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 Holt 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 extor tion, 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. The 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

grandson to opulent merchants, Thomas was destined to trade from his birth. But Sir Richard, although intending that his son should follow his own profession, resolved to give him the advantages of a liberal education at one of the universities. Thomas was sent to Cambridge, and yet was bound apprentice, as mercer, to his uncle John. Whether he went to the university first, and to his uncle's counting-house or warehouse afterwards, or whether he finished his apprenticeship first, and went to the university after that, we do not discover. We learn from Gresham himself that he served eight years' apprenticeship to trade. Probably his stay at Cambridge was but short, and was taken out of these eight years. In the year 1543 Thomas was in the Low Countries, acting by himself as a merchant, and as an agent for Henry VIII. In 1544 he married a rich widow. His wife was daughter to William Ferneley, esquire, of West Creting, in Suffolk, and widow of William Read, whose ancestors were settled at Beccles, in Suffolk. Read had been citizen and mercer of London, and must have lived on terms of intimacy with the Gresham family, for he appointed Sir Richard (the father of Thomas, who married his widow) overseer to his will, and bequeathed him a legacy of ten pounds and a black gown. Read's age is not mentioned. From the great haste of his widow to marry again, it has been conjectured that Read was a good deal older than his wife, or that upon other grounds she did not much lament his loss. He died in 1544, and she married young Thomas Gresham in the course of the same year. She had two sons by her first husband. Her younger sister, Jane Ferneley, was married to Sir Nicholas Bacon, the lord keeper, father to Nathaniel Bacon, and to the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam. To Gresham she bore one son who was named after his grandfather, Richard. This marriage did not keep Gresham at home: he was frequently absent for considerable periods of time in the Low Countries, or elsewhere. His head-quarters abroad were at Antwerp, the great centre of commercial and financial operations; but at times he resided at Bruges.

He had acquired a reputation for activity, ability, and stability as a merchant, and was enriched by an hereditary reputation, or by the high consideration to which so many of his family had attained, when the embarrassments of the English government called him fully into employment. Sir William Dansell, financial agent for the crown in the Low Countries, had shown a great lack of financial skill; and through ignorance, or negligence, had so mismanaged matters that the rate of interest was fearfully raised upon the King, and his credit at the same time much injured. He was "revoked from his office of agent by reason of his slackness."*

This happened in the month of April, 1551, in the fourth year of the reign of Edward VI. The court and government, being then entirely ruled by the incapable protector Somerset and his self-seeking and rapacious crew, were deeply in debt, and so discredited abroad that there was but little prospect of their obtaining any fresh loans. In this perplexity their lordships of the council called in several London merchants, to take their advice as to the means of extricating government from the difficulties under which it lay. Among these merchants was Thomas Gresham. He says himself" I was sent for unto the council, to know my opinion what way, with least charge, his Majesty might grow out of debt. And after my device was declared, the King's highness and the council required me to take the room [business or office] in hand, without my suit or labour for the same."+

At this time the annual interest on the king's foreign bonds amounted to what was for that time an enormous sum. By the management of the foreign exchanges, over which no English merchant had hitherto attempted to exercise any control, the rate of exchange was ruinously adverse to England. Moreover, the continental capitalists drove their trade much in the manner of cer

* Letters as quoted by J. W. Burgon, in Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham.

† Cottonian MS. as cited by J. W. Burgon.

tain disreputable modern money-lenders, who give to the spendthrifts with whom they deal so much in cash and so much in bad pictures, or in sour wines in the docks, or in bad jewellery, or the like. At every renewal of debt they required their slow and unpunctual creditors to purchase jewels or other wares and merchandise to a large amount, as a consideration for their giving time for the liquidation of the debt. It should appear that neither Henry VIII. nor his son and successor had ever been able to conclude an original loan without agreeing to take at a price fixed by the money-lenders some jewel "marvellous big," or some "fair and great diamond," or some other article of which they had no manner of need. "This," says Gresham, "was to his Majesty's extreme loss and damage."*

Being thus appointed to serve the king, Gresham now carried his wife and family to Antwerp, and established himself in the house of Gaspar Schetz, a rich merchant, with whom he had long been connected. This Gaspar Schetz was the eldest of three brothers, who were all wealthy, and partners with him in his business. Their family motto, or the motto they adopted on a medal which bore the names of Gaspar, Malchior, and Balthazar Schetz, was "CONCORDIA RES PARVE CRESCANT"By union small things increase. All the brothers, like their father before them (Erasmus Schetz), are described as having a taste for letters and for arts. Gaspar, the eldest, filled very high offices, having been successively chief factor to the Emperor Charles V., and treasurergeneral of the Low Countries. He was a connoisseur and collector of coins, and enjoyed besides the reputation of a poet. He was the foremost man in all Antwerp, and Antwerp was then the foremost trading city in Europe. The mind of Gresham was evidently cultivated and improved by his long connection with this family. In other respects Antwerp was a pleasant and joyous residence; but during the earlier part of his employment as royal agent, Gresham was not allowed to live there

* Original letters, as quoted by Mr. Burgon.

uninterruptedly. According to his own account, during the first two years of his service to King Edward VI. he posted from Antwerp to the court at Westminster no fewer than forty times, and each time upon short notice. It should appear that whenever there was a money difficulty at court and such difficulties were constantly occurring during the whole of the reign of Edward VI. Gresham was called over and taken into council by ministers that were as ignorant and blundering as they were selfish and rapacious. The common process was to discharge, or partially discharge, the interest due upon old debts, by making new debts at Antwerp. And still, goods or useless nicknacks continued to be forced upon the borrower, in the old fashion. More than once we find Gresham perplexed to his wits' end to know how he shall convey over to England scores of bales, the exportation of which is prohibited by the government of the Low Countries, and to devise how his own government are to turn hucksters, and force the immediate sale of commodities for which there is no demand in England. The ingenuity which the perplexed agent exercised in these dilemmas is very amusing, and seems generally to have been attended with success; but it was a system of tricks and expedients, to be excused perhaps in that ignorant, anti-commercial time, but certainly not to be upheld as an exemplar and model to the British merchant of a better, because a more enlightened, age. In many respects Gresham was to the true merchant and financier only what the alchemist and conjurer was to the chemist and true natural philosopher. His errors were indeed those of his age; but beyond his age he never appears to have looked, nor can we discover in him even a germ of those freer and juster ideas of trade which were timidly enounced a century after his death.

The government, and Gresham himself, entertained, in its widest extent, the fallacious notion of the time, that it was a most fatal thing to allow money to be carried out of the country; and, although there was no proper establishment of custom-house officers or coast-guards, no organized police, no suitable organization in any one