¹ George Abbot to Thomas Roe, 20 January 1617, The National Archives (TNA), SP 14/90/34.

² Sir Thomas Roe to the English Ambassador in Istanbul, 21 August 1617, in East India Company (EIC), Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East: Transcribed from the Original Correspondence Series of the India Office Record, 6 vols. (London, 1896–1902), 6:298Google Scholar.

³ Only a few Englishmen had traveled to the East Indies before the formation of the East India Company. The first Company ship arrived in Surat in 1608, and in the decade following several Company factors, or representatives, resided at the Mughal imperial court, but not as appointed and accredited ambassadors. These men carried letters from King James to various foreign rulers. The letters might be addressed to specific rulers, or might be blank, with space to fill in a name at a later date. Miles Ogborn has examined the production and use of these agent letters in creating a rhetorical discourse between English and East Indies rulers. See Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007), 33–34, 42–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For early English travelers to the East, see Foster, William, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London, 1921)Google Scholar; Foster, William, England's Quest of Eastern Trade (London, 1933)Google Scholar.

⁴ Recent work on ambassadors and diplomacy has begun to explore the social and cultural aspects of both. Rather than focusing on questions of developing professionalization or the emergence of “modern” diplomacy—questions that dominated the field at least since Garret Mattingly's influential study—new work has examined the institutions and practices that made up diplomatic representation. Daniela Frigo, writing on Italian diplomacy, led the charge to expand the history of diplomacy in this direction, though she was hardly alone. As a consequence, topics such as the role of ambassadors as cultural agents, the overlap of diplomacy and intelligence gathering, and the material world of ambassadors have each received attention. Nevertheless, the cultural and institutional aspects of European embassies transplanted outside of Europe continue to receive less attention. For questions of professionalization of diplomacy in the early modern period, see Bell, Gary, “Elizabethan Diplomacy: The Subtle Revolution,” in Politics, Religion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of DeLamar Jensen, ed. Thorp, Malcolm R. and Slavin, Arthur J. (Kirksville [MO], 1994), 267–88Google Scholar; Black, Jeremy, British Diplomats and Diplomacy: 1688–1800 (Exeter, 2001)Google Scholar; Lachs, Phyllis, Diplomatic Corps under Charles II & James II (New Brunswick, 1966)Google Scholar; Lee, Maurice Jr., “Jacobean Diplomatic Service,” American Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1967): 1264–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mattingly, Garret, Renaissance Diplomacy (London, 1955)Google Scholar. For examples of the new diplomatic history, see Frigo, Daniela, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frigo, Daniela, “Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy,” trans. Watkins, John, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 15–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watkins, John, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For ambassadors as cultural agents, see Hill, Robert, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting in Early Stuart Britain: The Parallel Careers of William Trumbull and Sir Dudley Carleton, 1609–1625,” Journal of the History of Collections 15, no. 2 (2003): 211–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, Robert, “Art and Patronage: Sir Henry Wotton and the Venetian Embassy, 1604–1624,” in Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe, ed. Keblusek, Marika and Noldus, Badeloch Vera (Boston, 2011), 27–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keblusek, Marika, “The Embassy of Art: Diplomats as Cultural Brokers,” in Double Agents, ed. Keblusek, Marika and Noldus, Badeloch Vera, 11–26Google Scholar; Loomba, Ania, “Of Gifts, Ambassadors, and Copy-Cats: Diplomacy, Exchange, and Difference in Early Modern India,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700, ed. Charry, Brinda and Shahani, Gitanjali (Burlington [VT], 2009), 41–76Google Scholar. For the overlap of diplomacy and intelligence gathering, see Adams, Robyn, “A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence,” in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, ed. Adams, Robyn and Cox, Rosanna (Basingstoke, 2011), 63–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hammer, Paul E. J., “An Elizabethan Spy Who Came in from the Cold: The Return of Anthony Standen to England in 1593,” Historical Research 65, no. 158 (1992): 277–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the material world of ambassadors, see Jacobsen, Helen, Luxury and Power: the Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar; Mark Netzloff, “The Ambassador's Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing,” in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, 155–71; Alan Stewart, “Francis Bacon's Bi-lateral Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing,” in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, 120–37.

⁵ Imperial historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found this use of Roe's journal and letters particularly attractive, though it was by no means limited to that period. See especially William Foster's Early Travels in India and England's Quest of Eastern Trade. Both Brown, Michael, Itinerant Ambassador: The Life of Sir Thomas Roe (Lexington, 1970)Google Scholar, and Strachan, Michael, Sir Thomas Roe, 1581–1644: A Life (Salisbury, 1989)Google Scholar, use the journal and letters in their biographies of Roe. Brown in particular can be uncritical at times, though Strachan's biography as a whole is an illuminating study of Roe's life and career.

⁶ These analyses generally have followed Edward Said's model. See Singh, Jyotsna G., Colonial Narrative/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Teltscher, Kate, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Bhattacharya, Nandini, Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century British Writing on India (Dover [DE], 1998), 36–55Google Scholar.

⁷ See Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), 112–13Google Scholar; Hadfield, Andrew, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Rubiés, Joan Pau, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cohn specifically addresses Roe's refusal to take part in the khilat ceremony and accept a robe of Jahangir's as a gift. Such a gift implied honor in the Mughal system, and Cohn argues that Roe might have understood the significance and chosen to refuse it. I think the issue was less definitive; certainly Company factors reported events and practices that they did not correctly understand. William Pinch likewise has argued for a more nuanced view of what Roe did or did not understand of the customs of the Mughal court. For example, discussing Cohn's argument, Pinch notes that a symbolically laden court life was not limited to the Mughal court and that the Jacobean court was also a ritual-political one. Pinch, William, “Same Difference in India and Europe,” History and Theory 38, no. 3 (October 1999): 401CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of the best overviews of the difficulties associated with these texts and travelers is Murphey, Rhoads, “Bigots or Informed Observers? A Periodization of Pre-colonial English and European Writing on the Middle East,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 2 (April–June 1990): 291–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ See Games, Alison, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York, 2008), 7, 154–56, 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. Bowen, H. V., Lincoln, Margarette, and Rigby, Nigel (Bury St. Edmunds, 2002), 71Google Scholar; Pinch, “Same Difference,” 401. Both Games and Subrahmanyam explicitly examine the specific historical contexts of their actors. For example, this approach leads Games to identify Roe as part of an unofficial cadre of men who did the work of English expansion. These early cosmopolitans (as she termed them) were culturally savvy and adaptable travelers who gained and used specialized experience in a variety of overseas locales.

⁹ Ambassadors certainly represented commercial or mercantile interests in other contexts and places, but those matters were always secondary to other political negotiations. For example, Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador in Venice, negotiated to remove anchorage taxes on English ships; see Smith, Logan Pearsall, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), 1:72–73Google Scholar. In the cases of the embassies associated with trading companies, in contrast, the commercial components formed a central concern of the embassy. In Muscovy, for example, Elizabeth's correspondence with Ivan directly requested him to treat her merchants well, and in the Levant, several European nations set up embassies and consular offices to handle commercial affairs. See Allinson, Rayne, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York, 2012), 124–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Epstein, Mortimer, English Levant Company: Its Foundation and Its History to 1640 (London, 1908), 74–75, 88Google Scholar; Steensgaard, Niels, “Consuls and Nations in the Levant from 1570 to 1650,” in Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (Aldershot, 1996), 180Google Scholar; Willan, T. S., Early History of the Russia Company, 1553–1603 (Manchester, 1956), 98, 217Google Scholar; Wood, Alfred, History of the Levant Company (London, 1935)Google Scholar. J. K. Fedorowicz argues that in the Baltic, as a rule, royal agents rather than intermittent royal ambassadors represented English commercial interests, Fedorowicz, J. K., England's Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Study in Anglo-Polish Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge, 1980), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Not all nations tasked their ambassadors with commercial considerations. Erik Thomson demonstrates that Swedish diplomatic correspondence in the early seventeenth century often reported commercial information, while French correspondence from the same period did not, even from the Levant. He identifies a number of possible reasons for the distinction, including different French and Swedish ideas about the proper decorum of the ambassador. Thomson, Erik, “For a Comparative History of Early Modern Diplomacy: Commerce and French and Swedish Emissarial Cultures during the Early 17th Century,” Scandinavian Journal of History 31, no. 2 (June 2006): 152, 155, 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Status competition by ambassadors in other respects has attracted notice; for example, the competition between ambassadors over precedence, and the attempts by ambassadors, especially European ambassadors to Eastern courts, to forego traditional obeisance to other rulers. See Games, Web of Empire, 156–57; Kołodziejczyk, Dariusz, “Semiotics of Behavior in Early Modern Diplomacy: Polish Embassies in Istanbul and Bahçesaray,” Journal of Early Modern History 7, no. 3–4 (2003): 245–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steensgaard, “Consuls and Nations,” 186–87.

¹¹ Braddick, Michael J., State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Braddick, Michael J., “The English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625–1688,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Canny, Nicholas (London, 2001), 286–308Google Scholar; Hindle, Steve, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar. Both Braddick and Hindle examine state formation, how people were drawn into the national political state via local political situations. Braddick, in his entry in the Oxford History of the British Empire, touches specifically on how nonstate actors could exercise state authority abroad.

¹² The Levant and Russia Companies likewise maintained both ambassadorial and consular establishments. See Mortimer Epstein, English Levant Company; Niels Steensgaard, “Consuls and Nations”; T. S. Willan, Early History of the Russia Company; Alfred Wood, History of the Levant Company.

¹³ Chaudhuri, K. N., The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (New York, 1965), 22Google Scholar; Rabb, T. K., Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, MA, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Foster, William, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, as Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London, 1899), 2:447Google Scholar. Foster edited two editions of Roe's journal. The first was published by the Hakluyt society in 1899 in two volumes. The one-volume 1926 edition, though less widely available, is the one I have chosen to cite where possible. The text of Roe's journal in the two is much the same, but the 1926 edition contains numerous letters from Roe that were not printed in the Hakluyt edition and which I reference. In the interest of citing as much as possible from one source, I am using the 1926 edition for material that appears in both editions. For material that appears in the 1899 edition but not the 1926 edition, as in this citation, I have cited the 1899 edition.

¹⁵ Ibid., 2:524.

¹⁶ James's instructions to Roe, 29 October 1614, TNA, CO 77/1/44, f. 80r.

¹⁷ Ibid., f. 80r–v.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ East India Company (EIC) court minutes, 2 November 1614, IOR B/5, British Library (BL). The court books of the EIC are paginated inconsistently and date is a more reliable finding aid than folio number.

²⁰ EIC court minutes, 14 October 1614, IOR B/5, BL.

²¹ EIC court minutes, 4 October, 1614, IOR B/5, BL.

²² See, for example, Thomas Kerridge to the factors at Surat, 7 September 1613, in EIC, Letters Received, 1:278–82; William Edwards to Sir Thomas Smith, 26 December 1614, in EIC, Letters Received, 2:243–44.

²³ Thomas Aldworth to the EIC, 9 November 1613, in EIC, Letters Received, 1:307; William Edwards to Sir Thomas Smith, 26 December 1614, in EIC, Letters Received, 2:243. This last letter had not reached London at the time the Company leaders debated Sir Thomas Roe's employment.

²⁴ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1899, 2:xviii, xix.

²⁵ EIC court minutes, 7 September 1614, IOR B/5, BL.

²⁶ Elizabeth married Frederick V, elector of the Palatinate. She became the electress of the Palatinate, and when her husband was offered the Bohemian crown, queen of Bohemia. She and Roe corresponded throughout his life. For an example of their correspondence see TNA, SP 97/12/122. For more biographical information on Sir Thomas Roe, see Michael Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe.

²⁷ He was also either newly married or about to be, and therefore also had a wife to support. The marriage was secret at the time and remained so during Roe's tenure in India.

²⁸ Sir Thomas Roe's letter to a friend from Mogol, undated, Harley 1576, f. 225r, BL.

²⁹ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 302.

³⁰ Cited in Lee, “Jacobean Diplomatic Service,” 1266. Lee is one of several historians who argue for the growing professionalization of the English diplomatic corps in the early seventeenth century. See also Gary Bell, “Elizabethan Diplomacy: The Subtle Revolution”; Bell, Gary, Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives, 1509–1688 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar. Historians studying the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries take as a given a professional (albeit unofficial) diplomatic corps. See Black, Jeremy, British Diplomats and Diplomacy: 1688–1800Google Scholar; Jacobsen, Helen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar; Lachs, Phyllis, Diplomatic Corps under Charles II & James IIGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Dudley Carleton, for example, who served in Venice and The Hague, received a viscountcy and became secretary of state after years of service. The post he wanted, provost of Eton, was given to fellow ambassador and sometime rival Sir Henry Wotton. See Lee, Maurice Jr., ed., Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624: Jacobean Letters (New Brunswick, 1972)Google Scholar; Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton; Thomson, Elizabeth McClure, ed., The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. The editors of Carleton's and Wotton's letter collections admit that they omitted many of the office-seeking letters, explaining that a modern reader would find them repetitious and tedious.

³² Roe to Sir Ralph Winwood, 29 January 1616, BL Add. MS 6115, f. 75r.

³³ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 465.

³⁴ Roe to the Earl of Pembroke, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS 6115, f. 86r.

³⁵ Roe to Winwood, 29 January 1616, BL Add. MS 6115, f. 75r.

³⁶ In contrast to historians who argued for the growing professionalization of diplomats, Daniela Frigo has asserted that it was not diplomacy as an institution, but rather the office of ambassador that developed in the early modern period. Prescriptive literature about diplomacy from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused on what made a good ambassador, often emphasizing ethics and education—qualities intrinsic to the character and upbringing of the ambassador—rather than professional accomplishments. Contemporaries recognized prudence, for example, as a key ambassadorial quality. See Daniela Frigo, “Prudence and Experience,” 16, 25.

³⁷ Terry, Edward, A Voyage to East-India. Wherein Some Things Are Taken Notice of in Our Passage Thither, but Many More in Our Abode There, within That Rich and Most Spacious Empire of the Great Mogol, Mix't with Some Parallel Observations and Inferences Upon the Storie, to Profit as Well as Delight the Reader. Observed by Edward Terry Minister of the Word (Then Student of Christ-Church in Oxford, and Chaplain to the Right Honorable Sir Thomas Row Knight, Lord Ambassador to the Great Mogol) Now Rector of the Church at Greenford, in the County of Middlesex (London, 1655), 218Google Scholar.

³⁸ Evidence suggests that Company factors often adopted local clothing. Thomas Kerridge, for example, referenced his turban in a letter to Roe. Kerridge to Roe, 18 and 19 November 1616, in EIC, Letters Received, 4:344.

³⁹ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 96.

⁴⁰ Sir George Carew to Robert Cecil, 8 October 1608, cited in Lee, “Jacobean Diplomatic Service,” 1267. Frigo notes that for many commentators on ambassadors, a fundamental quality of the ambassador was to be faithful to orders and not to deviate from instructions by making policy decisions themselves. Frigo, “Prudence and Experience,” 2, 26.

⁴¹ The weekly and sometimes daily dispatches of ambassadors posted to the Netherlands, Venice, Spain, France, and other European posts fill the state papers. Just as ambassadors could send frequent letters, they also received frequent letters—see, for example, the correspondence of John Chamberlain and Sir Dudley Carleton, and the correspondence of Sir Henry Wotton. McClure, Norman Egbert, The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939)Google Scholar; Thomson, The Chamberlain Letters; Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain; Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton. Robyn Adams observes that most late sixteeth-century intelligence letters were reports of facts, more lists than social letters. Robyn Adams, “A Most Secret Service,” 66. Mark Netzloff notes that diplomatic correspondence frequently addressed the question of lost or delayed letters, gaps in intelligence, and similar concerns about the access and flow of information. Netzloff, “The Ambassador's Household,” 159.

⁴² Furber, Holden, “The Overland Route to India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Private Fortunes and Company Profits in the India Trade in the 18th Century, ed. Rocher, Rosane (Great Yarmouth, 1997), 108–10Google Scholar.

⁴³ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 88–89. In return for Roe's missives, Carew sent long, yearly letters that recounted, month by month, the major political and social happenings that Roe had missed. The four surviving letters are collected in Maclean, John, ed., Letters from George Lord Carew to Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1617 (Westminster, 1860)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Roe to Pembroke, 30 November 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 152r.

⁴⁵ The role of diplomats as spies and the use of information as a commodity in these cases has received some recent attention. See Adams, Robyn, “A Spy on the Payroll? William Herle and the Mid-Elizabethan Polity,” Historical Research 82, no. 220 (2010): 1–15Google Scholar; Bossy, John, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven, 1991)Google Scholar; Bossy, John, Under the Molehill (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar; Hammer, Paul E. J., “An Elizabethan Spy Who Came in from the Cold: The Return of Anthony Standen to England in 1593,” Historical Research 65, no. 158 (1992): 277–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Most of the work on spies in the period has focused on the Elizabethan period.

⁴⁶ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 89. Roe got the system partially correct. Mughal rank was based on two numbers: zat, which referred to how many soldiers the landholder was allowed to field, and sawar, which referred to how many horses.

⁴⁷ Abbot, George, Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde, Wherein Is Particularly Described, All the Monarchies, Empires, and Kingdomes of the Same: With Their Seuerall Titles and Scituations Thereunto Adioyning (London, 1599)Google Scholar. Cartographic knowledge was valuable, and mapmakers could leverage cartographic knowledge into office. Peter Barber, “‘Procure as Many as You Can and Send Them Over’: Cartographic Espionage and Cartographic Gifts in International Relations, 1460–1760,” in Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, 14.

⁴⁸ Roe to Abbot, 29 January 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 74r–v.

⁴⁹ Roe to Pembroke, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 86v–89r, among others. See below for more on the Persia trade.

⁵⁰ Roe to the Lord Chamberlain, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 86v.

⁵¹ Peck, Linda Levy, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeeth Century England (New York, 2005), 6–7, 175Google Scholar. For the role of diplomats as collectors, see Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” 211–28; Robert Hill, “Art and Patronage,” in Double Agents, 27–58; Marika Keblusek, “The Embassy of Art,” in Double Agents, 11–26.

⁵² Roe to Pembroke, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 87r.

⁵³ Ibid., f. 88r.

⁵⁴ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 92.

⁵⁵ Roe to Winwood, 29 January 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 75r.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Subrahmanyam, “Frank Submissions,” 80.

⁵⁸ Roe to Abbot, 29 January 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 74v.

⁵⁹ Roe to Abbot, 30 October 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 131r–v.

⁶⁰ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1899, 1:112.

⁶¹ Roe to Southampton, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 88v.

⁶² Roe to Pembroke, 30 November 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 152r.

⁶³ Kołodziejczyk observes similar claims of ambassadors refusing to take part in customary obeisance, in his case, by Polish ambassadors to the Ottoman court. He concludes that the ambassadors' claims were fabrications, put forward to salve perceived slights to their honor. Kołodziejczyk, “Semiotics of Behavior in Early Modern Diplomacy,” 245–47.

⁶⁴ Factors at Surat to Roe, 26 May 1616, EIC, Letters Received, 4:310–11.

⁶⁵ Factors at Surat to Roe, 23 and 26 July 1616, EIC, Letters Received, 4:321.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 4:310–11.

⁶⁷ Sir Thomas Roe's letter to a friend from Mogol, undated, Harley 1576, f. 225v, BL. The letter seems to be a copy, because it is not in Roe's hand, but incidental details in the letter—a reference to a minister friend, for example, with whom Roe later corresponded from Istanbul—convince me of the letter's authenticity. An additional early letter to the countess of Huntington echoed these sentiments. Roe to the countess of Huntington, 30 October 1616, Huntington Library, HA 10561, M. 458.

⁶⁸ One of Roe's comments when he first arrived was that the factors had informed him that it was gifts, rather than “person, quality, [or] commission that will distinguish an ambassador of higher quality than [his] predecessors.” Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 77.

⁶⁹ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 73.

⁷⁰ Company records noted that “grave, staid men” would do better as factors than “young green heads.” EIC court minutes, 8 September 1615, IOR B/5, BL.

⁷¹ Commission rates for agents in Europe ranged from 2.5 to 4 percent. Chaudhuri, English East India Company, 75. One scholar has claimed that factors as a group “were legible” to an early modern English audience. Looking primarily at literary sources, she argues for a widespread anxiety about factors, and the potential misuse of the trust and money left in their hands. Barbara Sebek, “‘After My Humble Dutie Remembered’: Factors and/versus Merchants,” in Charry and Shah, Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture.

⁷² Chaudhuri, English East India Company, 81; EIC court minutes, 16 November 1614, IOR B/5, BL.

⁷³ Thomas Kerridge appeared frequently in the court minutes once he returned to England. Company leaders often sought his opinion on East Indies affairs. See, for example, EIC court minutes, 30 March 1629, IOR B/13, BL.

⁷⁴ George Pley to Edward Connock, 4 April 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 5:195.

⁷⁵ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 77.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 213.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 233–34.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 292.

⁷⁹ In Swally Road, aboard the Charles, 2 October 1616, EIC, Letters Received, 4:189–92.

⁸⁰ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 307.

⁸¹ Edward Petters to Robert Middleton, 2 June 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 4:32.

⁸² Edward Monox to the EIC, 28 December 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 4:282.

⁸³ Roe to Kerridge, 1617, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 175v.

⁸⁴ Roe to Kerridge, 25 April 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 5:202.

⁸⁵ Roe to his Majesty's ambassador in Constantinople, 21/31 August 1617, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 208r.

⁸⁶ Instructions given to our loving friends [from Roe], 6 October 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 6:112–13.

⁸⁷ Consultation by Captain Martin Pring and the Surat factors, 2 October 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 6:95–96. The original letter from the Company to the factors is no longer extant. After receiving the letter, the factors and the recently arrived captain met to debate what to do about the new instructions and whether to obey them: “whether punctually to follow the express words of that clause, in attending directions and order from his Lordship, or to proceed in what we their servants know necessary to be done, and as the business doth urgently require.” They recorded the opinion of everyone attending, and overwhelmingly agreed (including the captain) to ignore Roe's counsel and act as they saw fit. Their recorded reasons were that the business would decay, and that it would take too long to get in touch with Roe. Roe responded by accusing them of “triumvirate faction, and private plots.” Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1899, 2:482.

⁸⁸ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1926, 396–97.

⁸⁹ Roe to the factors at Surat, 8 November, 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 6:150.

⁹⁰ Roe to the factors at Agra, 6 October 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 6:105.

⁹¹ Roe to Kerridge, 21 October 1617, EIC, Letters Received, 6:128.

⁹² Roe to his Majesty's ambassador in Constantinople, 21/31 August 1617, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 208r.

⁹³ Roe to Abbot, 29 January 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 74r–v.

⁹⁴ Roe to Winwood, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 80r.

⁹⁵ Roe to Abbot, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 80v.

⁹⁶ Roe to Southampton, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 89r. One historian has termed this commitment to a foreign policy aimed at the advancement of Protestant alliances the “Protestant cause.” Roe's patronage ties, as well as his personal religious convictions, tied him firmly to the Protestant cause camp. See Adams, S. L., “Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624,” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Sharpe, Kevin (Oxford, 1978), 139–72Google Scholar; S. L. Adams, “The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630” (D Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 1973); Adams, S. L., “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy,” in Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government, ed. Tomlinson, Howard (London, 1983), 79–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁷ Roe to Abbot, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 81r.

⁹⁸ Roe to the Lord Treasurer, 15 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 86r.

⁹⁹ Roe to Abbot, 14 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 81r; Roe to the Lord Treasurer, 15 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 86r.

¹⁰⁰ Roe to the Lord Treasurer, 15 February 1616, BL Add. MS. 6115, f. 86r.

¹⁰¹ Roe's efforts on its behalf were ultimately unsuccessful. The project, however, resurfaced at intervals throughout the 1610s and early 1620s until it was implemented briefly in the late 1620s. Sir Robert Sherley, on behalf of Shah Abbas, finally convinced the English to attempt the diversion of the silk trade. Perhaps a grand alteration of the geopolitics of the region would have come to pass, except that the diversion only lasted for two years, until Shah Abbas's death; his successor was not able to maintain the redirection. This topic awaits a new treatment. See Davies, David William, Elizabethans Errant: The Strange Fortunes of Sir Thomas Sherley and His Three Sons, as Well in the Dutch Wars as in Muscovy, Morocco, Persia, Spain, and the Indies (Ithaca, 1967)Google Scholar; Steensgaard, Niels, Carracks, Caravans and Companies: The Structural Crisis in the European-Asian Trade in the Early 17th Century (Copenhagen, 1973)Google Scholar.

¹⁰² See Epstein, English Levant Company, 81–88.

¹⁰³ Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 1899, 2:522–23, 527–29.

¹⁰⁴ Abbot to Roe, 20 January 1617, TNA, SP 14/90/34.