London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  The year 1544 was a highly significant one for Thomas Gresham. The portrait most likely celebrated his marriage to a wealthy merchant’s widow, Anne Ferneley – as Anne Gresham, the ‘A. G.’ bound to the ‘T. G.’ through a shared motto. With his father Sir Richard more or less in retirement by this time, Thomas was running the Greshams’ successful family business. The future belonged to him, and it promised exceptional things.

  Thomas Gresham was born around 1518 at his father’s house on Milk Street, a couple of minutes’ walk from Cheapside and close to the Guildhall. The family’s parish church was St Lawrence Jewry, which young Thomas would have known in the 1530s, just as young Thomas More had done a few decades earlier, for More too had grown up on Milk Street. The church was well known throughout London for two mysterious objects on display to parishioners: the first, the tooth of an enormous fish ‘hanged up for show in chains of iron’ on a stone pillar; the second the reputed shin bone of a giant. The Elizabethan antiquary John Stow saw the tooth when he was a boy, though it had disappeared by the time he came to write his Survey of London in the 1590s. The bone – Stow thought it might once have belonged to an elephant – was still in the church, and presumably was destroyed when St Lawrence Jewry went up in flames during the Great Fire of 1666.1

  Of Thomas Gresham’s early life we have the basic shape. He had an elder brother, John, and two sisters Christian and Elizabeth. Their mother, Dame Audrey, died in 1522, when Thomas was three or four years old, and she was buried in St Lawrence Jewry. Sir Richard married for a second time – to Isabelle Taverson, who brought her daughters to live at Milk Street.

  In October 1530 Thomas was sent by his father to study at Gonville Hall in Cambridge, a small foundation of university scholars 200 years old with strong connections to the Greshams’ ancestral county of Norfolk. Thomas was thirteen or fourteen years old when he left London for the fens. He stayed in Cambridge for at least a year and perhaps a little longer.2 He was a ‘pensioner’, a kind of extra-mural student whose family paid for his room, food and drink, and who enjoyed the privilege of dining with the college fellows at high table, separated and elevated from the other, poorer boys.

  Life at Gonville Hall was a long way removed from the comforts of Richard Gresham’s house on Milk Street, however. The college was in essence an austere and tiny boarding school of twenty-five to thirty boys and young men mostly in their late teens and early twenties whose lives together were governed by unyielding routine. The community worshipped in the college chapel at five o’clock every morning, taking their meals in hall: an early breakfast, dinner at about ten o’clock, supper at about five. They studied in a library filled with books and manuscripts going back to the foundation of the college in 1349. They heard lectures in the university’s teaching rooms next door to the college, and gave scholarly disputations in their own college hall. For someone of Thomas’s age, the curriculum was the ‘trivium’ of advanced grammar, rhetoric and logic, building on the Latin he would have been taught from the age of about seven. At Cambridge, teaching was in Latin and, for the boys more advanced in their studies, Greek.

  At Gonville Hall there was no whisper of luxury. Chambers were sparsely furnished. The hall, unlike anywhere else in the college, was heated, though a brazier or two represented only the barest of nods to the winter cold. Meals were taken in silence, with a college fellow reading aloud passages from the Latin Vulgate Bible. On holy days like Christmas, stringent rules were relaxed just a little so that fellows and students could enjoy themselves with plays and music.

  The monastic feel of Gonville Hall in the early 1530s was accentuated by the familiar presence of young monks on study leave from the great religious houses of East Anglia. For a boy used to the bustle and news of London, Cambridge must have felt like a place out of time, small, self-contained and inward-looking. But in 1530 and 1531 the rumble of change was being felt even in the fens. In 1530 the university gave its collective opinion on Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’ – the legitimacy or not of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon – on which (with no great surprise) it decided in favour of the king.

  At Gonville Hall, as throughout Cambridge, reform was in the air, though for many it stank of heresy. There were efforts in 1531 within the university to suppress the writings and ideas of controversial theologians and translators like Jan Hus, Martin Luther and John Wyclif. There were suspicions that Gonville Hall was something of a hotbed of new and dangerous theology. Nicholas Shaxton, one of its Fellows, was a convinced supporter of the king’s Great Matter and a protégé of Anne Boleyn. Richard Taverner was a scholarly refugee from Oxford: accused of heresy there in 1529, he moved to Cambridge with the intervention and protection of Thomas Cromwell. A less controversial contemporary of Gresham at Gonville Hall was John Caius, then a twenty-year-old student of theology and an enthusiastic follower of the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam. Caius later became the best-known physician in England. And it is just possible that Gresham knew William Gonnell, a pensioner at Gonville Hall from 1531, who, at the time of Thomas’s birth, had been the brilliant tutor to the children of Thomas More.

  Given our knowledge of Thomas’s later success, we might imagine that his short stay in Cambridge was part of Sir Richard Gresham’s master plan for his son’s brilliant career. Perhaps it was – a university education was highly unusual even for the grandest of London merchants. But most likely Richard just wanted Thomas to have a thorough grounding in grammar and an acquaintance with the academic study of rhetoric, logic, the classics and history.

  Richard Gresham allowed his son no easy short-cuts. Thomas valued his father’s discipline, later explaining why he had served an apprenticeship of eight years to his uncle John. His father’s position within the Mercers’ Company could have spared him those years, ‘Albeit my father Sir Richard Gresham, being a wise man, knew … it was to no purpose except I were bound prentice to the same, whereby to come by the experience and to the knowledge of all kind of merchandize.’3 This was the Gresham way: hard work, attention to detail and steady application.

  The years 1535 to 1543 were a period of startling changes in Church and State, of Sir Richard Gresham’s mayoralty and of the family’s ever-increasing fortune. They were years, too, of Sir Richard’s careful placing of his son on the outer wings of the political and diplomatic stage, for Thomas’s apprenticeship was no ordinary one. In 1538 Sir Richard supervised the visit to London of French dignitaries, making sure to let the powerful Thomas Cromwell know that ‘My son hath waited upon them and doth keep the same company by the way to the intent to see them well entertained and used by reason of his language’ – he was a kind of chaperone translator.4 By 1543 Thomas was playing a minor role in diplomacy between England and the Holy Roman Empire, carrying letters between the royal courts. It was important to be noticed as a young man of promise.

  In some ways Gresham’s Antwerp portrait of 1544 is not representative of his very delicate edging forward into political and diplomatic life. Thomas was a man with a fine mind for business, with a father who was not afraid to tout his son’s talents, but he was neither a nobleman nor a diplomat. The picture speaks powerfully of Thomas’s own instinct of self-presentation. He was a kind of merchant-courtier hybrid, positioned by his father to become the head of a powerful family business; he was the son of a former lord mayor, with at least a taste of a Cambridge education, experience of international mercantile diplomacy, and some talent for languages. A true courtier, as Gresham would have known, was made as well as born. Baldassare Castiglione, in his Book of the Courtier (translated into English in 1561), laid out the essential criteria: of good birth and stock, favoured with the right kind of body (well proportioned and not too tall), amiable in countenance, curious, well spoken, wise, musical, knowledgeable about affairs, an accomplished linguist, honest, educated, clean and well dressed. He was to look much as Thomas Gresham looked in his Antwerp portrait: ‘To make his garments after the fashion of the most, and those to be black, o
r of some darkish and sad colour, not garish.’5

  Thomas Gresham’s life in London in the late 1540s was that of a rich gentleman merchant. His house on Basinghall Street, close to Guildhall, was both a home and a business headquarters, buzzing with servants, factors and extended family. In March 1547 his wife Anne gave birth to a son Richard, and she was a frequent attender at the christenings of her friends’ children. Minstrels played for the family over the Christmas of 1547, and Thomas celebrated the election of his uncle John, Sir Richard’s brother, as lord mayor for the year 1547–8. For relaxation, Thomas played dice for money, along with a game called ‘bank notes’.6

  By the time of Sir Richard Gresham’s death in 1549, the Greshams had been in the first league of the city establishment for nearly thirty years. Sir Richard’s will contained all the usual provisions for family, charity and livery company, and just a hint of the extent of his property portfolio: money for the poor as well as for grand commemorative dinners for his fellow mercers, and big houses in Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire. But most striking of all were the breadth and depth of his political connections. His will was a Who’s Who of the government of King Edward VI, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of his father Henry VIII in 1547. Privy councillors, courtiers, judges and law officers all received Sir Richard Gresham’s mourning rings. The most prominent among them was King Edward’s most powerful adviser, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Thomas Gresham’s sister Christian was married to Sir John Thynne, one of Somerset’s household officers. It could not be clearer that the Greshams were firmly embedded in the Tudor elite. Thomas’s future looked very bright indeed.

  In December 1551, Thomas Gresham had the most important interview of his career. It took place because of the refusal of the king’s agent in Antwerp, William Dansell, to return home to explain why English royal finance in Antwerp was in such a mess. Gresham later explained that Edward VI’s Privy Council had sent for him ‘to know my opinion (as they had many other merchants) by what way, with least charge, his majesty might grow out of debt’. Clearly Gresham’s performance before the council was impressive. There and then he was given the job of replacing Dansell in Antwerp, without, as he later put it, ‘my suit or labour for the same’.7

  For decades, Crown expenditure had far outpaced the ability of the government to raise sufficient sums of money effectively. Tudor taxation, whether by the king’s prerogative or through parliament, was as unpopular as it was inefficient and periodic. Even the extraordinary windfall provided by the dissolution of the monastic houses had not been enough to pay for Henry VIII’s ambitions. In the early summer of 1544, Henry had been preparing a military expedition in France, for which the sum of £250,000 was needed just for the first three months of the campaign. Stephen Vaughan, Henry’s financial agent, went to work with those whom he called the ‘foxes and wolves’ of the Antwerp financial world, using as his intermediary the hard-nosed Italian broker Gaspar Ducci of the international syndicate of Neidhart, Seiler, Ducci and partners. It was the Welser banking house of Augsburg that supplied the loan to King Henry of 100,000 crowns at an interest rate of 14 per cent, with the promise of 100,000 crowns more two months later. The Welser would accept security only from the Anglo-Italian mercantile houses of Vivaldi and Bonvisi in London.8

  As a proportion of the amount of money spent by Henry on campaigning in France and Scotland (characteristically he had opened up a war on two fronts at the same time), the Antwerp loan was modest. The total came to a little over £2 million. Parliamentary taxation, forced loans, the sale of ex-monastic lands (to families like the Greshams) and the debasement of England’s coinage covered the bulk of expenditure. But what was crippling about the Antwerp loan, particularly for a royal exchequer now drained dry, was the rate of interest being charged on it. In 1548 the sum owed to the Welser amounted to almost £240,000, rising quickly to £325,000.9 When Edward’s Privy Council interviewed Gresham, the books could not be made to balance. The king’s government desperately needed a pause for breath, and it was Gresham’s task somehow to manage the crippling repayments. In 1551 he was invited to take up what must have appeared to many an impossible brief.

  What made it worse were the policies being enforced by Edward’s Privy Council. Terrified that England’s economic fragility would lead to ‘the great impoverishment’ of the realm, the council ordered that no gold or silver in the form of ‘bullion, money, plate or vessel’ should leave the kingdom, forbidding also exchange dealings in England. At the same time the government introduced a devalued currency in the form of copper shillings, as a result of which prices in the kingdom rose and the value of sterling fell. Merchants were in uproar, and nine months later, after lobbying the government with their ‘lamentable complaints and humble suits’, the prohibition on exchange was at last lifted.10

  With Edward’s councillors floundering, Thomas Gresham could afford to be both brisk and blunt. His aim was to clear the king’s debts, and his approach was strictly commercial. Gresham lived and breathed Antwerp, and it was his mastery of the exchange and its processes that gave him the sort of advantage he would need to balance the kingdom’s books. His house in Antwerp was a stone’s throw from the New Bourse. He knew the Antwerp market inside out: its merchants, its deal-making bankers, the intrigues between the town and the emperor’s court at Brussels, the changing and often febrile world of big money. He knew that regular and accurate information was everything. He lived by numbers and data; probably he dreamt of exchange rates. As he wrote in 1553 with a self-important flourish: ‘No bourse passes wherein I am not furnished with a statement of all monies borrowed on that day.’11

  And yet, even for Thomas Gresham it was intense and demanding work. As skilled, able and obsessive as he was, he found himself stretched to his limits. The job he had been given called for all the persuasive skills of a merchant-courtier both suave and purposeful. Gresham, after all, was making deals with the foxes and wolves of international moneylending, where a banking house like the Welser could lend 800,000 crowns to Charles V and still have plenty of capital left over to make other loans in the hundreds of thousands of crowns – and the Welser were not as rich as the Fugger. There is nothing at all in Gresham’s style to suggest over-excitement or fretful anxiety – merely a command of every detail, with ever a plan, always a strategy, and an honest and unvarnished assessment of his negotiating hand.

  Still, the pressures and expectations were huge. A few years later Gresham wrote of the sacrifices he had made in the king’s service: taking his whole family and household to Antwerp; travelling forty times in two years between the Low Countries and the king’s court in England; the close negotiations; the intricate book-keeping; and ‘the infinite occasion of writing’ to the Privy Council – letters prepared without the help of a secretary ‘for mistrust in so dangerous a business’.12 Here he was undoubtedly playing up for effect the travails of his work. But he had had to fight for his plan for settling the king’s debts. At least once, when he was not getting his way, he had floated the suggestion of his own resignation, ‘For otherwise I see in the end I shall receive shame and discredit.’13

  So it was Gresham’s way or nothing. But for all the plain speech, he possessed a courtier’s talent for self-promotion, later claiming for himself sole credit for paying off the Crown’s debts and securing for King Edward ‘such credit both with strangers and his own merchants that he might have had for what sum of money he had desired’. He was fully confident in his skill at playing the Antwerp exchange in the king’s favour.14 In fact, on Gresham’s side were forces beyond the range of even his talents: in 1552, a crisis in silver production in central Europe caused the value of silver to rise at the Antwerp exchange, which is precisely what Gresham needed to be able to settle the king’s debts with the least amount of pain.15

  Nevertheless, Gresham’s plan in 1552 to pay off the Crown’s debt was audacious. It was nothing short of a forced loan imposed on the Company of Merchant Adventurers, wh
ereby the adventurers would pay the king’s debt out of their sales in Antwerp, to be compensated within three months by the royal exchequer. Already bruised and battered in 1551 and early 1552, the adventurers knew that such a deal was hardly in their favour, but later, looking back on his plan, Gresham himself was satisfied that everyone benefited from it, however much the merchants had grumbled at the time. He wrote: ‘there was touched no man but the merchants for to serve the prince’s turn, which appeared to the face of the world that they were great losers, but to the contrary in the end when things were brought to perfections [sic] they were great gainers thereby’.16 The adventurers must have fumed at Gresham, one of their own. In a remarkable coup, Gresham was able – just – to satisfy two constituencies: king and city. He was not shy of trumpeting his own success. Thomas Gresham was ever a master of businesslike self-congratulation.

  The deal was done at Syon Palace on Monday, 3 October 1552. That it was necessary was clear from the huge sums of money set out on paper by the king’s secretary, Sir William Cecil. He knew the scale of the repayments to be made: £48,000 on 9 November 1552, followed by £21,000 in February 1553, £14,000 in July and £26,309 in August. Edward’s Privy Council intended to do everything it could to pay off the debt, selling Crown and chantry lands, bullion, church plate and lead. The reason for Gresham’s plan was that the money had to be raised quickly: the next repayment to foreign creditors was due within weeks. The sum to be borrowed in the short term from the merchant adventurers was £30,000.

  It was clear the adventurers had very little choice but to agree. At Syon Palace they met Gresham and Edward’s Privy Council. Cecil’s minute of their meeting records with magnificent understatement what must have been a frank exchange of views. ‘Upon much communication and treaty’, the merchants ‘agreed for themselves’ (Cecil was keen to make that clear for the record) ‘that they would pay in Antwerp by the end of December of every cloth they had twenty shillings to the discharge of the king’s debt, requiring repayment within three months after the delivery thereof.’17 Thus the merchants were heavily leaned on by the Privy Council to offer the Crown short-term credit on terms wholly favourable to the government.18 The scale of the plan is hard to ignore. It was an audacious gamble, a naked political interference in the conduct of international trade on big scale. A whole adventurers’ fleet ready to sail out to the winter mart of 1552 was held back: thirty to forty ships carrying up to 40,000 pieces of cloth worth up to £150,000.19