[1] Abbot's whole career, which had begun under no external advantages, was a remarkable instance of well-directed energy and enterprise; it was one of the earliest examples of the creation of enormous wealth by the application of great personal abilities to commerce, and illustrates the extraordinary development of the English foreign trade at the close of the sixteenth and opening of the seventeenth centuries.
[4] Abbot was one of the original directors of the East India Company, which was incorporated by royal charter in 1600, was among the earliest to invest large sums in its "stock",[4] was a member of its special committee of direction from 1607 onwards, and was throughout his life foremost in defending its interests against its enemies at home and abroad.
[4] During subsequent years the disagreements with the Dutch increased in force, and in 1619 Abbot was one of those appointed to treat in London with commissioners from Holland as to the peaceful establishment of the two companies abroad.
A treaty was signed (2 June), which secured two-thirds of the spice produce of the Molucca Islands, where the disputes had grown hottest, to the Dutch company, and the remaining third to the English.
The commissioners were at first well received (20 November 1620) by the Prince of Orange and the states-general; but the Dutch were unwilling to make any concessions, and pursued the negotiations, according to the English accounts, with too much duplicity to admit of any effectual arrangement.
[4] It was clearly impossible to diminish the active feelings of jealousy that existed between the English and Dutch residents in the East Indies, and Abbot shared the sentiment too heartily to enable him to improve the position of affairs.
He recognised at once the necessity of "pressing the matter modestly",[8] in order to avoid open war with Holland; but in repeated audiences with James I and in petitions and speeches to the privy council he insisted that demand should be made of the Dutch authorities to bring the perpetrators of the outrage to justice.
In 1612 he was nominated a director of a newly incorporated company "of merchants of London, discoverers of the north-west passage",[9] and his statement that in 1614 he "brought to the mint 60 pounds weight of gold for Indian commodities exported" proves that his own commercial transactions continued for many years on a very large scale.
In 1621 he was elected Member of Parliament for Kingston-upon-Hull;[9][10] shortly afterwards was nominated one of the commissioners for equipping merchant vessels to take part in a projected expedition against the pirates of Algiers, and he appears to have been consulted by the king's ministers in every stage of the preparations, which were for a long period under discussion.
On many occasions he complained of the obloquy heaped upon himself and his friends, because it was supposed that their extensive foreign trade deprived this country of the benefit of their wealth, and, with a discrimination far in advance of his age, denounced the "curiousness" of the English in forbidding the exportation of specie, and asserted the economic advantages to the state of the company's commerce.
[14] In "the first show" described by Heywood he makes allusion to "the trading of the right honourable the present lord mayor, who is a merchant free of the Turkey, Italian, French, Muscovy, and was late governour of the East-Indy Company".
[14] In another "show" a shepherd was introduced to typify the cloth trade, in which Abbot was still engaged, and subsequently an actor in the pageant, in the character of an Indian, addressed laudatory verses to the new lord mayor as the chief merchant of England, "By whose commerce our nation hath been fam'd".
On 28 May he sent to the Poultry Counter a woman suspected to have distributed during the Whitsuntide holidays a pamphlet by John Lilburne, the famous agitator; but the House of Lords in the following year reversed Abbot's decision.
[14] In 1633 Robert Ashley dedicated his translation of an Italian work on Cochin China to Abbot, and attributes to him the assertion that "the remotest traffique is always the most beneficiall to the publick stocke, and the trade to East Indies doth farre excell all other".