Henry VII can take some of the credit for the modest resurgence of royal authority in Ireland by the early sixteenth century, from its nadir fifty years earlier. In restoring the Kildare ascendancy he had recognised the necessity of laying aside some of his kingly pride and distrust of his great noblemen. But this decision was made easy for him anyway, because the alternative – bringing Ireland under direct rule from England – was a waste of time and money. Henry’s (mostly) benign neglect of his lordship of Ireland reflected a fundamental political truth, which was that the foundation of his power lay at the centre of his realm, not on the peripheries. It was natural therefore that he and his advisers looked to replenish royal authority at its roots, and here they were fortunate in that the great recession that had blighted the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV had ended by the 1490s. No longer could ambitious magnates like Warwick the Kingmaker foment popular rebellion on the (wholly unkeepable) promise of alleviating hardship and bringing back the good times of old. Although tax revolts continued intermittently under the Tudors, on the relatively rare occasions when the people resorted to organised violence, they did so to restore what they saw as the traditional order, not to overthrow their king, as they had done a generation earlier. And as the economy strengthened so too did the government’s military resources, making it harder for dynastic rivals to wage war on anything like equal terms. Henceforth, there would be room for only one over-mighty power in Tudor England, and that was the crown itself.
Law state and war state
From the distance of James I’s reign, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, the philosopher and royal biographer Francis Bacon (1561–1626) recounted a ‘merry tale’ concerning Henry VII’s pet monkey. The king, being ‘full of apprehensions and suspicions’, kept a notebook in which he recorded his secret observations about ‘whom to employ, whom to reward, whom to inquire of, whom to beware of’ – and finding this notebook the monkey tore it in pieces, ‘whereat the court which liked not those pensive accounts was almost tickled with sport’.19 This story, though probably apocryphal, is nevertheless revealing of what contemporaries took to be a defining aspect of Henry’s style of kingship. The first of the Tudor monarchs never forgot that he had usurped the crown from a usurper, and that as fortune and his friends had raised him up, so fortune and his enemies might cast him down. If he was ‘haunted with sprites’, as Bacon termed it – or paranoid, as we might – it was not without reason.20
To retain the throne that he had so fortuitously won, Henry must invest his rule with such unshakeable authority as to inspire awe and dread in even his greatest subjects. It was Henry’s wish, observed Polydore Vergil, to make ‘all Englishmen obedient through fear’;21 and to Spanish diplomats, writing home in 1498, it seemed that the king was succeeding: ‘Henry is rich, has established good order in England, and keeps the people in such subjection as has never been the case before.’22 More than most monarchs, Henry equated ‘subjection’ with money. Dudley put it well when he remarked that his royal master believed that ‘security standeth much in plenty of treasure’.23 Although the king was legal-minded in the extreme, not to say obsessively bureaucratic – he scrutinised and countersigned every page of the royal accounts – the financial devices he employed to exact obedience largely explain why the monarchy would become more exploitative, tyrannical even, during his reign than it had been under the mightiest of the Plantagenets.
To appropriate the enormous sums that Henry felt necessary for his security would involve challenging some of the most deeply held political assumptions in English society. England, as we have already noted, had acquired a system of government by the mid-thirteenth century that was deeply rooted in legal forms and observance. This ‘law state’ provided a stable platform from which Edward I (who reigned from 1272 to 1307) and his successors launched invasions of Wales and Scotland, and then took on France in the Hundred Years War. Warfare became England’s staple export from the late thirteenth century and, in the process, law state gave way to ‘war state’, pushing the crown into ever closer political partnership with the landed classes. Needing money and cooperative subjects to sustain their military ambitions, the Plantagenets granted the nobility and gentry a major role in governing the localities, and agreed to impose direct taxation only with the consent of Parliament. The effect of these various trade-offs was to make government increasingly consensual, an activity that a significant section of the population, from yeomen (the village elite) upwards, participated in and manipulated for their own purposes. Royal authority became public authority inasmuch as it was deployed on behalf of and by an informed and articulate political community that existed alongside the monarch. The monarchy, in turn, became more closely identified with the role of serving and protecting society. Faced with Henry VI’s inept kingship in the mid-fifteenth century, this conception of the state as a body devoted to the public good would acquire a new name and language, that of the ‘commonwealth’.
The war state of the later Middle Ages had been capable of prodigious military feats. Henry V’s conquest of Normandy in the 1410s had dazzled all of Europe. Clearly the partnership between the crown and the political community had created a formidable war machine. But looked at from Henry VII’s perspective, the crown had made a Faustian pact with its people. It could tap the wealth of the realm with an efficiency and regularity that some of its European rivals could only envy – but upon two conditions. In England (but crucially, not in France) a consensus emerged during the fourteenth century that direct taxation should only be levied to address an immediate or obvious military need, and on the understanding that such levies required the consent of the political community as represented in Parliament. The taxes voted by Parliament, together with customs revenues and loans, were generally sufficient to meet the crown’s military needs; and Parliament’s support added greatly to royal authority, especially in time of war. But then came the weakening of the monarchy under Henry VI, defeat in 1453, and France’s re-emergence as a European superpower. The English state contained deep-seated forces pushing for prolonged war, and yet geopolitical reality made such a commitment impossible to sustain by the mid-fifteenth century. France was just too powerful. Once intermittent peace became the normal state of affairs, the crown’s dependence upon parliamentary taxation became a huge liability. Henry VII and his successors found themselves trapped by the political conventions of England’s imperial past.
Henry VII’s reluctance to continue hostilities against France beyond 1492 deprived him of parliamentary taxation while at the same time doing little to reduce his need for cash. For example, he spent very large sums of money after 1492 – sometimes in excess of £100,000 (or roughly his ordinary annual income) – on ‘loans’ (bribes) to the Emperor Maximilian and other foreign princes to persuade them to extradite or cease sheltering Yorkist exiles on the Continent. Not quite as costly, but still very expensive, was the investment Henry made in the royal gun-making industry, based at the Tower of London. He was determined to control the manufacture of heavy artillery in England, and to ensure that he had more and bigger guns than any of his subjects. Yet with no war to justify regular parliamentary taxation, his government had to resort to more piecemeal and frowned-upon methods to meet this expenditure. Informers were employed to spy on the monied and influential and to nose out hidden wealth; the property of Henry’s Yorkist enemies was seized at every turn; and a concerted effort was made to exploit the money-raising potential of the royal prerogative – that is, the reserve and emergency powers which inhered in the king by virtue of his status as an anointed sovereign.
These sharp financial practices certainly succeeded in increasing Henry’s income, but as the king seems to have realised, to secure a significant, long-term improvement in royal revenue would require renegotiating the financial – and, therefore, political – relationship between crown and subject. The Spanish