Writing in 1617 to Sir Thomas Roe, English ambassador at the Mughal court, George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, confided his belief in the importance for England of Roe's embassy and similar ventures. Abbot explained that “as things now stand throughout the whole world, there is no place so remote, but that the consideration thereof is mediately [sic] or immediately of consequence to our affairs here [in England].”Footnote 1 Roe, half a world away from London and at the forefront of English expansion, was not so sure. In a letter to the English ambassador in Istanbul that same year, he wrote that he doubted whether anyone in England would care much about Eastern affairs, lamenting that “it will neither much profit nor delight you to know any thing of the estate nor occurrences of these [Indian] kingdoms, as their actions are separated from any co-mixture with Europe.”Footnote 2 His comment demonstrated an anxiety that an English audience would judge his embassy useless, or at least uninteresting, because India was so far from England. Roe feared that his successes as an ambassador would be overlooked, because they were also “separated from any co-mixture with Europe.” The world that Abbot envisioned—in which Eastern affairs were already inextricably linked into English affairs—was alien to Roe, the ambassador supposedly negotiating it.
When Sir Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1615 to take up his first diplomatic post, he was embarking on a new career in an unfamiliar court. Few Englishmen had ever traveled to the Mughal court, Company trading settlements in India were less than a decade old, and Roe had very limited personal and institutional knowledge at his disposal. Not only was this embassy his first ambassadorial posting, it was also the first East India Company embassy and the first official English embassy to the Mughal court.Footnote 3 Unlike most English embassies in which an ambassador took orders directly from the Crown, Roe was supposed to represent both Crown and Company, and he found it difficult to manage the difference he perceived between the objectives of his two masters. Every early modern ambassador balanced the needs of the Crown with his own aims—usually securing favor and office—but in the case of this embassy, Roe found himself juggling the interests of Crown, Company, and self.Footnote 4
Sir Thomas Roe's embassy to the Mughal court has long held a privileged place for scholars. For historians of Mughal South Asia and the British Empire, Roe's reports represent the fullest and most detailed contemporary English-language account of Mughal India and Jahangir's court. As such, some scholars have tended to read Roe's journal as a transparent record of English attitudes toward, and the English position at, the Mughal court. They emphasized elements of Roe's accounts that suggested early British imperial success.Footnote 5 More recent scholars have subjected Roe's journal to postcolonial analysis, underlining how Roe's descriptions of the Mughal state—as one without rule of law in which the emperor's judgment and exercise of power were absolute—followed tropes that later became standard orientalist characterizations. In naming Roe an early or proto-orientalist, these scholars made him into an early part of the intellectual project of establishing English dominance over the subcontinent.Footnote 6 Still other scholars have examined more explicitly the ways in which European travelers like Roe read their normative views of European politics onto societies they encountered in the East, at times missing or misunderstanding the cultural significance of events they saw or took part in.Footnote 7 Despite their differing interpretations of Roe, for all of these scholars Roe and his embassy represented some deeper truth about the nature of the later British Empire. Only a very few studies have rejected this idea, delving into the context of early modern English expansion itself. In these works, Roe and men like him did not prefigure empire, but rather they suggested the way in which mind-sets, careers, and context shaped the process of early modern expansion.Footnote 8
Rather than depicting Roe as an emblem of empire to come, close examination of Roe's accounts of his embassy reveals fractures. Roe was conflicted about the objectives of his embassy and what he hoped to gain for himself, for James, and for the East India Company in the 1610s, and thus narrated his embassy differently to different audiences. Sir Thomas Roe and his embassy were products of the changes wrought by England's overseas expansion in the early modern period. His ambitions, however, always remained for more traditional career success. Roe longed for domestic office and despaired of advancement that took him to the outer edges of English experience and influence. He took advantage of the new opportunities that English overseas expansion opened up—and in fact built a career around those opportunities—even as he sought to use the rewards of the new system to navigate the old. The new system he found himself maneuvering, however, presented unforeseen complications. The extension of English diplomacy into Asia, for example, transformed diplomatic structures, requiring ambassadors to represent and manage merchant companies and their factors in ways not required in Europe.Footnote 9 Indeed, many of the challenges facing Roe in India developed out of his difficulties in squaring what he saw as mercantile interests with what he understood as the courtly and state demands of his embassy. For Roe, this tension manifested as a constant anxiety about securing and demonstrating his status and authority, especially over the Company's agents in the East.Footnote 10 The split interests that Roe thought characterized his embassy, and his disputes with the Company's factors, revealed the practical problems of English expansion and the difficulties of adapting the tools of Tudor-Stuart statecraft to meet the needs of company-led English expansion.
Split Interests in the Roe Embassy
England's entry into long-distance trade in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods forced a sometimes-uneasy alliance between the state and private companies. The period saw the consolidation of state power in part through allowing nonstate actors to exercise that power on a wider stage or in ways that the state itself could not. English influence thus spread in part through the licensing by the state of groups and individuals to act in its name.Footnote 11 Trading companies depended on privileges granted by either the Crown or parliamentary statute to protect their exclusive trade, and in turn they carried out various state functions abroad, notably ambassadorial and consular functions that the Crown could not otherwise afford.Footnote 12 Chartered in 1600, the East India Company was one of these new trading ventures. Its early voyages resulted in heady profits—the voyages from 1601 to 1612 earned an average profit of over 150 percent, while the first joint stock (which ran from 1613 to 1623) earned an average profit of 87 percent—and spurred widespread interest in the East Indies trade. From 1609, the Company's membership included not only merchants but also aristocrats and gentry.Footnote 13 The Company's royal charter guaranteed it exclusive right to traffic and trade in the East Indies, meaning everything to the east of the Cape of Good Hope, in return for developing the East Indies trade for England. This trade required the Company to establish trading settlements, called factories, in ports and major cities of the East Indies, where factors lived year-round to manage the trade and acquire goods in preparation for the arrival of Company ships. In 1614, in response to a request from the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, Company leaders prepared to send an ambassador to the Mughal court.
As the first ambassador to the Mughal court, what was Sir Thomas Roe expected to accomplish? There were two sets of official expectations for him to consider: the East India Company's and the Crown's. The Company's primary expectation was for Roe to settle the trade permanently; it had “procured his Majesty to employ him as Ambassador” in hope that he could settle an “absolute trade” within the Mughal dominions.Footnote 14 Roe discovered that permanent agreements, trading or otherwise, did not exist in the Mughal political framework—agreements, firmans, were contingent on the issuing emperor and ended when he died. Roe strove in vain for a permanent settlement, although he did succeed in securing several firmans that settled matters for the moment and that, he assured the Company leaders after his return, were sufficient for their trade.Footnote 15
From the Crown's perspective, the Roe embassy was as much about James's—and hence the nation's—honor as about commercial matters. Commercial concerns were not absent from the king's instructions to Roe, which urged the ambassador to follow the directives of the Company to advance the East Indies trade, referring him “to such further directions and prescriptions, as you shall in that behalf, at present or hereafter, receive from the said Company, from which, either towards the persons of their factors, or their goods, you are in no wise to digress, as you shall answer the contrary at your peril.” The very first instructions, however, did not concern the East Indies trade; they addressed, rather, how Roe should conduct himself. Roe was “to be careful of the preservation of our honor, and dignity, both as we are a sovereign prince, and a professed Christian.”Footnote 16 The Mughal empire was too distant for the emperor to know anything of England and James except through “fame and report,” but if Roe could make Jahangir love and appreciate him, he might “draw on the constance of his affections” toward Roe and impress upon Jahangir “the quality and constitution of [James's] estate.” James emphasized to Roe that he should be sure to convey the great reputation of the English nation within Europe, “to which circumstances of greatness, you may add the access of our power, and strength at sea, which giveth us not only reputation and authority, amongst the greatest princes of Christendom, but maketh us even a terror to all other nations. . . [W]e be not only absolutely obeyed, but universally beloved and admired of all our people.”Footnote 17 James hoped that proof of his great reputation and authority would lead the Mughal emperor to greater esteem of the English and possibly translate into the commercial benefits the East India Company sought. Finally, James gave Roe rights of diplomatic representation in the nations bordering the Mughal empire, because the place was remote and another embassy unlikely.Footnote 18 Rather than directly addressing commercial matters, therefore, the majority of the instructions to Roe concerned the proper portrayal of the English nation to the Mughal emperor. Certainly the East India Company affairs were important, but as conveyed in his letter, James's overwhelming interest in the embassy was to give the right impression of himself and the nation. It was an embassy more focused on appearance than on discrete actions.
This dichotomy that Roe took so to heart between the Company's and the Crown's aims, and between commercial interests and national honor, was not as distinct as the instructions suggested. What the king's directives did not make clear, despite their acknowledgment of the importance of merchant affairs, was that the official ambassadorial instructions for Roe had probably been created in collusion with the East India merchants; James's care for the Company's wishes was not accidental, therefore, but planned. Discussing the embassy, Company leaders specified that they had to ensure that Roe's commission “from the State . . . must direct him to the articles and instructions that shall be drawn by the Company.”Footnote 19 The distinction between Company and Crown was more illusion than reality.
The merchants in London were not indifferent to the portrayal of the English nation, but it was a means to an end, rather than the end itself, for the embassy. Concern over that portrayal was what led the Company to choose Sir Thomas Roe, and not a merchant, as ambassador. Its trade situation within the Mughal empire was tenuous; the Company had only recently been granted permission to establish factories in the empire. Company factors felt vulnerable to Portuguese influence at the Mughal court and needed an ambassador, both because Jahangir had requested one and also to counter the perceived Portuguese clout. The East India Company leaders chose Sir Thomas Roe specifically because he was a courtier. As noted, Roe's primary task was to obtain an “absolute settlement” guaranteeing English trading rights in India, but because he was not meant or expected to be a factor or a merchant, the terms of Roe's employment specifically prohibited him from meddling in Company business in India. Indeed, his Company instructions gave more detail about what he could not do than what he was supposed to do. The leaders gave him full authority in all noncommercial aspects of Company affairs in India and its surrounding regions, but not in commercial affairs: the chief factor would have the “command and managing of all the Company's affairs,” while Roe was “not to intermeddle with their business and merchandise.”Footnote 20 They worried about “the power which [ambassadors] will assume unto themselves in those heathen countries, to command the Company's goods without control and subject the lives of their men at their pleasure,” and thus sought to limit it.Footnote 21
The decision to send Sir Thomas Roe—to send any courtier rather than a merchant—occasioned much debate within the Company. Earlier letters from India had strongly advised against sending a merchant; the Portuguese had pointed out to Jahangir that earlier messengers to the court had been sent not by James but by a group of merchants.Footnote 22 One letter from India advised that the Company send “such a one whose person may breed regard, for they here look much after great men,” and another that the man be appointed by the king, “for that the title of a merchant is of them despised.”Footnote 23 Yet the Company leaders in London were not so sure. While some of them agreed that “there is no such necessity of a merchant there, but rather one that hath been practiced in State business,” others worried that the cost would exceed any possible benefit.Footnote 24 The Company leaders eventually consented to send Roe, whom they described as a gentleman of “pregnant understanding, well-spoken, learned, industrious and of a comely personage.” They proclaimed him “fit to be about the emperor.” This last quality ultimately reflected why they chose to send a courtier as ambassador rather than a merchant who might reasonably be expected to have a better grasp of the commercial aspects of the embassy.Footnote 25 “Fit to be about the emperor,” fluency with the business of state and the methods of court were desirable qualities, and meant court rather than city ties.
The distinction between court and city ties, though not specifically named in the East India Company minutes, highlighted some of the ambiguities in Roe's status. Sir Thomas Roe was himself from a well-to-do city family—his grandfather was Lord Mayor of London in 1568, and his uncle in 1608—but Roe had only been knighted in 1603 or 1605. He had taken part in an expedition to Guyana in 1610–11 and had sat for Tamworth for the short-lived 1614 Parliament. Roe had close ties with two of James's children, Henry and Elizabeth, and shared with both of them a firmly Protestant faith.Footnote 26 He was sufficiently aristocratic for the Company, but his rise was recent and not irreversible; he had secured some important patronage ties, but at the expense of his fortune—he was broke.Footnote 27 Roe himself acknowledged with regret that he had squandered what patrimony he had and looked to the East India Company to help repair his fortunes: “[W]hen I had fully ended and wasted my patrimony and saw no way but scorn (the reward of folly), before I suffered disgrace [God] undertook me and being as it were new born he restored me to a new inheritance [i.e., the opportunities of India].”Footnote 28 Elsewhere he wrote of his “patrimonial unthriftiness.”Footnote 29 Roe needed his aristocratic connections to secure the ambassadorial post, and he needed the ambassadorial post to secure office at home and a return of fortune.
Roe's preferred path to advancement was hardly ingenious, though the expectation that he might recoup a fortune on the venture was more unusual. The career path of embassy to office was becoming well trodden. Like the loosely identified group of his fellow ambassadors, unified not so much by training as by similar background and aims, Roe hoped to parlay his stint as ambassador at the Mughal court into office in London. As one of his colleagues noted, “[W]ho would live exiled from his country in a place of continual care and toil without . . . present profit or hope of future preferment?”Footnote 30 In heading to the Mughal court rather than a posting in Europe, Roe traveled farther afield than most of his contemporaries, but the aim was the same: to serve time abroad and return to a better—and more regularly paid—position in England, a “competent estate.”Footnote 31
Ultimately, whose ambassador was Roe? At the heart of the Roe embassy was, if not an ambiguity, then a multiplicity of interests: James's and the nation's, the Company's, and Roe's own. Complicating the matter was the fact that at times any two or three of the various interests conflicted, at least as Roe understood them. To Roe, the instructions seemed to indicate that the Crown and the Company expected different outcomes, or at least objectives, of the embassy, and Roe emphasized the differences between the various masters he served. Writing to Secretary of State Sir Ralph Winwood, he mentioned that he had perhaps written overmuch to James, and asked him to excuse it, as it proceeded “from much zeal to the good of my country, and I love it, though I serve the Company.”Footnote 32 To James he wrote that he attempted to present James's dignity and exalted state, as well as accomplish the merchants' aims, “but these two sometime cross one another.”Footnote 33 In another letter, he summarized the trade as “very fit to be maintained, because it furnishes the merchants with goods,” but he seemed to have little else to say for it.Footnote 34 Elsewhere he wrote that the trade, with some key adjustments, could be made “profitable as well for England.”Footnote 35 In each of these examples, he rhetorically separated himself from both the Company and the merchants. Part of Roe's difficulties arose because he either would not or could not acknowledge that state and Company objectives were not as distinct as he thought them. Instead, Roe emphasized that Company matters were his duty, while England's matters, especially as related to London, were his zeal.
The continued distinction between Company and Crown business attracted Roe because it reinforced for him and his English audience that although he represented merchants, he was not one. His court ties and character had won him the position and the opportunity for advancement, but being too deeply involved in mercantile matters, not as an investor but as an actor, might well ruin his chances at court.Footnote 36 Like the Mughal court, the English court did not prize a mercantile background, and Roe's background was modest by court standards. Roe's position with the East India Company put him in a bind: he was not a courtier dabbling in mercantile affairs, but a paid representative of a company of merchants. These tenuous distinctions explained some of Roe's more pugnacious behavior in India. He was desperate to assert his identity as a courtier and ambassador separate from and above the merchants he was paid to represent. Thus, for example, he insisted upon grand English-style clothes unsuited to the Indian climate, refusing to adopt Indian clothing as the English factors in India did themselves. Years later Roe's minister, Edward Terry, remembered how the entire household wore English clothes, with the only concession to the heat being to make the clothes as cool as possible. It served to make them so visibly identifiable, “that we needed not, wheresoever we were, to invite spectators to take notice of us.”Footnote 37 The clothing choices made Roe and his household distinctive not only from the rest of the Mughal court but even from the other English factors.Footnote 38 Roe wanted, in short, his status affirmed by visible and acknowledged differences between himself and other Company employees. Even the captain of the Company's fleet, whose authority came, like Roe's, directly from a royal commission, did not escape Roe's attention. Roe wrote to the Company governor to ask for command of the entire homeward-bound fleet, not, he claimed, to exercise the authority, but as better befitting his dignity. “It goes against my stomach,” he explained, that everything he requested on board had to be approved by the captain, who “loved I should know his authority, and then denied me nothing.”Footnote 39
To better avoid the taint of commerce, even as he was dependent on its opportunities, Sir Thomas Roe sought refuge in the common tasks of the ambassador. Roe, however, ensconced at the Mughal court and distant from Europe, worried that he was unable to do so. He was at a disadvantage for at least one of the most familiar tasks set an ambassador: gathering and passing on intelligence. An ambassador was supposed to be a conduit for information, meant “to advertise and not to advise.”Footnote 40 For ambassadors in Europe, this function could be carried out by means of weekly or as-needed dispatches; for the East Indies, it was nearly impossible to send more than yearly dispatches.Footnote 41 The ships for London sailed only once a year, and letters sent overland, at great expense and vulnerability for interception, still might take a year to arrive.Footnote 42 The extensive detail of the surviving letters from the East Indies testified to these circumstances—a half year's or a year's worth of doings had to be told in each letter. Roe could no more keep the secretary of state apprised of events in India than he could expect timely responses to the information he did send. He doubted, additionally, that anyone in England would be interested in what he could tell. Writing to his friend and possible patron George, Lord Carew, Roe apologized for the information he sent, “there being nothing of worth, nothing memorable.”Footnote 43 To another patron he said that he would “forbear to write your Lordship large discourses of this place, though there be many rare and worthy passages. But they would be obscure and harsh, in broken pieces, without delight, or profit. . . . [T]his kingdom almost concern not Europe.”Footnote 44 Roe might be fast becoming England's expert on Mughal politics, but he did not know if it would gain him anything. If information was a commodity, then he feared that no one wanted to buy what he had to offer.Footnote 45
If Roe could not send useful political information to England, he could send information of a different type. Specifically, he sent information that would not change: on the structure of the Mughal political system, on the character of the king and court, and on the geography of the place. Following the apology for the lack of political news in the above-mentioned letter to Lord Carew, Roe explained that he would “descend to a more universal description of the state and customs of the land,” giving explanations of the organizational structure of the empire, detailing, for example, how the Mughal system of honor was based on the number of horses a noble was allowed to field and how European maps of the East Indies invariably underestimated the vastness of the Mughal empire.Footnote 46 This type of geographic and cultural information found a place in nearly all the letters Roe sent to individuals outside the Company—the patronage letters, in other words. A letter to Archbishop Abbot gave cartographic remonstrations—“Ortelius, Mercator, Atlas, nor any understanding any truth herein”—and a whirlwind overview of the “land, customs, and manners” of the place. He could hope that Abbot might be particularly interested in the cartographic information because Abbot had a long-standing interest in world affairs and geography. Abbot had published a geography, or description of the world, in 1599, and its multiple printings and editions throughout the seventeenth century testified to its popularity.Footnote 47
Although the affairs of the Mughal court might not interest Abbot except as curiosities, Roe was reasonably certain the news he had gathered of affairs at the Persian court would, because it concerned the expulsion of the Portuguese from Persian lands and might affect England's policy regarding the Ottoman Empire. Roe had heard rumors that Shah Abbas of Persia was interested in diverting the silk trade out of Ottoman lands and might “be persuaded to put it into our hands.” The possibility was “a matter of infinite consequence, for if I were to open these trades I could show important differences, for the kingdom of England.”Footnote 48 Other patronage letters contained much the same type of information, in terms of geography, customs, and information of the Portuguese and Persia.Footnote 49 It was this type of information, not about Mughal politics, but about the regional geopolitics, that Roe thought might be of interest to his patrons in London; if they had “a little leisure, to view the estate of these parts, as they begin by league, and traffics, to co-mix with Europe,” Roe would take it upon himself “to signify that which is now most new, and material.”Footnote 50
The financial payoffs of ambassadorships were small. The real wages of an ambassador were connections, favors owed or held, honor, and status. These unofficial wages were the purpose of the patronage letters and the reason that Roe scrambled to collect news and interesting tidbits. Connections and favor could be secured in a variety of ways, including, for example, collecting information and executing commissions for patrons. The difficulties of information gathering have been discussed, but an ambassador could, and often did, act as an agent for his patrons, collecting art or goods. In Istanbul in the 1620s, for example, Roe collected art and coins for Buckingham.Footnote 51 In India, Roe collected gems and carpets. Apologizing for his inability to secure promised goods, he reminded Pembroke how he had “offered my poor services to your Honor at my departure, to provide you with rarities.” Unfortunately, those rarities had turned out to be rarer than Roe anticipated.Footnote 52 Roe had come to India with hazy expectations of the riches of the East and was disappointed to find them incorrect: “I took all India for a China shop,” he wrote to Pembroke, “but I find this rude enough, without any curious arts, only some carpets.”Footnote 53 All his hopes, therefore, might rest on the uncertain reception of the “most new, and material” news that Roe could gather.
The news, the cartographic information, and the carpets all tended to one end: to curry favor with influential men in London and secure office in London. The embassy in India was a stepping-stone back to London, or if not to London, at least to Europe. The pleas were not subtle; “I shall be glad to do your Lordship's service in England,” Roe wrote to Lord Carew, “for this is the dullest, basest place that ever I saw, and maketh me weary of speaking of it. Therefore, if you be also weary of reading, I am glad.” Roe wanted to be back in London, where “with all respect and little ceremony, I hope to return to do you better services.”Footnote 54 To Winwood, he explained that there was little gain to be had for him in India. “Here is no probability of profit for me,” Roe wrote, “or to do my self much good.”Footnote 55 He asked Winwood to effect his return to London: “I hope your honor will be a means that in the fleet to be set out, in the year 1616, or 1617, I may return. . . . I [have] served 4 years or else five, a long banishment, where is no content to beguile the consideration of it.”Footnote 56 Roe might be representing merchants in the Indies at the moment, but his ambition was elsewhere, at London and at James's court.
Versions of the Embassy
Sanjay Subrahmanyam observed that in the absence of Mughal sources that deal with Roe's tenure at the Mughal court, the truth-value of Roe's narrative is impossible to gauge.Footnote 57 Subrahmanyam was primarily concerned with Roe's descriptions of the Mughal court and court customs, and while it is difficult to find alternative accounts to read against Roe on those topics, on other matters, Roe himself provided alternative accounts, supplemented by accounts found in the factors' letters. Roe's role and function as ambassador, for example, can be traced through four types of sources: his journal, his letters to the Company, the patronage letters, and the letters to and from the factors. The journal was an accounting of Roe's actions for the Company leaders in London and covered the day-to-day activities of the court. The letters to the East India Company leaders addressed specific concerns, updates on the trade or events, and the timely—as opposed to day-to-day—issues that required further instruction. The letters to the factors were almost entirely concerned with immediate situations, relevant political developments, and advice on trade. The patronage letters provided information Roe thought might be interesting or useful to the addressees, promises to do favors and collect special goods for them, and requests to keep him in mind. Taken together, the variety of documents is analogous to having a variety of accounts and voices.
Owing to the documents written for London and the high estimation in which historians have held Roe for so long, the image of Roe at the Mughal court that became enshrined was of a resolutely proud and virtuous Englishman who refused to bow, quite literally, to the follies of a dissolute monarch who therefore held him in high esteem. Roe wrote to Archbishop Abbot how he refused to enact the traditional obeisance to the emperor, involving kneeling and touching one's head to the ground, and how Jahangir excused him from it—an action, Roe noted, that he had never allowed the Turkish or Persian ambassadors to omit. Instead, Jahangir “granted me all liberty of mine own manners.”Footnote 58 He wrote that the Persian ambassador was “not allowed so good rank nor presence in court” as Roe was.Footnote 59 Elsewhere he wrote that “the king never used any ambassador with so much respect; without any dispute giving me leave to use mine own customs, not requiring that of me, which he useth of the Persian.”Footnote 60 To one patron, he wrote that he stood “in good terms with the king, who never gave that respect to any ambassador, of Turk or Persian.”Footnote 61 To another he was, “here in good credit, according to the customs of this prince's court.”Footnote 62 According to these accounts, Roe was not only esteemed at the Mughal court but also honored beyond the standard and beyond his rivals. If a primary task of his embassy was to secure respect for the English king and country, then ensuring that he himself was highly regarded at court demonstrated his ability to do his job. In addition, precedence disputes between rival ambassadors were the bread and butter of early modern diplomacy; Roe's honor and advantage in comparison to his rivals highlighted his ambassadorial abilities for his London audience.Footnote 63
The letters between Roe and the factors in India, however, told a different story. Absent was the high esteem and respect. When he described to them the difficulties he encountered in negotiating at the Mughal court, they advised him that he might need to engage in tactics he would normally abjure. If Roe could “procure not honorable respect to [his] place and person,” the factors suggested that he and they could enact a scheme to compel his better reception. Once the English ships arrived at Surat, the agents suggested, they could capture some Mughal ships to ensure that Roe would have to be appealed to at court to secure their release; then “it is in your Lordship's hand to remedy,” the factors wrote. Such a course of action, the factors claimed, would force Mughal respect for the English king and his ambassador, because Roe would be shown not to demand respect, but to deserve it. The fact that it was a cunning plot would, of course, be secret. It would underline his abilities as a worthy ambassador, “from whence also they may observe how to deal in the affairs of our Prince, in giving due respect to his ambassador.”Footnote 64 When Roe balked, they repeated that they might yet “constrain the Prince's better liking and yielding,” if he would agree.Footnote 65 Instead of honoring Roe above the Turkish and Persian ambassadors, the factors wrote to console him about the Persian ambassador's better relationship with Jahangir. It was true that much honor was shown the Persian ambassador, but his case was entirely different than that of the English ambassador. “We cannot but acknowledge,” they wrote, “the causes are different, [Shah Abbas] being a potent prince bordering on these territories, and ours far off, whose greatness is scarcely known or not believed.” Again they urged Roe to consider securing his honorable reception via martial means. These, they argued, would “increase your honor, esteem, and reputation with the king and nobility, without which it were dishonor to our king, nation, and your person to remain.”Footnote 66 Even though the ploy was necessarily coercive, the factors assured Roe that he would appear to best advantage as ambassador and win the honor he seemed to be failing to secure.
One letter, distinct from any of the other London letters, corroborates the impression from the factors' missives. This letter, written by Roe to an unknown party, possibly an in-law, at some point during his tenure at the Mughal court, seems to be a personal letter. If so, it is the only one surviving from the Mughal embassy. Roe described himself as “your banished friend,” explaining that “it is not the title of an ambassador that can afford a contented life.” He expounded on some of the difficulties facing him, including that his “credit with the king hath been besieged and battered.” Indeed, in the letter he was sure that “this court is not worth a Christian king's ambassador,” and he had “fallen short of an European reception” that he might have expected for his efforts.Footnote 67 Far from a feted and respected member of court, this Roe was unvalued and unacknowledged.
Contesting the Persia Trade
Examining the various accounts of Sir Thomas Roe's dispute with the Company factors over the opening of trade with Persia reveals further complications of status and authority in the Roe embassy. Roe's arrival in 1615 with gifts, though inferior to what Roe noted was expected, had helped secure the English presence in the Mughal empire by means of the firmans he received. His arrival also caused new problems, however: it created rival centers of authority among the English in India.Footnote 68 The Company leaders had prohibited Roe from influencing commercial business aside from securing a permanent trading settlement, and indeed, James's instructions to Roe had cautioned him to respect the Company's decisions regarding mercantile matters. Roe, however, took his exclusion from business as an affront to his dignity and a challenge to his authority. He wrote to the Company leaders that he had only their best interests at heart and could accomplish more if he were allowed to offer advice on the commercial side of the business.Footnote 69
The men Roe sought to advise on commercial matters—the Company's factors posted in the East Indies—were skilled agents who managed the English trade and whom the Company leaders trusted with a valuable and expensive enterprise. Company leaders in London paid great attention to the appointment of factors, including investigating the background and reputation of potential factors, because the success of the East Indies trade depended on them.Footnote 70 Though the Company leaders sent instructions, factors enjoyed considerable autonomy in the East, a necessary function of long-distance trade. Unlike merchant factors in Europe, often paid on commission, the Company factors received yearly wages ranging from £40 a year to £500 for the top agents.Footnote 71 Factors entered into bonds before leaving for the East Indies and were required to invest between £100 and £500 of their own money in the Company.Footnote 72 The men collectively referred to as factors were men of means, or connected to men of means who would stand surety for them. To put the sums in comparison, Roe's salary from the Company was also £500 a year. The factors, therefore, were men whose fortunes rivaled Roe's and who had influence in their own right, though in different arenas than Roe. His birth and position might have distinguished him from the factors, but they were not peons waiting to take direction from him. In fact, a number of the factors became men of influence within the Company after their return to England, converting their expertise into commercial office, much as Roe sought to do at court. For example, Thomas Kerridge, chief factor during Roe's tenure, served as a committee of the Company (one of the governing body) in the 1630s, and he was not the only factor to ascend to the upper echelons of Company leadership.Footnote 73 Roe's desire to advise them on commercial matters, therefore, was a direct infringement on their recognized expertise.
The restriction on Roe's commercial actions might have remained a minor annoyance, important to Roe symbolically but ultimately of little practical concern, had it not been for the shiploads of unsellable broadcloth and other goods sent out from England in expectation of sale in India. Because the cloth did not sell in India, the factors at Surat decided that they would try selling the cloth in Persia, where the different climate might make English broadcloth more attractive. Several factors were sent to Persia to assess the commercial possibilities, and their preliminary reports looked promising. The trouble was that the factors had no clear mandate from the Company leaders in London, and Roe himself was not in favor of the trade. With no guidance from the Company leaders, the disagreement over the Persia trade highlighted some of the difficulties of the Roe embassy. Kerridge, as chief factor in Surat, had no diplomatic authority to send a representative to the Persian court, but he had commercial authority to send a trading venture. Roe, in contrast, had the diplomatic authority but was specifically prohibited from the commercial authority. Both understood that no trade in Persia would succeed without sending a representative to the Persian court at Isfahan and making a favorable impression on Shah Abbas. Had Kerridge and Roe sided together, there would have been no problem, but instead their split on this issue revealed and exacerbated the split in authority between the factors at Surat and the ambassador. The rancor between the factors and Roe grew, leading one factor to resort to biblical analogy to describe its divisiveness as “that house which is divided cannot stand.”Footnote 74
The reception of Sir Thomas Roe's advice by the factors at Surat, and by Thomas Kerridge in particular, angered and annoyed the ambassador. In prohibiting him from meddling with the commercial aspects of the East India business, the Company leaders had tied Roe's hands regarding the central purpose of the Eastern venture. In excluding him from business matters, they excluded him from real authority. Shortly after arriving in India, Roe wrote to the Company, “I can say little of the estate of your business; only it is kept in the breast of some few men, and your jealousy to give me any authority of your business hath disabled me to look into many things that should have redounded to your profit.” He added, “If I but find just fault or give honest council, the meanest can say it concerns not me; I have naught to do with them.”Footnote 75 The restriction allowed for the easy circumvention of Roe's authority. By May 1616, he wrote in his journal that recent letters from Surat contained “nothing but a bundle of contradictions to whatsoever motion I made in my opinion for the advancement of the Company's affairs.”Footnote 76 Chafing at his restricted position almost from his arrival, Roe had written to the Company to clarify what the bounds of his authority were with regard to commercial trade and the Surat factors. In September 1616, before the arrival of the 1616 fleet, Roe noted in his journal that “[the Company leaders] left me so little credit among them that whatsoever I motioned was contradicted, even to show their authority.”Footnote 77 Roe complained in November 1616 that the factors still did not treat him with proper deference—“judge what respect your factors give me,” he wrote—and how they ignored his advice even though a letter from the Company had arrived that required them to consult with Roe about the most important matters. Instead, he complained, “[Y]our chief factor [Kerridge] hath too much sudden fire and too great an opinion of his abilities to give a temperate advice.” The factors had rejected his suggestions and even “bragged they had crossed all my advices.” This strife, Roe observed, was the natural result, the “fruits of division,” and it only followed that the normal order would be subverted, with subordinates trying to rule their superiors.Footnote 78 In barring Roe from one aspect of authority, he argued, they had lost him all authority.
One month earlier, in response to the Company's letter giving Roe commercial authority on major decisions, the factors at Surat had met secretly, to push ahead with the Persia trade before Roe could gainsay them. Captain Pepwell, commander of the 1616 fleet, attended the meeting and at the time seemed to support their decision to continue without Roe's permission. The 1616 fleet had brought another shipload of goods that could not be sold in Surat, and “therefore we the servants of that honorable body might there consult and determine how and in what manner thereof to dispose, to the better satisfaction of our said masters and our own reputations.” Roe's reputation may have been based on his reception and honor as ambassador, but the factors' reputations were entirely mercantile in origin and depended on their proper prosecution of business. The factors decided to send the goods to Persia and debated whether to send to Roe to hear his opinion, but knowing that he would not agree, “after debatement and full consideration, it was generally agreed that this Persian expedition and employment should, notwithstanding his Lordship's letter, forthwith receive determination.” In other words, they acknowledged and then ignored the newly modified chain of authority. In their opinion, Roe, regardless of his official control, did not understand merchant matters and though they willingly admitted it was “the great devotion and zeal of his Lordship to the benefit of the Honorable Company (without relation had or at least to him known of the necessity of our trade) that hath and now doth altogether guide him both in the past and in this at present,” they had to act according to their judgment.Footnote 79 They knew the trade, and he did not. Roe was not pleased with what was essentially mutiny: “[B]ut now,” he wrote, “as they begin against my consent, they may proceed without my assistance.”Footnote 80
By spring 1617, the ship of goods had reached Isfahan, and the factors sent with it were writing to Surat and hearing back. Because the initial opening of a trade with Persia was now complete, the debate about whether or not to begin the trade ended, but a new point of contention arose. The question of who would take the position of head factor in Isfahan began to occupy many letters, and Kerridge and Roe supported different candidates. Roe proposed one Thomas Barker, whom the factors thought malicious and deceitful. Several of the other factors sent to Persia argued the same, dispatching numerous accounts of Barker's bad character and misdeeds.Footnote 81 Kerridge supported Edward Connock, whom he and the factors argued was honest, worthy, and able. Roe had heard rumors, however, told by Barker, that Connock had styled himself as the ambassador to the Persian court. If true, this action usurped Roe's authority, because technically, Roe's credentials named him ambassador to the Mughal court and adjacent countries, including Persia. Connock wrote back that only a fool would falsely assume the title of ambassador and still hope to return to England. The question of Connock's status and character was unresolved at the time of his death in December 1617. Because he died a professed Catholic, having converted (or reverted) on his deathbed, news of his death only confirmed Connock's duplicitousness for Roe, though the factors maintained otherwise.Footnote 82 Ultimately for Roe, Connock's abilities were irredeemably overshadowed by his supposed pretending to the title of ambassador.
The disagreement over Persia and the rancorous exchanges between Roe and Kerridge came to a head in spring 1617 over the issue of the pretended ambassador. Roe's letters to Kerridge, sarcastic, accusatory, and self-justifying, repeatedly referenced his honor and the honor of James and the English nation. “I am not light of credit, nor love to hear ill report,” Roe wrote, “but I am in this past any doubt, that you ought to recall [Connock] with speed, with expedition lest you wink at your king's dishonor, the scorn of your nation and the waste and ruin of your employers' stock.”Footnote 83 What angered him the most, though, was the personal slight of having a Company factor place himself at Roe's level: “[I]t was not my wont to be tossed in the censures nor attempted with the braves of fellows of his base condition, whose honesty and bravery will vanish when I shall call it in question. But my horseboy will not forgive it him if they meet; he will surely knock him, and that is all the personal revenge I think him worthy of.”Footnote 84 Connock's supposed pretended status became a refrain in Roe's letters whenever he touched on Persia.
To his fellow ambassador in Istanbul, Roe wrote to caution him about Connock and his purported embassy. In “assuming false titles,” he made “our nation ridiculous,” and would ruin the worth of the office of ambassador, so that “a very eminent quality and great expense will hardly set upright the scorns it hath gotten by impostures.”Footnote 85 He felt sure Connock would promise things neither he nor the Company could deliver, and then “we”—the Company, the nation, the ambassadors themselves—would receive the disgrace. Roe worried that, without care, not only would his personal authority be compromised but also possibly the authority of the entire office. Indeed, once a group of factors were finally sent to Persia, Roe expounded upon the subject in his instructions to them. If they found that Connock or any other factor had “taken upon him title of ambassador,” then he was to be discharged and sent away, first yielding up “all such authority usurped or given, in the name of His Majesty my Sovereign Lord.” It was not that Roe was jealous of all exercise of authority—he accepted that he could not foresee all situations and therefore must leave the factors some room to maneuver—but he wanted them to be careful, to behave themselves as merchants and not to call themselves ambassadors.Footnote 86
The struggle over the Persia trade ended when the 1617 fleet arrived in September, carrying a letter from the Company, which instructed the factors that Roe had the authority “to instruct, direct and order all the factors in the Mughal's country in all the affairs and business of the said Honorable Company.”Footnote 87 This action increased Roe's authority to include every sphere of Company action in India, directly subjugating the chief factor, Kerridge, under Roe. In early October, to address the concerns of the factors of what this change would mean, Roe wrote, more amicably than he had in months:
I perceive you conceive that either the Company hath put a new authority into my hands or that I am very willing to assume one. First, let me desire you not to mistake me nor them; they have given no more than I thought ever I had, nor will never take more upon me, which is, friendly to join with all their good servants in advice, not to govern or overrule nor to do any thing of mine own head. . . . I do first as my opinion deliver that, if Mr. Kerridge think his authority is any way lessened, that he be persuaded to the contrary, for that both his deservings and experience will protect him from any such matter.Footnote 88
Having had his complete authority confirmed by the Company in London, Roe found the increased responsibilities oppressive. Once confirmed in his right, he did not want to have to exercise it. He wrote to the factors that “all this is vanity to talk of authority; let us all despise all authority to control us from any ill, and you shall all find me a tame lion.”Footnote 89 He wrote further that “it is not so as that all is referred to me absolutely. . . . [I]ndeed I might show authority if I would, but I will meddle no farther but by advice . . . and therefore I pray, whatsoever any write, expect your directions from below [from Kerridge].”Footnote 90 Kerridge apparently felt slighted and, because his term of service was over, requested to be sent back to England. Roe, recognizing that Kerridge was crucial to continued profitable trade, entreated him to stay. Kerridge agreed, but he took his newly subordinated position seriously and began to send almost daily dispatches to Roe to keep him informed and request his advice on the day-to-day affairs of the factory at Surat. Those dispatches have not survived, but some of Roe's responses, testy and overwhelmed, have. “Mr. Kerridge,” Roe wrote, “[i]n answer of all your former I have written of the 4th, 5, 8, 11, 13, 15 of October . . . proceed in your business for the present . . . such as you think fittest . . . without staying for any directions from me.” The Company's newly given authority, he added, was not meant to slow down business, and Roe assured Kerridge that he trusted his judgment.Footnote 91
Once the relationship between factors and ambassador was settled, Roe generally did not seek to exercise the ultimate authority that had been entrusted to him. His concern had been about knowing and acknowledging authority, not necessarily about acting upon it. As long as no one disregarded Roe's express orders or openly flouted his authority, business could proceed as usual. Although the dispute with the factors lasted well over a year, little hint of this aspect of the Persia trade showed up in the patronage letters. This is unsurprising, given that the dispute with the factors showed Roe's inability to exert authority, rather than a competent handling of the business. In India and in Company communications, Roe struggled to secure his authority, even as he hesitated to enforce it. The aim was not to be a merchant, but to be unequivocally set above the merchants.
Yet Roe was deeply interested in the Persia trade for another reason than his authority. Far from the reservations about opening the Persia trade that Roe expressed to the factors, almost from the moment of his arrival in the East the patronage letters showed Roe's enthusiasm for the endeavor, but for other reasons than the factors planned. As noted above, news of Persia was a topic Roe seemed sure would reliably interest his patrons, especially because many of Roe's patrons shared his religious fervor. The factors may have been certain that a successful trade into Persia would benefit the Company, but Roe was interested, at least in the patronage letters, in the wider scope of the Persia trade, namely, the geopolitical ramifications for England and Christendom of diverting the silk trade away from the Ottoman Empire and through Hormuz and thence to Europe via the sea route. The factors' trade into Persia might make or lose the Company money, but the Persia project could benefit the whole of Protestant Christendom. If England succeeded in securing the trade, in one swoop the Turkish and Spanish empires would suffer. Securing the trade, Roe wrote, would “wholly alter the face of this part of the world.”Footnote 92 Sir Robert Sherley, acting as envoy from the Persian court, had already approached the Spanish and the English courts to try and interest either one of them in the project, with no takers. Roe spoke fondly of Sherley and hoped to interest his patrons in the plan, in the implementation of which Roe saw himself playing a central role.
Roe's letters emphasized the geopolitical consequences of this possibility. To Abbot, Roe wrote that it was “a matter of infinite consequence.”Footnote 93 To others, Roe claimed to have explained the project at large to the Company, emphasizing “the importance of the negotiation” and how, if the English failed to secure the trade, it would result in “loss and disgrace to our nation.”Footnote 94 The project was “of no small importance to Christendom.” If England failed to take it up, Roe claimed, Spain would be the richer by a million crowns a year, on top of bolstering the Portuguese reputation in the East.Footnote 95 Thus, not only would Spain's securing of the trade have the primary effect of greatly enriching the Spanish Crown, but it would also have the secondary effect of derailing English efforts in the East through reinvigorating England's great enemies, the Portuguese, restoring “all his credit here, where he lay languishing for breath.” If the Spanish and the Portuguese lost the East Indies, however, “how had it advanced the peace of Christendom.”Footnote 96
Roe acknowledged the Company's interests in Persia, but he wrote to patrons in London in a different tone. Apologizing for the brevity of his explanation, Roe urged Abbot to “command what I have written to the East Indian Company,” to see the matter treated at large.Footnote 97 Despite his references to the Company, Roe's enthusiastic advocacy of the Persia project to people outside the Company suggested that the project was more effectively Roe's affair than the Company's. The business was an opportunity for one's “care of the public good” to be “reduced into action,” Roe urged his patrons.Footnote 98 The merchants must be necessarily interested, though the end result was that piles of money would pour into some king's coffers, preferably James's.Footnote 99 Holding to the advice that an ambassador was meant to advertise and not advise, Roe occasionally apologized for his analysis of the situation, “lest it should appear arrogance which is faithful zeal to do my country.”Footnote 100 Zeal for country and religion spurred him beyond the unsatisfying conflict with the factors.Footnote 101
Conclusion
When Sir Thomas Roe left India in early 1619, he was the first and last official ambassador the East India Company would employ for almost a century. One of the reasons the Company did not send another, though it never recorded any such debate, may have been a hesitation to embark again on an endeavor as ambiguous at its heart as the Roe embassy. Many early modern English ambassadors began their tenures hoping to parlay an ambassadorship into higher office in London, but few embassies shared such a divided set of interests. Roe maneuvered between Crown, Company, and his own aims, and Company leaders themselves had been split on the advisability of a courtier ambassador rather than a merchant representative. Comparable examples to set against the Roe embassy were other embassies underwritten by trading companies, most of which remained extraordinary rather than standing embassies, sent only as needed, with the sole exception of the standing embassy at Istanbul. True to expectations, those other underwritten embassies saw frequent controversy between Crown and company; the appointment of the Istanbul embassy, for example, caused repeated conflicts between Charles I and the Levant Company leaders in the 1620s.Footnote 102 Given a choice, perhaps the Levant Company leaders would have proven similarly reluctant to undertake the great cost and complications of an ambassador, but because the Ottoman emperor required a resident ambassador, the decision was not left up to them.
On the one occasion in which the East India Company had to send an official ambassador, they chose an up-and-coming courtier they hoped would be fit for residence at an imperial court of reputed grandeur. James's instructions to Roe emphasized the importance of honorably conducting himself, underlining how Roe's conduct not only reflected on the Company but also might be the Mughal emperor's only evidence upon which to judge James and the English nation as a whole. Roe was careful of this charge. Not only for James's sake but also for his own, he paid especial attention to perceived threats by the Company factors in India. With them, he zealously guarded his personal authority and the authority of his office, quick to see pretension to inappropriate honor and authority in their actions. His authority, which he sought to have recognized more than to exercise, was a buffer to help him escape the taint of commercial activity that might hinder his prospects of advancement at the English court.
The surviving letters from the Roe embassy make clear that Roe presented different faces of his embassy to different people. In keeping with the varied interests that lay at the heart of his embassy, he presented his embassy and himself as ambassador in varied ways, not least because his personal stake in the embassy hinged on returning, successful, to London. It would be overly simplistic to read Roe's different presentations of his actions and events in India as calculated manipulations to sway opinions in London—they were that, too, but the point was that Roe, in some sense, was, and either believed or needed to believe, each version. For his patrons in London, he was truly a successful ambassador, highlighting examples that demonstrated him holding on to the certain privileges granted him by Jahangir. For the factors in India, he, and the English, were indeed not regarded highly enough, to the point that the factors advocated various stratagems to coerce respect.
When Roe returned to London in 1619, the Company leaders greeted him warmly. They were generally pleased with his performance and granted him a modest annuity for a few years, though less than what Roe thought he deserved.Footnote 103 He continued his services for the Company in later years, advising, meeting on occasion with the Company leaders, and sometimes negotiating for them in Whitehall. The East India Company may not have sent a follow-up ambassador, but Roe's diplomatic career certainly prospered after serving as the Company ambassador in India. It developed around his perceived facility with trading companies, mercantile affairs, and distant locales. The Mughal embassy may not have secured him the London office he sought, but it put him on a long, circuitous path that brought him, with each successive posting, closer to London. Roe served next as another trading company ambassador, this time for the Levant Company in Istanbul, for close to a decade. Then followed several postings in Europe, including to the Baltic and Poland, before Roe finally gained a place on Charles's Privy Council in 1640. His success was not incidental; it was, after all, why he, and others, served as ambassadors in the first place. What was more surprising, however, was that Roe's success in India came even as, in his own estimation, he failed to do much of what he thought an ambassador ought to do, instead finding himself exploring projects, like the Persia trade, outside the traditional purview of an ambassador and difficult to investigate from Europe, and struggling to defend the sanctity of his office not from rival ambassadors but from his own countrymen and charges.
Even as England's commercial horizons were expanding, providing the opportunities from which Roe sought to benefit, so its political horizons were as well; the affairs at those far-flung princes' courts that Roe hoped to leave were beginning to have direct bearing on James's court and European affairs. “A man is simple,” Archbishop Abbot wrote to Roe, “that doth not see that the king of France, the princes of Italy, and especially the Hollanders our nearest neighbors are the greater or the lesser for the event of those things, which they or others have in those eastern parts.”Footnote 104 Gracelessly and often unhappily, Roe found himself at the forefront of a changing system, eager to take advantage of the opportunities the new state-company partnerships offered, but wanting, more than anything, a place firmly in the old system, away from merchants' affairs and secure in the favor of his prince.
