ABSTRACT
As many of the articles in this volume attest.Thomas Gresham was one of a new group of people who in the Tudor period were defining for themselves, outside the court, a social place of enormous respect and power. Their actions and behaviour are central to the debate raging all through the period concerning gentility and nobility by birth or by actions - a debate that set the terms for the final disruption of the concept of divine power, laid out the vocabulary for the Civil War of the seventeenth century, and formed the basis for the constitution of a 'class' called the bourgeoisie who became the citizens of the liberal social contract.
