi (1555–9) a tract, later translated and included in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall navigations (1589),³ on the great importance and potential of discovering a northern passage to East Asia, ‘which navigation to Cathay, although it be not as yet throughly knowen, yet if with often frequenting the same, and by long use and knowledge of those seas it bee continued, it is like to make a wonderfull change and revolution in the state of this our part of the world’.⁴

As a result of the initial successes of pioneering voyages to explore the northern coast and interior of Russia in the 1550s and the literature that emerged from those voyages, Russia came to hold a prominent place in Tudor travel and trade information, compilations and cosmographies, as a celebration of English adventuring spirit.⁵ References to Russia appeared in Tudor theatre, poetry, works on husbandry, religious texts and political theory. In the 1580s, Hakluyt celebrated the English exploration of Russia by collecting and publishing over seventy accounts and documents relating to Anglo-Russian interactions.⁶ In Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), it was ‘cold Muscovie’ that provided the metaphor for the captivating, enslaving and tyrannous love that Stella ignited in Astrophil, ‘Now even that foot-steppe of lost libertie / Is gone, and now like slave borne Muscovite: / I call it praise to suffer tyrannie’.⁷ By 1597 William Warner, in his epic verse account of England’s history, Albion’s England, was celebrating how the Muscovy Company had taken on the harsh conditions of the Arctic Ocean and had succeeded in developing a lucrative trade with a far-off and barbaric land beyond Europe’s ‘old world’ peripheries,

through the Seas of ysie Rocks, the Muscovites disclose

We shal our English Voyages, the cheefe at least, digest

Of which in this her Highnes Raigne have been perform’d the best

…

Yeat him to say for most the Meane, it weare not us to shame

Of English new Discoveries, that yeeld us Wealth and Fame.⁸

The widespread appearance of literature on overseas travel, exploration and trade in the sixteenth century has resulted in an abundant and extensive scholarship on many of these subjects, which has broadened to include analysis of cultural relations, first encounters with unfamiliar peoples and how Western Europeans conceptualised and articulated the cultural differences they encountered in their explorations of the wider world. The focus, understandably, has often been turned towards the ‘New World’ of the Americas. Elena Shvarts, in her illuminating study of English representations of Russia from the early modern period onwards, draws attention to what Daniel Vitkus has called ‘a new globalism in early modern studies’ describing ‘the obsession with New World colonial histories that has gripped early modernists, especially since the 500th anniversary of Columbus’.⁹ Much of the historiography, particularly of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century exploration, adventure and trade, seems to have overlooked the less familiar, but still equally important, sites of northern ‘discovery’, revealing an anachronistic fascination with the new world of America, perhaps dictated by the present global context.¹⁰

The scholarship of overseas travel and trade has, of course, been profoundly influenced by Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism.¹¹ Both the argument of Orientalism and its subsequent critique, although focused primarily in scholarly writings on the colonial period, has had a significant impact on the discussion of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century exploration, experience and appropriation of unfamiliar lands and new worlds.¹² In fact, the subject of Said’s original argument, the eastern ‘other’, has been put to use to explore and explain fifteenth- and sixteenth-century encounters with the new world to the west of ‘Europe’. Problematically, much of this scholarship has often heralded amalgamations of European accounts of the unfamiliar ‘other’ at the expense of individual responses to these unfamiliar lands. Scholars have frequently presented only one way of writing an unfamiliar land – an essentialised view that expresses a homogenous ‘orientalising discourse’ to be found in all Western European accounts of ‘the other’, as opposed to seeing the multiple ways in which unexplored, unfamiliar lands were represented and how these representations were utilised for differing mercantile, political, religious and cultural purposes.

More recently, however, scholarship of the early twenty-first century has demonstrated an increasing awareness of the essentialising tendencies in the study of early modern travel and trade, recognising that the Americas have often been prioritised over other narratives of exploration. Exhibitions and works, such as Russia Engages the World, 1453–1825 (2003), Daryl Palmer’s Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (2004), John Archer’s Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (2002) and the edited collection Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe (2012), have all contributed to broader discussions on the nature of travel writing in the early modern period, engaging with and scrutinising a historiography dominated by ‘new world’ subjects and all too often focused towards identifying Western Europe’s exotic ‘other’. An examination of the accounts of the Muscovy Company and of Fletcher’s interactions and responses to Russia builds on and contributes to this more recent, less insular trend in the scholarship of renaissance travel and trade, widening the horizons beyond perceptions and interactions with a defined ‘other’ in a ‘new world’ context.

This work also contributes to the historiography of Elizabethan political culture, and its fascinations with the changing face of Elizabeth’s government over the course of her reign. It investigates how explorers, merchants and diplomats thought about structures of Elizabethan government, be it within the microcosm of the Muscovy Company or the macrocosm of the Elizabethan commonwealth. The study of the Muscovy Company records and Fletcher’s works together sheds more light on the ways in which politically active and educated Elizabethans conceptualised and experienced their commonwealth and how they perceived the old and new worlds emerging and evolving around them. Examining trade, travel and diplomatic accounts in this way provides an alternative approach to the study of Elizabethan political thought and culture, in contrast to the pervasive emphasis on classical republican and/or neo-Roman influences in much of the recent historiography, profoundly influenced by the work of J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Patrick Collinson.¹³

The political culture of the Elizabethan period has attracted much attention in recent scholarship, partly as a result of two intimately linked and persuasive arguments relating to the changing character of Elizabeth’s rule over forty years on the throne. Patrick Collinson’s concept of the ‘monarchical republic’ and John Guy’s ‘second reign’ theory are both concerned with exploring Elizabeth’s government and the role of counsel within kingship. As Peter Lake points out, the phrase ‘monarchical republic’ was coined by Collinson to discuss the reactions of members of Elizabeth’s privy council, most notably Burghley, to moments of extreme anxiety and crisis in the regime, characterised by assassination plots directed against the queen, the continuing threat of Mary, Queen of Scots and the diminishing hopes of Elizabeth producing a direct, Protestant heir. In the years 1584–5, for instance, contingency plans written up by Burghley suggested that in the event of Elizabeth’s assassination or death without an heir, the privy council and parliament should take proactive measures in the interests of protecting the Protestant commonwealth to exclude Mary, Queen of Scots from succession to the English throne.¹⁴ Such contingency plans, also identified at an earlier point in the Elizabethan regime by Stephen Alford, were, he argues, examples of Collinson’s ‘monarchical republic’ – where active members of the authorised ranks of counsel took the initiative in creating a provisional, transitional kind of government in the absence of a ruler and thus invoking the inherent authority of the parliament without a monarch, or ‘Grand Council’ as Burghley envisaged it, in its own right to weigh up potential claimants for succession.¹⁵

There has been much discussion in response to Collinson’s concept of the ‘monarchical republic’.¹⁶ Some scholars, for instance Markku Peltonen, Andrew Hadfield and John Guy, have taken Collinson’s ‘monarchical republic’ model to the more acute ‘republican’ end of the spectrum, in what Lake has identified as a ‘maximum’ interpretation, as opposed to a ‘minimum’ interpretation, of what the term ‘monarchical republic’ could mean when applied to the Elizabethan context.¹⁷ However, a ‘minimum’ understanding of the term ‘monarchical republic’, as intended by Collinson’s original use of the phrase, seems to be the most helpful in the study of late Elizabethan politics. For although the term ‘republic’ was part of the Elizabethan lexicon, used variously to refer to ancient Roman government, the classical works of Plato and Cicero, the republics of Venice, Pisa and Genoa, or ‘that prodigiouse republicke or colourable commonwealth in Holand & zeland’, it was not a term generally applied by Englishmen to their own situation.¹⁸ Markku Peltonen, among others, has drawn our attention to the language of virtue and action, defining thought and behaviour that embodied the ethos of classical humanist and republican ideas.¹⁹ More often than not, however, the language of virtue was expressed and harnessed for discussion and debate over how to protect the English commonwealth from tyranny, rather than to articulate a form of proto- or quasi-republicanism. Perhaps, because of over-use, the term has lost some of its analytical rigour, being stretched and applied far beyond the original remit of what Collinson had intended.

Collinson argued that ‘to have a monarchical republic you must have a word interchangeable for the sixteenth century with republic, a commonwealth’.²⁰ Perhaps this term ‘commonwealth’ is one we should be exploring more fully in studies of late Elizabethan politics, rather than, as Blair Worden has warned, ‘reach[ing] for the term republicanism too readily’.²¹ A more thorough investigation of what privy council, political yeomanry and private subjects alike considered the structure, role and responsibilities of the ‘commonwealth’ to be, and the various meanings attached to the word, would enhance our understanding of the workings of Elizabethan government, the differing views of the extent of a monarch’s prerogative and what role counsel and parliament had to play in maintaining and managing the wellbeing of the body politic. Building on the work of Phil Withington and David Rollinson on the politics of commonwealth, an important objective of this study is to examine what ‘commonwealth’ meant, in the context of overseas trade and diplomacy, to a queen and her privy council, to governors, members and servants of a mercantile joint-stock company, to illegal private traders, to a humanist, Protestant ambassador and to his various audiences in the late Elizabethan regime.²²

Alongside discussions over the concept of the ‘monarchical republic’, there has also been much debate in recent scholarship concerning the nature of Elizabeth’s government in the later years of her reign. John Guy has argued for a marked shift in the style of monarchical government in the 1590s, going as far as to identify two distinct reigns of Elizabeth, divided by the mid to late 1580s.²³ Guy asserts that the concept of the Elizabethan commonwealth as a ‘mixed polity’, where the assent of parliament was required to make any significant political changes, and where parliament – the queen, Lords and Commons conjoined – was the only authoritative legislative body, diminished during this second period or ‘reign’.²⁴ Paul Hammer’s work on the influence of the Earl of Essex and his conflicts with the Cecils in the politics of the late Elizabethan regime has also reinforced this idea of a significantly different political climate in Elizabeth’s later years.²⁵ Peter Lake, however, has challenged Guy’s ‘second reign’ theory by suggesting an earlier Elizabethan aversion, expressed by Elizabeth herself and by anti-popish and anti-puritan voices in the regime to the idea of ‘mixed-estate’ government.²⁶ Lake also contests the concept of the ‘monarchical republic’ as an unproblematic definition of what Elizabeth’s rule looked like.²⁷

More recently, Alexandra Gajda has also challenged the uncomplicated character of Guy’s hypothesis by suggesting that the chronological division imposed by Guy has served to homogenise a literary and political culture both pre- and post-1585 that was much more varied, complex and creative, responding to the specific circumstances of Elizabeth’s ever-mutable reign. Her work reveals an array of contrasting theories of government that remained in print circulation throughout the 1590s, emphasising the diversification of political thinking in late Elizabethan England, despite the concerted efforts of the regime to foster the theory of absolute monarchy.²⁸ Gajda highlights the importance of contrasting the authoritarian definitions of monarchy promoted by the late Elizabethan regime with the pervasive popular interest in histories of government, expressed through the medium of poetry and drama, which discussed resistance and deposition, tyranny and civil war and were ‘frequently used as a vehicle to explore political ideas, and to scrutinise the actions of monarchs and their greater subjects’.²⁹ She identifies the prose and verse histories of the medieval baronial wars and Wars of the Roses found in the works of John Hayward, Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, as well as various plays by Shakespeare depicting the fates of weak tyrants, such as Edward II and Henry VI and the despots Richard II and Richard III.³⁰ Paulina Kewes takes this line of argument further in her exegesis of Henry Savile’s 1591 translation of Tacitus’s Histories and the Agricola, exploring ‘how late Elizabethan translators, historians, and imaginative writers guided readers to draw suitable topical inferences while avoiding official censure’.³¹

It was not only translators, writers of histories, poets and playwrights, of course, who offered up texts that provided their audiences with opportunities to ruminate on the state of government and the nature of Elizabeth’s rule through the stories of other times and places, real or imagined. As this study argues, works of travel narrative, diplomatic reports, mercantile accounts and descriptions of foreign lands that often combined history, translation and imaginative or at least creative writing functioned in a similar way.³² In this respect, we can place Fletcher’s work in a cultural, political and social milieu in which the narratives of other lands, whether historical, imaginative or far-off, were used to meditate on contemporary events, political developments and changing forms of government. His work can be interpreted as an attempt to mobilise the generic mode of travel scholarship in order to scrutinise foreign governments and theorise on the politics of commonwealth. Not only did this enable Fletcher’s audience to explore other political theories besides the regime’s orthodoxy, it also allowed the potential for reading into the fortunes of Russia a veiled criticism of the Elizabethan state, if readers chose to interpret his text in this way. Thinking with Russia could either be a harmless exercise in humanist political theory or, more controversially, a criticism of the changing face of Elizabeth’s reign, incorporating by inversion an elucidation of mixed-estate theories of government at a time when the regime was ramping up its claims to absolute monarchy.

As well as contributing to our understanding of Tudor conceptions of commonwealth and tyranny and the use of accounts of other lands to theorise on government, this work also engages with the specific historiographies of overseas trade and diplomacy and English accounts of interactions with Russia. The history of the Muscovy Company has attracted less attention than its due in the scholarship of early modern exploration, trade and diplomacy. An exception is T. S. Willan’s mid-twentieth-century account of the early history of English trading relations with Russia.³³ In his analysis, Willan drew extensively on the work of nineteenth-century historians, such as George Hamel, E. A. Bond, Yury Tolstoi, E. D. Morgan and C. H. Coote, and from the early twentieth century, Inna Lubimenko.³⁴ The Russian historian Vasilli Kliuchevskii produced a late nineteenth-century summary of Western European accounts of Russia, but his analysis focused on how useful the texts were for displaying an accurate picture of Muscovy in the sixteenth century.³⁵ Sergei Mikhailovich Seredonin’s 1891 essay on Fletcher’s treatise similarly attempted to correct its factual ‘errors’, weighing up whether Fletcher’s text was a viable source for the history of early modern Russia.³⁶ During the 1960s, various North American scholars took a particular interest in early Anglo-Russian encounters, presumably as a result of Cold War fears and fascination with the politics of Eastern Europe. Between 1964 and 1968, for instance, four separate editions of Fletcher’s Of the Russe Common Wealth were published in the USA.³⁷ In the 1970s and 1980s, wide-ranging research on the early history of Anglo-Russian relations was pursued by Samuel H. Baron, examining Russian embassies to England, mercantile relations with Russia and Fletcher’s embassy in 1588.³⁸ The intervening period has seen little work specifically focused on Fletcher, but Maria Unkovskaya, and Maija Jansson and Nikolai Rogozhin have explored sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglo-Russian relations more generally.³⁹ Significantly, within the last decade there have been several different analyses of sixteenth-century Western European encounters with and writing about Russia in the work of John Archer, Marshall Poe, Daryl Palmer, Elena Shvarts and Anna Riehl Bertolet.⁴⁰ Palmer and Archer, in particular, have paid more attention to Fletcher from a literary perspective. However, there has been little attempt to put the Muscovy Company and Fletcher and his work thoroughly under the microscope and place him firmly within the context of late Elizabethan political culture, both domestic and foreign.

This book aims to address the lacunae by analysing Fletcher’s voyage, experience and works on Russia within the context of late Elizabethan humanist discourse and the domestic and foreign politics of the 1580s and 1590s. It also seeks to tease out the important themes of commonwealth and tyranny found in the Muscovy Company literature, as well as in Fletcher’s works. Similar themes of commonwealth and corruption have been identified in the mercantile rhetoric of the East India Company ventures and activities.⁴¹ This work, however, situates the language of ‘corporate virtue’ and corporate corruption among the earlier trading ventures towards the north-east pursued by the Muscovy Company.⁴² It outlines the lofty ideals of the Muscovy Company in embryo, the practical realities of company life abroad in a ‘barbarous’ and unfamiliar land and how these corporate concerns of commonwealth and