The early Tudors made repeated attempts to shift the basis of their income away from parliamentary taxation to financial sources grounded upon the royal prerogative. This in part explains Henry VII’s reputation for avarice. It also accounts for his unpopularity. For although his exploitation of his prerogative rights was perfectly legal, it violated the spirit of political partnership between crown and people as it had developed in the preceding two centuries. Henry’s resort to prerogative taxation sparked numerous small-scale riots, and contributed significantly to major uprisings in Yorkshire, in 1489, and Cornwall in 1497. The Cornish insurgent army, 15,000 angry taxpayers, got to within a few miles of London before Henry’s cavalry cut it to pieces. When Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, introduced a non-parliamentary ‘benevolence’, or forced loan in 1525 – the spectacularly misnamed Amicable Grant – it would provoke unrest not in far-off Cornwall but in London and the home counties, and was hastily dropped. ‘All people curssed the Cardinal’, claimed one of his critics, ‘as subvertor of the Lawes and libertie of England. For thei said if men should geve their goodes by a Commission [royal warrant], then wer it worse than the taxes of Fraunce and so England should be bond and not free.’26 The English would continue to associate the French monarchy with tyranny for the next three centuries.
Public opinion and the almost religious veneration of common law and custom – enforced and enforceable through the courts – prevented Tudor monarchs from riding roughshod over ‘Lawes and libertie’ in the manner of French kings. Nevertheless, Henry VII succeeded in making government more regal, and less accountable to the political community – partly because in the absence of long-term military commitments he did not need to call Parliaments as often as his predecessors had. The great struggle against France had required the crown to call Parliaments regularly in order to vote the necessary taxes, and that had given Parliament-men the opportunity to maintain a running check on royal government. Without regular Parliaments it would prove more difficult to hold the monarchy to account. Parliament would not regain the executive power it had enjoyed under the Plantagenets until the British civil wars of the 1640s.
The most powerful instrument of Henry’s intensely personal style of government was the royal council – or rather an inner ring of councillors, grouped into committees, who owed their influence entirely to the king and who worked under his supervision. One of these committees – the ‘Council Learned in the Law’ – was set up specifically to enforce the king’s prerogative rights, and was widely feared for its power to summon anyone, at will, on unspecified charges. Henry had no time for the traditional notion that noblemen of ancient lineage were the monarch’s natural advisers, his ‘born councillors’. His council was dominated by lawyers, royal dependants ‘and such other caitifs and villains of [low] birth’.27 His two most prominent councillors by the end of his reign were Edmund Dudley and his fellow lawyer Sir Richard Empson. These were Henry’s most notorious henchmen, ‘whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches [bloodsuckers] and shearers … both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves, insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance’.28 Empson and Dudley came to symbolise the rapacious and intrusive character of royal government during Henry’s final years.
As a lawyer from a prominent London family, the future lord chancellor and Catholic martyr Thomas More (1478–1535) was all too familiar with the inquisitorial practices of Empson, Dudley, and the Council Learned in the Law. If he had any particular monarch in mind when exploring the themes of royal misgovernment and aggrandisement of power in his early works it was surely Henry VII. His great critique of European society, Utopia, published just a few years after Henry’s death, describes an imaginary land where the office of king is elective and where the ruler can be deposed for ‘suspicion of tyranny’. More was one of the first English writers, though by no means the last, to use classical republican texts and arguments about popular sovereignty to criticise the swelling power of Renaissance monarchy.
The ruthless legalism of Henry’s kingship was matched by its financial efficiency. In a novel departure from his predecessors, Henry merged his private sources of income, those belonging to the crown, and national taxation into one consolidated (though physically dispersed) treasury, administered mainly from a department of his household, the Chamber, and subject to close royal scrutiny. This chamber system of finance concentrated large amounts of cash in the king’s hands – a good deal of which he secretly stockpiled in the Tower and other places – giving him unprecedented political independence, and excluding all but his inner entourage from understanding the true extent of the crown’s wealth. In a similar spirit, Henry created a new inner space within the royal household, the privy (or private) chamber, staffed by a corps of hand-picked servants – mostly men of relatively low social status – who alone had access to him during his private hours. The privy chamber, like Henry’s specialised council committees, or the royal bodyguard he formed against possible assassination, put further distance between the king and the political community – thus imitating, probably consciously, features of the French and Breton courts where he had spent his formative years. His lavish building projects served the same purpose as his innovations at court: to invest Tudor monarchy with a godlike majesty. Nothing spoke more tellingly of this aspiration than the magnificent chapel in Henry’s Thameside palace at Richmond, which was apparently unique in England in having the royal closet, or private pew, placed not at the west end, but to one side of the nave, closer to the altar (probably in deliberate emulation of chapel usage at the court of the dukes of Burgundy).29 Royal appropriation of sacred space was equally striking in Henry’s contribution to the completion of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with its antechapel made over not to Christian iconography but to massive displays of Tudor heraldic badges and royal arms.
As Henry’s health began to deteriorate from the late 1490s, so his obsession with ‘treasure’ and the control it supposedly conferred grew even stronger. To the victims of his ever-expanding system of financial penalties, it must have seemed that he had succumbed in his declining years to greed, pure and simple. Yet the lavish burial chapel that he commissioned to be built at the east end of Westminster Abbey, at a cost during his lifetime of £34,000, reveals a king who was still willing to spend liberally on affirming his inherited and divine right to rule. The time and money he invested in securing the Tudor dynasty would prove to have been well spent, for when he died in ‘grete agony of body & soule’ on 21 April 1509, no one challenged the succession of his son, Prince Henry. In his sermon at Henry VII’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, listed among the late king’s worldly accomplishments his success in making Tudor authority ‘dredde every where, not onely with in his realme but without also, his people were to hym in as humble subgeccyon as ever they were to kynge’.30
The morning after Henry VII’s death, Dudley and Empson were arrested and sent to the Tower. The following year, in response to public pressure, the young Henry VIII would have the two men tried and convicted on trumped-up treason charges, and then beheaded. The kingdom had rid itself of these ‘horse-leeches’, to be sure, but the political conditions that had given rise to an Empson and a Dudley remained. Permanently in need of cash, and in ever-increasing quantities, the crown was dependent for its long-term financial health upon an unwieldy and sometimes fickle institution: Parliament. Resorting instead to prerogative taxation was always an option, but only in emergencies, and even then it ran the strong risk of alienating the political community. The partnership between crown and subject that had formed under the Plantagenets had thus become a love–hate relationship for the Tudors. It helped them govern and yet hindered them financially. Strong monarchs though they were, neither Henry VII, Henry VIII nor Elizabeth I proved capable of putting royal finances on a fundamentally new and less consensual footing. The kingdom’s fiscal system would remain fossilised in its medieval form until the mid-seventeenth century.
Such a king as never before
Of all the prosperous Londoners who had felt the lash of Henry VII’s greed and distrust, perhaps the most articulate was Thomas More. It was with