timately 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, t