Men of Kent and Kentishmen/Sir Henry Billingsley
Sir Henry Billingsley,
Mathematician,
Was the son of Roger Billingsley, of Canterbury, where he was born about 1550. Though educated at Oxford, he was subsequently apprenticed to a haberdasher in the City of London, in which business he acquired a fortune, and was in 1596 elected Lord Mayor, and knighted. On the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII., he took into his household one Whitehead, an Augustine Friar, at Oxford, an eminent mathematician, with whom he read, and made great progress in the science. On Whitehead's death he made a translation of Euclid's Elements, with notes taken from MSS., which Whitehead had bequeathed to him, and with observations of his own, and published the whole with a preface by Dr. John Dee, 1570. He died 22nd November, 1606.
[Rose's Biographical Dictionary" See also "Wood's Athena Oxon.," by Bliss.]