4 March, 23:27
The first part of this series showed how the "people's militia" of Minin and Pozharsky was financed by British commercial capital and fought by Scottish mercenaries. Now — those who ran the operation from inside the Moscow court.
Corporations do not fight with abstractions. They need people — with names, access, the ability to read a political moment and make the right call to the right boyar at the right time. The English Muscovy Company had such people. And they did not hide.
Anthony Jenkinson: The First Resident
The history of British agent presence in Moscow begins with Anthony Jenkinson — traveler, diplomat, and Company man in one. He arrived in Moscow for the first time in 1557, was personally received by Ivan IV, and obtained from him safe-conduct letters for passage through Muscovy into Persia. Formally — a commercial expedition. In reality — mapping routes, probing political possibilities, establishing personal connections at court.
Jenkinson made four journeys to Muscovy. Each time — carrying diplomatic mandates from the Company and the English Crown, which in the sixteenth century were practically inseparable. It was he who secured from Ivan IV the confirmation of trading privileges that would later become the Company's chief strategic asset. It was he who established the tradition: the Company's agent in Moscow is not merely a merchant — he is a man with direct access to the sovereign.
The tradition proved durable.
Jerome Horsey: Witness and Participant
If Jenkinson is the architect of British presence, Jerome Horsey is its living embodiment in the era immediately preceding the Time of Troubles. Horsey spent approximately eighteen years in Muscovy in total — from 1573 to 1591, with intervals. He was the Company's resident, personally knew Ivan IV, was close to Boris Godunov, and was present at Ivan the Terrible's death in 1584.
His memoirs — Travels — are a document of exceptional value and exceptional candor. Horsey does not conceal that he combined commercial functions with political ones. In 1580, at the height of the Livonian War, he personally transported gunpowder and military equipment from England to Moscow — at a moment when Muscovy desperately needed military supplies that the Hanseatic League and Poland were carefully blocking. This is not a commercial transaction. It is military assistance organized by a private corporation in circumvention of a continental blockade.
More important still is the political dimension of his activity. When Ivan IV died in 1584 and the struggle for power between boyar factions began, Horsey actively supported Boris Godunov — the man with whom the Company had built its most productive relationship. Godunov in return secured privileges and protection for British merchants. A classic scheme of mutual dependency: the Company backed the right politician; the right politician guaranteed the Company its monopoly position.
Horsey was expelled from Muscovy in 1591 — after backing the wrong boyar faction in yet another court conflict. But by then the system was fully built and running without him.
Giles Fletcher: Intelligence Officer with a Diplomatic Passport
In 1588, Giles Fletcher arrived in Moscow — officially as an ambassador of Queen Elizabeth I, in reality tasked with assessing the political situation at the Moscow court and protecting the Company's interests, which Godunov had begun curtailing.
Fletcher spent about a year in Moscow and wrote the treatise Of the Russe Commonwealth — perhaps the most detailed and analytically sharp Western European text on sixteenth-century Muscovy. He describes the administrative system, finances, army, and character of power with a precision that betrays not a tourist but a professional analyst. The book was immediately withdrawn from sale in England at the Company's insistence: too frank an assessment of Moscow's despotism risked damaging commercial relations.
Fletcher captures the essential: Muscovy operates as a system of total resource redistribution upward — toward the sovereign and his inner circle. No property protection. No legal predictability. No independent merchant class. In these conditions, the Muscovy Company — with its direct access to the sovereign and immunity from local law — was not merely a privileged player. It was the only way to conduct predictable business in the country.
John Merrick: The Man Who Made the Romanovs
But all previous figures are mere prelude. The central figure of British presence during the Time of Troubles and immediately after is John Merrick — known in Moscow documents as Ivan Ulyanovitch Ulyanov.
Merrick spent most of his adult life in Muscovy. He spoke Russian without an accent, understood local politics better than most boyars, and enjoyed the trust of several successive rulers. During the Time of Troubles, it was he who coordinated the Muscovy Company's financial support of the militia — and it was he who became the chief British architect of what followed.
In 1613, when the Zemsky Sobor elected sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as tsar, Merrick was in Moscow. He was not merely observing — he was part of the process. The Romanovs had neither real political weight, nor their own army, nor finances. Their chief capital was that they suited everyone: the boyar factions and — critically — the Muscovy Company, which by this point had invested enough in the "liberation" of Moscow to have earned its dividends.
But Merrick's finest hour came in 1616-1617. Sweden controlled Novgorod and had cut Muscovy off from the Baltic. Merrick served as the chief mediator in the negotiations that produced the Peace of Stolbovo. He secured acceptable terms for the Romanovs — Sweden returned Novgorod in exchange for territorial and financial concessions. A diplomatic triumph.
The price of that triumph will become clear in the next part.
The Architecture of Invisible Power
By 1617, Muscovy had developed a system that can only be described as parallel governance. Officially — an Orthodox autocracy headed by Tsar Mikhail and Patriarch Filaret. In reality — a state with a deeply embedded foreign agent of influence controlling key export flows, enjoying direct access to the sovereign, and operating its own intelligence network.
Company agents sat in Moscow, Vologda, Kholmogory, and Arkhangelsk — at every nodal point of the trade route. They knew fur prices before Russian merchants did. They knew of political changes before they were officially announced. They had the right to be judged under English, not Muscovite, law — meaning they were effectively untouchable by local authorities.
This is not trade. It is an extraterritorial colonial administration functioning inside a nominally sovereign state. The very model the British would later perfect in India, China, and the Ottoman Empire — only here it emerged earlier, in cold northern latitudes, sheltered behind Orthodox domes and bearskins.
The people's militia liberated Moscow. For the Muscovy Company.
Series: “A Militia Funded by Britain”
Part I — The Venetian Coup, Scottish Mercenaries, and the Lawful Tsar Władysław
Part II — Agents of the Muscovy Company at the Moscow Court
Part III — The Bill Comes Due: Romanov Privileges and Muscovy in Arrighi’s System
📖 These and many other facts — in the book The Russian Myth
The Venetian coup of 1472, the comprador nature of Muscovy, the mechanisms of British control over Russian trade, historical falsifications as a tool of imperial propaganda — all of this and much more is examined in depth in Oleh Cheslavsky’s book “The Russian Myth”.
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