The second great struggle of the Merchants Adventurers was with the Hanseatic traders in England. In the 14th century the HANSEATIO LEAGUE (q.v.) had been a great power, but towards the end of the 15th it began to decline. It had established itself (temp. Henry III.) strongly in England. Its merchants assisted the English kings financially and were therefore favoured. Having first settled in some of the towns on the east coast, they finally concentrated themselves in the STEELYARD at London, where they had an establishment imposing by its magnitude and strong defences. A rigorous discipline was maintained amongst the Easterlings, as they were called, the jealous hostility of the city population requiring them to be perpetuallyon their guard. The Merchants Adventurers, when they had successfully asserted their claims against their English rivals, were eager to get into their hands the whole export trade, at least that in woollen cloth. They were jealous of the comparative immunity from customs enjoyed by the cloths exported through the Hanse The treaty of Utrecht, 1474, had provided that Englishmen should possess the same privileges in Hanseatic towns abroad as the Germans did in England. But the English merchants complained that this reciprocity was not accorded to them. Efforts were made in consequence by Henry VII. to obtain such compacts with Denmark, and such a footing in Livonia, as would to some extent make English traders independent of the Hanse. But political motives led the king to recede from the attitude thus taken up, and to confirm to the Hanseatic traders the privileges they enjoyed in London. Henry VIII. also, unwilling to provoke the enmity of the League, continued to protect the rights of the " Merchants of the Steelyard." Meantime the Merchants Adventurers had been pushing with great energy their trade with the Low Countries. Wolsey, dissatisfied with the treatment of English traders in the Netherlands, sought to remove the staple for cloth to Calais, and Thomas Cromwell wished to establish it in England. But both these projects failed. The latter proposal was revived in the reign of Elizabeth, and was strongly advocated by Cecil ; but the Merchants Adventurers preferred to continue trading to Antwerp, probably because the new arrangement would have necessitated the granting to foreigners in England an equality with the native traders. The Duke of Alva, when sent to the Netherlands by Philip II., seized the property of the English merchants at Antwerp, and they in consequence withdrew in 1578 to Hamburg, where special inducements were offered them. Antwerp, as a commercial centre, was ruined by the civil war ; many of the Netherland merchants also removed to England, and a great number of artisans did the same, thus introducing branches of the cloth manufacture which had not previously been practised there. Already in 1552 the English merchants had obtained from the Privy Council a decree abolishing the privileges of the Steelyard, and reducing the Hansa traders in England to the position of other foreigners. Their privileges were, however, partially restored under Mary, and in the early part of Elizabeth's reign ; but, failing to recover their old position, they procured the expulsion from Hamburg of the English merchants who had been invited thither. After various measures of retaliation on both sides, the English were, in 1597, expelled from all the dominions of the Empire. Elizabeth forthwith directed the civic authorities of London to close the Steelyard, and ordered the German merchants to leave England, thus bringing to an end the history of the Hanseatic league in this country.
After this period, we find the "foreign residence or oomptoir " of the Merchants Adventurers fixed successively at Groningen, Delft, and Dort. In 1649 they are invited to return to Bruges, but decline to do so. They are then finally established at Hamburg, and come to be commonly known as the Hamburg Company.
The general model of the Merchants Adventurers Association was followed in the regulated companies which are the great feature of English commerce from the middle of the 16th century. To encourage the trade with Russia opened by Chancellor, Queen Mary incorporated the Muscovy Company, and English factors settled at Novgorod ; the charter of the company gave it the exclusive right of trading to Russia. The EASTLAND or Baltic Company was incorporated 1579, the TURKEY Company 1581, the Mauritania Company 1585, and the Guinea Company 1588. (See COMPANIES, STAPLE.) Mercantile companies, with special powers entrusted to them by the government for the protection of trade, may, Adam Smith remarks, "have been useful for the first introduction of some branches of commerce, by making at their own expense an experiment which the state might not think it prudent to make." And the trade of England was certainly in its early stages greatly furthered by the action of the Merchants Adventurers. The abuse to which such corporations are liable is the restriction of the greater part of the trade to the directors of the company and their particular friends, and the enforcement of burdensome regulations with a view to that end. The Merchants Adventurers were not always free from this evil ; but by the interference of parliament, as we have seen, the terms of admission were reduced, and, ANDERSON tells us, from the middle of the 17th century no complaint was made against them. Smith admits that the RUSSIA and Eastland Companies were not, in his time, oppressive. The Turkey trade, he says, notwithstanding recent legislation to open the corresponding company fully, was still considered by many people as very far from being altogether free. He does not believe the AFRICAN COMPANY, though accused of "restraining the trade, and establishing some sort of improper monopoly," really open to that charge. But he censures it on the ground that it did not fulfil its duty of properly maintaining forts and garrisons. And, where such maintenance is necessary from the trade being with barbarous or semi-civilised communities, he holds that regulated companies are less likely to attend to it than joint-stock companies, first, because the directors of the former have no interest in the prosperity of the general trade of their company, and may even be gainers by its limitation ; and, secondly, because they have no adequate fund at their disposal, the company possessing no common stock, and being dependent for their outlay on the casual revenue from admission fines and corporation dues. While Smith appears scarcely to allow the regulated companies due credit for the part which most competent authorities assign them in the extension of English commerce, it is, doubtless, true that, when he wrote, the services which such corporations were fitted to render were substantially exhausted, and, as he says, the highest eulogy that could be bestowed on them was that of being merely useless.