The Merchant Adventurers occupied a unique place in the history of England. Their life and activities were closely associated with the most varied phases of the national progress; their influence is seen not only in the municipal and domestic affairs of the realm, but also in many of its most important international relations. Through their branch organisations in the different towns of England the Adventurers were brought into close contact with local and municipal life; through their position as the great buyers and exporters of woollen cloth they came into immediate contact with English industrial development. For several centuries the Society enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the foreign trade in the English cloth manufacture. Its wealth and power became very great, and, as is to be expected, the Adventurers, both as individuals and as a corporate organisation, became potent factors in the field of national politics also—a fact seen most clearly in their participation in the restoration of financial credit in the sixteenth century, and the overthrow of the Stuarts in the seventeenth. In international affairs the Adventurers were connected at a very early date with the active intercourse between England and the Low Countries. Concerned solely with foreign commerce, and strongly supported by the Crown, they gradually secured for themselves the English commerce on the North Sea, and therefore necessarily became the agents and exponents of the successful commercial policy inaugurated by the Tudors. The Fellowship and its activities became the channel through which the mutual influence of England and the Continent in the industrial and commercial world was chiefly transmitted, and the history of the Adventurers strikingly illustrates those larger interests which England in her economic development shared with Europe.