In 1453 Sir John Norman was the first mayor who rowed to Westminster. The mayors had hitherto generally accompanied the presentation show on horseback. The Thames watermen, delighted with the innovation so profitable to them, wrote a song in praise of Norman, two lines of which are quoted by Fabyan in his "Chronicles;" and Dr. Rimbault, an eminent musical antiquary, thinks he has found the original tune in John Hilton's "Catch That, Catch Can" (1658).
The deeds of Sir Stephen Forster, Fishmonger, and mayor 1454 (Henry VI.), who by his will left money to rebuild Newgate, we have mentioned elsewhere (p. 224). Sir Godfrey Boleine, Lord Mayor, 1457 (Henry VI.), was grandfather to Thomas, Earl of Wiltshire, the grandfather of Queen Elizabeth. He was a mercer in the Old Jewry, and left by his will £1,000 to the poor householders of London, and £2,000 to the poor householders in Norfolk (his native county), besides large legacies to the London prisons, lazar-houses, and hospitals. Such were the citizens, from whom half our aristocracy has sprung. Sir Godfrey Fielding, a mercer in Milk Street, Lord Mayor in 1452 (Henry VI.), was the ancestor of the Earls of Denbigh, and a privy councillor of the king.
In Edward IV.'s reign, when the Lancastrians, under the bastard Falconbridge, stormed the City in two places, but were eventually bravely repulsed by the citizens, Edward, in gratitude, knighted the mayor, Sir John Stockton, and twelve of the aldermen. In 1479 (the same reign) Bartholomew James (Draper) had Sheriff Bayfield fined £50 (about £1,000 of our money) for kneeling too close to him while at prayers in St. Paul's, and for reviling him when complained of. There was a pestilence raging at the time, and the mayor was afraid of contagion. The money went, we presume, to build ten City conduits, then much wanted. The Lord Mayor in 1462, Sir Thomas Coke (Draper), ancestor of Lord Bacon, Earl Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Salisbury, and Viscount Cranbourne, being a Lancastrian, suffered much from the rapacious tyranny of Edward IV. The very year he was made Knight of the Bath, Coke was sent to the Bread Street Compter, afterwards to the Bench, and illegally fined £8,000 to the king and £800 to the queen. Two aldermen also had their goods seized, and were fined 4,000 marks. In 1473 this greedy king sent to Sir William Hampton, Lord Mayor, to extort benevolences, or subsidies. The mayor gave £30, the aldermen twenty marks, the poorer persons £10 each. In 1481, King Edward sent the mayor, William Herriot (Draper), for the good he had done to trade, two harts, six bucks, and a tun of wine, for a banquet to the lady mayoress and the aldermen's wives at Drapers' Hall.
At Richard III.'s coronation (1483), the Lord Mayor, Sir Edmund Shaw, attended as cup-bearer with great pomp, and the mayor's claim to this honour was formally allowed and put on record. Shaw was a goldsmith, and supplied the usurper with most of his plate. Sir William Horn, Lord Mayor in 1487, had been knighted on Bosworth field by Henry VII., for whom he fought against the "ravening Richard." This mayor's real name was Littlesbury (we are told), but Edward IV. had nicknamed him Horn, from his peculiar skill on that instrument. The year Henry VII. landed at Milford Haven two London mayors died. In 1486 (Henry VII.), Sir Henry Colet, father of good Dean Colet, who founded St. Paul's School, was mayor.
Colet chose John Percival (Merchant Taylor), his carver, sheriff, by drinking to him in a cup of wine, according to custom, and Perceval forthwith sat down at the mayor's table. Percival was afterwards mayor in 1498. Henry VII. was remorseless in squeezing money out of the City by every sort of expedient. He fined Alderman Capel £2,700; he made the City buy a confirmation of their charter for £5,000; in 1505 he threw Thomas Knesworth, who had been mayor the year before, and his sheriff, into the Marshalsea, and fined them £1,400; and the year after, he imprisoned Sir Lawrence Aylmer, mayor in the previous year, and extorted money from him. He again amerced Alderman Capel (ancestor of the Earls of Essex) £2,000, and on his bold resistance, threw him into the Tower for life. In 1490 (Henry VII.) John Matthew earned the distinction of being the first, but probably not the last, bachelor Lord Mayor; and a cheerless mayoralty it must have been. In 1502 Sir John Shaw held the Lord Mayor's feast for the first time in the Guildhall; and the same hospitable mayor built the Guildhall kitchen at his own expense.
Henry VIII.'s mayors were worshipful men, and men of renown. To Walworth and Whittington was now to be added the illustrious name of Gresham. Sir Richard Gresham, who was mayor in the year 1537, was the father of the illustrious founder of the Royal Exchange. He was of a Norfolk family, and with his three brothers carried on trade as mercers. He became a Gentleman Usher Extraordinary to Henry VIII., and at the tearing to pieces of the monasteries by that monarch, he obtained, by judicious courtliness, no less than five successive grants of Church lands. He advocated the construction of an Exchange, encouraged freedom of trade, and is said to have invented bills of exchange. In 1525 he was nearly expelled the Common Council for trying, at Wolsey's instigation, to obtain a benevolence from the citizens. It is greatly to Gresham's credit that he helped Wolsey after his fall, and Henry, who with all his faults was magnanimous, liked Gresham none the worse for that. In the interesting "Paston Letters" (Henry VI.), there are eleven letters of one of Gresham's Norfolk ancestors, dated from London, and the seal a grasshopper. Sir Richard Gresham died 1548 (Edward VI.), at Bethnal Green, and was buried in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry. Gresham's daughter married an ancestor of the Marquis of Bath, and the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Braybrooke are said to be descendants of his brother John, so much has good City blood enriched our proud Norman aristocracy, and so often has the full City purse gone to fill again the exhausted treasury of the old knighthood. In 1545, Sir Martin Bowes (Goldsmith) was mayor, and lent Henry VIII., whose purse was a cullender, the sum of £300. Sir Martin was butler at Elizabeth's coronation, and left the Goldsmiths' Company his gold fee cup, out of which the Queen drank. In our history of the Goldsmiths' Company we have mentioned his portrait in Goldsmiths' Hall. Alderman William Fitzwilliam, in this reign, also nobly stood by his patron, Wolsey, after his fall; for which the King, saying he had too few such servants, knighted him and made him a Privy Councillor. When he died, in the year 1542, he was Knight of the Garter, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He left £100 to dower poor maidens, and his best "standing cup" to his brethren, the Merchant Taylors. In 1536 the King invited the Lord Mayor, Sir Raphe Warren (an ancestor of Cromwell and Hampden, says Mr. Orridge), the aldermen, and forty of the principal citizens, to the christening of the Princess Elizabeth, at Greenwich; and at the ceremony the scarlet gowns and gold chains made a gallant show.
In Edward VI.'s reign, the Greshams again came to the front. In 1547, Sir John Gresham, brother of the Sir Richard before mentioned, obtained from Henry VIII. the hospital of St. Mary Bethlehem as an asylum for lunatics.
In this reign the City Corporation lands (as being given by Papists for superstitious uses) were all claimed for the King's use, to the amount of £1,000 per annum. The London Corporation, unable to resist this tyranny, had to retrieve them at the rate of twenty years' purchase. Sir Andrew Judd (Skinner), mayor in 1550, was ancestor of Lord Teynham, Viscount Strangford, Chief Baron Smythe, &c. Among the bequests in his will were "the sandhills at the back side of Holborn," then let for a few pounds a year, now worth nearly £20,000 per annum. In 1553, Sir Thomas White (Merchant Taylor) kept the citizens loyal to Queen Mary during Wyatt's rebellion, the brave Queen coming to Guildhall and personally re-assuring the citizens. White was the son of a poor clothier; at the age of twelve he was apprenticed to a London tailor, who left him £100 to begin the world with, and by thrift and industry he rose to wealth. He was the generous founder of St. John's College, Oxford. According to Webster, the poet, he had been directed in a dream to found a college upon a spot where he should find two bodies of an elm springing from one root. Discovering no such tree at Cambridge, he went to Oxford, and finding a likely tree in Gloucester Hall garden, began at once to enlarge and widen that college; but soon after he found the real tree of his dream, outside the north gate of Oxford, and on that spot he founded St. John's College.
In the reign of Elizabeth, many great-hearted citizens served the office of mayor. Again we shall see how little even the best monarchs of these days understood the word "liberty," and how the constant attacks upon their purses taught the London citizens to appreciate and to defend their rights. In 1559, Sir William Hewet (Clothworker) was mayor, whose income is estimated at £6,000 per annum. Hewet lived on London Bridge, and one day a nurse playing with his little daughter Anne, at one of the broad lattice windows overlooking the Thames, by accident let the child fall. A young apprentice, named Osborne seeing the accident, leaped from a window into the fierce current below the arches, and saved the infant. Years after, many great courtiers, including the Earl of Shrewsbury, came courting fair Mistress Anne, the rich citizen's heiress. Sir William, her father, said to one and all, "No; Osborne saved her, and Osborne shall have her." And so Osborne did, and became a rich citizen and Lord Mayor in 1583. He is the direct ancestor of the first Duke of Leeds. There is a portrait of the brave apprentice at Kiveton House, in Yorkshire. He dwelt in Philpot Lane, in his father-in-law's house, and was buried at St. Dionis Backchurch, Fenchurch Street.
In 1563 Lord Mayor Lodge got into a terrible scrape with Queen Elizabeth, who brooked no opposition, just or unjust. One of the Queen's insolent purveyors, to insult the mayor, seized twelve capons out of twenty-four destined for the mayor's table. The indignant mayor took six of the twelve fowls, called the purveyor a scurvy knave, and threatened him with the biggest pair of irons in Newgate. In spite of the intercession of Lord Robert Dudley (Leicester) and Secretary Cecil, Lodge was fined and compelled to resign his gown. Lodge was the father of the poet, and engaged in the negro trade. Lodge's successor, Sir Thomas Ramsay, died childless, and his widow left large sums to Christ's Hospital and other charities, and £1,200 to each of five City Companies; also sums for the relief of poor maimed soldiers, poor Cambridge scholars, and for poor maids' marriages.