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Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College SIR THOMAS GRESHAMAND GRESHAM COLLEGE UfCX.S'.IX George Vertue, Gresham College on Bishopsgate detail. (Detail of engraving for/ Ward, Lives of the Professors of Gresham College, London, 1740). Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College Studies in the intellectual history of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries edited by Francis Ames-Lewis 13 Routledge Taylor&Francis Croup LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition copyright © 1999 by Francis Ames-Lewis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN 9781840146417 (hbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ames-Lewis, Francis Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the intellectual history of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 1. Gresham, Sir Thomas. 2. Gresham College. 3. London—Intellectual life—History. I.Title. 942.1'0099 US Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the intellectual history of London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / [edited by] Francis Ames-Lewis p. cm. (hardback; alk. paper) 1. Gresham, Sir Thomas, 1519P-1579. 2. Great Britain—History— Tudors, 1485-1603—Biography. 3- London—Intellectual life—sixteenth century. 4. London—Intellectual life—seventeenth century. 5. Royal Exchange (London)—History. 6. Philanthropists—Great Britain— Biography. 7. Diplomats—Great Britain—Biography. 8. Merchants— Great Britain—Biography. 9. Gresham College. I.Ames-Lewis, Francis. DA317.8.G74S571999 98-36781 332'.092—dc21 CIP Transferred to Digital Printing in 2011 Contents List of illustrations vii Notes on contributors ix Foreword xii Francis Baden-Powell Introduction xiii Francis Ames-Lewis 1. Reconstructing London: Sir Thomas Gresham and Bishopsgate 1 Ann Saunders 2. Sir Thomas and the 'House of Gresham': activities of a mercer- merchant adventurer 13 Ian Blanchard 3. Citizen and mercer: Sir Thomas Gresham and the social and political world of the city of London 24 Vanessa Harding 4. Failed transmission: Sir Thomas Gresham, reproduction, and the background to Gresham's professorship of physic 38 Margaret Felling 5. Early insurance in and around the Royal Exchange 62 Trevor Sibbett 6. Sculpture at the Royal Exchange in the seventeenth century 77 Katharine Gibson Vi CONTENTS 7. Civic rhetoric, 1560-1640 88 Lynette Hunter 8. Plato in the Tudor academies 106 Sarah Hutton 9. Testimonia humanitatis: the early lectures of Henry Savile 125 Robert Goulding 10. 'No small force': natural philosophy and mathematics in Thomas Gresham's London 146 Stephen Clucas 11. Gresham College and London practitioners: the nature of the English mathematical community 174 Mordechai Feingold 12. Christopher Wren's Greshamite history of astronomy and geometry 189 Jim Bennett 13. Why translate Serlio? 198 J.V.Field Index 223 list of illustrations LIST OF PLATES 1. George Vertue, Gresham College on Bishopsgate 2a & b. Queen of Clubs and Four of Diamonds 3a & b. Six of Spades and Six of Diamonds 4. Seven of Clubs 5a. Frans Hogenberg, The exterior of the first Royal Exchange 5b. Frans Hogenberg, The interior of the first Royal Exchange 6. George Vertue, The first statue of Thomas Gresham 7. Nicholas Stone, Statue of Queen Elizabeth 8. Unknown sculptor, Statue of Charles I 9. Wenceslas Hollar, The Byrsa Londinensis 10. Robert White, The Cornhill facade of the second Royal Exchange 11. John Bushnell, Statue of Charles I 12. John Bushnell, Statue of Charles II 13. Grinling Gibbons, Statue of Charles II 14. Sutton Nicholls, The courtyard of the Royal Exchange 15a. Attributed to Arnold Quellin, Model for the statue of Henry VIII 15b. Attributed to Arnold Quellin, Model for the statue of Charles II I6a. Attributed to Caius Gabriel Gibber, Model for the statue of Edward III I6b. Attributed to Caius Gabriel Gibber, Model for the statue of Edward IV LIST OF FIGURES 1. John Roque, Plan of the cities of London and Westminster 2a. John Dee's 'hieroglyphic monad' 2b. Its geometrical construction 3- Diagrammatic representation of uniform difform motion of a body with initial velocity AB viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 4. Diagrammatic representation of a uniform difform motion of a body encountering uniform air resistance AFG 5. Diagram illustrating difference in the 'degree of motion' of a body 6. Muhammad al-Baghdadi's method for the proportional division of a quadrangle 7. Gateway in Tuscan or Rustic style 8. Church using the Corinthian order 9. Diagram for dividing an area ABC into two equal parts 10. Diagram for drawing the profile of an ornamental urn 11. Two perspective constructions for finding the images of squares Notes on contributors Francis Ames-Lewis is Reader in History of Art at Birkbeck College, Univer- sity of London. As Chairman of the Society for Renaissance Studies (1995- 98) he organized the Society's conference on'Gresham College 1597-1997', in March 1997 and agreed to edit the transactions. His research field, how- ever, is the history of Italian early Renaissance art, and he has published books and articles on, inter alia, Renaissance drawings, and the art patron- age of the Medici in fifteenth-century Florence. Jim Bennett is Keeper of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. Recent publications have been associated with exhibitions there: The geometry of war (with Stephen Johnston) and The garden, the ark, the tower, the temple (with Scott Mandelbrote), both on early-modern themes. His research interests are in the history of astronomy, of practical mathemat- ics and of scientific instruments. Ian Blanchard is Professor of Medieval Economic History at the University of Edinburgh. His major interest is in the workings of the international economy in the Middle Ages and early-modern period. A new monetary theory of international economic development in this period was pre- sented in his inaugural lecture The Middle Ages: a concept too many? (Edinburgh: Newlees Press, 1996). He has also published a number of works on modern Russian economic history, 1700-1914. Stephen Clucas is Lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is editor of a forthcoming volume of essays on the Elizabethan mathematician and natural philosopher John Dee, John Dee: interdisciplinary essays in English Renaissance thought (Dordrecht, 1999), and is currently working on a book on Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northum- berland (1564-1632) and his intellectual circle. X NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Mordechai Feingold is Professor of Science Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He is currently working on the history of the Royal Society. / V Field, an honorary research fellow in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London, works on the history of the math- ematical sciences in the period from about 1400 to 1650, and is the author of The invention of infinity: mathematics and art in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1997). Robert Goulding is Elizabeth Wordsworth Junior Research Fellow at St Hugh's College, Oxford. He is currently completing a doctorate at the Warburg Institute, University of London, on the mathematical papers of Sir Henry Savile. His previous publications concern proto-Tychonic planetary theory among Savile's European collaborators and the parallactic theory of John Dee and Thomas Digges. At present he is researching the circulation of Regiomontanus' manuscripts in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, and the pre- history of logarithms. Katharine Gibson has published articles on the coins and medals of King Charles II of England, and on the 1682-84 decoration of St George's Hall, Windsor, as well as on the statuary at the Royal Exchange.The iconography of Charles II was the subject of her recent PhD thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and she hopes to publish more on this topic and on the King's patronage. Vanessa Harding is Senior Lecturer in the History of London at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on the society, economy and culture of late-medieval and early-modern London. She has published on London's archives and on the capital's demography, growth, and physical development. She is currently finishing a comparative study of death and burial in early modern London and Paris. Lynette Hunter is Professor of the History of Rhetoric at the University of Leeds and Gresham Professor of Rhetoric (1997-2000). She has written on political rhetoric throughout the post-medieval period, and has a substantial interest in domestic and household literature in the Renaissance. With Peter Lichtenfels, she is currently co-editing Romeo and Juliet for the Arden Shakespeare. Sarah Button is Reader in Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. Her publications include New perspectives on Renaissance thought (edited with John Henry, London, 1990), Henry More (1614-1687). Tercentenary studies (Dordrecth, 1992), and a revised NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi edition of Marjorie Nicolson's Conway Letters (Oxford, 1992). Her edition of Cudworth's Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996. Most recently she has edited, with Lynette Hunter, Women, science and medicine, 1500-1700 (Alan Sutton, 1997). She is currently working on a book-length study of Anne Conway. Margaret Petting is a University Research Lecturer in the Modern History Faculty, University of Oxford.
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