London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  There was always something a little different about Thomas Gresham’s career. Unlike his father, he never quite took the conventional path. Where a city man of Gresham’s standing might set out in middle age to pursue civic office, Sir Thomas showed no particular inclination to stand for election as a sheriff, alderman or lord mayor. He was the queen’s man in Antwerp as well as a London merchant of formidable reach. And he was enormously wealthy. The furnishings of just one of his country houses, Mayfield in Sussex, were valued at an astonishing £7,550, though grander still was his great palace at Osterley Park in Middlesex, and Gresham House on Bishopsgate, a few minutes’ walk from the Exchange, was furnished at a cost of £1,128. Sir Thomas Gresham was a tycoon sans pareil, more than simply a merchant (even a startlingly rich one) and different from the normal kind of royal courtier. He was ever the elusive hybrid, as he had been since his twenties and thirties. We can look back to that early Antwerp portrait of Gresham in his twenty-sixth year – on the surface unadorned and unostentatious, but in style and message audaciously ambitious – and compare it to Sir Thomas two decades later in a picture by the Dutch artist Anthonis Mor. This time seated, turned at an angle to the viewer, Gresham looks as plain as ever in an impeccable black doublet of a glossy sheen, with a high white ruff and a black cap. The face is one, not so much of power or the need to command, but of experience, patience and control: spare, lean and a little lined around the cheeks and eyes, with a greying beard and steady eyes of hazel. Above all, it is Gresham’s eyes, which in their time had observed and made sense of so many people and situations, that hold and penetrate. The quiet shrewdness of the man is impossible to miss.

  The Royal Exchange was Sir Thomas Gresham’s greatest legacy, his gift to his native city. It was a bourse for the merchants of Europe; for Gresham, a home from home. But more than this it was a place where Londoners could meet, rivalling St Paul’s and Paul’s Cross churchyard. It represented ‘exchange’ in the broadest sense: of conversation, of news and opinions, of entertainment, of goods and services, standing magnificently between Cornhill and Lombard Street. The words the poet Daniel Rogers used to describe the New Bourse in Antwerp applied just as well to Gresham’s Exchange in London: ‘A confused sound of all languages was heard there, and one saw a parti-coloured medley of all possible styles of dress; in short … a small world wherein all parts of the great world were united.’1

  No one understood the fact that an exchange for London was long overdue better than Richard Clough, Sir Thomas Gresham’s man in Antwerp. Clough was every inch the gentleman, elegant in a dark and fashionably slashed doublet, pale-coloured hose and high ruff, with fine brown gloves and a decorated rapier. Doing business with some of the most powerful and elusive men in Europe, he dressed the part. But Clough was very much more than a man of style. His face was one obviously beaten into shape by experience and hard work, with the pale forehead of a man who spends too long at a desk, and the wrinkles and greying beard of a tough negotiator who put in long hours at the bourse and on the Antwerp quayside. And he valued plain words. About London’s city fathers he was blunt. They refused to do anything for the benefit of London, he wrote to Gresham in 1561, ‘as for example considering what a 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 like pedlars than merchants’. Clough himself was itching to get on with the job: ‘I will not doubt but to make so fair a bourse in London as the great bourse is in Antwerp.’2

  The key year was 1563. In May, London’s ruling corporation asked Gresham to build a bourse for the city – that was the formal approach, but Sir Thomas and the corporation had probably been in informal talks for a few months beforehand. Perhaps the negotiations would have rumbled on for months or years. What changed the dynamic completely and terribly was the shock for Gresham of the death of his son Richard at sixteen years old. Richard had fallen ill in Antwerp on 1 May with what was described as pleurisy. He was bled, but the treatment achieved nothing and he died the following day. One of Gresham’s servants wrote, with characteristic Tudor understatement: ‘it was no small grief unto my master and to my lady for that they had no more children’. Bereft of a son and heir, Gresham threw both his grief and his considerable fortune at the Exchange project.3

  The deal was done in January 1564: Gresham would build an Exchange for London out of his own fortune, on condition that the city government would provide the necessary land. A small committee of aldermen quickly found a suitable site on the north side of Cornhill. The negotiations for clearing the site of tenements, storehouses and gardens (not to say the tenants themselves) were as delicate as they were expensive, and in the demolition work a number of people were seriously injured, two of whom were nearly killed. But by May 1566 the site was ready, and on Friday, 7 June, between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, Gresham himself laid the first brick. The bricklayers who continued the work were most probably Flemings, which led to a howl of protest by the Bricklayers’ Company of London, the picketing of the building site and intimations of violence, all of which were negotiated with authority by London’s corporation and by Gresham. Gresham’s choice of master mason was Hendryck van Paesschen of Antwerp. John Stow described in his Survey the completion of the Exchange: ‘by the month of November, in the year 1567, the same was covered with slate, and shortly after fully finished’.4

  From the start it was an ambitious project. An early scale drawing shows a rectangular court with columned arcades. There would be two doorways, one out to Lombard Street, the other to Cornhill, as well as two towers, each with a spiral staircase and (shown prominently on the plans) a double privy on the ground floor. Early copperplate engravings by Frans Hogenberg show just what Paesschen was able to do, for Gresham’s Exchange was to become an achievement of architectural grandeur unrivalled anywhere in London, not even by the Guildhall. It was one of the few buildings in the city to be entirely new, rising up from a site cleared of its past. The work of a Londoner whose money came from Antwerp and whose master mason was a Fleming, it was a powerful statement of cosmopolitan ambition.

  This is really the key to understanding Gresham’s intentions. Building the Exchange was a conflation of private and public ambitions: Sir Thomas, a great benefactor of his city, was offering to London’s citizens a bourse that was the equal of Antwerp’s. Perhaps it was a mark, too, of Gresham’s objective of recalibrating the relationship between Antwerp and London; certainly the Exchange was out of all proportion to London’s status in the early sixteenth century as a modest satellite of western European trade and finance. But the Exchange was more even than this. It was Gresham’s personal legacy. Where most city grandees were content to hold high office for short periods of time, Gresham wanted to make a permanent, physical mark upon London, something for future generations to wonder at. ‘I will not doubt but to make so fair a bourse in London as the great bourse is in Antwerp’: Richard Clough’s words might have been Gresham’s. And Clough’s language is significant: more than simply a place of business, the Exchange stood for beauty, culture and consumption, a meeting place for Londoners to rival St Paul’s Cathedral and Paul’s Churchyard. By nature a workaholic, Sir Thomas Gresham had spent a fortune on his own houses; and as a lover of fine things, the Exchange offered just a sample of his tastes as a connoisseur.

  The scale of the building was correspondingly impressive, a quadrangle eighty paces long and sixty wide, estimated by one visitor to be large enough to hold 4,000 merchants. Engravings show a courtyard paved and cobbled in a style reminiscent of the patterning of a knot garden. Marble columns set ten feet apart formed a sheltered colonnade on two levels. Similar columns helped to form the two doorways, above each of which was a bas-relief of the royal arms of England. There were three galleries. The first, known as New Venice (a nod to the most formidable European mercantile city in the Mediterranean), was a kind of undercroft used by drapers and cloth merchants. In the upper gallery there were perhaps as m
any as 150 stalls selling expensive merchandise. The southern gallery on Cornhill was known ‘the Pawn’. This name, like the building itself, had its origins in the Low Countries: ‘pawn’ derived from pand, the kind of cloister or arcade where merchants and retailers set up their stalls during the great Antwerp marts. Set just to the east of the southern doorway out onto Cornhill was a tower with a bell, which rang to indicate the end of trading as well as to tell the time. A clock with face and hands was added in 1599.

  It was emphatically the Royal Exchange, enhanced in reputation and status by the queen’s personal approval. The message projected by those bas-reliefs of the royal arms of England was unambiguous. Elizabeth herself made a visit in January 1571. Attended by her nobility, she came from Somerset House on the Strand to Temple Bar, along Fleet Street and Cheapside to Threadneedle Street. After dining with Sir Thomas at Gresham House, she and her courtiers entered the Exchange from Cornhill: ‘and after that she had viewed every part thereof above the ground, especially the pawn, which was richly furnished with all sorts of the finest wares in the city: she caused the same bourse by an herald and a trumpet, to be proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be called from thenceforth, and not otherwise.’5

  For merchants, the working day at the Exchange (or at least the formal bit of it) was very short. There were two sessions: one before dinner (between eleven o’clock and twelve noon), the second before supper (between five and six o’clock in the afternoon). Hundreds of merchants and moneylenders met to put together deals and to gossip. Instead of meeting in the jostle of Lombard Street in all weathers, separate ‘nations’ of merchants had – in theory – their own allotted portions of the Exchange. In practice, however, movement throughout the courtyard and colonnades was free, and one would have bumped into all kinds of men from France, the Low Countries, Germany, Italy and Spain. Activity and busyness were the keynotes, with the arrival and departures of the merchants’ ‘posts’ (couriers) bringing news and bills of exchange.

  One essential thing to emphasize is that the Exchange was a public and not a private space. It was more like a shopping mall that happened also to be the beating heart of a city’s mercantile life. All sorts of Londoners went there – to buy and consume, to pose, to talk, to gossip and to beg. This was no more incongruous than the way Londoners had long used St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘It is … the whole world’s map, which you may here discern in its perfect’st motion jostling and turning. It is a heap of stones and men, with a vast confusion of languages … The noise in it is like that of bees, a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet.’6 St Paul’s was still busy with Londoners. But the Exchange was quickly its equal – noisy, lively and polyglot. As Thomas Dekker put it: ‘They talk in several languages, and (like the murmuring fall of waters) in the hum of several businesses: insomuch as the place seems a Babel (a confusion of tongues).’7

  One Elizabethan moralist worked up a whole parade of characters who walked in the Exchange, finding in that place eighty paces by sixty a microcosm of society: merchants, retailers, strangers (that is foreigners), ‘sadducees and libertines’, worshipful gentlemen, the poor, printers and stationers, sailors, sea captains and gentlemen soldiers, musers upon God, as well as husbands and wives ‘who likewise have their pleasurable walking there at convenient times’.8 For those with full purses, it offered things to appeal to all the senses: shopping at the Pawn, listening to music played in the galleries on the long afternoons of spring and summer, and eating and drinking next door at the Castle tavern, where gentlemen frequently entertained their friends.9

  The shops were kept only by retailers who could afford Gresham’s hefty rents. Wealthy Londoners bought all kinds of things there. Thomas Deane, a haberdasher, sold parchment, writing tablets, silk purses, pomanders, linen and silk threads, tapes and ribbons, fastenings for clothes and shoes, decorative laces and ties, and handkerchiefs. Deane, with a house in the city furnished in modest affluence, did well for himself. Other shops in the Pawn sold mousetraps, birdcages, shoe-horns, lanthorns and jew’s harps, and in the upper gallery there were the shops of apothecaries, booksellers, goldsmiths, glass-sellers and armourers.10

  Fashionable consumption coexisted with poverty. London’s poor were rarely out of sight of the rich, and the Exchange was a magnet for vagrants and beggars hoping for a few pennies out of the purses of merchants and gentlemen. These beggars were an irritation, and the perennial Elizabethan anxiety about poverty and crime meant that the city fathers were always trying to clear out of the Exchange the rogues, thieves, beggars and children who were upsetting the dealings of honest citizens. ‘The poor … pass to and fro through the Exchange,’ John Payne wrote in 1597, ‘both the godly poor and profane poor, the one under God’s blessing and favour, the other under his frowns and displeasure.’11 The deserving poor, genuinely in need of help, like a woman who gave birth in the Exchange in 1573 or a little boy abandoned there by his mother in 1601, were supported by local parishes.12 But stalking wealthy Elizabethans in particular was the fear of being duped by organized criminals – a character like the ‘cheater’ or ‘fingerer’, who on the surface looked like a well-dressed gentleman, but was in fact an idle vagabond. Such men, so John Awdeley wrote in 1575, ‘go so gorgeously, sometime with waiting men and sometime without. Their trade is to walk in such places where as gentlemen and other worshipful citizens do resort, as at Paul’s, or at Christ’s Hospital, and sometime at the Royal Exchange.’ Feigning friendship, the fingerer preyed on rich and naive young gentlemen with an eye to spending their fortunes.13

  Bookshops quickly became a feature of the Pawn. Clever London booksellers like Thomas Hacket saw the possibilities for selling books from the most glamorous meeting place in the city, and in about 1572, having run shops in Paul’s Churchyard and on Lombard Street, he opened a new one in the Exchange at the sign of the green dragon. Hacket, as we will see later, was an entrepreneur with a keen feel for the kinds of books Londoners liked. He specialized in books on practical subjects like seamanship and navigation, and he came to the Exchange with a reputation for translating the latest accounts of global discovery. Hacket also knew the secret of an eye-catching title, and he had a talent for courting the interest of powerful patrons: the first book that advertised his shop in the Exchange begins with a letter of dedication printed for Sir Thomas Gresham himself, with a self-confident flourish: ‘From London, by yours for ever, Thomas Hacket.’14

  At the Exchange, information was a living currency all of its own. Merchants relied upon private letters, reports and fuller newsletters that gave digests of intelligence from all over Europe. A busy and crowded exchange was the perfect place for some Londoners to advertise themselves and their wares; for others it was an easy spot to merge in with the crowd and hide in plain sight. Noticed there in 1574 was the English agent of the feared Spanish general, the Duke of Alba, one Philippes, ‘seen at London [at] the Royal Exchange, all in black apparel, after the manner of a merchant’.15 Plastered all around were bills and posters, just as they were outside St Paul’s Cathedral.16 One of Gresham’s own doctors advertised in the Exchange, and Sir Thomas himself complained when a ‘testimonial upon the Royal Exchange of the cures he hath done’ was pulled down by a rival physician.17 The seriously aggrieved Clement Draper, a merchant whose business was ruined by a long-running feud with the Earl of Huntingdon, made his case directly to fellow merchants at the Exchange: ‘I protested publicly unto my creditors and spread the same protests upon the Royal Exchange and gates of the city, to manifest my wrongs and to crave liberty.’18

  The Royal Exchange was not surprisingly a gift for London’s Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. It was a place of meeting and of movement, of (sometimes dubious) business, of retail and fashion and all the promenading vanities moralists and preachers loved to denounce. It was itself a kind of stage that opened up the imaginative worlds of the city and its many kinds of people, capturing something of the range of human life and society: as Thomas Dekker w
rote, ‘This world is a Royal Exchange, where all sorts of men are merchants: kings hold commerce with kings, and their voyages are upon high negotiations.’19

  Later Elizabethan dramatists looked to the city around them, one their audiences knew as well as they did. The first to do this was William Haughton in Englishmen for My Money (1598), a play about merchants, gentlemen, money and thwarted love. A key part of the action takes place at the Royal Exchange, during the first session of business between eleven o’clock and noon. When the Exchange bell rings to end business for the morning, it marks also the end of the scene. Haughton’s merchants come together to do business – in part the principal character’s selling off of his daughters in marriage. There is news of a ship with a valuable cargo lost to pirates, and the arrival of the post carrying a highly suspicious and potentially ruinous bill of exchange that turns out in the end to be genuine – a portrayal of that ever-fine balance between a merchant’s success and the failure of his business. Money is everything. ‘Go to th’Exchange,’ one character says, ‘crave gold as you intend.’20

  Naturally the Royal Exchange was deeply imprinted with associations of mercantile money, retail and display, while news and information were very important too. In the revised version of Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (c. 1610), reputations are made and lost at the Exchange. The merchant Kitely, fearing his ruin, says, ‘Lost i’ my fame for ever, talk for th’Exchange’, a position quite opposite to that of the real Clement Draper who, out of desperation, went publicly to the Exchange to recover his name and his liberty.21