On the afternoon of January 23rd, in the year 1571, Queen Elizabeth went from her Palace of Somerset House to dine with Sir Thomas Gresham at his fine mansion in Austin Friars. She went in state with her Trumpeters and Halberdiers, but the visit was no such great mark of distinction as in these days it would be. For one thing, Sir Thomas was a person of much importance in the Realm. He was a member of the Mercers’ Company which was established as long ago as 1172; he was the Royal Agent in the Low Countries, and by other important services had Her Majesty in his debt. There was another reason not to be lost sight of in any narrative which is concerned with the City of London. The social barriers--which at a later date were to divide the City from the Court for the best part of a couple of centuries--had not yet been erected. Wars and the art of soldiering have been from time immemorial the great origins of social divisions, and these were times of peace. Seventeen years had still to come before the Armada was to sail out of Corunna harbour. Moreover, there was no West End. Great nobles lived cheek by jowl with the great merchants, and the latter held their own in social esteem much as they have done during the last fifty years. The Queen was on her way to open Sir Thomas Gresham’s new Burse, and she sat at dinner with Sir Thomas Gresham upon her right hand, and upon her left the French Ambassador, Monsieur La Motte Fénélon, to whom we are indebted for an account of his share in that great woman’s conversation. We have no record, worse luck, of what passed between her and Sir Thomas Gresham. But no doubt she whispered to him her intention to dignify his Exchange with the epithet of “Royal,” and no doubt he took the occasion to embroider upon certain passages from a letter which he had had the honour to write to her from Bruges: “The Stillyard hath been the chiefest point in the undoing of this your Realm and the Merchants of the same.”