How a humiliating defeat secured Britain its empire

Beneath a flinty church tower deep in the Kent marshes, ‘among putrid estuaries and leaden waters’, lies a monument to an Elizabethan man of business. It is not much to look at. David Howarth calls it ‘second rate… dull’ and ‘strangely provisional’, despite its expanse of glossy alabaster. Moreover, the name of the man commemorated will ring few bells, even among historians. But it is the only memorial erected to one of the most important men in English history.

Sir Thomas Smythe was perhaps the greatest businessman in Elizabethan England. He not only founded the East India Company; he also played a leading role in several other significant commercial and pioneering proto-colonial ventures of the age. He started off running the Muscovy Company, the first joint stock company in history; then sat at the helm of the Levant Company, engaged in trade with the Ottoman empire, and was treasurer of the Virginia Plantation, which supervised the early English colonies in the New World. In these various capacities he laid the groundwork for many of the institutions that would do most to propel England from a relatively impoverished country at the edge of Europe to what would become, just a century and a half later, the world’s biggest economy and most successful imperial power.

Portraits of Smythe show a grave, bearded, stovepipe-hatted figure, his face nestled in cambric ruffs. He wore, at different times, many different hats: member of parliament; sheriff and auditor of the City of London; importer of currants from the Greek islands and spices from Aleppo; co-founder of the Levant Company and the Somers Isles (or Bermuda) Companies; and even ‘principal commissioner for the London expedition against ye pirates and for a voyage to ye river Senega[l] upon ye coast of Africa’.

But his most important initiative was to set up the meeting at the Founders Hall in Moorgate Fields, on the edge of London, on 24 September 1599 – around the time Shakespeare must have been pondering the concluding scenes of Hamlet.