Contributions
Born into a dynasty of merchants of the Mercers' Company, Thomas Gresham became the Crown's financial agent in Antwerp, the banking capital of northern Europe. For four successive sovereigns, from Edward VI to Elizabeth I, he negotiated royal loans, worked the exchange and restored England's credit with the Flemish bankers with formidable skill. His name survives in "Gresham's Law" — bad money drives out good — a principle of monetary circulation that nineteenth-century economists later named after him. But his most lasting act was built in stone: at his own expense he raised the Royal Exchange in London (1565-1571), a bourse modelled on that of Antwerp, which Elizabeth opened by granting it its royal title. By his will his fortune and his mansion founded Gresham College, where seven professors taught the sciences and humanities to the public free of charge — an institution still alive today.
Significance
Gresham was the architect of England's emerging financial power at a time when London was still a satellite of Antwerp. By restoring the Crown's credit and mastering the mechanisms of international exchange, he gave the Tudor state the means of its ambitions, from wars to great maritime ventures. His great audacity was to furnish London with institutions worthy of a merchant capital: the Royal Exchange gave traders for the first time a covered place in which to deal, prefiguring the financial City. Its galleries of shops and arcaded courtyard made Gresham a public benefactor as much as a man of business. His founding of Gresham College carried the vision further: convinced that learning should serve trade and navigation, he created a popular university before the term existed, which would later host the meetings that gave rise to the Royal Society. The shadow in this portrait is the hardness of the money-man: Gresham could speculate, divert public operations to his own profit and amass a colossal fortune. His genius was to devote part of it to works that have outlived him by more than four centuries.
Influence
He shaped the financial centre of London and bequeathed to English commerce the model of the covered exchange. Gresham College, born of his will, spread public scientific teaching and served as a cradle for the scholars who founded the Royal Society; "Gresham's Law" entered the lasting vocabulary of monetary economics. He had learned his trade at the Antwerp Bourse, Europe's model of trade and banking, and within the merchant tradition of the London Mercers' Company, drawing directly on Flemish and Italian banking practice.
Anecdote
The founding of his college hinged on a woman who declined to remarry. By his will Gresham had provided that his London mansion would become a free college after the death of his widow, Anne Fernely. She enjoyed the estate until her death in 1596, and only then did Gresham College finally open its doors, nearly twenty years after the founder's death. The institution, which still offers free public lectures in London, remains one of the oldest living legacies of a Renaissance merchant.