The younger son of Sir Richard, who was a knight, alderman, sheriff, and Lord Mayor of London, and a prosperous merchant, had the twofold example set him by his father, of an intelligent pursuit of trade, and of public spirit and munificence. He was sent to Cambridge, distinguished himself in study, and might, undoubtedly, have risen to reputation in one of the learned professions; but, by his father’s wish, he turned his attention to business, and was admitted a member of the Mercers’ Company at the age of twenty-four. Having, through his father’s eminence as a merchant, succeeded in obtaining the trust of agent to King Edward the Sixth, for taking up money of the merchants of Antwerp, he quickly discerned the abuses under which the king’s interest suffered. He proposed methods for preventing the Flemish merchants from extorting unfair commissions and brokages, and so turned the current of advantage to the king’s favour, that the young prince was enabled to pay all the debts for which his father and the Protector—Somerset—had left him responsible. During the short reign of Edward, this active and enterprising merchant made forty journeys from England to Antwerp; and, by the application of his genius, retrieved English commerce from the disadvantage into which it had fallen by mismanagement at home, and the superior shrewdness of the Netherland merchants. The precious metals had become scarce in our country, but Gresham brought them back again; our commodities were low in price, and foreign ones high, but he reversed their conditions of sale: while the king’s credit, from being very low abroad, was, by Gresham’s skill, raised so high, that he could have borrowed what sums he pleased. For such services the young and acute negotiator had a pension of £100 a year appointed him for life, and estates to the value of £300 a year were also conferred upon him by the king.
At the accession of Mary, Gresham was discharged from his agency; but, on his drawing up a memorial, and its allegements being proved, he was re-instated. Queen Elizabeth immediately re-engaged him, at her accession, and employed him to provide and buy up arms for the national defence. She knighted him a year afterwards, and he then built himself the mansion known by his name in Bishopsgate Street; and, till lately, occupied by the “Gresham professors.”
His noblest public work was performed soon after. His father had striven to move King Henry the Eighth to build an Exchange for the city merchants, who then met in the open air in Lombard Street, but could not. Sir Thomas Gresham now publicly proposed, if the citizens would purchase a piece of ground large enough, and in the proper place, to build an Exchange at his own expense, with covered walks, and all necessary conveniences for the assemblage of merchants. This was done; the site was cleared; Gresham himself laid the foundation stone; and Queen Elizabeth, when the building was complete, “attended by nobility, came from Somerset House, and caused it, by trumpet and herald, to be proclaimed the ‘Royal Exchange.’” This building, as our young readers know, was burnt down some years ago, and the present stately fabric, opened by Queen Victoria, has been erected on its site.
About the time that the building of the Royal Exchange was commenced, Gresham was again employed to take up moneys for the royal use at Antwerp. Experience had so fully shown him the evil of pursuing this system, that he at length persuaded the Queen to discontinue it, and to borrow of her own merchants in the city of London. Yet his views were so much in advance of the contracted commercial spirit of that age, that the London citizens, in their common hall, blind to their own interests, negatived his proposition when it was first made to them. But, on more mature consideration, several merchants and aldermen raised £16,000, and lent it to the Queen for six months, at six per cent. interest; and the loan was prolonged for six months more, at the same interest, with brokage. This illustrious London citizen, by his superior intelligence, thus opened the way for increasing others’ as well as his own gains.
Sir Thomas Gresham’s successful negotiations issued in so large an increase of his own wealth, that he purchased large estates in several counties, and bought Osterley Park, near Brentford, where he built a large mansion, in which he was accustomed to receive the visits of Elizabeth. Even here the ideas of the merchant were predominant. “The house,” says a writer of the period, “standeth in a parke, well wooded and garnished with many faire ponds, which affoorded not onely fish and fowle, as swannes and other water fowle, but also great use for milles, as paper milles, oyle milles, and corn milles.” On his retirement to Osterley, he transformed his residence in Bishopsgate Street into a “college,” for the abode of seven bachelor professors, who were to read lectures there on “divinity, law, physic, astronomy, geometry, music, and rhetoric,” and to have £50 each per year.
He was the richest commoner in England—such were what is usually termed “the substantial” rewards of his perseverance; while his name deserves lasting honour as the patron of learning, and the exemplar of merchant-beneficence. He left, by will, not only ample funds for continuing his “professorships,” but endowments for almshouses, and yearly sums for ten of the city prisons and hospitals.
JAMES LACKINGTON,
The son of a journeyman shoemaker and of a weaver’s daughter, passed his early years amidst circumstances which must have enduringly impressed him with the miseries of vice and poverty. His father was a selfish and habitual drunkard, and his mother frequently worked nineteen or twenty hours out of the four-and-twenty to support her family. He was the eldest child of a numerous family, and was put two or three years to a dame’s school; but was less intent on learning than on “getting on in the world,” even while a boy. He heard a pieman cry his wares, and soon proposed to a baker to sell pies for him; and so successful did young Lackington prove as a pie-vender, that he heard the baker declare, a twelvemonth after, that he had been the means of extricating him from embarrassment. A boyish prank put an end to this engagement; and when the baker wished to renew it Lackington’s father insisted on placing him at the stall. Again, however, his pedlar inclinations, which in after life led him to affluence, rescued him from the disagreeable treatment he expected to receive under his father’s rule. He heard a man cry almanacks in the street, and importuned his father till he obtained leave to start on the same itinerant enterprise. In this he succeeded so well that he deeply aggrieved the other venders, who, as he tells us in his very whimsical but interesting biography, would have “done him a mischief had he not possessed a light pair of heels.” Resolute on not continuing at home, he persuaded his father, at length, to bind him apprentice with a shoemaker in a neighbouring town, and at fourteen years of age sat down to learn his trade.