The wings of Daedalus: The business and politics of the linen trade in late seventeenth-century England

This article focuses on English linen drapers – retail and wholesale traders – during Charles II’s reign. These businesspeople became notable proponents of proposals to prohibit French imports of linens into England, but also to settle linen production domestically. Such proposals derived from the context of a Francophobic, anti-Catholic politics of religion which, by the 1670s, had manifested in efforts to ‘defend’ English Protestants from the various threats which ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary government’ were held to represent, not least in the form of French Counter-Reformation, absolutism, and expansionism, and the likelihood of a Roman Catholic successor to the English throne, James, Duke of York. Linen drapers’ participation in debates about the balance of trade and domestic linen production reflect how the linen trade became a point at which this Reformed Protestant, Dissenting, and Whig politics of religion and politics of trade intersected, cohered, and was cultivated.