ABSTRACT
In the reign of Queen Anne, England’s relationship with the Northern Crowns (as the states around the Baltic Sea were collectively known) reached a peak of complexity. Interest in the region had seriously developed in Elizabethan times, when English cloth gained a strong foothold on the eastern shore, an area known in Britain as the East Country. In 1579, the year when the Hanseatic League lost its privileges in London, English Baltic merchants formed themselves by royal charter into the Eastland Company.1 This began as a regulated company (in which merchants traded under their individual stock) and it stayed that way, unlike the slightly earlier Russia Company which at times had joint-stock status.2 Another early regulated company had been the Merchant Adventurers and there was some overlap in boundaries. The Eastland Company shared the German territories bordering the Baltic and parts of Denmark with the Merchant Adventurers and could, in exceptional times, ship goods through Hamburg which was the Merchant Adventurers’ staple.3 But in terms of the Baltic Sea, the Eastland Company was the organization which had most to gain or lose. The Russia Company was later to compete in the Gulf of Finland, but its activities for the time were confined to Archangel.4
