Since a turnover of a mere [pounds]13,500 was declared for 1587, we can guess that this "very cunning scheme" cost the shareholders about half their dividend; and historians surmise that because they employed Company ships, Barne and Walsingham must have colluded with Anthony, who was supposed "to prevent private trade by numbering every truss of cloth and hogshead of brimstone."(11) The agent was, in fact, himself related to both men; and their conspiracy was presumably sealed with the complicity of the local official responsible for receipt of goods into the royal household: the bailiff of the Clerk of the Greencloth, the very Richard Bull in whose offices on Deptford Strand, long mistaken for a tavern, Christopher Marlowe would eventually pay his own mysterious reckoning.(12)
12 For Richard Bull and the office of the Greencloth, see W.
