The founder of the Royal Exchange was born in the year 1519; and he lived during the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. He was descended from a family originally settled in the county of Norfolk, and which had become considerable and wealthy, by

James Gresham, his great-grandfather, chiefly resided at Holt, where he had a manor house and good estate. But he frequently resided in the populous and busy city of Norwich. This James Gresham was succeeded by his son John, and John married a lady who brought him a large fortune, and in due process of time

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four sons, -William, Thomas, Richard, and John. Richard, the father of Sir Thomas, the founder of the Royal Exchange and Gresham College, was knighted by Henry VIII., as was also his younger brother John. It

appears that three of these four brothers, including William, the eldest, who succeeded to the landed estates, were all engaged in trade.

William was mercer and merchant-adventurer of London, and one of the principal freemen of the Mercers' Company. In 1544 he joined his younger brothers Richard and John in making a loan to Henry VIII. ; and at this time he was ranked among the most considerable of the English merchants that traded with the Low Countries. His brother Richard, the father of Sir Thomas, was bred a mercer in the city of London, being apprenticed to Mr. John Middleton, an eminent mercer and merchant of the staple at Calais. As early as the year 1507 Richard was admitted to the freedom of the Mercers' Company. He was so very fortunate in trade that he purchased vast estates in several counties of England. He was frequently, absent upon business at Calais and in the Low Countries. During his residence on the continent he was a diligent collector and writer of news; and he corresponded directly with the king's ministers, and with no less a personage than Cardinal Wolsey, to whom he was much devoted. Richard Gresham acted in fact as political or money agent for Henry VIII. in the Nethersands, and resided in this capacity at Antwerp during a part of Henry's capricious and ridiculous wars with France. He was the first of our merchants to discover that foreign loans were precarious and costly, and that money might possibly be raised in the city of London for the

rvice of the king or government without applying to the Dutch and Flemings. His devotion to the government got him into some trouble in the city, but there is good reason to believe that it also obtained for him many preferences and advantages. In the year 1531 Richard became sheriff of London, and received the honour of knighthood from Henry VIII. At this time Sir Richard attempted to do what was afterwards done by his son Sis

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Thomas. The merchants of London, having no convenient place of resort, were accustomed to meet at 'change-hours in Lombard Street, where they were exposed to the open air and all injuries of the weather. Sir Richard wrote a letter to Sir Thomas Audeley, Lord Privy Seal, to acquaint him that there were certain houses in Lombard Street belonging to Sir George Monnocks, which, if allowed to be purchased and pulled down, would afford space for building a handsome Bourse or Exchange, such as existed in the Netherlands and in other countries; and he therefore entreated Audeley to move his Majesty, that a letter might be sent to Sir George requiring him to sell those houses to the mayor and commonalty of the city of London for such prices as he did purchase them for.” Sir Richard calculated that two thousand pounds or something more would pay for the new building, which would be very“ beautiful to the city, and also for the honour of our sovereign lord the king.” The scheme, however, fell to the ground, the fault, it should seem, lying mostly, if not entirely, with the citizens. In the year 1537, Sir Richard became Lord Mayor of London. It appears that he continued to manage various financial matters for the court, and that he obtained the goodwill of the various ministers who succeeded Cardinal Wolsey, and the favour of Henry VIII., even when that once debonnaire King had grown into a gross, capricious, and sanguinary tyrant. The last fact will explain that Sir Richard had a yielding conscience in matters of religion (and this, indeed, appears to have been the case with his son Sir Thomas as with all the other members of the family). While sheriff he had received into his custody and committed to Newgate the accomplished and unfortunate James Bainham, a Protestant gentleman of the Temple, who was charged with heresy by the Popish priests, and who in the end was burned in Smithfield. 'Many years after this, when Sir Richard was not trammelled by any official duty, as he had been during his shrievalty, he became one of the commissioners to find out heretics and bring them to condign punishment, Henry having declared that, whe

ther Papists or Protestants, all were heretics who rejected his own unsettled exposition of the faith. Bishop Bonner presided over this commission, and under it cruelties were committed as atrocious as any that were perpetrated in the time of Queen Mary. Sir Richard's brother, Sir John Gresham, was also in this commission. Yet Sir Richard had come early into the market as a purchaser of church and monastic property, and had written letters to Thomas Cromwell, the great agent in the confiscation, to beg him to move the king to give him preference in the market, and let him buy at a price of his own naming, certain church lands in his own native county of Norfolk.

He received from the king five successive grants of church lands; and in 1540-1 he was named one of the commission for taking the value of the abbeys, monasteries, &c., in and about London, a most money-making occupation, and which no man performed without looking to himself. Yet if Sir Richard benefited himself by the breaking up of the old institutions, he made some laudable efforts to get something out of the scrambling for the destitute classes, who in former times had depended upon the alms of the Popish clergy, and upon the hospitals and infirmaries attached to the abbeys and monasteries. He petitioned the King “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;" and he prayed his majesty to order that the “ three hospitals or spitals within the city, commonly called St. Mary's Spital, St. Bartholomew's Spital, and St. Thomas's Spital, and the new abbey by Tower Hill,” should be set apart and endowed for the use of this poor and sick people. The prayer of this petition was in part granted by Henry, and the grant was confirmed under his son Edward VI. And in the grand confiscation of religious houses in the city Sir Richard obtained for the Mercers' Company the house of St. Thomas of Acre, and the Company erected the Mercers' chapel, in Cheapside, on the site. He died in the month of February, 1548, about a year after Henry, VIII., at his mansion at Bethnal

Green. His brother John, who was also knighted, was equally successful in the world, being one of the principal merchant adventurers trading with the Levant. He also was sheriff and lord mayor. In 1546 Sir John Gresham bought of his eldest brother, William, the family manorhouse at Holt, and converted it into a free grammarschool, and most liberally endowed it with estates in Norfolk, and some lands or houses in London. Like other property bequeathed for the same noble purposes, this endowment has been allowed to be shamefully mismanaged by a City Company, and in part alienated, and instead of being one of the foremost establishments in all England, which it well might have been by this time, the IIolt grammar-school educates only some forty or fifty boys, and has only one university exhibition of twenty pounds per annum. The passion for plunder, and extortion, and self-appropriation, did not cease with the remorseless scramble for church property at the dawn of the Reformation ; and, unhappily, the good intentions of the Gresham family, have been particularly exposed to the mean and selfish passions of those who have lived after them, and who have been unworthily intrusted with the administration of the property they bequeathed for high and ennobling purposes.

Sir John joined his brother Sir Richard in imploring Henry VIII. to make over some of the suppressed religious houses in the city for the use of the poor and diseased ; and it is said that to him the city was mainly indebted for Bethlehem Hospital as an asylum for lunatics. Sir John, who died in Queen Mary's time, had a very grand and very papistical funeral

. Thomas Gresham, younger son of Sir Richard, it has been said, was born in the year 1519.

place of his birth is somewhat doubtful. Fuller in his Worthies says decidedly that he was born in the county of Norfolk. Others again say that he was born in London. One part of Fuller's account is, that he was bred a mercer and merchant in the city of London.” His mother, the first wife of Sir Richard, was Audrey, daughter of William Lynne, esquire, of Southwick, in Northamptonshire. Son, nephew, grandson, and great

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