How to Pawn the Crown Jewels
Elizabeth Hines
Johns Hopkins University
What do you do if you want to launder precious jewels, illegally export gold, and smuggle goods in early modern England? The actions of a community of Anglo-Dutch courtiers and financiers under the early Stuart kings raise these questions. This paper argues that the Stuarts allowed a network of Anglo-Dutch financiers to continue questionable business practices as part of their efforts to produce a favorable environment for financing the court, particularly when they wanted to pawn crown jewels in the Netherlands. They pawned crown jewels not once, not twice, but four different times in the early seventeenth century, always with merchants from within the Anglo-Dutch network to which they had been providing privileges. Exploring the system of loans on the crown jewels that emphasizes the role that precious jewels and metals played in the growth of both the English and Dutch states and empires.
