Gresham College in the City of London
Over 400 Years of Free Public Lectures in the Arts and Sciences
Sep 27, 2008 Richard Mankiewicz
The Legacy of Sir Thomas Gresham
Gresham College was established by Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579), a merchant, financial adviser and Royal Agent to three monarchs. In 1565 he founded the Royal Exchange in London, based on the Antwerp bourse, with the support of the City of London Corporation and the Worshipful Company of Mercers, a Livery Company of which Gresham was a member.
Although Gresham died in 1579, the College itself was not formally founded until 1597, because he stipulated in his will that his Bishopsgate residence should be used as the College premises only after the passing away of his widow. The rents from the Royal Exchange were used to pay for the running of Gresham College and the generous stipends of the professors.
The Seven Gresham Professors
The original endowment called for seven professorships; these were in Divinity, Astronomy, Music, Geometry, Law, Medicine and Rhetoric. There is a very close relationship between these subjects and the medieval curriculum. The Liberal Arts were subdivided into the trivium of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, and the mathematical quadrivium of Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astronomy. With some amalgamation of topic areas and the insertion of the increasingly important professions of Law and Medicine, Gresham was able to preserve the heptad. However, as recently as 1985 a Professor of Commerce was also appointed.
The New Astronomy
In the spirit of the Renaissance, Thomas Gresham sought to bring both wealth and enlightenment to the realm, without challenging the academic supremacy of Oxbridge. The subject of Astronomy gives us a good example of this approach. The year 1543 saw the publication by Copernicus of his heliocentric system. This could have been dismissed as academic speculation save for the supernova witnessed in 1572. The immutability of the heavens as taught by the Church was to be seriously challenged. But the new Astronomy also brought practical advances in navigation and geography. The first Gresham Professor of Geometry was Henry Briggs, who perfected Napier's logarithms, speeding up significantly time-sensitive calculations such as a ship's position at sea.
The Birth of the Royal Society
Gresham College was the birthplace of the Royal Society, the founding meeting taking place immediately after a lecture by Sir Christopher Wren, then Gresham Professor of Astronomy. Leading scientists of the day were meeting informally at the College well before the Society was formally established and continued to meet there for some fifty years. Gresham College has seen the establishment of various scientific societies and academies in London, as well as the founding of the University of London in the early nineteenth century, and yet it has remained largely unchanged in its mission since the time of its founder.
The Modern Gresham College
Gresham College continues its mission “to reinterpret the new learning of Sir Thomas Gresham's day in contemporary terms”, “to foster academic consideration of contemporary problems.” It has retained its independence from government and hence is able to think aloud those topics of interest to its Professors rather than follow prevailing educational fashions. It continues to provide free public lectures and since 2000 has also funded Visiting Professors to lecture in areas outside its normal range. The internet now provides a distribution channel for written, audio and video files of the Gresham lectures.
Sir Thomas Gresham
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