We are not to picture Sir Thomas as unduly elated; the building was, to be sure, a great thing in the history of London and a definite help to the commerce of England. It had been mooted before. His father, Sir Richard Gresham, Master of the Mercers’ Company and Lord Mayor of London, for many years had advocated the erection of an Exchange in London and to him credit for the original conception must be given. Henry the Eighth in the twenty-sixth year of his reign sent his letters to the City for the making of a new Burse at Leadenhall, but by a show of hands the City had refused it, preferring that the merchants should still meet to conduct their business on the cobble stones of Lombard Street. Now, however, the Exchange was a fact. It stood facing Cornhill with the great gilt Grasshopper of Sir Thomas Gresham’s crest perched on the top of its tall tower. But the Exchange was not the end of Sir Thomas Gresham’s policy--it was no more than the half-way house on the road of his high ambitions. It was to be one of the means by which Englishmen were to become masters in their own City and the pernicious rule of the Lombardy men, and above all of the Stillyard was to be destroyed. The Stillyard was, to the modern understanding, one of the strangest institutions which the world has ever seen. It took its origin from the debts of the early English kings and the money with which the German traders from the Baltic, the Easterlings as they were called, were able to provide them. These Easterlings or Emperor’s men--the latter designation in time came to supersede the earlier--were the representatives in England of the famous Hanseatic League, and for the greater part of the five centuries which followed upon the reign of Edward the Confessor, they used England’s inability to finance her wars on the Continent, and her Crusades in the East, to fix a stranglehold upon British Commerce. They were established in rights and privileges which no English shared with them; they paid fixed taxes; they held a monopoly of the export of the most valuable raw materials, such as wool, and of the import of the most valuable finished products. The early history of this country gives many a significant little proof of the great power which they held. They were responsible for the upkeep of Bishopsgate, except the hinges, for which the Bishop of London was responsible, and on account of this obligation they were relieved from the tax called “Murage,” which was devoted to the upkeep of the City walls. In 1303, Edward the First, when replying to a Petition, presented by the Mayor, Aldermen and Commoners of the City of London, asking that the Lombards might be forbidden from dwelling in the City, acting as brokers, or buying and selling by retail, stated, that if the Citizens would put the City under good government, no foreigner should be allowed so to dwell or act in the City or its Liberties, save and except the merchants of the Hanseatic towns.