The fabric belongs to a private company, consisting of 400 shareholders, and the shares were originally of £50 each, but are now of uncertain amount, the last addition being a call of £25 per share, made for the construction of the new edifice. The affairs of this company are conducted under a cumbersome and restrictive deed of settlement, by nine "managers," elected for life by the shareholders, no election taking place till there are four vacancies. The members or subscribers, however, entirely conduct their own affairs by a committee of thirty of their own body. Neither members nor committee are elected for more than one year.
The number of members at present exceeds 1,700. The subscription is paid to the "managers," who liquidate all expenses, and adopt alterations in the building, upon the representations of the committee of the members, or even on the application of the subscribers. Of the 400 shares mentioned above, the whole, with scarcely an exception, are held by the members themselves. No one person is allowed to hold, directly or indirectly, more than four.
The present building stands in the centre of the block of buildings fronting Bartholomew Lane, Threadneedle Street, Old Broad Street, and Throgmorton Street. The principal entrance is from Bartholomew Lane through Capel Court. There are also three entrances from Throgmorton Street, and one from Threadneedle Street. The area of the new house is about 75 square yards, and it would contain 1,100 or 1,200 members. There are, however, seldom more than half that number present. The site is very irregular, and has enforced some peculiar construction in covering it, into which iron enters largely.
CHAPTER XLII
THE ROYAL EXCHANGE
The Greshams—Important Negotiations—Building of the Old Exchange—Queen Elizabeth visits it—Its Milliners' Shops—A Resort for Idlers—Access of Nuisances—The various Walks in the Exchange—Shakespeare's Visits to it—Precautions against Fire—Lady Gresham and the Council—The "Eye of London"—Contemporary Allusions—The Royal Exchange during the Plague and the Great Fire—Wren's Design for a New Royal Exchange—The Plan which was ultimately accepted—Addison and Steele upon the Exchange—The Shops of the Second Exchange.
In the year 1563 Sir Thomas Gresham, a munificent merchant of Lombard Street, who traded largely with Antwerp, carrying out a scheme of his father, offered the City to erect a Bourse at his own expense, if they would provide a suitable plot of ground; the great merchant's local pride having been hurt at seeing Antwerp provided with a stately Exchange, and London without one.
A short sketch of the Gresham family is here necessary, to enable us to understand the antecedents of this great benefactor of London. The family derived its name from Gresham, a little village in Norfolk; and one of the early Greshams appears to have been clerk to Sir William Paston, a judge. The family afterwards removed to Holt, near the sea. John Gresham married an heiress, by whom he had four sons, William, Thomas, Richard, and John. Thomas became Chancellor of Lichfield, the other three brothers turned merchants, and two of them were knighted by Henry VIII. Sir Richard, the father of Sir Thomas Gresham, was an eminent London merchant, elected Lord Mayor in 1537. Being a trusty foreign agent of Henry VII., and a friend of Cromwell and Wolsey, he received from the king five several gifts of church lands. Sir Richard died at Bethnal Green, 1548-9. He was buried in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry. Thomas Gresham was sent to Gonville College, Cambridge, and apprenticed probably before that to his uncle Sir John, a Levant merchant, for eight years. In 1543 we find the young merchant applying to Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries, for leave to export gunpowder to England for King Henry, who was then preparing for his attack on France, and the siege of Boulogne. In 1554 Gresham married the daughter of a Suffolk gentleman, and the widow of a London mercer. By her he had several children, none of whom, however, reached maturity.
It was in 1551 or 1552 that Gresham's real fortune commenced, by his appointment as king's merchant factor, or agent, at Antwerp, to raise private loans from German and Low Country merchants to meet the royal necessities, and to keep the privy council informed in the local news. The wise factor borrowed in his own name, and soon raised the exchange from 16s. Flemish for the pound sterling to 22s., at which rate he discharged all the king's debts, and made money plentiful. He says, in a letter to the Duke of Northumberland, that he hoped in one year to save England £20,000. It being forbidden to export further from Antwerp, Gresham had to resort to various stratagems, and in 1553 (Queen Mary) we find him writing to the Privy Council, proposing to send £200 (in heavy Spanish rials), in bags of pepper, four at a time, and the English ambassador at Brussels was to bring over with him £20,000 or £30,000, but he afterwards changed his mind, and sent the money packed up in bales with suits of armour and £3,000 in each, rewarding the searcher at Gravelines with new year presents of black velvet and black cloth. About the time of the Queen's marriage to Philip Gresham went to Spain, to start from Puerto Real fifty cases, each containing 22,000 Spanish ducats. All the time Gresham resided at Antwerp, carrying out these sagacious and important negociations, he was rewarded with the paltry remuneration of £1 a day, of which we often find him seriously complaining. It was in Antwerp, that vast centre of commerce, that Gresham must have gained that great knowledge of business by which he afterwards enriched himself. Antwerp exported to England at this time, says Mr. Burgon, in his excellent life of Gresham, almost every article of luxury required by English people.