But Mr Wheatley was not the only benefactor the city knew. Wealthy merchants were generous givers, and the education of youth and provision for the sick and needy were not matters held to be solely within the Church's province. The names of Richard Whittington and John Carpenter[584] of London, and of Cannynges of Bristol, deserve ever to be held in remembrance, and there are hundreds of other half-forgotten donors entitled to an equal fame. Thomas Bond, merchant of the Staple, founded at Bablake a hospital for ten men "and one woman to look after them," the candidates to be chosen on a general day of the Trinity guild, and, as bedesmen of this omnipotent fraternity, to repeat three times a day Our Lady's Psalter for the brethren of the guild. Both Bond's almshouse and that erected by William Ford, merchant, and William Pisford, at Greyfriars, still remain, and are among the few perfect specimens of domestic architecture of the sixteenth century that we possess. The latter, first enriched by Ford's will in 1509, contained six men and their wives, the nominees of the Trinity guild, each couple receiving 7-1/2d. a week for their maintenance.[585] [Illustration: FORD'S HOSPITAL] But it was not the welfare of the aged alone which absorbed the charity of these merchants. To John Haddon, draper, is due the honour of initiating the system of granting loans to young freemen to aid them in beginning commercial life. By his will (1518) he bequeathed £100 to be distributed among men of the drapers' fellowship--poor clothmakers the _Leet Book_ calls them--in loans of £5 each, to enable them to buy wool or cloth, for the cloth trade at that time was undergoing a period of great depression in Coventry, and £100 to be similarly divided in £4 loans among young freemen of all occupations; all loans, free of interest, to be repaid at the end of first year.[586] His example had numerous imitators;[587] but undoubtedly the gifts of Sir Thomas White, mayor of London and founder of S. John's College, Oxford, whom Mary knighted for his loyalty at the time of Wyatt's rebellion, surpassed the rest. At the time of their greatest need, in 1543, he lent the corporation £1400, wherewith they purchased certain lands and tenements confiscated at the Reformation, and they agreed to distribute £40 arising from the rents of the tenements in loans to apprentices of the city for nine years' use.[588] From some cause or other, probably by reason of his great and numerous acts of benevolence, and the backwardness of the corporation in paying a promised annuity, Sir Thomas fell into poverty in his later years, and seems to have been utterly cast down by the thought that his wife would be left without provision. "Whereas I have gently written unto you heretofore," he writes in 1566 to the mayor and corporation, "to let my wife have her annuity of £46 for part of her jointure, I require you as you shall answer before God at the day of judgment that you lett my wife have £24