therein. The salaries of the lecturers, which were far more than defrayed by the rents arising from the Royal Exchange, were fixed at 50l. per annum each, a sum equivalent to at least 4007. or 500l. a year at the present day. It might have been expected from a financier and man of business like Gresham, that he would have foreseen that the increasing trade, industry, and ingenuity of the country would rapidly bring in money, and decrease the representative value of the pound sterling and of all other coin; that the rents derivable from the Royal Exchange must be rapidly raised in proportion; and that with this foresight he would have abstained from fixing the salaries according to the value of money and of the rents derivable from the Exchange in his day. But, in cases like this, an enlightened and high-minded legislature would so far interfere with the mere letter of a will as to alter it into the intention of the donor; and the real intention of Gresham could only have been that the seven professors should have and enjoy in all time to come what should be equivalent to the fifty pounds per annum of his own time, and the amount of which would be defrayed by the rising rents of the Exchange. Nothing could be more earnestly worded than all these portions of his will. He conjures the parties charged with the administration of his will to see his intentions carried out, as they will answer the same before Almighty God;" and he tells them that the default thereof "shall be to the reproach and condemnation of the said corporations afore God."*

As such bequests have been most rare among us, it is the more lamentable that the good example set by Gresham should have been in a manner destroyed by those corporate bodies whose bounden duty it was to uphold it, and diffuse the benefits which might have resulted from it. In his great scheme of education the mind of our royal merchant took a high flight. His notion was that the citizens of London, who were all to

*Sir Thomas Gresham's will, as given in Dr. Ward's 'Lives of the Gresham Professors."

have free access to the lectures, would be quite capable of learning the higher sciences and the elegant arts. He instituted a lectureship upon astronomy at a time when the science was not taught in any school or university in this country, and when its rudiments were almost unknown. Ever since the destruction of the Chantries under Henry VIII. and Edward VI., the taste for music had been on the decline. Gresham included

music among his endowed lectures, intending to give a new impulse to that delightful science in the capital of the empire. And, upon the whole, though subjected to disheartening inconveniences and long interruptions, the musical class of Gresham College appears to have conferred more benefit upon society than any of the other classes, or than all the others put together. If from the first there had been in each class or faculty a succession of professors like Mr. Taylor, the present excellent Gresham professor of music, Gresham College would never have become a nonentity or a laughing-stock, and a taste for the arts which civilize, adorn, and cheer the life of man would not have been allowed to perish or decline as it long did among those "in populous cities pent."

Nor did Sir Thomas Gresham forget in his will charities and pious uses. In his lifetime he had built at the back of his London mansion eight substantial alms-houses, and to the inmates of each of these houses he bequeathed the annual sum of 67. 13s. 4d. Furthermore he left 50%. a year to be distributed among the poor prisoners for debt in the London jails. These and other sums for charitable purposes were to be paid by the Corporation and the Mercers' Company, out of the revenues derived from the Exchange, for those rents amounted to more than 7007. per annum, and the salaries of the seven Gresham professorships came only to 350l. per annum. He left 100l. a-year to his Company for four dinners in the course of a year; and no doubt the worshipful Mercers, however careless as to other parts of his last will and testament, have taken especial care to keep up these celebrations, and to eat the dinners thus provided

for them; taking also into account the difference between the costs of a civic feast in the seventeenth and in the nineteenth century.

Gresham had an illegitimate daughter by a Flemish woman, whom he brought up in his own house in England. He is said to have given her a good education and a good dower. The last fact, at least, seems to be proved by the importance of the family into which she married. This Anne Gresham could call the great Lord Bacon brother-in-law: her husband was Sir Nathaniel Bacon, second son of Sir Nicholas, the Lord Keeper, by his first wife Jane Ferneley, sister to Lady Gresham. As her name does not occur in his will it is supposed that Gresham's daughter died before the year 1575, when that will was made.

Sir Thomas had no fewer than four or five stately mansions in the county of Norfolk, his favourite house in that county being at Intwood. Besides these he had a fine seat (Osterley) in the county of Middlesex, not far from Brentford; a magnificent old place (Mayfield) in Sussex, and apparently one or two houses in other parts of the kingdom, in which he occasionally resided. "Osterley Park (now the property of the Countess of Jersey) came into the possession of our splendid merchant before the year 1562. It is believed that he knocked down an old house and built a new one upon the site. Norden, who wrote in 1593, describes the house as being a stately building of brick, and the park as being extensive, and "garnished with many fair ponds, which afforded not only fish and fowl and swans, and other water-fowl, but also great use for mills,-as paper-mills, oil-mills, and corn-mills." Here Queen Elizabeth_paid Gresham a visit in the year 1570. It is quaint old Fuller that tells this pleasant and well-known story:

"Her majesty 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 (money commands all things), 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 the knight's family) affirmed that 'any house is easier divided than united.'"'* It is not wealth that always makes the best temple for the household gods. It has been conjectured that many of our merchant's family differences arose out of his affection for his natural daughter; but it should appear that his wife was, on other matters, an irritable sour-tempered woman.

Old and wealthy as he was, the last moments of Sir Thomas's life were devoted to business. "On Saturday the 21st of November, 1579, between six and seven of the 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 dead." By his death many large estates in several counties of England, amounting at that time to the yearly value of two thousand three hundred pounds and upwards, came to his lady, who survived him many years. He, in fact, took nothing from her; for neither Gresham House nor the rents of the Exchange were to be appropriated to the college until after her decease, and yet she begrudged those two well-intended donations, and quarrelled and litigated with the corporation about insignificant sums; and it is quite clear that if she could have annulled the will she would have done so in order to add Gresham House and the rents derived from the Exchange to the great estates which she left to her son by her first marriage. On the 15th of December, the remains of our great merchant were deposited in St.

*Fuller, Worthies, vol. ii.
Holinshed. Chronicle.

Helen's Church, Bishopsgate Street, close to his own house, and the resting-place of his son Richard. He had prepared for himself a sumptuous tomb or monument during his life-time: but neither his widow, nor his stepson William Read, who, after her, came into possession of the mass of his splendid fortune, ever went to the expense of putting an inscription on the tomb, and it remained without a date and without a name until the year 1736, when the following brief inscription was cut on the solid black marble slab which covers the alabaster tomb, by order of the churchwardens:

SIR THOMAS GRESHAM, KNight,

Bury'd. Decembr. the 15th 1579.

Lady Gresham twice attempted to act contrary to her husband's will; and wealthy as she was (being reputed the richest widow of those days) she tried hard to derive unfair advantages from that small portion of property, the rent derivable from the Exchange, &c., which was entrusted to her for her life-time only. And these things she did in spite of the solemn trust and confidence which her husband in his will said he placed in her as his faithful loving wife. Parliament was obliged to interfere. In the year 1581 an act was passed, confirming all the good uses and intents of the will of Sir Thomas, and sanctioning and guaranteeing not only the private appointments of his will, but likewise his public benefactions (as the college and professorships) and his charities to the poor. Yet still begrudging her husband's bequest for the promotion of learning, not contented with the usufructu, and looking beyond the natural term of her own life and to the further enriching of her already wealthy son William Read, Lady Gresham, in the year 1592, endeavoured to get an act of Parliament to empower her and her heirs to make leases from time to time of twenty-one years of the shops in the Exchange, reserving the fines to herself and her heirs. In petitioning the Privy Council she suggested, or insisted, that she ought to have what she asked for, inas