Governing Over Distance: Delegating Trust and Dealing with Disorder in the Early East India Company Trade

ABSTRACT

This study uses an overlooked case to reveal how the problem of distance shaped the early English East Indies trade. In 1617, preacher William Lesk returned to London from Surat. He had been sent to be a moral leader for East India Company factors, but they returned him when his scandalous behaviour threatened the survival of the Company’s trade in the Mughal empire. The social circumstances of the factory had real, material consequences. The factors sent signed eyewitness accounts of his misdeeds for Company leaders to address, but in London, Lesk’s claims of first-hand knowledge of the East Indies trade and affairs in Surat, along with savvy use of the politics of publicity, meant that Company leaders found him challenging to deal with. The story of Lesk reveals how managing distance required compromises on how best to govern the East Indies trade. Distance shaped how Company leaders interpreted events in the East Indies, while also opening up avenues for resisting Company judgements. Distance informed every aspect of the Company’s operation – not just economic but also social and political – and is essential to understanding how and why the Company developed as it did, both in the East Indies and London.

KEYWORDS:

• East India Company
• East India factories
• Surat
• Sir Thomas Roe
• Thomas Kerridge
• public sphere
• principal-agent
• distance
• reputation
• factors
• preachers

In September 1617, William Lesk returned to England from the East Indies, sent home in disgrace by the East India Company’s factors in Surat. They had been unable to control his riotous living – his ‘sundry misdemeanours and disordered vicious life’ – and worried about the effect his behaviour would have on the Company’s affairs in India. Along with the person of Lesk himself, Company factors sent a damning written record of his misdeeds, ranging from drunken and disorderly conduct, sexual incontinence, and attempted murder.¹ It was an impressive tally for a preacher chosen and dispatched to be a moral example.

Despite the factors’ careful letter, once back in London, Lesk had resources at his disposal to protect his reputation. For one, he was able to rebut in person the charges they had made against him in writing. Lesk’s actions were so incongruent with the expectations Company leaders had for the behaviour of a minister that many were sceptical of the factors’ account. Lesk denied the charges and challenged the judgment of the Company’s factors, suggesting that his own account of his actions (in which he was blameless) was more accurate than the accounts they sent back (in which he was guilty of significant bad behaviour). For another, he used tools of public appeal to make it harder for Company leaders to punish him for his ungodly behaviour without risking public exposure of scandalous doings by Company employees in the East Indies. Company leaders found themselves balancing truth, trust, and profitability to evaluate events half a world away and many months previous, but whose consequences might still be felt both in London and the East Indies.

Lesk’s story speaks to an underlying challenge facing the East India Company in the early seventeenth century. England and the East Indies were separated by a half year of travel each way – this was the physically farthest trade England engaged in – and that physical distance and the time to traverse it shaped the development of the East India Company’s activities in fundamental ways.² This problem was not unique to the East Indies – all overseas ventures required management of the logistical problems of operating at a remove from England, i.e. the delegation of significant power and resources to people who operated outside of the direct oversight of the delegating person or institution. This delegation occurred at the highest level – the royal crown delegated authority to corporations or individuals via letters patent to develop new trades or to colonise new territories – and at the corporate level, where company leaders in London had to delegate authority and resources to factors in the East Indies.³ The necessary delegation of power opened up other concerns even as it enabled new overseas ventures: how much oversight was possible or necessary? How could delegators trust the delegatees to act in the best interests of the company and the nation? How could delegators evaluate the delegatees’ efforts?

As the East India Company was initially conceived as an economic venture, it is little surprise that most scholarship examining these questions has addressed them in terms of economic efficiency. In other words, how able were long-distance overseas trading companies to recruit their employee’s economic efforts on their behalf and minimise the problem of private trade, to ‘manage the manager’ over long distances and with only unreliable and slow information transfer?⁴ This scholarship has opened up new ways of thinking about the challenge of distance and the means at the disposal of companies to mitigate it, but someone like William Lesk fits poorly into this analytical lens. He did indeed engage in private trade, but he was sent over to serve as a preacher and figures in Company archives primarily in that capacity.

The problem of distance was not solely an economic one. Social probity was as important as economic probity in the operation of the Company factories in their earliest iteration. In the early seventeenth-century, the factories were small and the factors in each factory were intended to live, eat, and work together under one roof. Each factory was literally a single household. What factors and Company leaders both knew was that the social life and conduct of the English in the East Indies could and did affect the Company’s trade.⁵ East India Company factors lived and traded in the Mughal empire because they were allowed to; English factories in the early seventeenth century were not fortified, and the Mughal empire was under no obligation to allow the English to conduct trade.⁶ With permission of local authorities, Company factors dwelt year-round in the trading centres where they worked on the Company’s behalf. That permission, however, was revokable. A merchant group that made itself unwelcome, including on account of the conduct of its members, might be asked to leave.

The problem of distance thus also represented a social problem. Company leaders in London could not oversee the daily life and affairs of their factors. Instead, they had to figure out how to govern their factors’ lives and actions from a distance. They tried to choose factors carefully to minimise foreseeable problems – questions of character were routinely considered alongside mercantile experience. Additionally, Company leaders could designate a chief factor or senior merchant to oversee the others; they could rest oversight authority in the commander of the yearly fleet; they could attempt to provide the religious structures of English life by sending preachers to minister to the Company men;⁷ and they could require regular, detailed written reports from the factors along with in-person debriefs from returning factors.⁸ However, day-to-day self-government had to be entrusted to the factors themselves. Delegating power for the factors to govern themselves in most circumstances was a necessary solution to the social problem of distance, but one that Company leaders were frequently uneasy with: they were all too aware of the gaps in their oversight.

The second act of William Lesk’s story, his successful self-defense after his return to London, reveals how the problem of distance was also a political problem. This is obvious in some of the better-known incidents in early East India Company history, where the meaning and consequences of events like the joint EIC-Persian conquest of Hormuz, or the legal execution at Amboyna, took on a life of their own separate from the original events once translated to Europe. In this new life, they were understood and reacted to in relation to the domestic and/or European political concerns of the trading companies and countries involved.⁹ The Lesk story shows us that the same occurred in relation to ‘smaller’ events that have received little or no attention from scholars, because what distance meant in this sense was the disconnect in context between the East Indies and England. The parameters for decoding an event and its consequences in the East Indies were distinct from the parameters in England. The factors’ concerns about Lesk’s unruliness in Surat could not be fully understood in London; William Lesk could allege alternative meanings to the production of the document outlining the charges against him that spoke to different concerns about delegation among Company leaders in London. In addition, the contours of the Company’s political problems in the early seventeenth century increasingly involved the politics of publicity, and lurking in the background of the London portion of Lesk’s story was the use of publicity as a tool or threat.

The story of William Lesk thus highlights how central the social and political problems of distance were to the actions of Company leaders and Company factors in the early seventeenth century. Managing distance required Company leaders and factors to accommodate an unresolvable challenge – ultimately there was no way to bring the East Indies closer to London or to shorten travel time. The story of Lesk reveals how managing distance forced compromises on how best to govern the East Indies trade. It reveals how distance shaped official responses and policies, including how it could be used to thwart Company initiative. Distance pervades every aspect of Company operation – not just economic but also social and political – and it is essential to understanding the form and function of the Company’s trade in the early seventeenth century, both in the East Indies and in London.

The Social Challenge of Establishing Trade

The limited power and insecure foundations of the Company in Surat in the early seventeenth century are essential to understanding how important the social life and conduct of Company employees were in the initial days of Company activity in India. Surat at the time was in its heyday. It was a major commercial centre and the premier port of the Mughal empire, with deep sea mooring at nearby Swally or Swally Road (modern Suwali). The city was populous, with an estimated 200,000 inhabitants. It was protected by city walls and a garrisoned fort which had been built in 1540 as a counter to the Portuguese who had bases in the nearby towns of Diu and Daman. Surat had been part of the Mughal empire since its conquest by Akbar in 1573, and enjoyed a special relationship with the Mughal crown; town administrators were appointed directly by the Mughal imperial government, and the revenue of the administrative district of Surat was given to members of the imperial family. In the bustling marketplaces of Surat, one could buy textiles, indigo, spices, tobacco, precious metals, and ivory. The city was home to communities of Persian, Armenian, Turkish, and Central Asian merchants, in addition to the domestic merchant communities of Banias, Parsis, Jains, and Muslims, including Sunni, Shia and Ismaili members.¹⁰ It was, in short, a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, and the English were only the most recent arrivals with hopes of developing a rich commerce in this place that was, according to a 1617 description, the ‘fountain and life of all the East India trade’.¹¹

The English factories in the early seventeenth century existed on sufferance. The East India Company had received permission from Mughal authorities to settle a factory in Surat only in 1613, shortly followed by factories in Agra, Burhanpur, and Ahmedabad, but the English had no automatic right to trade in the East Indies.¹² There were two options for European traders to establish a trading presence: the English could follow the Portuguese and Dutch model and fortify settlements (à la Goa or Batavia, for instance), effectively asserting a right to trade if it was not otherwise granted and backing up the assertion with firepower; or they could settle trade by treaty allowance. In the first decades of the Company’s operation, treaty rather than fortification was the usual choice, with proponents arguing that treaties were far cheaper than fortifications (and, technically, the EIC patent did not grant the power to fortify). Treaties, however, meant the Company was dependent on the goodwill and acquiescence of local political regimes, which in turn meant that reputation, status, and appearance had real consequences for the Company’s ability to trade.

In practice, this meant that in the first years of the Company’s venture in the Mughal empire, Company actors were constantly trying to manage the Company’s reputation. This ranged from demonstrating sufficient military prowess to prove themselves an effective counter to Portuguese influence by winning skirmishes against the Portuguese at sea, which the English had done in 1612 in the Battle of Swally and was part of the reason they were able to settle a factory in Surat; to demonstrating diplomatic ability by presenting desirable gifts to Mughal officials and negotiating at the imperial court, which was the aim and overall outcome of the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, sent at the Company’s behest in 1615 as an official English ambassador to the Mughal court; to proving themselves good neighbours, unproblematic to live beside and allow in East Indies towns.¹³ This last proved quite difficult, especially in Surat.

This was despite the fact that the men chosen as factors by the East India Company were a carefully selected group, picked both for commercial acumen and good character. Company leaders in London interviewed all applicants, inquiring into both experience and ‘carriage’ – good reports of both were required and it was not unusual for men to be turned away because of concerns on either account. The Company aim was to find ‘grave, staid men’ who would act with care and were ‘not tainted in their lives’ rather than ‘young green heads’, to whom Company leaders attributed ‘the wrongs that ha[d] been committed’ thus far in the Company’s trade.¹⁴ Most men chosen for the East Indies had previous experience working outside of England, whether in continental Europe, the Levant, or Muscovy. They had served lengthy apprenticeships already, and were also men of some means, required to execute bonds to the Company for anywhere from £100–£500 before sailing. If they did not die in the East Indies, they often lived and worked there for years.¹⁵ To take one example, William Methwold petitioned the Company for employment in 1615. As qualifications, he cited his nine year apprenticeship with another London merchant, including five years working in Middelburg, his knowledge of Dutch and French, and his ability to keep accounts. Company leaders investigated his suit, and ‘satisfied of the reports given by so many’ in Methwold’s favour, hired him.¹⁶ He was around 26 when he arrived in Surat, and worked as a Company factor for over two decades.¹⁷ In short, before turning over resources and responsibility, Company leaders endeavoured to ensure that their factors would be reliable and trustworthy in the conduct of their jobs and their lives.

Company leaders also prescribed specific religious and governmental practices for factors once they departed England to keep them reliable and trustworthy. For example, the 1610 commission of Laurence Femell, sent as principal factor in the Company’s sixth voyage, instructed Femell to oversee the religious observance of the merchants under his charge: ‘we exhort you in the fear of God to be very careful to assemble together your whole family every morning and evening’. This regular, communal religious observance was central to establishing the godly behaviour Company leaders desired from their factors, figured as a familial group, and a prerequisite for their moral conduct. Femell’s commission also outlined the importance of the public conduct of the men under his charge. Men who conducted themselves badly in foreign lands would hurt the Company’s ability to develop a trade, so it was especially important that Company merchants govern themselves properly:

For that civil behaviour is very requisite for the begetting of love and estimation amongst those heathenish people we pray you to settle such modest and sober government in your household that neither amongst themselves there be contentious quarrels or other occasions of strife which may tend to the prejudice of our affairs and be a scandal to our profession and religion, as also that none of your people give just cause to any stranger to complain of their misdemeanour.¹⁸

The commission thus outlined the connection between the quiet living and self-regulation of the Company’s factors, and the possibility of a prosperous trade.

In terms of self-regulation, one might think the job would have been easier because Company factories in the East Indies were uniformly small. The largest English factory in the Mughal Empire was Surat, which in March 1616 was listed as having a total of twelve English residents.¹⁹ Seven were identified as factors and five as attendants on the factors, meaning specialised servants or apprentices who might eventually work their way up to become factors, who had more responsibility, autonomy, and salary.²⁰ The smallest English factory was at Burhanpur, with four English residents: three factors and one attendant.²¹ Beyond the men named in the list, there were usually a small number of menial English servants whose names were not included.²² There was also regular movement between factories to carry goods or messages, and as deaths forced personnel reshufflings. Lastly, the factors worked closely with local merchants, so the English household also included by extension indigenous brokers, servants, and other employees, though not all of this number lived permanently in the factory.²³

During the weeks or months that Company ships put in at port towns like Surat, the population of the English greatly increased.²⁴ The sudden augmentation of the English population in the town caused problems for the permanent residents as the small community swelled with sailors who, according to common report, were often boisterous and drunk. Numerous interactions involving English mariners in trading towns suggested that managing the disorder that seemed to accompany them was challenging and sometimes impossible. This situation was also rooted in the problem of distance, as sailors cooped up during long voyages looked to enjoy themselves on shore in ways that risked quiet living. Company commissions to fleet commanders advised them to give mariners going ashore ‘express warning to behave themselves peaceably and civilly towards the people of those places the better to procure their friendship’.²⁵ Despite these instructions, incidents of small and large crime and public disorderliness pepper the Surat factory records for the period, with most (but not all) of them involving sailors temporarily in Surat while the English fleet was there. Ships’ logs from Company vessels similarly attest to disorderly behaviour of their men while on shore. For example, one Gregory Lillington killed a fellow sailor on shore at Surat in 1617.²⁶ Most crimes and complaints that appeared in the record, however, were of a more mundane nature, usually involving drunkenness and disorderly behaviour, primarily, though not exclusively, involving mariners.²⁷

It was these actions that led the English as a whole to acquire a reputation for disorderliness, which the factors thought unfair. In early 1617 the Surat factors wrote to Company leaders lamenting that because of the behaviour of some in the English fleet and the Portuguese agents who sought to discredit them by drawing attention to English problems, the English had acquired ‘the greatest disrepute that ever yet hath been conceived of them, as theft, drunkenness, quarrelling, mutiny and manslaughter’. The factors explained that ‘our troubles arising from complaints of our own people hath given us more vexation than all our other affairs’. The complaint made it clear that by ‘our own people’ they meant English men, but also that they did not include themselves in this account. It was ‘malice’ that caused reports that all who lived at Surat ‘should merit taxation of wicked and notorious livers’ since they themselves ‘were as well governed as if they lived in France or nearer you [e.g. Company leaders] to give daily account of their actions’.²⁸ The problem of distance made an appearance in this comparison, with its implicit assumption that men at a distance were harder to govern, even as the factors assured Company leaders it was not so.

Despite the distinctions the factors wished to draw as to who was in fact disorderly, the English in Surat were judged collectively; the disorder of their most unruly members attached to all of them and threatened the continued survival of the Company’s trade in India. Sir Thomas Roe was greeted upon his arrival at the Mughal court with tales of English intransigence told not by the factors but by Mughal officials. Prince Khurram, son of Emperor Jahangir and officially governor of Surat (though he delegated the responsibility and title of the position to someone else), complained to Roe about the ‘unruliness of the English of Surat, of their drinking and quarrelling in the streets, and drawing swords in the custom house’. The governor of Surat had informed him of this problem, and Khurram requested that Roe undertake to curtail the objectionable behaviour. Roe was at a loss to justify the English actions, beyond a reflexive reference to abuses that might have been offered them first. Khurram asked Roe to write to the English at Surat and restrain their behaviour, and warned that if the situation continued, he would punish the disorderly. This was no general request for better behaviour – Khurram wanted Roe to write immediately, Roe promised to do so the next day, and Khurram assured him he would send the letter post to Surat ‘to prevent more disorders and complaints’. While not entirely pleased with the prince’s declaration, Roe admitted that ‘this motion savoured so much reason I could not refuse it’.²⁹ Khurram’s words to Roe, in short, were in response to a series of actual English misdeeds that had already attracted attention at the highest levels. He was warning Roe that the English needed to get their house in order. This was the problem facing the English East India Company in 1615.

Company leaders in London were aware of the issue of English disorderliness there. For them, the best means to get the English house in Surat in order and bolster the Company’s foundation was to send a preacher and encourage religious observance. They already sent preachers with each fleet, and commissions for voyages already included directions for regular religious practice. With the settling of a permanent factory in Surat, however, they planned to send a preacher specially chosen to reside there. Such was the importance of this position as they envisioned it, in fact, that Company leaders decided to solicit recommendations for ‘learned, religious, and honest’ candidates from Governor Thomas Smith’s friend and prominent Cambridge puritan divine, Laurence Chaderton.³⁰ This person would lead Company employees in their faith and prove by his example the outward virtue of the reformed religion, defending Company factors from the influence of Roman Catholics, i.e. the Portuguese and the Jesuits, who both Company leaders in London and factors in the East Indies suspected of working to hinder English influence at the Mughal court.³¹

By 1614, Company leaders had chosen a number of preachers to send on their ships and had developed a standard procedure for choosing preachers. Interested applicants usually gave test sermons to demonstrate their practical skills.³² The vetting procedure for preachers also encompassed character. As with their choice of factors, Company leaders preferred older men for preachers, on the assumption that men of ‘graver years’ would less easily be led astray by worldly lures, and would more readily be heeded by the factors.³³ Company leaders sought quiet-living, older, well-educated men of good credit, report, and education to fill their posts. Good credit referred here to their personal credit and character, though the Company also turned away those looking for overseas employment as a means of escaping their creditors.³⁴

Company leaders picked William Lesk because he seemed to meet these criteria. Little about William Lesk has survived in the historical record, but it seems that he came to the Company via the influence or example of Patrick Copland, another preacher employed by the Company. Both men were Scots, and both had ties to Aberdeen: Lesk received his Master’s degree from King’s College, and Copland at Marischal College.³⁵ Copland may have encouraged Lesk’s application, or perhaps Lesk had followed his career and hoped to emulate him (Lesk later asked for the same employment conditions that Copland had received, naming him specifically). Regardless, the first mention of Lesk in the Company court minutes was on 21 October 1614, at which time he had already been vetted and approved, his ‘graver years’ giving him an edge over a rival candidate.³⁶ At the request of Company leaders, Lesk had preached before them every Friday that summer, an unusually rigorous trial period. By October, after weeks of trial sermons, Company leaders were well satisfied with his ‘bearing and gravity’ and that he would be ‘able to contest with and hold argument with the Jesuits that are busy at Surat’.³⁷

That Company leaders always intended Lesk to have an especially public role in his capacity as Company preacher was clear. At the end of November 1614, Company leaders briefly changed their minds and considered sending Lesk to Banten in honour of his learning – Banten at the time was the more important Company factory compared to Surat. They reconsidered precisely because of the public role they envisioned for him with regard to countering Catholicism. They ‘conceived him fittest for Surat, where he may oppose the Jesuits that are busy there, and will be attempting against our people’ though they warned him not to seek out confrontation.³⁸ Most preachers chosen by the Company were employed primarily to tend to the needs of the English communities on ship or in port, but Lesk they imagined holding religious disputations and serving as a living example of upright behaviour to the English before a hostile Catholic audience.

Lesk’s evident godliness was also joined to a certain practical savvy. He either kept up with the Company’s policies and recent affairs or drew on his friend’s experience, and requested the same compensation – £100 a year and a £30 allowance to buy what he needed for the voyage – that Patrick Copland had received.³⁹ Of the preachers engaged by the Company to that point, Lesk was the most scrupulous about securing specific terms and conditions for his salary, including permission that once his tenure as preacher in Surat was completed – Company leaders expected him to stay at least five years – he would be guaranteed passage on the next available ship to England.⁴⁰ He provisioned himself not only for the voyage; preparing for illicit private trading activity, he took with him a significant amount of private goods to sell, including fancy looking glasses and a variety of knives.⁴¹

Company leaders seemed confident that in Lesk they had found exactly the right man. The fleet carrying William Lesk departed England in January 1615. In keeping with his new position as Company minister, Lesk preached a sermon on 22 January at Gravesend, and another aboard ship a week later, on 29 January. He dined with the captain, William Keeling, made the acquaintance of a fellow passenger, Sir Thomas Roe, the new ambassador to the Mughal court, and seemed to be settling into his new role.⁴² It was a fine start to his role as public exemplar of the moral life and East India Company representative.

Problems in Surat

It is not possible to determine the full timeline that led from the expectations of William Lesk’s good influence at the time of his arrival in Surat in late August 1615 to the point, less than a year and a half later, when the factors decided to send him back to England. Lesk had arrived in India with no sign that the high hopes Company leaders had of him were misplaced. Though Captain Keeling made no further note of sermons delivered by Lesk once England was out of sight, Sir Thomas Roe – who was deeply religious – had arrived in India well pleased with Lesk’s knowledge and disposition. They sailed on different ships, but ship’s logs from the fleet reveal frequent social engagements and movement between ships throughout the voyage.⁴³ In April 1616, Roe wrote to Lesk – addressing him as his ‘worthy friend’ who was ‘minister of God’s word at Surat’ – that though he had not seen him recently, he sent his well wishes and would be glad to see him soon. Roe’s tone was confiding and he treated Lesk as more of an equal than he did any other Company employee in India. Roe respected Lesk on account of his position as preacher and of his ‘sincere carriage’ and asked to be remembered in Lesk’s prayers.⁴⁴

Read in hindsight, by September 1616, there were already signs in the factors’ correspondence that all might not be well. Roe’s chaplain died in late August, and he wrote to Lesk to ask him to take up the post. Lesk declined and ignored further letters, eventually reiterating his refusal of the offer only via Thomas Kerridge, the chief factor in Surat. In a letter from October, Roe wrote to the factors at Surat that he had heard not a word from Lesk, ‘for which I am both sorry and wonder’. Roe begged to be remembered to Lesk, adding, ‘I would have been glad of him; but if it stand not with his liking, I will wish him better fortune’.⁴⁵ Kerridge reiterated that he had ‘often earnestly solicited Mr. Lesk’ to join Roe, but Lesk was ‘continually excusing it’.⁴⁶

There is also evidence, however, that Lesk was engaged in the work he had been charged with in London. In November 1616, for example, he provided advice about where to mount a bell in the factory (his suggestion: outside the common meeting hall). The factors claimed that the bell was an attempt to address disorder in the factory by providing a shared timekeeping and organisational instrument – ‘for the better order in our house, as calling our people to prayers, etc.’ in the words of Thomas Kerridge who related the incident to Roe. The bell proved unexpectedly contentious when rumour spread through Surat that it was an emblem of English desires to convert the people and overthrow the government of the town. The notoriety of the bell seemed to surprise all of the factors (Kerridge noted, for example, the impossibility of eight or ten Englishmen holding out against the 200 mounted and 2,000 foot soldiers who came to take it down), but there were no hints in the account that perhaps Lesk had misjudged in his advice or that the desire to install a bell was misguided.

In discussing how the situation spiralled, Kerridge included several other comments that suggested misjudgements by Lesk. Kerridge described how Lesk had met with the governor of Surat, a sometime ally of the English and who had in this instance promised to intervene on their behalf. At the end of the meeting, however, Lesk made some unspecified comparisons that led to the governor departing ‘in choler’ and which ‘settled a jealousy in the governor and caused his misapprehension’.⁴⁷ Not far between the lines was that Lesk had mishandled an important meeting with a powerful ally. There are no other instances of Lesk being tasked to handle sensitive negotiations.

Less than two months later, on 8 January 1617, seven of the Company’s Surat factors – Henry Woodroff, Robert Hutchinson, Lewis Smith, Francis Futter, William Martin, Thomas Rastell, and Thomas Kerridge – met to compile their record of the ‘sundry misdemeanours and disordered vicious life of William Lesk, minister to the English factory at Surat’. They noted that some of what they recorded had already been formally complained of to Thomas Kerridge, while the rest was ‘generally observed by all the factors and other the said Company’s servants in that place’. They explained that Lesk lived in ‘such gross and dissolute manner’ that he brought dishonour on the English as well as the Christian religion, and that they had decided, by ‘general voice and joint consent’ to ask Captain Henry Pepwell, the commander of the 1617 Company fleet, to take Lesk back to England. The reasons the factors gave for their actions was their ‘zeal to Christ (as becometh Christians)’ and their care for ‘the reputation of our country and honourable masters whom we serve’ but what really made Lesk’s faults particularly dangerous was their public nature.⁴⁸ The testimony assembled by Kerridge and the other factors in Surat drew attention to their inability any longer to hide what Lesk did.

The document the factors compiled was highly unusual in the early history of the Company. Lesk in key ways was neither fish nor fowl: his position as minister, which made his misbehaviour so crucial, also made the factors uneasy about passing judgment on him, yet as a resident of the Company’s factory, he was directly under Kerridge’s authority. There was no equivalent to Lesk in Kerridge’s experience. Kerridge had dealt with unruly sailors, and he could deal with unruly factors – he had ordered imprisonments and whippings on occasion with no apparent self-doubt – but his instructions from the Company had not covered preachers.⁴⁹ In his capacity as minister, Lesk would never have been subject to the judgment of someone like Kerridge in England. Even in common law ministers were exempt from secular punishment. In England an unhappy parishioner might be able to complain up the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but there was no episcopalian structure in the Company’s fleet or factories, and no alternate legal mechanism for a flock to expel a minister in the early seventeenth century. Lesk’s actions threatened the Company’s trading interests, but the consequence of distance meant that the normal structures for dealing with the problem did not exist.

The solution for Thomas Kerridge and the other factors was to sidestep this thorny question and send Lesk to England for judgement by Company leaders. The group of factors together charged Captain Henry Pepwell, ‘by virtue of his power from His Majesty and our said masters to command him the said W. Lesk from this place and order his conveyance home for England’ and present the problem to Company leaders themselves.⁵⁰ The factors included their testimony so that the Court of Committees in London might understand Lesk’s dismissal in disgrace. For each charge they made against Lesk, the men who could attest to that charge signed their names. Thus some were witnessed by one or two factors, while others were verified by four or five factors. The men who signed this document were a varied group. Some of them (Robert Hutchinson, Thomas Kerridge, William Martin, and Henry Woodroff), had been in India for several years, others (Francis Futter, Thomas Rastell, and Lewis Smith) had arrived only a few months earlier. Kerridge was the most senior, while Hutchinson, as an attendant on the factors, was the most junior in terms of authority. Given the way the population of the factory could change, it is not clear whether the men who signed the document represented a portion or all of the factors then in Surat (and by corollary whether there were some who refused to sign the document). The document’s reference to ‘all the factors’ and attendants, and that they took action by ‘general voice and joint consent’ suggested that this was an action by most or all present.⁵¹

Several complaints about William Lesk concerned his sexual behaviour. The factors’ account recorded that in June or July, Henry Woodroffe had seen Lesk take a sweeper’s wife into an inner room where he had sexual intercourse with her. Beyond the obvious licentiousness of this behaviour, it was especially problematic because of the caste associations of his choice of partner. The factors’ account of this action explained to London readers that sweepers were widely considered ‘so contemptible amongst these people that the basest degree avoids the conversing or as much as touching them, as held things defileable’. Lesk had made many ‘false oaths and persuasions’ of his innocence to Kerridge and was believed at the time, yet now Woodroffe was testifying as an eyewitness to the event.⁵² Other factors testified to Lesk’s frequent attendance at ‘dishonest houses’ and one attendant of the factory, assigned to watch Lesk’s movements, testified that Lesk sometimes went to the ‘common brothel-house twice in one week’.⁵³ The factors at some point had therefore begun collecting information on Lesk’s behaviour, suggesting a growing sense over time that his conduct was becoming an actionable problem.

Other complaints concerned Lesk’s drunken and disorderly behaviour. The factors recounted an occasion when Lesk attempted to pick a fight with one of the ‘youths in the house’ for ‘some pretended offence’ while drunk, waving a bedstaff as a sword at him. When the youth refused to engage with him, ‘enraged with wine and madness and leaving his bed (upon which he then lay) in great fury, without his upper garment issued out of his chamber and madly assailed the young man’. The two fought a ‘long scuffling conflict’ and ‘very valiantly tore one another out of their clothes’.⁵⁴ The impression is of fighting in the hallways of the residence, in full view of the factors – indeed three testified to what they had seen – and the entire English household.

Two other offences described how William Lesk wasted Company funds or tried to use Company property either for his private profit or to engage in more questionable behaviour. The factors labelled him a ‘most licentious, ungodly liver and one that prefers his epicurism [sic], drunkenness, and intolerable, insolent pride before the divine worship of God’. Aside from his debauched behaviour, Lesk also neglected his duties as a preacher, preferring to ‘live as a libertine and give the bridle of his loose affections free scope’; drank an ‘unmeasurable proportion of wine’ at table, more than his provided ration, ‘of which the whole fleet have taken particular notice’; and then privately in his chamber would ‘there by himself drink drunk alone’. The factors jointly testified that it was Lesk’s addiction to his lifestyle that had led him to refuse Sir Thomas Roe’s request to become his chaplain and even to leave Roe’s letters unanswered.⁵⁵

They described how Lesk had attempted to take a Company horse ‘to go out upon his own pleasure’ to the brothels, at a time when ‘there might be surely expected employment for the horse in many the Company’s affairs’. He was engaging in inappropriate behaviour, requiring Company substance to do so, at times when Company affairs ought to have been undertaken. On that occasion, Thomas Kerridge stopped him and Lesk defamed him, ‘calling him dog and the like’ and, still unsatisfied, ‘insolently struck him on the face’. It was a clear challenge to Kerridge’s authority to govern him – Lesk, the preacher, had struck Kerridge, who was ‘there a chief’ who ‘might with a word have caused his present ruin’.⁵⁶

Kerridge might have been expected to take action against Lesk, who challenged his authority as leader and his honour as an individual.⁵⁷ And yet Kerridge did not. The reason given in the document was that Kerridge had refrained from disciplining Lesk to save face for the English: ‘for the preservation of his country’s repute [he] abstained from prosecuting his just anger against him, that notice might not be taken the English were taught by such a minister’.⁵⁸ This consideration was key. As notorious as Lesk’s behaviour was, in every example mentioned above, evidence of his wrongdoings generally was limited to English eyes and English participants and thus containable, or took place outside of the English house in locations where individual transgression might be expected or overlooked (for instance, in brothels). The one exception involved an Indian whose low status made Lesk’s actions more dangerous if discovered, but at the same time, was someone whose conversation was shunned by higher-status Indians. In short, the factors could argue that all of these examples of bad behaviour were better to overlook than to prosecute, lest the whole community be tarred.

The event that seems to have been the tipping point in prompting the factors to send Lesk back to England – it took place only three days before the composition of this official account – involved public sexual misconduct coupled with public financial misconduct. On 5 January, a prostitute came to the factors’ residence to find Lesk because he had paid for her services the day before with counterfeit money. He refused to exchange the bad money for good, leading her to air the situation and ‘shamelessly and railingly to discover both their shames’ and in the process attracted the notice of the other factors. Thus Lesk’s behaviour in the situation had caused a ‘common noted whore’ to seek him out at the English house. Several factors then made inquiries at the brothel where the ‘sinful matron’ of the brothel vouched for Lesk’s appointment there the day before.⁵⁹ This incident therefore brought together problematic sexual behaviour and allegations of passing counterfeit money, an especially dangerous charge to be associated with representatives of a trading venture who regularly borrowed from and sent money via local money lenders and merchants.⁶⁰ It was also an association made likelier by Lesk’s private trade and therefore active engagement in commercial activities.

The testimony of the factors hinged on the way Lesk’s behaviour jeopardised the factors’, the Company’s, and even the nation’s honour and reputation. The honour the factors appealed to in this document was not the honour of lineage and blood, but of patriarchy and social order. Each household was a microcosm of the commonwealth in contemporary English social and political theory; thus the English house at Surat was also the English household at Surat. Disorder in the house that the head of the house, Thomas Kerridge, could not control meant the household was in disorder, and as these men were the representatives of the English, this disorder reflected badly on king, country, and Company.⁶¹ This type of mismanagement and its consequences was precisely what Company leaders had been trying to prevent with their screening of candidates and instructions for good government and what Roe had been warned about by Prince Khurram. William Lesk’s danger, therefore, lay in his ability to discredit the English as a whole. Given the shaky ground on which the English stood at the Mughal court, news of decay and deceit at the heart of the English factory might result in real and damaging consequences for English trade. This complicated calculus lay behind the factors’ decision to manage Lesk for months before reaching the point where they decided to send him back to London for judgement.

It is also entirely possible that Lesk was not the only factor who resorted to brothels or whose sexual behaviour was questionable. There were no English women in the Company’s factories. Any sexual liaisons the factors had would have been with women in Surat, and it seems likely that the same brothels that Lesk frequented were also frequented by the others. The letters from Surat to London or to other East Indian factories were very circumspect with regard to the sexual liaisons of the factors. In some cases, however, we know that the English factors resorted to prostitutes and sometimes formed long-lasting and legal relationships with local women.⁶² The factors may have overlooked Lesk’s activities for so long because they were very little different from their own, or they may have overlooked them until they stopped being like their own. Perhaps paying a prostitute with counterfeit coin or sleeping with a sweeper’s wife – the two instances of sexual misconduct that garnered the most attention in their account – were indefensible in a way that an illicit visit to a brothel generally was not.

Learning of the outcome of the meeting, William Lesk, apparently contrite, convinced a factor to mediate between Thomas Kerridge and himself to drop the charges. Lesk conceded the justice of the charges and that he ought to leave Surat, citing the ‘guilt of his own conscience’. He promised not to contest being sent back to England, and even offered to board ship immediately, waiting onboard until March when the fleet would cast off, but asked that the testimony of his ‘debauched and lascivious life’ not be sent. This show of goodwill struck a chord with Kerridge, who agreed, ‘unwilling to publish these his so many foul vices to the censure of many’.⁶³ The guiding principle was to quiet the scandal and avoid detection in India, not to exact retribution for Lesk’s actions in London.

The trouble was that William Lesk did not actually board ship, nor did he reform his behaviour, which in fact got worse. For example, his actions now took place ‘in time of much business’ when anyone might be passing by. One day Lesk grabbed one of the brokers who was walking past his door, forced him into the room and whipped him with a horsewhip. The broker, an Indian, cried out that he would go to the governor of Surat for justice for this unprovoked attack.⁶⁴ An appeal to the governor would have been the worst possible outcome for English interests and Kerridge managed to persuade the broker that the English themselves would deliver full justice. Kerridge collected several of the factors and the captain of one of the ships to help him question Lesk, ‘to require reason of this outrage, so far unbeseeming his coat and profession’. Lesk, ‘enraged with wine and madness, railed in most unsufferable terms generally on them all’. He refused to give a reason for his attack except that he willed it, and that the broker would not give him goods which Lesk had demanded without payment.⁶⁵

Thomas Kerridge censured William Lesk for his actions and gave him an ultimatum: either change his behaviour or board the ships. Lesk did not take the reproof well, and ‘vowed to send the said Thomas Kerridge aboard’ and any who tried to help Kerridge. The factors retreated to the room of fellow factor Thomas Rastell to deliberate and come up with ‘some course for his disposure without further scandal to us or our nation’. As they deliberated, Lesk came looking for them, forcing his way into Kerridge’s empty chamber and then into Rastell’s room, crying that he came for Kerridge’s blood. When the factors attempted to turn him out of the room, Lesk ‘felt in his bosom as if he had hidden there some instrument of mischief’. Another factor reached to find what Lesk felt for and pulled out a naked blade. Not content to leave well enough alone, Lesk ‘impudently boasted for whom it was intended’.⁶⁶

It seems unlikely that any promise of good behaviour and repentance could have satisfied Thomas Kerridge at this point. He was the chief of the factory, and while he may have hesitated to discipline Lesk, he could not allow Lesk or anyone else to publicly assault him in a way that threatened real violence – Kerridge was, after all, the head of the English household. But it was not only Kerridge who had been assaulted this time; a key component of this point of no return was that Lesk had whipped an Indian broker who threatened to bring Lesk’s actions to the notice of Mughal authorities. There was no action possible at this juncture to keep Lesk’s affairs private. Covering for Lesk at this point meant becoming complicit, and that was the outcome the factors had been trying to avoid. Lesk was bound and left alone in a room, the factors inventoried his goods, and after a general vote, they decided to send him to the ship. Lesk was left to consider the matter for a few hours and decided to go on board freely and not under restraint, an attempt once again to give the appearance to any onlookers beyond the factors that he was not being sent in disgrace. Each of the seven factors who saw the assault first on the broker and then on the chief factor subscribed their name to this second account, which was sent, along with the original six charges, to the Court of Committees of the East India Company in London.⁶⁷ Some of these men had also signed the initial charge (Thomas Kerridge, Thomas Rastell, Henry Woodroffe, William Martin, and Lewis Smith), while John Crowther and Robert Young had only arrived in Surat with goods for the ships a few days before, just in time to see Lesk’s most recent episode.

When the convoy sailed in March, Lesk sailed with it aboard the Globe, and the Lesk affair was over as far as the factors at Surat were concerned. Sir Thomas Roe, upon hearing the circumstances of Lesk’s dismissal, wrote to the factors that he was grieved by the news and hoped their respect for Lesk’s calling would not diminish even as Lesk himself had proved a problem. He advised them to ‘let the scandal die’ and added, ‘his absence I hope will expiate his memory’.⁶⁸ Either absence did expiate his memory, or the factors proved adept at controlling the scandal, for William Lesk did not appear again in the Surat records once the last of his debts had been paid or collected and his goods shipped back to England.

Contesting the Story in London

If this was the extent of William Lesk’s story, it would be a valuable insight into the operation of the Company in the early seventeenth century. But Lesk’s involvement with the East India Company did not end with his exile from India. Instead, it is his actions to salvage his reputation that distinguish the final part of his story.

William Lesk arrived in England in late August 1617. Still aboard the Globe, but after it docked in Plymouth, Lesk composed a letter to the leaders of the East India Company.⁶⁹ It was not a plea for clemency or a justification of his actions as might be expected under the circumstances, but rather, a long, detailed, and slanted exposition of how matters stood in Surat. What was obvious to anyone who had dealings with the East India Company was that what its leaders lacked above all was information. Lesk sought to leverage that desire for information against the charges against him. He presented himself as a necessary and longed-for intelligencer, an ‘ancient resident’ in India, ‘from whom alone the secrets of the kingdom are to be learned’.⁷⁰ Information was valuable and its carrier a valuable person.

Lesk’s missive sowed discord by appealing to the worst fears of Company leaders. His allegations fit neatly into Company tropes of mismanagement. He pointed fingers at the captains of Company ships, accusing them of engaging in private trade, neglecting to mention that he himself had brought back privately bought goods worth some £300. He lingered on disagreements between the factors at Surat and Sir Thomas Roe, accusing the factors of wilful ‘great indiscretion and want of government’ and of delaying shipments of necessary goods to Roe.⁷¹ Lesk questioned the abilities of the factors and accused them of ‘sottish negligence’ and described how the factors had let profits slip through their fingers.⁷² Worse, he argued, the death of the former chief factor and the departure of another factor had left Company business in India

in the hands of a company of young, wanton, riotous lads, who, far from the eye of justice, violently carried with a streak of disordered passions, and all power without controlment in their own hands, not only freely burst out into all manner of lewdness but also by their indiscreet and heady carriage of business have brought both themselves and the nation to stink in the sight of the people of the land.⁷³

One factor, for example, he characterised as so willing to resort to his rapier and duelling that the other factors avoided him for long stretches of time.⁷⁴

Company leaders did not realise, he implied, the real state of affairs in Surat. Lesk presented disagreements among the factors over trade policy in the East Indies as anarchy struggling against ordered restraint, reducing months-long debates to the simple stereotype of youth rejecting authority. Kerridge and the factors were ‘young lads, without governor or government’ and they met ‘tumultuously’ to be irreverent and to laugh and make fun.⁷⁵ Almost turning his own story inside out, Lesk recounted how the factors had acted with ‘impudence and boldness, all business set aside’ and how, in the English house in Surat, ‘the vices of whoredom, drunkenness, excess and riot, for fear formerly in some sort refrained, were now with a high hand publicly maintained’.⁷⁶

Lesk inverted his own actions to provide the outline of what he charged the factors with doing. Matters had come to such a pass in Surat, he wrote, that

fighting, brawling and challenging into the field were now so usual that the governor of Surat, fearing further trouble to ensue, was forced to interpose his authority, who soundly having beat and bound Thomas Kerridge, struck great terror and fear in the hearts of the rest.⁷⁷

This recounting could be his story, except that the governor had not been called in after all, which was the objective the factors had striven to ensure, and it was Lesk and not Kerridge who had been bound. The one person wholly untouched by any of Lesk’s accusations was Sir Thomas Roe, perhaps because Lesk respected the man, but probably because he still hoped to benefit from the connection, and trusted Roe not to publish his disgrace – which assumption proved correct, for Roe wrote nothing condemnatory of Lesk at any point.

William Lesk’s return to England, according to him, was not caused by any faulty behaviour of his own, but arose from his attempts to reprove the factors. He wrote that the factors repudiated him for calling attention to their own sins, which they then falsely accused him of. His descriptions of their actions consistently emphasised their youth and disorder, playing on the bias of Company leaders to older men, and generally echoed contemporary ideas about youth and its proclivity to disorder. His own actions could only be understood by biblical comparisons: he was like Lot trying to persuade the men of Sodom, or Moses speaking to Pharaoh, and the Company’s factories were a Babel he had attempted to bring to order.⁷⁸ According to his letter, once Lesk realised not only that he would always be despised by the factors for calling attention to their ungodly lives (though he noted that as a preacher he was used to such a response), and that the individual factories would always remain small, providing no ‘auditory or congregation beseeming the residence of a minister’, he made a secret resolution to board the next ship to England. This was not an acknowledgment of defeat, but rather a choice to minister ‘where the preaching of the word was most desired’, and where he could best ‘earn and deserve’ his salary.⁷⁹ Yet even as he claimed that his return to England was self-prompted and his plans kept secret, he explained that the factors had pre-emptively laid the groundwork for destroying his reputation to cover their sins. His letter suggested that they were guilty of a whisper campaign, by which ‘the grossest imputations should peremptorily be fastened upon me and with all subtlety and craft divulged and conveyed unto the ears of the masters and merchants of this last fleet’. These supposed witnesses had been bought with ‘no small promises of love, amity and assistance in their private affairs’.⁸⁰ Operating under apparent ignorance of the physical documents the factors had sent to make their case, Lesk suggested the factors, in order to avoid ‘the suspicion of malicious spleen, like cunning and crafty gunners, closely and afar off making some small smoke rather than any true fire’, had used rumour conveyed by other men’s mouths to smear him.⁸¹

Lesk’s haste to assert his side of the story could not forestall the spread of rumours about his activities in Surat – within days of the convoy’s arrival at Plymouth, Company records showed that Company leaders had heard something of the scandal. The Company minutes have preserved some of the rumours. The court minutes in September 1617 revealed that William Lesk had petitioned to have his £300 worth of private goods delivered without paying freight charges, but that Company leaders were split about whether to grant him this favour because ‘some condemned him in their opinions, as worthy of no kindness, seeing he was sent home as a malefactor (as is said)’. Others had heard a different story, had ‘heard that he was wronged’. The rumour they heard absolving Lesk was more involved than the excuses he gave in his letter; some had heard that the factors in Surat had plotted against him, setting up an elaborate scheme of planting a woman to be found with him in the English house.⁸² The document written by the Surat factors did not reach Company leaders until early October, meaning that for some time, the only information Company leaders had was rumour and possibly Lesk’s own letter. The fact that they had heard so much, and representing both sides, reveals that Lesk, returning factors (there was at least one), and the ‘masters and merchants’ he had warned about, were sharing their stories.

Company leaders received and read the factors’ letter in early October. A select group of Company leaders immediately questioned Lesk. This did not go well for him. When asked, he denied the charges, some ‘utterly’ and some ‘so weakly as that the truth of them in a manner was half confessed’. The charge of fighting was so badly excused, for example, that ‘he could not free himself from the blame and shame thereof’. One other man who had travelled on the convoy, Thomas Mitford, was called in to corroborate the charges. He had been a factor in Surat before being posted to Ahmedabad; he was not one of the signatories of the document but had specific knowledge of the factory in Surat. Mitford testified to Lesk’s ‘drunkenness and quarrelsome disposition’, ‘that he heard him charged with incontinency’, and that one of the officers on the fleet had told him how Lesk had whipped the broker and assaulted Kerridge. The written charges, Mitford’s corroboration, and Lesk’s poor rebuttal convinced Company leaders. They condemned Lesk, blaming him ‘for his so evil and dissolute carriage, which was the more heinous in one of his coat’ and took especial exception to Lesk’s hypocrisy in blaming the factors for his own failings.⁸³

Having confirmed the charges against William Lesk, condemning his behaviour was not a shocking step to take, yet the Company’s condemnation remained entirely private. Despite his tarnished reputation as an upright preacher, Company leaders debated how they should act in light of his ‘coat’ – that is, that he was a preacher.⁸⁴ They decided not to report his behaviour to the ecclesiastical authorities but to leave his guilt to his conscience, though they reminded him that ecclesiastical authorities would ‘severely punish such infamous faults’.⁸⁵ Company leaders made no further punishment than the threat of what would happen to him if they reported him, which they had already said they would not. They admitted that a guiding concern was ‘that the world might not take public notice of his errors’.⁸⁶

Having failed to prove his innocence in the eyes of the Company, Lesk made one further, entirely public gesture to salvage his reputation. On 24 October, London publisher George Purslowe made an entry in the Stationers’ Register for a sermon by William Lesk.⁸⁷ The sermon that was published was advertised as delivered on 18 May 1617 at the Cape of Good Hope. The dedicatory epistle to the East India Company governor, Sir Thomas Smith, overflowed with praise and contained a short justification of the good works done by the Company both in terms of trade and of spreading the Christian faith. The title page of the sermon described Lesk as a preacher ‘entertained by the Honourable Company of Merchants trading into East India, for the instruction and comfort of the Fleet, by them sent forth for those Eastern parts Anno 1614’. This description enumerated Lesk’s Company ties more directly and extensively than any other printed sermon from the time.⁸⁸ It also emphasised the remade version of Lesk’s role that he had explained in his letter: he ministered the fleet rather than the factory. The Bible verse printed on the title page was a psalm, including the words ‘forsake me not’ and ‘I have shewed thy strength unto this Generation’ gently echoing the sentiments of Lesk’s letter, that he had preached morals in India to the young factors and been repudiated by them. The end of the dedicatory epistle additionally asked Smith to ‘protect from the slanderous and carping tongues of malicious atheists, this small treatise’. In no way did the sermon directly reference the circumstances which had sent Lesk home and even the references cited above were circumspect and not obvious.⁸⁹

The decision by Lesk to print the sermon after he had already been found wanting by the Company and after they had already decided not to pursue further action against him was one calculated to make it impossible for them to revisit that decision. Publishing the sermon and emblazoning it with his name and ties to the Company was an attempt to establish himself as an unexceptionable figure, with positive ties to the Company. It was not a defence against charges against him, but an assertion of normal and notable service in a format that aggressively identified Lesk with the East India Company. If the Company repudiated Lesk without publicising the entire affair, they would appear to be renouncing a loyal and dutiful servant. If they publicised the entire affair, they risked the good name and reputation of their work in the East Indies. Printing the sermon, in other words, was an action intended to firm up the Company’s resolve not to pursue actions against him. It was a skilled use of the politics of publicity.

The concern of Company leaders with public notice in their questioning of Lesk and his decision to purposely enter the public arena with his sermon allude to the growing recognition of the power of publicity in and around the Company. By 1617, the East India Company had begun – somewhat unwillingly – to experiment with the politics of publicity. ⁹⁰ A series of printed pamphlets critiquing the Company had appeared in 1614 and 1615. Internal Company debate about the critical pamphlets revealed that Company leaders were actively conceptualising the real meaning and consequence of this new form of public critique, and whether to ignore, respond in kind by publishing their own pamphlet, or file suit. Ultimately, Company member Sir Dudley Digges published a defence of the East India Company in 1615 directly responding to the most critical of the pamphlets.⁹¹ The episode was essentially their introduction to the nascent public sphere, and that critique offered in a public, printed forum could damage them. When Lesk published his sermon in 1617, therefore, that a printed pamphlet could draw extra scrutiny to the Company was a recently learned lesson. Within a decade Company leaders embarked on full-fledged campaigns using the politics of publicity to attempt to shape policy and public opinion in the aftermath of the legal proceedings at Amboyna, but in 1617, what was more evident to Company leaders was how effectively publicity could be deployed against the Company, as Lesk was doing.⁹²

The threat of negative publicity worked because Company leaders were constantly preoccupied with the Company’s public reputation. The Company’s ability to function depended on investment; public perception of Company malfeasance, either economic or moral, could have real consequences on the ability to run the trade, and the first two decades of the Company’s operation saw frequent attempts by Company leaders to restrict the circulation of news of events or actions that might reflect badly on themselves or the Company. Company leaders also perceived the reputation and moral behaviour of Company employees as being in the public eye, a particularly dangerous circumstance since they knew that Company employees sometimes fell short of their standards. In December 1614 Company leaders had confiscated and then probably burned ‘certain lascivious books and pictures’ one captain had brought back from abroad because they would have been ‘a great scandal to the Company, and unbecoming their gravity to permit’.⁹³

The decision to condemn and cover up Lesk’s behaviour was thus an acknowledgement of the power of reputation and that the knife of publicity cut both ways – the story of Lesk’s affairs would ruin Lesk but it would also damage the Company, and so they let Lesk go without further penalty. Moreover, Company leaders even decided to allow Lesk to keep his illegally brought £300 of goods so long as he paid the freight charges. Ironically, they were afraid that confiscating his ill-gotten gains would deter other preachers from joining the Company, in a sotto voce acknowledgment of the ubiquity of private trade.⁹⁴ Company leaders cut ties with William Lesk, but otherwise appear to have let him go unscathed. Lesk’s letter and sermon did not rehabilitate him, but they may have helped protect him from the kind of prosecution the factors in Surat might have expected of someone who drew a knife on the chief factor, passed counterfeit coins, and whipped people he had no business whipping.

Conclusion

After his 2 October 1617 interrogation before the Company Court of Committees, Company records made no more mention of Lesk; nor is it clear what he did after returning from India beyond publishing the sermon in late October. The scandalous story of Lesk disappeared too, as factors and Company leaders contained the story to minimise its damage. But the issues Lesk brought to the forefront did not disappear, and Company leaders continued to struggle with the difficulties of governing their employees from a distance of two years, of maintaining their place and reputation both in India and in London, and managing the dangers and uses of publicity. The factors in the East Indies similarly continued to struggle with self-government and order in the peculiar hothouse environment of their small factories that existed somewhat precariously in East Indies cities.

The variables that distance introduced tested everyone. Company leaders had only imperfect tools at their disposal to govern the men who controlled their money and resources in the East Indies. As the example of William Lesk demonstrated, picking ‘grave’ preachers could only take Company leaders so far. Ultimately, their fortunes lay (literally) in the hands of men far away. The Surat factors felt the distance no less acutely. From the protestations that they governed themselves no differently than if they were only as far as France, to the carefully attested document they sent back with the person of Lesk, the factors understood that they were speaking to men – the Company leaders – well aware of their imperfect grasp of their affairs. They had not only to live at a distance but defend themselves at a distance as well.

The problem of distance had no solution; it could not be resolved. Distance was simply a feature of long-distance trade. Company leaders and employees had to learn to manage it and live with it, to accommodate the problems it introduced to the Company’s operation. The early years of the East India Company reveal the difficult process of learning how to manage an extensive overseas trade – to manage the social and political problems of distance. As newcomers to Surat, the English spent their first decades in India always on the brink of being asked to leave. Various public disturbances at their hands had not favourably inclined the authorities to them, and their Portuguese rivals would have been only too happy not to have to share the India trade with the English. Sending a preacher was meant to bolster the English position, but William Lesk through his disorderly conduct seemed to jeopardise the entire trade for the English. For the factors in Surat, Lesk threatened the honour of the English nation. In London, Company leaders spoke of the honour of the Company and the evil of private trade. Nevertheless, both the factors and Company leaders wanted the continued prosperity of the East Indies trade and both knew that the distance at which the trade was conducted shaped the trade in ways the participants could only sometimes predict. The consequences of even the best-intentioned efforts, of Company leaders and factors, to govern the factories were entirely unpredictable.

The story of William Lesk also reveals that what occurred in Surat could mean something very different in London. Social probity united trade, trust, and prosperity, but managing the distance between Surat and London presented very different challenges in both places. In Surat, the factors ultimately could not keep the story of Lesk’s indiscretions secret and so, purposely publicised the story by sending Lesk and their account to London. Company leaders, on the other hand, worked hard to keep the story secret and succeeded: it is recorded only in Company documents. Lesk himself adopted a very different tone in Surat and London, leveraging publicity and his virtuous reputation against what the Company knew of him. He too won given that the degree of his misdeeds is recorded only in Company documents. The distance between Surat and London was therefore not only measured in miles but also in terms of expectations, presumptions, and consequences real and imagined.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Foster, Letters Received, 5: 36.

2 Prevailing winds meant that East Indies voyages occurred only at certain times of the year. Most English ships departing for the East Indies were gone for two to five years, travelling to numerous East Indies ports before returning to England. Sending and receiving an answer might take two years.

3 MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession, 79–120; MacMillan, Atlantic Imperial Constitution, 11–29; Mishra, Business of State; Mishra, “Diplomacy,” 20–24. This delegation of power by the central authority to local actors also characterised the operation of the English state and mechanisms of state formation in the seventeenth century: Braddick, State Formation; Hindle, State and Social Change.

4 For K. N. Chaudhuri, the creation of an extensive bureaucracy solved the problem of oversight: Chaudhuri, “The English East India Company in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Pre-modern Multinational Organization,” 37–8. A central issue in recent work is the extent of agents’ private trade and whether it took place at the expense of company trade. Ann Carlos, sometimes writing with Stephen Nicholas, has approached this question as an application of the principal-agent problem. Her analysis reveals that despite widespread concerns about the prevalence of private trade (both by contemporaries and later historians), companies had sufficient tools to allow for efficient operation: Carlos and Nicholas, “Agency Problems”; Carlos and Nicholas, “Managing the Manager”; Carlos, “Bonding and the Agency Problem”. This work joins an extensive historiography looking specifically at the role of private trade in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century East India Company, as Company revenue soared and its imperial character developed: Furber, John Company; Marshall, East Indian Fortunes; Mentz, English Gentleman Merchant; Watson, Foundation for Empire.

5 Insofar as the social life and conditions of early overseas settlements have been studied, it has generally been in the context of the Atlantic world colonies. Recent works include Kupperman, Jamestown Project; Kupperman, Providence Island; Horn, Adapting to a New World; and Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea. Conditions in the early East Indies are far less well studied. A few exceptions that touch on social aspects include Fury, “First English East India Company Voyage”; Games, Web of Empire; Games, Inventing the English Massacre, 13–57; Gokhale, Surat; Hubbard, Englishmen at Sea; O’Connor, Chaplains, 24–69; Mentz, English Gentleman; and Rawlinson, “Life in an English Factory in India”.

6 Strategic uses of force at sea were key to developing the Company’s trade, and there were many within the Company who advocated using the threat of force as a tool, but, in the first half of the seventeenth century, in contrast to the Portuguese Estado da India and the Dutch East India Company, the EIC had not been granted the power to fortify and settle. Force, actual and threatened, became a more regularly used tool by the late seventeenth century, as fortification took a more central role in the Company, though Watson notes that the threat of force always accompanied the supposedly peaceful trade the English engaged in: Watson, “Fortification and Force,” 70–72, 74–75; Stern, Company-State, 61–82.

7 The role of religious personnel in the early history of the Company deserves further investigation. Most work has treated the chaplains and preachers who went overseas as a separate and recognisable group with shared aims over time; for example O’Connor, Chaplains; Smith, “Risky Business”; while Games, Web of Empire, 219–253 investigates ministers’ experiences moving between different overseas ventures.

8 Historians have long recognised the role of records, recordkeeping, and paperwork in the function of the EIC and consolidation of its power. See Ogborn, Indian Ink; Mishra, “In the Company of Merchants”; Siddique, “Governance through Documents”.

9 In general, historians tend to study the Company’s history either in England, or the East Indies. How people, events, or ideas in one sphere influenced the other is less often the subject of exploration. A few examples of works that do track people, events, or ideas moving between England and the East Indies include Dirks, Scandal of Empire; Games, Invention of the English Massacre; Milton, “Marketing a Massacre”; Mishra, Business of State; Ogborn, Indian Ink, 104–39; Pettigrew, “Failure of the Cloth Trade”; Stern, Company-State, 41–60.

10 Gokhale, Surat, 8–20; 51–2; 98–115; Subrahmanyam, “Hidden Face,” 219–222.

11 Foster, ed. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. ii, 408–09.

12 The initial articles agreed upon by Thomas Best and Mughal officials in Surat allowed the Company to settle factories not only in Surat but also Cambay, Ahmedabad, Goga, and any other locations within the Mughal empire: Foster, “Thomas Best,” 31–3. Best was not the first Company representative to try to secure trading privileges; the March 1610 commission for Lawrence Femmel, sent as principal factor for the sixth Company voyage, instructed him to try to secure trading privileges for the English to reside in Surat: Birdwood, First Letterbook, 319–21.

13 Hubbard notes the self-conscious attempts by Company fleets to project a civil and trustworthy appearance in places where economic opportunities were mediated by trust: Hubbard, Englishmen at Sea, 221–3.

14 British Library [henceforth BL] IOR B/5, 8 September 1615.

15 The best study of the Company’s factors in the early seventeenth century is in Chaudhuri, English East India Company, 74–88.

16 BL IOR B/5, 19 August 1615. 25 September 1615.

17 Some factors joined the ranks of Company leaders once they returned to England. After Methwold returned to England in 1639, for example, he was elected to the Company’s leadership. He was not the first; Thomas Kerridge was elected to the Company’s leadership after his return to England in 1628.

18 Birdwood, First Letter Book, 322–23.

19 Foster, ed. Letters Received, 4: 301–302. This list comes from a letter from the factors at Surat to the EIC, 10 March 1616.

20 Robert Hutchinson, for example, seems to have been a Company employee in London at least by 1610, when he was tasked with taking an account of goods, IOR B/3, 30 November 1610. In 1614, he was sent to India to be an apprentice or the servant of one of the factors. At that point, he already had a number of specialised skills, including Italian, French, Dutch, and music: Sainsbury, Calendar of State Papers, East Indies, 2: 273.

21 Fury’s numbers for the Bantam factory in 1603–05 – seven factors out of some 22–24 total inhabitants – are consistent with what I have observed for the Indian factories: Fury, “‘Good Wills Hunting’,” 527.

22 Lesk, for example, had a servant named Benjamin Elie who attended him. He was never mentioned by name and only rarely by position, i.e. ‘Lesk’s boy’.

23 Gokhale, Surat, 137–146; Nadri, “The English and Dutch East India Companies”; Sen, “Searching for the Indian”.

24 Gokhale estimates the average population of Surat in the early seventeenth century as 150,000 to 200,000 though there was considerable seasonal fluctuation; the cool season, when ships could most easily arrive and depart, saw merchants, caravans, and crews descend on the town in large numbers. The arrival of the English ships was part of this yearly pattern. Gokhale, Surat, 10–11.

25 Birdwood, First Letter Book, 331.

26 Foster, ed. Letters Received, 5: 128–129; BL IOR E/3/4, no. 452, f. 198r. Lillington was eventually executed according to martial law.

27 See for instance, Strachan and Penrose, eds., Journal of William Keeling, 110, 112, 114; Terry, A Voyage to East India, 174–75.

28 Foster, ed. Letters Received, 5: 120–121.

29 Foster, ed. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, Vol. 1, 136–37.

30 BL IOR B/5, 13 December 1613.

31 For example, Surat-based factor William Biddulph wrote to Company leaders in 1613 about the need to have a representative at the imperial court to counteract whatever ‘these prating Jesuit Fathers put into the King’s head’: Chaudhuri, English East India Company, 43.

32 BL IOR B/5, 21 October 1614 and 26 October 1614.

33 One applicant in 1614 was not hired on account of his youth, Company leaders deciding that the factors ‘will not regard the speeches nor admonitions of one so young’, BL IOR B/5, 26 October 1614. Youth was a capacious category, however; an applicant identified as 30 years of age was also deemed too young, BL IOR B/6, 11 November 1617.

34 On credit in early modern English society, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation.

35 A ‘Gulielmus Leisk’ received an MA between 1601 and 1605. Copland was listed as a student at ‘nova academia Aberdonensi’ or Marischal College, where he later endowed a chair in divinity: Scottish Notes and Queries, vol. 2, 2nd ser. (1900): 32; Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae, I: 159–162. Copland is better known for his later career as a preacher in Bermuda: Games, Migration and the Origins, 200; Games, Web of Empire, 3–6, 219–226.

36 BL IOR B/5, 21 October 1614; 26 October 1614. Copland was already in the East Indies in 1614.

37 BL IOR B/5, 26 October 1614. On occasion, the verse texts of the sample sermons were recorded; an applicant in 1609 preached upon Matthew 5:5: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’: BL IOR B/3, 15 March 1609.

38 BL IOR B/5, 29 November 1614.

39 BL IOR B/5, 21 October 1614.

40 BL IOR B/5, 29 November 1614.

41 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 4:82. The Company seized Lesk’s goods in 1616, including three fancy looking glasses, two less valuable looking glasses, and 23 knives, valued at some 235 mahmudis. This may have been the remainder of what he had brought to India, or evidence of ongoing trade.

42 Strachan and Penrose, East India Company Journals, 54–55.

43 See for example Strachan and Penrose, eds., Journal of William Keeling, 58–9, 61, 63.

44 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 4: 100. My characterisation of Roe’s character is based on Mishra, “Diplomacy at the Edge”.

45 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 4: 205; BL Additional MSS. 9366, 113r. Kerridge promised to send Roe a new chaplain and soon dispatched Edward Terry. Terry was young, about 25, but the ‘graver’ of the two preachers on the convoy. BL Additional MSS. 9366, 114r.

46 BL Additional MSS. 9366, 122r.

47 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 4: 346–347.

48 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5: 37. The original of this document can be found in BL IOR E/3/4, f. 145r–146v. The version in Letters Received omits the most salacious wordings. The original notes that Lesk had paid the prostitute ‘in lieu of the beastly lustful use he had made of her body’ but the printed version omits this phrase with an ellipsis.

49 See for example BL IOR G/36/84, f. 45r; 55v.

50 Foster, ed. Letters Received, 5: 37.

51 Ibid. The March 1616 list of the factors in each factory was already out of date in late 1616 as at least two of the factors listed for Surat had since died.

52 Ibid. This accusation was one of few that had a date associated with it. The list noted that this took place some six months previously.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 38.

56 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5: 38.

57 Among social equals, an action like Lesk’s could not be ignored. Lesk and Kerridge, however, might not be considered social equals, and so protocol might be less clear: Cust, “Honour and Politics,” 76.

58 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5: 38.

59 Ibid., 36.

60 For an example of the extensive financial connections between Company factors and local merchants and moneylenders, see BL IOR G/36/84.

61 Ibid., 81–82; Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder.

62 Games, Web of Empire, 105–09. John Leachland, Company factor in Surat, married an Indian woman and had a child. He lost his employment with the Company when he refused to leave his family: Rawlinson, British Beginnings, 18–9.

63 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5: 39. The description is unfortunately undated, but took place sometime between the 8 January meeting and the departure of the convoy in March.

64 ‘Broker’ as a term could apply to merchants of great wealth and influence in Surat as well as smaller middlemen. That a broker could have recourse to the governor was not, therefore, impossible or even unlikely.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 40.

67 Ibid.

68 BL Additional MSS. 6115, f. 175v, 177r.

69 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5:175.

70 Ibid., 178.

71 Ibid., 176–7. For more on the disagreements between the factors and Roe, see Mishra, “Diplomacy at the Edge,” 16–21. Company leaders knew of the tension between the two.

72 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5:178, 182.

73 Ibid., 180.

74 Ibid., 181–3.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., 181.

77 Ibid., 181. The other incident Lesk inverted in this account was the attempt to install a bell, which had indeed led to Kerridge’s brief arrest before he could sort out the situation (a situation troubled in part because of Lesk’s angering of the governor, described above).

78 Ibid., 184. See also Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. Shephard presents contemporary ideas on the progression from disorderly youth to orderly householder.

79 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5:184–6.

80 Ibid.

81 Foster, ed., Letters Received, 5:185.

82 BL IOR B/8, 23 September 1617.

83 BL IOR B/6, 2 October 1617. Lesk suggested that Swanley, the officer who told Mitford about the whipping, was indebted to Kerridge and thus a suspect witness.

84 BL IOR B/6, 2 October 1617.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.

87 Arber, Transcript of the Register, vol. 3, 285.

88 Lesk, A Sermon Preached Aboard.

89 Ibid., titlepage, A3v.

90 The earliest iterations of what we might term the nascent public sphere were coming into shape in the early seventeenth century. Company leaders were in many ways early adopters of the tools of public appeal, though with very mixed success. For a good introduction to the function and limitation of the concept of the public sphere in late Elizabethan and early Stuart public sphere, see Lake and Pincus, eds., Politics of the Public Sphere.

91 Mishra, Business of State, 121–25.

92 Milton, “Marketing a Massacre”, Mishra, Business of State, 216–235.

93 BL IOR B/5, 16 December 1614.

94 BL IOR B/6, 23 September 1617.