high-handed practices with the merchant-adventurers, and to extract money from them by way of forced loans. As a much greater storm was brewing on the continent, Gresham had many journeys to make in Flanders upon state business. In one of these his horse fell with him, and his leg was broken. The leg was set, but he is said to have continued lame for the rest of his life. He returned to England in March 1561. In the month of July of that year, he begged Cecil to appoint a day for the meeting of the commissioners, who, with the friendly Cecil at their head, were to examine his accounts. The accounts appear to have been pleasantly passed by the commissioners; and in August Gresham was sent back to Flanders to get 30,000l. out of the English merchants, to pay therewith part of the queen's debts, and to ask time of her creditors for the rest. The commotions in the Low Countries had by this time greatly increased, and Count Egmont and the powerful Prince of Orange had placed themselves at the head of the malcontents. These people wanted arms and ammunition for themselves; yet Gresham succeeded in obtaining a good supply of saltpetre, some armour and guns, with which he returned to England. During his now very frequent absences from his post his duties as queen's agent at Antwerp were intrusted to his old and faithful servant Richard Clough, a Welshman, one of the most laborious and minutest of correspondents. Gresham was of opinion that the custom-house at Antwerp was a much more efficient establishment for the collecting of duties than that of her majesty Queen Elizabeth at London; and he wrote to Richard Clough to desire him to get and send him full information as to its constitution and management, with all the details connected with it. Honest

Richard, who delighted in details, went to work con amore, and soon filled twenty folio pages. He not only ran down the London custom-house, but he also abused the London merchants and the rulers of the city, as a company "that do study for nothing else but for their own profits." As, for ensample," says Richard, 'considering what city London is, and 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 liker pedlars than merchants; and in this country and all other, there is no kind of people that have occasion to meet but they have a place meet for that purpose. Indeed, and if your business were done, and that I might have the leisure to go about it, and that you will be a means to Mr. Secretary [Cecil] to have his favour therein, I will not doubt but to make so fair a Bourse in London as the great Bourse is in Antwerp, without molesting of any man more than he should be well disposed to give." Gresham, as we have seen, inherited the notion of a London Bourse or Exchange from his father Sir Richard; but Richard Clough, no doubt, had a good deal to do in maturing the idea, and in aiding him in the execution of it.

By this time Sir Thomas was busily employed in building his new and spacious house in Bishopsgate Street, which afterwards became Gresham College, and which Stow describes as being "the most spacious of all other thereabout; builded of brick and timber." The house was surrounded by open grounds-convertible into pleasant gardens - which extended from Bishopsgate Street to Broad Street. His foreign agents and corre spondents in the Low Countries shipped for him such materials as could not easily be had in England. The large sums he was expending on this vast building were a proof of his wealth, and a fresh provocation to

envy.

Sir Thomas, being on the continent in 1562, told Cecil that for a certainty there would shortly be a great league for religion's sake against Elizabeth: and partly because the Catholic party in France were so very poor at the time, he earnestly recommended the queen to support and join the French Huguenots, and thereby_regain possession of Calais and the other strips of English territory in France which had been lost under her sister Mary. Soon an English army was sent over to Havre de Grace under Sir Edward Poynings; and thus was begun a system which never ceased during Elizabeth's

reign, she succouring and leaguing herself with the revolted subjects of the Catholic powers, and those powers sending their succours to her disaffected Catholic subjects in England, and sending troops to act with her rebels the Papists of Ireland. In the year 1564 Gresham entered largely into some home manufactures. By an act of parliament, followed by a royal proclamation, England prohibited the importation of cutlery, pins, hats, girdles, ribands, and other articles. These things had hitherto been chiefly imported from the Low Countries, but now Gresham and others had entered upon the speculation of manufacturing them at home. The proclamation was therefore to act as a protection to the speculation of the queen's agent and friends.

In the summer of 1566, the war of religion and independence, which was to last more than half a century, was begun in earnest at Antwerp. His occupation in that country being now almost gone, Gresham busied himself in England about other matters. At the beginning of the year 1565 he had made a proposal to the court of aldermen, that if they would purchase and give him a piece of ground in a proper place, and large enough for the purpose, he would build upon it a Bourse or Exchange, with large and covered walks, where the merchants and traders of all sorts might daily assemble, converse together, and transact business with one another, at all seasons, without any interruption from the weather, or other impediments of any kind. The merchants and citizens had recently had many meetings and consultations upon this subject; for the inconveniences attending the meeting in the open air in Lombard Street were now seriously felt. The court of aldermen accepted the proposal made to them by Sir Thomas, and the subscription was set on foot to raise money for purchasing the land. No fewer than seven hundred and fifty citizens subscribed in small sums, the total sum immediately wanted being short of 4000l. The subscription commenced in March 1565, and ended in October 1566. The bargain for the land was concluded in the month of September; but the ground was cleared and the first

stone laid some months earlier. The citizens, in conveying the ground to Sir Thomas Gresham, entered into certain covenants with him, and they afterwards complained that these covenants were broken. They also affirmed that the ground cost them more than the sum originally stipulated. It has not been discovered how much the materials and building cost Sir Thomas; but as he derived the then large sum of 7007. a year as rent from the Exchange, and as labour was then cheap, and much of the building material furnished by his own estates, he no doubt got something like good interest for his outlay. His architect was one Heinrick, a Fleming. Many of the bricklayers and other workmen came also from the Low Countries; and the statues which decorated the edifice seem in all probability to have been made in Flanders. In short, the building and everything about it had a Flemish character, the design itself being an imitation of the great Bourse or Exchange of Antwerp. According to an engraving, executed most probably at Gresham's own order, the edifice was "full ended" in the year 1569. It consisted of two portions, an upper and a lower: the upper portion was laid out in shops, 100 in number, and the lower into walks and rooms for the merchants, with shops on the exterior. It was to increase the reputation of the place, and especially to get tenants for these shops, and not to open the Exchange, which had been finished and opened long before, that Queen Elizabeth was induced by Gresham to pay her much celebrated visit to the spot in the year 1571. The manœuvre was very ingenious and characteristic of the man. For more than a year after the completion of the Exchange, the shops remained almost empty, thus causing much disappointment to the founder, who had anticipated a handsome income from them in the shape of rent. Gresham's imagination went to work, and hit upon a new "device." It was noised abroad that the queen was coming in state to visit the Bourse, and Gresham "went twice in one day, round about the upper part, and besought those few shopkeepers then present that they would furnish and adorn

with wares and wax lights as many shops as they either could or would, and that they should have all those shops so furnished rent-free that year, which otherwise at that time was forty shillings the shop by the year."* All things being prepared, and all the city bells ringing, on the 23rd January 1571 "the queen's majesty, attended with her nobility, came from her house at the Strand, called Somerset House, and entered the city by Temple Bar, through Fleet Street, Cheap, and so by the north side of the Bourse to Sir Thomas Gresham's in Bishopsgate Street, where she dined. After dinner her majesty, returning through Cornhill, entered the Burse on the south side; and after that she had viewed every part thereof above the ground, especially the Pawne [the upper part of the building wherein were the hundred shops or stalls], which was richly furnished with all sorts of the finest wares in the city, she caused the same Burse, by an herald and trumpet, to be proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be called from thenceforth, and not otherwise."t

After this grand celebration, Gresham's bazaar or shops began to be filled and the rents to be raised! “And within two years after, he raised that rent unto four marks a year; and within a while after that he raised his rent of every shop unto four pounds ten shillings a year, and then all shops were well furnished according to that time; for then the milliners or haberdashers in that place sold mouse-traps, birdcages, shoeing horns, lanthorns, Jew's trumpets, &c. There were also at that time that kept shops in the upper Pawne of the Royal Exchange, armourers that sold both old and new armour, apothecaries, booksellers, goldsmiths, and glasssellers: although now it is as plenteously stored with all kinds of rich wares and fine commodities as any particular place in Europe, unto which place many foreign princes daily send, to be served of the best sort."+

But great fame as well as great profit was derived by Gresham from this royal visit. Dramatists and poets † Id.

* Stow.

+ Id.