II. Sir Thomas Gresham
(1519-1579)

Sir Richard Whittington had been dead ninety-six years when Sir Thomas Gresham was born. London had many famous merchants during the four generations that separated these two men; but Whittington had, in all respects, no successor as notable as himself until Gresham came to surpass him.

SIR THOMAS GRESHAM

Perhaps the most eminent London merchant in the interval was Sir Thomas Gresham's father. Sir Richard Gresham. He was the son of a wealthy gentleman of Norfolk, who, early in the reign of Henry VIII., established his four sons as mercers in London. One of the sons afterwards became a clergyman; the other three carried on an extensive business in partnership. Sir Richard, though not the oldest, was the most prosperous. He not only made much money as a merchant, but also acted as a sort of banker to Henry VIII. and Edward VI. He was a great friend of Cardinal Wolsey's, continuing his friend even after his disgrace. To Wolsey he lent £200, equal to nearly £2000 according to the present value of money, shortly before his death, "I borrowed it," said Wolsey, "to bury me and bestow among my servants."

Many other proofs of Sir Richard Gresham's goodness are on record, chief of all being his zeal in inducing Henry VIII., at the great division of church property in 1557, to allow three old monasteries. Saint Mary's, Saint Bartholomew's, and Saint Thomas's, to be handed over to the City of London and converted into hospitals "for the aid and comfort of the poor, sick, blind, aged, and impotent persons, being not able to help themselves, nor having no place certain where they may be refreshed or lodged at, till they be holpqn and cured of their diseases."

Eighteen years before that, in 1519, his son Thomas was born. Of Thomas's early life we are not told much. At the age of thirteen he went to Cambridge for three years, and in 1535 he was put to learn the intricacies of London commerce as it was practised by the Mercers' Company. "To that science," he said in a letter written some time after, "I was bound 'prentice eight years, to come by the experience and knowledge that I have. I need not have been 'prentice, for that I was free by my father's copy; albeit, my father, being a wise man, knew it was to no purpose except I were bound 'prentice to the same, whereby to come by the experience and knowledge of all kinds of merchandize."

The Mercers' Guild, of which young Gresham was thus wisely qualified to be a working member, was still, as it had been in the days of Whittington, the chief school for London merchants. But it was no longer the great representative of London commerce. Already the old guilds had done their best work, and, as guilds, were beginning to make feasts and shows their principal business. Their more active members used them chiefly as a means of introduction to the Company of Merchant Adventurers, which took the lead in Gresham's time, as the Society of the Merchants of the Staple had done in Whittington's.

The Merchant Adventurers traced their origin to a period long before Whittington. The founder of their company is said to have been Thomas a Becket's father, Gilbert Becket, who, in the time of the Crusades, went to the far East for purposes of trade, while most of his adventurous countrymen were devoting themselves to chivalrous fighting against the Saracen enemies of the Cross. Gilbert a Becket, as the doubtful story runs, was taken prisoner in Syria by a cruel Paynim. But, if the Paynim was cruel, his pretty daughter was kind. Falling in love with the English merchant, she contrived his escape, and, when he had safely returned to Enjland, managed to run after him. Knowing only two English words, "London" and "Gilbert," the bold damsel made her way from Syria to England, and, after much wandering about, found her lover in front of his shop in Cheapside; to be rewarded, let us hope, for all her boldness and devotion.

MERCER'S HALL, CHEAPSIDE, LONDON

That tale can hardly be true; but it is true that Gilbert a Becket was an enterprising merchant in the time of Henry II., and the trading company, said to have been founded either by him or by others in furtherance of his commercial projects, was incorporated by Henry IV., perhaps with assistance from Whittington, who was then at the height of his greatness, as the Brotherhood of Saint Thomas a Becket. Soon after that time it became a powerful and very prosperous society. By its means English merchants were then able to do in a body what the jealousy of kings and statesmen made it impossible for them to do singly. They established a regular colony in Antwerp, which was then the chief trading town on the Continent, and which gained much by the fresh trade that they brought to it.

"To England," said an Italian resident in the Netherlands in the time of Sir Thomas Gresham, "Antwerp sends jewels and precious stones, silver, quicksilver, silks, spices, sugar, cotton, linens, serges, drugs, hops, glass, salt fish, and other merceries of all sorts, to a great value. From England, Antwerp receives vast quantities of fine and coarse draperies, fringes, and other things of that kind, the finest wool, sheep and rabbit skins without number, a great quantity of lead and tin, beer, cheese, Malmesey wines, and other sorts of provisions, in great abundance. This is of immense benefit to both countries, neither of which could, without the greatest damage, dispense with this their vast mutual commerce."

The English half of this famous trade was managed by the Company of Merchant Adventurers; and that he might take his share in it, as his father was then doing, young Thomas Gresham was sent to Antwerp in 1543, when he was twenty-four years old, and as soon as his apprenticeship to the Mercers' Guild was over. Antwerp was his usual home for four-and-twenty other years.

The chief English merchant resident in Antwerp, a sort of governor or controller of the whole colony, was known as the King's Factor, that title being given to him because, besides his work in presiding over the whole body, his special business was to negotiate any loans with wealthy merchants and money-lenders that might be needed by the English sovereign, and to keep the sovereign informed as to all the important foreign matters known to him. He was not only a sort of governor and consul, but a sort of ambassador and foreign secretary as well. This was, in fact, the most influential employment, out of England, under the English crown. When young Gresham went to Antwerp to look after his father's business and to begin business on his own account, a Stephen Vaughan was in office. In 1546 he was succeeded by Sir William Dansell, a good-natured man, but not much of a merchant, and no financier at all. In 1549 he was reproved for a grievous piece of carelessness, by which, it was said, £40,000 was lost to Edward VI. He answered that he had done his very best, that he could not have done better if he had spent forty thousand lives on the business, and that what he had done was with the assistance of "one Thomas Gresham," But the members of Edward VI.'s Council were not satisfied.

FLEMISH MERCHANT OF THE 16TH CENTURY.

When Dansell wrote to say, "It seemeth me that you suppose me a very blunt beast, without reason and discretion," they did not deny the charge. They thought, and thought wisely, that "one Thomas Gresham" would act better as principal than as assistant. Accordingly, in or near December 1551, he was appointed King's Factor; and personally, or by deputy, he held the office, with a gap of about three years during Queen Mary's reign, for a quarter of a century.

The long history of his services in this capacity need not here be detailed. Though all the while he was working zealously and very profitably as a merchant on his own account, his official work was not strictly that of a merchant A great part of his duty was in borrowing money for the three sovereigns who employed him—Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth—and in paying, or trying to pay, their debts. This he did very cleverly, and with great advantage to his sovereigns and his country.

"When I took this service in hand," he wrote, shortly after the death of Edward VI. in 1553, "the King's majesty's credit in Flanders was small; and yet afore his death he was in such credit with strangers and his own merchants that he might have had what sum of money he desired. Whereby his enemies began to fear him; for the commodities of his realm were not known before. And for the accomplishment thereof I not only left the realm, with my wife and family, my occupying and whole trade of living, by the space of two years; but also posted in that time forty times at the least, upon the King s sending, from Antwerp to the Court."

Gresham conferred small as well as large favours upon Edward VI. For a New-year's gift in 1553, he sent him a pair of long Spanish silk stockings, "a great present," says the old chronicler, "for you shall understznd that King Henry VIII. did wear only cloth hose, or hose cut out of ell-broad taffeta, unless by great chance there came a pair of Spanish stockings out of Spain."

ENGLISH MERCHANT OF THE 16TH CENTURY.

Edward VI. was not ungrateful for either the great or the little kindnesses. Three weeks before his death, having at previous times bestowed upon him property worth three times as much, he gave to Gresham lands worth £100 a year, saying, as he handed the charter, "You shall know that you have served a king!"

Besides a king, Gresham served two queens right nobly. His service to Queen Mary was not so great as it might be, because his dislike of her Romish ways, and those of her husband, Philip of Spain, put him out of their favour, and also made it impossible for him to do heartily much that they required of him. But better fortune came to him with the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558. Hearing of the change of sovereigns, he hurried from Antwerp to England to render homage, and he was very graciously received.

"Her Highness promised me, by the faith of a queen," he said, in a letter describing the interview, "that she would not only keep one ear shut to hear me, but also, if I did her none other service than I had done to her late brother and her late sister, she would give me as much land as ever they both did; which two promises made me a young man again, and caused me to enter on my great charge again with heart and courage. And thereupon her Majesty gave me her hand to kiss, and I accepted this great charge."

He worthily fulfilled it. During the first three and a half years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, as appears by a bill which he drew up, he spent £1627, 9s. in "riding and posting charges" on her Majesty's service—which amount, like all others of this date, we must multiply by nine or ten to get the approximate value in the currency of to-day. Once, in 1561, he rode so fast that he fell from his horse and broke his leg, whereby he was lamed for the rest of his life. He had hard work to do in travelling from place to place, borrowing money from one merchant, paying the debts due to another, and conciliating all by feasting them after the fashion for which Antwerp was famous during many centuries. And he was not busy simply with money matters; he was often employed on political errands, watching the movements of the Queen's enemies, negotiating with her friends, and in all sorts of ways promoting her interests.

Thus he was not always resident in Antwerp. From the commencement of Elizabeth's reign, indeed, he was never there for long at a time. His own business, and the local duties attached to his office as Queen's Factor, were performed by a clever agent named Richard Clough, an honest Welshman, in whom the prompt and expeditious merchant found only one fault. "My servant," he said, "is very long and tedious in his writing." Other trusty clerks he had in London, at Seville, at Toledo, at Dunkirk, and elsewhere. Antwerp, however, after London, was his headquarters up to the year 1567.

In that year his services as Queen Elizabeth's factor at Antwerp came to an end. For some time previous, war had been waging between the Protestant States of the Netherlands, and Philip, the Catholic King of Spain. In 1567 the Spaniards took possession of Antwerp, driving out not only the English merchants, with Gresham at their head, but also a great number of Flemish traders, many of whom settled in England, adding much, by their industry and honesty, to the wealth of their adopted country.

Henceforth Gresham was much more strictly a London merchant For some time to come he seems to have been settled down in his banker's and mercer's shop in Lombard Street, where every kind of merchandise was traded in, and where, after the fashion of all great merchants of those times, he also carried on a thriving business as pawnbroker and moneylender. It was still the custom, as it had been in Whittington's days, for princes and nobles—banks proper, railways, national funds, and other modern means for investing money not yet being introduced—to lodge their surplus money with the great tradesmen, who used it with such advantage that they were able to pay good interest to the traders, besides making large profits for themselves. Others, who needed more ready cash than they had at command, used to bring their jewels and treasures, even their title-deeds and rent-rolls, to the same tradesmen, who lent money upon them, just as pawnbrokers now do.

Of that sort, and of all other sorts, was the business carried on by Sir Thomas Gresham in his Lombard Street shop, with its branches and agencies in various parts of England and the Continent. King of the merchants of his time, he was also, in his quaint, blunt way, a famous courtier in the famous court of Queen Elizabeth, where men like the great Earl of Leicester, and his worthier nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, contributed to the gaiety and the renown. Could we look back through three centuries, and see London and England as they really were, we should miss many of the refinements of the modern civilisation which the commerce of men like Gresham did not a little to promote. But travellers of that time, having none of the later refinements to compare them with, were charmed with the state of things which they saw. Let us listen to one of them, a Dutch doctor, who visited London in the days of Sir Thomas Gresham:—

"Frankly to utter what I think," he says, "of the incredible courtesy and friendliness in speech and affability used in this famous realm, I must confess it doth surmount and carry away the price of all others. The neat cleanliness, the exquisite fineness, the pleasant and delightful furniture, wonderfully delighted me. Their chambers and parlours, strewed over with sweet herbs, refreshed me. Rich nosegays in their bed-chambers, with comfortable smell, cheered me up, and entirely delighted all my senses. And this do I think to be the cause that Englishmen, living by such wholesome and exquisite meat, and in so wholesome and healthful air, be so fresh and clear-coloured. At their tables, although they be very sumptuous, and love to have good fare, yet neither are they to overcharge themselves with excess of drink, nor do they greatly provoke and urge others thereto, but suffer every man to drink in such manner as best pleaseth himself."

Another traveller, a German, writing at about the same time, was less complimentary to London and its people.

"The inhabitants," he says, "are magnificently apparelled, and are extremely proud and overbearing; and because the greater part, especially the tradespeople, seldom go into other countries, but always remain in their houses in the city, attending to their business, they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them; and, moreover, one dare not oppose them, lest the street-boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds, and strike to right and left unmercifully, without regard to person; and because they are the strongest, one is obliged to put up with the insults as well as the injury."

Yet even this poor traveller, who had to run away from the rude 'prentices, but could not run out of hearing of their chaff, spoke well of London as a place of trade.

"London," he said, "is a large, excellent, and mighty city of business, and the most important in the whole kingdom. Most of the inhabitants are employed in buying and selling merchandise, and trading to almost every corner of the world, since the Thames is most useful and convenient for the purpose, considering that ships from France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Hamburg, and other parts, come nearly up to the city with their goods. It is a very populous city, so that one can scarcely pass along the streets on account of the throng."

A hundred years before the great fire of 1666, which did good at any rate in leading to the building of better roads and houses than previously existed, the streets were far narrower than now-a-days,and the inhabitants—nearly as numerous within the city walls as now, though of course the great suburbs of London were still only out-of-the-way villages—must have found it hard to get along, as they went to market in Cheapside or the neighbourhood of Leaden Hall, or to change their money and transact wholesale business in Lombard Street and the adjoining parts.

Lombard Street at that time was the central haunt of the merchants. There, especially in the open space near Grace Church, they used to meet, at all hours and in all weathers, to transact their business.

"What a place London is!" exclaimed Gresham's agent, Richard Clough, writing to him in 1561; "that in so many years they have not found the means to make a bourse, but must walk in the rain when it raineth, more like pedlars than merchants."

A bourse or exchange, for merchants to meet in, and do their business comfortably in spite of rain or wind, had long before been built in Antwerp, and as early as 1537 Sir Thomas Gresham*s father had been anxious to build one in London. Others also had proposed it; but the enterprise was too great, and most of the London merchants were too careless in the matter, for anything to be done, until Sir Thomas Gresham took the project in hand; and putting his whole heart into it, toiled on till it was completed.

THE FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE, LONDON.

This was the great work of his life, less memorable in itself than other services done by him to his country, but, in its effects, almost more helpful than anything else to the progress of English commerce. Contributing much money himself, he persuaded seven hundred and fifty other citizens of London to subscribe smaller sums, and between March 1565 and October 1566, £4000 was collected. The city of London gave the land, which was supposed to be worth about £4000 more, and before the end of 1566 the building was fairly begun. The stone was brought from one of Gresham's estates in Norfolk; the wood from another in Suffolk; the slates, iron-work, wain-scoting and glass were sent from Antwerp by Richard Clough; and the quaint Dutch-looking building, with ample walks and rooms for merchants on the basement, and a hundred shops or booths, called the Pawn, above stairs for retail dealers, was completed by the summer of 1569.

Queen Elizabeth christened it on the 23rd of January, 1571.

"The Queen's Majesty," says the old historian, "with her nobility, came from her house at the Strand, called Somerset House, and entered the city by Temple Bar, through Fleet Street, and, after dinner at Sir Thomas Gresham's in Bishopsgate Street, entered the Bourse on the south side, and, when she had viewed every part thereof above the ground, especially the Pawn, which was richly furnished with all sorts of the finest wares in the city, caused the same Bourse, by a herald and trumpet, to be proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be called thenceforth, and not otherwise."

CROSBY HALL, LONDON.

The house in Bishopsgate Street, at which Sir Thomas Gresham gave a dinner to Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers, had been built nearly ten years before. It was one of the finest houses in the city, inferior perhaps to none but the noble Crosby Hall, very near to it, built by a much older merchant of London, Sir John Crosby. In it Gresham generally lived, after leaving Antwerp, the Lombard Street shop being used henceforth only as a place of business. He was owner of several other splendid mansions, one of them being Osterley House, near Brentford. There he added to his trading occupations by setting up a paper-mill, (almost the first in England,) oil-mills and corn-mills. There, too, in 1579, he entertained Queen Elizabeth in courtly fashion. On this occasion Gresham is reported to have amused Queen Elizabeth with a triumph of engineering.

"Her Majesty," says old Fuller, "found fault with the court of the house as too great, affirming that it would appear more handsome if divided with a wall in the middle. What doth Sir Thomas, but, in the night-time, send for workmen to London, who so speedily and silently apply their business, that the next morning discovered that court double which the night had left single before. It is questionable whether the Queen, next day, was more contented with the conformity to her fancy, or more pleased with the surprise and sudden performance thereof; whilst her courtiers disported themselves with their several expressions, some avowing it was no wonder he could so soon change a building who could build a 'Change; others, reflecting on some known differences in this knight's family, affirming that any house is easier divided than united."

That last joke was unkind. In 1544, Gresham married a widow, Dame Anne Read, aunt, by marriage, of Sir Francis Bacon; and his wife and he do not seem to have agreed very well together. They had an only son, Richard, who died in 1564, when he was sixteen years old. Sir Thomas Gresham, an active merchant to the last, lived to the age of sixty.

"On Saturday, the 21st of November 1579," it is written in the Chronicles of England, "between six and seven o'clock in the evening, coming from the Exchange to his house, which he had sumptuously builded in Bishopsgate Street, he suddenly fell down in his kitchen, and, being taken up, was found speechless, and presently died."

On the 15th of September he was buried, solemnly and splendidly, in Saint Helen's Church, hard by; a hundred poor men and a hundred poor women following him to the grave.

His property, worth £2300 a year, passed to his wife and a son of hers by another marriage. The Bishopsgate Street house was devoted to a charitable project, which seems to have been very dear to the merchant's heart during the last years of his life. This was the establishment of Gresham College. He meant it to be as helpful a school for London apprentices as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge could be for other students. But those to whom he entrusted the work used in selfish ways the large sum which he left for the purpose, and Greshara College is now only a monument of the good intentions of its founder.