GRESHAM, SIR THOMAS 0519-1579), London mer chant, the founder of the Royal Exchange, was descended from an old Norfolk family, and was the son of Sir Richard Gresham, a London merchant knighted by Henry VIII. He went to Caius college, Cambridge, and was apprenticed for eight years to his uncle, Sir John Gresham. In 1543 he was admitted a member of the Mercers' Company, and went to the Low Countries, where he lived for some years, carrying on business and acting as an agent for Henry VIII. In 1551 owing to the mismanagement of Sir William Dansell, "king's merchant," Gresham was called in to advise the English Government. He was allowed to apply his own methods, many of them quite arbitrary and unfair, for rais ing the value of the pound sterling on the "bourse" of Antwerp, and in a few years nearly all Edward VI.'s debts were discharged. Except for a short period during Mary's reign, he remained financial agent of the crown until he was obliged to leave Ant werp on March 19, 1567, on the outbreak of the war in the Low Countries. He was at the time on embassy to the duchess of Parma at Brussels. He continued his business as merchant and financial agent of the Government, though living in London. Elizabeth kept Lady Mary Grey a prisoner in his house from June 1569 to the end of 1572.
In 1565 Gresham proposed to the court of aldermen of London to build at his own expense a bourse of exchange, if they would purchase a suitable piece of ground. He reimbursed himself by letting out the upper part of the building as shops. He died on Nov. 21, The bulk of his property was bequeathed to his widow with the stipulation that after her decease his residence in Bishopsgate street, and the rents accruing from the Royal Ex change should be vested in the hands of the corporation of Lon don and the Mercers' Company for the purpose of instituting a college in which seven professors should lecture on astronomy, geometry, physic, law, divinity, rhetoric and music. The lectures were given in the original building from 1S97 until 1768 when it was converted into an excise office. The Royal Exchange was then used for them until the present building was erected in A notice of Gresham is contained in Fuller's Worthies and Ward's Gresham Professors; but the fullest account of him, as well as of the history of the Exchange and Gresham College is that by J. M. Burgon in his Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham (2 vols., 1839) . See also a Brief Memoir of Sir Thomas Gresham (1833) ; The Life of Sir Thomas Gresham, Founder of the Royal Exchange (1845) ; and F. R. Salter, Sir Thomas Gresham, 1518-1579