Gresham, SIR THOMAS,

Gresham, SIR THOMAS, founder of the Royal Exchange, was born in 1519, the only son of Sir Richard Gresham, an opulent merchant of Norfolk ancestry, who in 1537 was elected Lord Mayor of London. Apprenticed awhile to his uncle, Sir John Gresham, a wealthy London mercer, and then sent to study at Gonville Hall, Cambridge, in 1543 he was admitted a member of the Mercers' Company, and in 1551 was employed as 'king's merchant' at Antwerp. In two years he paid off a heavy loan, entirely restored the king's credit, and introduced a new system of finance. As a Protestant, he got his dismissal from Queen Mary, but, on presenting a memorial of his past services, was soon reinstated. By Queen Elizabeth he was in 1559 knighted and appointed for a short time English ambassador at the court of the regent at Brussels. The troubles in the Netherlands compelled him, in 1567, to withdraw finally from Antwerp, to which city he had made more than forty journeys on state service; in one, in 1560, he was thrown from his horse and lamed for life. In 1569, by his advice, the state was induced to borrow money from London merchants, instead of from foreigners, to the great advantage of the mercantile body. Having in 1564 lost his only son, Richard, in 1566-71 he devoted a portion of his great wealth to the erection of an Exchange (q.v.), in imitation of that of Antwerp, for the London merchants, who were wont to meet in the open air. Renowned for his hospitality and liberality, he frequently entertained foreign personages of distinction, and erected a magnificent mansion at Osterly Park, near Brentford, where he was visited by Queen Elizabeth. For the endowment of a college in London he directed by his will that his town-mansion in Bishopsgate Street should be converted into a residence and lecture-rooms for seven professors, to be salaried out of the Royal Exchange revenues. Gresham College gave place to the Excise Office in 1768, and the lectures were delivered in a room in the Exchange till 1843, when the lecture-hall in Basinghall Street was built out of the accumulated fund. The subjects of lectures (all of which since 1876 are delivered in English only, not Latin) are divinity, physic, astronomy, geometry, law, rhetoric and music. Gresham also provided for the erection and support of eight almshouses, and made many other charitable bequests. He died suddenly, 21st November 1579. See his Life by Dean Burgon (2 vols. 1839). For Gresham's Law, see BIMETALLISM.