Richard Clough

Who was Richard Clough?

Sir Richard Clough, known by his Welsh contemporaries as Rhisiart Clwch, was a merchant from Denbigh, north-east Wales, and an agent of Queen Elizabeth I of England.

Clough was from a humble background, but his fortunes were improved when he was noticed, as a boy chorister in Chester Cathedral, for his remarkable singing voice and was sent to court in London:

By virtue of his visit to Jerusalem, he became a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. Back in London, he became a factor for Thomas Gresham and entered the Mercers' Company. In 1552 he was located in Antwerp, currently the centre of North European commerce and banking. Here he met his wife Catherine Muldart, from that city. In 1561, he wrote to Gresham - his employer - with the suggestion that something along the lines of the Antwerp Bourse could be established in London. Gresham took this up, founding the London Royal Exchange, which opened in 1571. Clough played an important role in its development, providing finance and appointing Hendrik van Passe, the Flemish architect to work on the building.

Many of his lengthy letters, which were passed by Gresham to the government for their use in intelligence, have survived and been used by historians. His eye-witness account of the "Iconoclastic Fury" or Beeldenstorm in Antwerp in 1566, is often quoted. He saw: "all the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marvelled at." The Church of Our Lady in Antwerp, later made the cathedral: "looked like a hell, with above 10,000 torches burning, and such a noise as if heaven and earth had got together, with falling of images and beating down of costly works, such sort that the spoil was so great that a man could not well pass through the church. So that in fine [short], I cannot write you in x sheets of paper the strange sight I saw there, organs and all destroyed."