In debt to Henry VIII: the signed warrant that gave Richard Gresham two more years

Imagine you owe Henry VIII money, and the day to pay it has already passed.

Not a small sum, either. Measured against the average wage, it would be worth about £6 million today.

What would happen to you?

A debtor who defaulted on the Crown could have his lands and goods valued and seized by the sheriff, and one who failed to answer could be outlawed and arrested.

In March 1513 that was the position of Richard Gresham, a London mercer. Henry chose none of those remedies. A Henry VIII–signed document records what he did instead. It is a royal warrant, dated at Greenwich on 3 March 1513, in which the king tells John Heron, Treasurer of the Chamber, to let Gresham keep the £637 10s he owed the Crown for another two years. Henry signed it “Henry R” at the head, beside the words “By the kyng”.

Why Henry spared Gresham, the warrant does not say. The people around it are easier to trace. Henry was 21, and within four months he would cross to France at the head of an army. Gresham’s son later gave London its Royal Exchange.

The warrant measures 11.3 by 8.5 inches.

It is written on paper laid by hand, on a wire mould. It was the method used across Europe for three centuries before machine papermaking existed.

You can feel it in the sheet itself: run a finger across the surface and there is a faint, regular corrugation, almost like fine fabric, left by the wires of the mould pressing into the wet pulp as it drained and dried.

At the centre of that pattern sits a watermark: an open hand resting above a plain cuff banded at the wrist. A six-petalled flower rises from the tip of the middle finger. It was never meant to be seen easily.

Hand and flower watermarks of this type are catalogued in Briquet’s Les Filigranes, the standard reference for European watermarks of the period.

Documented examples run from 1499 to 1519, bracketing this document’s own date of 1513 almost exactly. A close match, Briquet number 11165, appears on a letter written by King Ferdinand of Aragon, its paper traced to a mill at Perpignan around 1505.

A debt of £637 10s, held over for two years

The warrant recites that Gresham “of oure Citie of London with other stonde bounde by obligacion for the payment to oure use of the somme of Sixe hundred thirty seven poundes and ten shillynges at a certayn daie expired”. The day had passed. Henry orders Heron to let Gresham keep the money, without demand, for two more years, and to hold his earlier bonds without “puttyng the same to sute” in the king’s name. The only reason offered is “certeyn consideracions us movyng”.

The MeasuringWorth calculator puts £637 10s in 1513 at £571,200 in 2024 prices, or £6.1 million measured against the average wage.

The closing line dates the letter “the thirde day of Marche the fourthe yere of oure reigne” at the manor of Greenwich, where Henry had been born on 28 June 1491. The R of “Henry R” stands for Rex, king, the same letter that closes the signatures of both Elizabeths.

Richard Gresham, six years into his trade

Gresham was not yet a City grandee. The History of Parliament, which gives his birth only as “by 1486”, records that he was admitted to the freedom of the Mercers’ Company in 1507 and began exporting cloth at once: 17 cloths in his first year, rising until in 1519-20 he imported goods worth nearly £5,000. His trade centred on the Netherlands.

In the 1520s and early 1530s he supplied tapestries for Hampton Court and York Place and cables for the navy. Later he acted as the Crown’s financial agent, raising money in Antwerp. In 1537 the king wrote instructing the City to choose him as mayor. The History of Parliament has him knighted within weeks, by 16 November 1537, while Wikipedia dates the knighthood to 1531, his year as sheriff. He died on 21 February 1549, and the History notes two sardonic poems on his death that “testify to the feelings aroused by his activities as a moneylender and land grabber”.

Four months before the invasion of France

The warrant was signed while Henry was preparing to invade France. Letters patent of 16 September 1512, later sold at Christie’s, order Charles Brandon to muster able men in Carnarvon, Merioneth and Anglesey, and the Christie’s catalogue links those musters to the invasion of the following year. Henry arrived at Calais on 30 June 1513 with 11,000 men.

On 16 August English and imperial troops routed the French cavalry near Thérouanne, and the haste of the French retreat gave the day its name, the Battle of the Spurs. Thérouanne fell on 22 August and Tournai on 23 September. The warrant itself says nothing about the campaign it precedes.

The bourse the father could not build

As mayor, Gresham revived a scheme for a London bourse in Lombard Street at a cost of £2,000. George Monoux refused to part with the land and then, after the king and Thomas Cromwell had declared their support, delayed the sale. A bill “for the bourse” failed in the Parliament of 1539, and, in the History’s words, the project “had to wait for realization by his son”.

His son, Sir Thomas Gresham, had worked at the Antwerp bourse as a royal agent. In 1565 he offered the Court of Aldermen an exchange built at his own expense, provided the City found the site. Elizabeth I opened it on 23 January 1571 and, as the London Museum records, proclaimed that it should be called the Royal Exchange. The Royal Exchange’s own history calls it London’s first purpose-built centre for trading stocks. Oxford’s Newton and the Mint project notes that stockbrokers tended to work from coffee houses nearby, such as Jonathan’s and Garraway’s.

The number on the back, Phillipps MS 35570

The reverse carries the address, ending “John Heron Tresurer of oure Chamber”, and below it, in a later hand, “Phillipps MS 35570”. Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792 to 1872) amassed the largest collection of manuscript material of the nineteenth century, some 60,000 manuscripts, and his agents outbid his rival, the British Museum. English legal documents were relatively cheap in his day, and many owe their survival to him. The dispersal of his collection took more than a century, and the final portion sold at Christie’s on 7 June 2006.

From Heron’s chamber to the Phillipps library

The warrant was addressed to the Treasurer of the Chamber in the months before Henry invaded France, and it spared a merchant whose son would build the Royal Exchange. In the nineteenth century it passed into the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, and his number is still written on the back.

The warrant is now offered by Paul Fraser Collectibles for £45,000 (US$59,783.67), with photographs of the front, the signature and the reverse.