Thus ended a great day in the history of London, and seven years later Sir Thomas Gresham had his way. The Queen, encouraged by Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, and Sir Thomas Gresham, declared all the privileges of the Stillyard merchants of whatever nature, null and void for ever. The next year she struck a harder blow. She forbade them to export wool, thus depriving them of the most profitable branch of their business. The Stillyard merchants were unwise enough to appeal to the Diet of the Hanseatic League at Bruges. The Diet responded to the appeal. It threatened England that, unless the Stillyard was restored to its former privileges and rights, the English Company of Merchant Adventurers would be expelled from every town in Germany in which it had established a branch. The Diet, however, did not know the Lady with whom it had to deal. The answer came prompt and sharp in a proclamation which not only closed the Stillyard itself peremptorily, but bade every German merchant leave the Kingdom before the last day of February, 1597. This proclamation was carried out, the German merchants left, the Stillyard was handed over as a store house to the Admiralty, and thus disappeared an institution as pernicious to the trade of England as the Kingdom has ever known. But these Germans had built their house well and the great walls of the Yard were still standing in 1863, when the South Eastern Railway built Cannon Street Station. As for the Royal Exchange itself, it became at once the meeting place of merchants and the promenade of men of fashion. In the day-time grave people of business paced those Turkish hone stones, adjusted their disputes and engaged in transactions with outlandish people from all the then known countries in the world. In the evening the butterflies of fashion would flit from Paul’s Walk to the gaily lighted shops of the Pawn, where all they could want from lace, glass, strange curios, to that queer new useful invention--the common pin--was laid out to attract them. “What artificial thing,” says an old writer, “was there that could entertain the senses or the phantasies of man that was not there to be had? Such was the delight that many gallants took in that magazine of all curious varieties that they could almost have dwelt there, going from shop to shop like bees from flower to flower if they had but had the fountain of money that could not have been drawn dry.” The evening, however, was not apparently ended in the Pawn. There was a certain routine in the amusements of the people of fashion as there is to-day. From the Pawn the stream of gay people flowed to Bucklersbury, where were the Indian shops with their scents and perfumes, and the Italian Confectioners, where they took their supper before going home to bed. Thus for ninety years the first Royal Exchange played its important part in the life of London. In 1666 the Great Fire swept it away. CHAPTER II. THE GREAT FIRE AND THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.