146 TRADE AND MARKETS. 



As I have said, the best description of the Cromwellian army 

 is in Bunyan's Holy War, and of a dishonest tradesman in the 

 same author's Life and Death of Mr. Badman. So in Vanity 

 Fair, the same author probably gave a heightened description 

 of what he saw at Stourbridge : the three weeks' mart, which 

 was not indeed in the seventeenth century what it had been for 

 the three previous centuries, but was still one of the most 

 considerable trade gatherings in England. 



Sir Josiah Child's discourses on trade, published in 1670, 

 assert that English trade and English wealth had greatly in- 

 creased during the last twenty years. This was due un- 

 doubtedly, in the first place, to the position which Cromwell's 

 administration secured for England among the European 

 powers; and in the second, to the men who had still retained the 

 temper and energy of the old cause. It was noted, Macaulay 

 tells us, that if a man was active and prosperous in business, 

 after the Restoration, he would generally be found on enquiry 

 to be one of the men who sympathised with the cause which 

 won its final victories at Marston Moor and Naseby, at Dunbar 

 and Worcester. Child comments, as proof of the progress 

 made, on the great rise of London rents, doubled, he tells us, 

 after the fire, though just before that disaster they had been 

 25 per cent, higher than they were in 1650. Shipping he tells 

 us had doubled in the time, the number of merchants and 

 traders had greatly increased, and ready-money business was 

 far more common than it was previously. Child was a director 

 of the East India Company, and greatly increased his fortunes 

 in that undertaking. Later on he was not free from suspicion 

 of complicity in that corruption by which the Company strove 

 to ward off threatened attacks on them in Parliament, but he 

 can be trusted when he speaks of the manner in which the 

 English were enabled to baffle in some degree that monopoly 

 of the spice trade which it was the policy of the Dutch to 

 acquire and keep. The dividends on the East India stock 

 during the greater part of the reign of Charles were very large, 

 for the price often stood we are told at 300, or even at 500. 



