Thomas Gresham: Rigging the Antwerp Exchange and Building London's Bourse

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Thomas Gresham was born around 1519, son of Sir Richard Gresham, a Lord Mayor of London knighted by Henry VIII for negotiating loans with foreign merchants. He studied at St Paul's School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, while apprenticed to his uncle Sir John Gresham in the Mercers' Company, and became a liveryman at 24. In 1543 he went to Antwerp, the center of European trade and its bourse, as a merchant and agent for Henry VIII. In 1551, with Edward VI's government drowning in foreign debt after a previous agent's mismanagement, Gresham held back payments by the English merchant fleet to make sterling scarce, bought bullion, and let the pound rise, clearing almost all the king's foreign debts in a few years.

Paid in land grants worth about 400 pounds a year, he lost favor when Mary I took the throne in 1553 but was soon reinstated, smuggling gunpowder, arms and bullion out of Antwerp hidden in shipments of velvet and spices. Under Elizabeth I he was knighted in 1559 and served as ambassador to the Duchess of Parma. From 1569 to 1572 Elizabeth made him jailer of Lady Mary Grey at his houses, including Osterley Park. He funded the Royal Exchange, kept 700 pounds a year in shop rents, and died of apoplexy in November 1579. His will created Gresham College, which opened in 1597 as London's first institution of higher learning.

• For his work under Mary I he received 20 shillings a day plus church lands worth 200 pounds a year.
• Lady Mary Grey, sister of Lady Jane Grey, was confined for marrying Thomas Keyes without the queen's permission.
• Gresham College funded seven professors in subjects including astronomy, geometry, physic, law, divinity, rhetoric and music.
• Gresham's Law was attributed to him in 1857 by Scottish economist Henry Dunning Macleod, though Copernicus had described the idea earlier.
• The golden grasshopper crest on the Royal Exchange weather vane is almost certainly a pun on the family name.