2 - ‘England's Vulcan’: Artillery Supply under the Early Stuarts

Summary

Ordnance production at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I was characterised by diversity both in terms of manufacturers and commercial interests. In late 1594, for example, we find six active founders in the Ordnance Office registers: Henry Pitt, Peter Gyll, Thomas Johnson, George Elkyn, Richard Phillips and Samuel Owen. Of these Pitt, Phillips and Owen appear to have concentrated primarily on the production of ‘brass’ (bronze) ordnance. Other persons who were not actually founders, such as Robert Evelyn, sometimes provided guns for state service, both through sub contracting and providing foreign pieces, captured or otherwise, thus acting as middle men. At the same date six or possibly seven furnaces capable of supplying guns were working under different iron masters in the Weald of Kent and Sussex.

This situation would change comparatively rapidly over the next few years with the birth of a major gun founding dynasty – perhaps best described as a cartel – which would integrate production vertically and horizontally, consolidating financial interests in a relatively few hands. It was built up not only through consummate craftsmanship, management, and product diversification, but by successive bargains with changing regimes – and single-minded exploitation of the methods of the period, judicious marriage and purchased monopoly. Perhaps unusually little resource was diverted to fund the traditional trappings of success such as titles or extensive estates, nor was the business put in hock to one creed or brand of politics which might have proved its undoing. The father of this concern was Thomas Browne of Brenchley (born 1559), a son of Thomas Browne of Yalding in Kent and his wife ‘Cicely’, a daughter of Jasper Iden. Young Thomas Browne's first industrial enterprise was the running of Thomas Willoughby's furnace at Bough Beech, near Chiddingstone. He actually purchased the ironworks, together with a parcel of land in 1589, paying £1,047, though whether capital to fund this purchase was gathered through other family interests or his work in the iron business during war with Spain is unknown. In the 1590s Browne was accredited as a supplier of shot to the Crown.

At the accession of King James Browne's particular significance was recognised with the title of ‘his majesties founder of yron shot’. With this post went a daily fee of 6d, though according to later complaints this nominal sum was seldom paid; what mattered was the formal status and commercial connections that the title bestowed.