Gresham’s Law: The Life and World of Queen Elizabeth I’s Banker by John Guy

From The Guardian:

When the Anglican divine John William Burgon published his classic two-volume biography of Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579) in 1839, he introduced his readers to a character – government banker, founder of the Royal Exchange, putative proponent of “Gresham’s law” – who had lived a life of “unsullied honour and integrity”. 

For Burgon, Gresham was among the most illustrious ancestors “of which our metropolis can boast” – not just owing to “the skill with which he contrived to control the exchange with foreign countries”, thereby laying “the foundations of England’s commercial greatness”, but also because his qualities spoke of an upstanding friend, associate, husband, father. When Gresham died, he deserved to be remembered as a “true patriot, beloved in private life and honoured in his public station”.

Burgon’s remarks are emblematic of the 19th-century view of Gresham as an honourable and self-made man: Queen Victoria’s recorder considered him an “eminent citizen and chief benefactor of his kind”. And such depictions are not without merit. But as the historian John Guy argues in this assiduously researched new account of Gresham’s life: “Something subtler is needed.” Accordingly, Guy has consulted several “large caches of often entirely virgin sources” in order to offer a reassessment of Gresham’s professional undertakings and “a fuller investigation of Gresham’s private life than anything attempted before”. It is an enterprise from which he does not emerge well.

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