The life of Sir Thomas Gresham. Founder of the Royal Exchange / [Anon].

  • MacFarlane, Charles, 1799-1858.
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life of Sir Thomas Gresham. Founder of the Royal Exchange / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/258 (page 21)
    acted otherwise than he did, without exposing him- self to severe legal penalties and to the wrath of a king who was already setting himself above ail law. But it should seem that Gresham showed great subserviency, and a readiness to execute any orders which came from Henry. In 1541, or more than three years after he had ceased to be mayor, when Henry declared that, whether papists or Pro- testants, all were heretics who rejected his own un- settled exposition of the faith, and named commis- sions to find out heretics and bring them to condign punishment, Sir Richard, as well as his younger brother, Sir John Gresham, was put into the com- mission for heresies done in the city and diocese of London, over which Bishop Bonner continued to preside; and under this commission cruelties were committed as atrocious as any that were perpetrated in the time of Queen Mary. A capital difference between Henry’s persecution and the Marian per- secution was this: Mary proceeded only against Protestants and sectarians, her father proceeded with equal fury against Catholics, Protestants, ard sectarians, often causing to be coupled together a Catholic with a Protestant on the same hurdle, and so to be drawn to Smithfield, to the horror of both sects. It was this made a Frenchman exclaim, ‘* Good God! how do people make a shift to live here, where papists are hanged and anti-papists are burned!” At this time Sir Richard Gresham was not trammelled by any official duty, as he had been during his shrievalty ; and either he must have solicited the office or have been selected for it from the knowledge that he would do the king’s will with alacrity, and make no distinction between the old Catholics and the new Protestants. ‘This dis-