CHAPTER VII.

MONARCHICAL POLICY.

 

We have been able to see how closely Henry’s state policy, properly so called, had become bound up with his commercial policy. Trade with the Netherlands still formed the central point of England’s mercantile interests; next in importance to it stood that with the countries bordering on the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Among the schemes projected by Henry for the advance of England’s trade, some were not crowned with success. The attack upon the men of the Hanse towns in their own field had completely failed; nor, after the first attempts, had any further expeditions to the West been undertaken; yet, with the increased stability of the Throne and State, the English merchant could venture forth with more energy and boldness.

Closely connected with his commercial policy were Henry’s efforts to encourage English shipping as a means of furthering trade. The Parliament of 1490 had renewed the first Navigation Act, which had for a while been in abeyance, had forbidden the importation by foreigners of Toulouse woad-dye, as well as of French wines, and had laid certain restrictions on freightage by foreign ships to English ports. Unfortunately direct information as to the success of this law is not to be obtained; but that it was successful is seen by its gradual extension, and especially by the fact that Henry ventured to entrust the export of woollens for the Netherlands, which he was particularly anxious to promote, to English merchant vessels exclusively. This export of woollens, as also a considerable portion of the general trade between England and the Netherlands, still continued to be forbidden to foreigners, even after the removal of the last interdiction on trade during the years 1504 to 1507. Henry took away the sum deposited in pledge with the men of the Hansa, on the ground that they had disregarded this interdiction, and all importation of goods from the territories of the Archduke Charles was forbidden them when a new ten years’ charter was granted to the Venetians for trade with England (March 24, 1507). With the increasing efficiency of English merchant vessels, the hitherto indispensable assistance of foreigners had become less necessary.

As these merchant vessels could at any time be requisitioned by the king for the service of the State, to increase their number was of the greatest importance for the protection of the country. Usually the vessels were either hired or forcibly requisitioned for the king’s service from the proprietors, whether foreigners or not; but Henry thought it well, instead of depending entirely on vessels thus obtained, to secure supremacy for himself over the neighbouring seas by creating the nucleus of a royal fleet. Perhaps it is vessels of this fleet which are meant when, in the items of expenditure, “the king’s ships” are mentioned amongst which the Sovereign is often named, together with the Mary of Portsmouth, and the Swan. The Great Harry acquired a certain celebrity, and was subsequently rechristened the Regent by Henry’s son. It is true that, as far as we can learn, these beginnings were small and modest; still the honour remains to Henry of having, in this matter also, taken the first step, and shown the way to his successors.

The king’s example served to foster the spirit of enterprise in his subjects, as was the case with the encouragement he gave to Cabot. Towards the end of the century an Italian observer mentions fishery and navigation as the principal occupations of the English people, and the intelligent Polydore Vergil commends Henry especially for having made England rich by the support he afforded to commerce, “in order to improve this art, which is at once useful and excellent for all mortals.” In the first place, this policy of the king’s affected the two great English trading companies—the Staplers and the Merchant Adventurers.

It was the merchant adventurers who almost exclusively reaped the benefit of a commercial policy, the object of which was to exclude the foreigner, and to open up for the native trade new paths and fields of commerce; for it was the export of woollen goods, their special commodity, which Henry endeavoured to foster, rather than of wool, the commodity of the staplers. The merchant adventurers formed a loose association extending over the whole country, and a sign of their rising prosperity is shown in an attempt made to form in their midst a closer, but also more stable and self-dependent association. This attempt originated with the London merchants.

Once already very vigorous and successful efforts had been made by the Londoners to obtain a monopoly, by keeping in their own hands as much as possible the whole trade of England which passed through London. In Henry’s third Parliament, 1487, there came up for discussion an ordinance of the city authorities, which forbade the citizens to frequent other markets in England outside the metropolis. They considered themselves possessed of sufficient power in the metropolis of commerce to exercise this pressure; but at once great lamentations arose over the ruin which threatened the other markets, where the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who would now be obliged to come to London, had hitherto bought their goods. The Parliament reversed this ordinance, and prohibited it from being re-enacted on penalty of a substantial fine.

The new measure proceeded, not from the town itself, but from the principal merchants, under the leadership of the Mercers’ Guild. In certain places on the Continent, especially at Antwerp, the merchant adventurers, in order to defray the expenses of management, levied a toll on their merchants, amounting at first to half a noble, afterwards to a hundred shillings Flemish. The Londoners, who were in the ascendant at Antwerp, carried their point, and required that every merchant trading with the Netherlands should pay an entrance fee of £20. This was certainly intended to be the first step towards getting the trade with the Netherlands into the hands of the richer merchants, who could easily pay such a duty. The rest of the trading class would thereby be brought into a state of dependence on a ring of London monopolists, and the wider association hitherto existing would be replaced by a narrow and exclusive corporation.

The effect of this was seen at once; the other merchant adventurers withdrew from Antwerp, but laid a complaint before the Parliament of 1497, pointing out the injury thus threatened to the export trade in woollens, and the rise which would ensue in price of imported commodities. Ready as Henry was to further English trade at the expense of foreigners, he entirely discountenanced such selfish action in England itself. An Act of Parliament declared trade with the Netherlands free, and only permitted the levy of a toll of ten marks. Any further taxation by English subjects for the benefit of themselves or their company was forbidden on penalty of a fine of £20, and the payment to the injured person of ten times the amount of the impost.

This enactment for preserving freedom of competition was not directed against the merchant adventurers in general, but against a certain section of them, those, no doubt, the most powerful. Some consolation, however, was afforded to the Londoners, for after having on one occasion disregarded their complaints directed against retail dealing by foreigners in their town, Henry was finally induced, on the 2ist of May, 1498, in return for the payment of £5000 to the royal coffers, to confirm to the Londoners their privileges, and to restrain foreigners from trading, except through the medium of the citizens. Hence the privileges of the Hanse merchants, when subsequently renewed, were still restricted as far as regarded the town of London.

Though Henry had discountenanced attempts at exclusiveness within the circle of the merchant adventurers, he was nevertheless ready to strengthen the position they already held as a company, and to give them a stronger central administration. On the 4th of March, 1499, he granted per­mission to the company to assume a coat-of-arms of their own, and on the 9th of November, 1500, he confirmed the ancient charter of Henry IV. His decree of the 28th of September, 1505, however, went still further. The removal of the market to Calais in January, 1505, during the course of the commercial quarrel with Philip, had aroused in Henry himself a desire for a stricter organisation of English merchants, which would facilitate the carrying out of such measures. An elected governor and twenty-four assistants, likewise elected out of various guilds, were to have the direction of affairs and the right of pronouncing judgment within the company, and were to be allowed to punish resistance to their decisions. By a supplementary decree of the 24th of January, 1506, they obtained the right to call all their members together to a congress in London or any other place. Their enactments were not, of course, to encroach on the royal dignity and prerogative; with this proviso, all merchant adventurers were to submit to them, and the king promised them his support on all occasions.

The head-quarters of this authority was at first Calais, but, after the conclusion of the commercial conflict, it was removed to the Netherlands; and thus it was not in London, but at the centre of the merchant adventurers’ foreign commerce that this authoritative administration, armed with such extraordinarily strong powers, was created, facilitating any transaction between the king and the company, preventing any separate action within the body itself, and yet not pos­sessing the right to interfere beyond its own sphere.

This was just the point against which it was necessary to guard, for once already Henry had been obliged to take the ancient Company of the Staplers under his protection against the Merchant Adventurers. While the staplers held the monopoly of the rich export trade for the Continent in raw materials, wool-fels, hides, lead, and tin, as well as wool, many of them also traded individually in other articles, more especially in cloth, outside the Staple. In November, 1504, the merchant adventurers instituted a law-suit before the Star Chamber on this subject, because these same staple merchants had, in such cases, objected to submit themselves to the authority established by the merchant adventurers. The court decided that any member of one corporation, who should take up the trade of another, must become subject to the regulations of that other. The exact scope of this decision had not been well thought out. The merchant adventurers, who at that time had been transferred to Calais, the ancient head-quarters of the staplers, at once demanded from the Staple merchants trading in cloth, a duty of ten marks, and, in default of payment, confiscated the goods. Henry immediately decided (June 25, 1505) that the sentence was to be understood thus: no pressure was to be put on merchants to enter the company, and only the usual duties might be levied on the goods, which were to be forthwith restored to the owner.

Henry had no intention of sacrificing the Staple, which had for long been the foster-child of the Crown; it was on the revenues of the Staple that the extremely expensive maintenance and protection of the English continental port of Calais depended. The Italian narrator remarks that “the Castle of Rhodes itself could not be more strongly guarded from the Turks than was Calais from the French.” The Parliament of 1487 resolved that the whole proceeds of the duty levied on wool and skins should be handed over to the staplers. Out of this they had to provide the yearly sum of £10,022 4s. 8d., for the garrison of Calais and of the border forts; and in the event of their not receiving from the king a safe escort for their goods to Calais, they were to keep back, out of the customs dues in excess of this sum, the cost for protection on the sea. Besides this, they had also to con­tribute towards the London custom-house officials and the judges. The law remained in force sixteen years, and was renewed, with slight alterations, in 1504, for the same number of years. Both times it was expressly enacted that the Staple should not be removed from Calais.

Notwithstanding the increase in other kinds of exports, the duty on wool amounted to 36 per cent, of the entire revenues derived by the king from the customs; the staplers paid in customs dues nearly 33,1/3 per cent., and those who were not members of the Staple even as much as 70 per cent, on the value of their goods. The average duty on wool was quite sufficient in Henry VIIth’s reign to cover the required amount. Hence the export of wool continued to be most necessary to the State ; nor must its political importance be underrated, since the need for wool kept both the Netherlands and Venice to a certain extent economically dependent on England—a circumstance of which Henry often enough took advantage. This was the reason why Henry also protected the Staple against the younger and more aggressive company of Merchant Adventurers. Few felt the importance of a policy of peace with the Powers of the Continent more than the Staplers, whose market lay beyond the sea; it was they who had felt most severely the stoppage of trade during the wars of 1491 and 1492, the more so as they had also suffered great losses from the ruin of their debtors, during the disturbances in the Netherlands not long before, in the year 1488.

The merchants of the Staple were possessed of many privileges and enjoyed in their business relations greater independence than did others. This was especially the case with the freedom allowed them in the exchange of money; for, as a rule, the business of money-changing could only be carried on under a royal licence, and in 1508, this was farmed out for one year to a Florentine, named Corsy, for a sum of £240. Henry had a special dislike to the business of money-lending; for, concerning usury he adhered to the view of the Middle Ages still supported by the Church, according to which capital in money was unproductive, and interest on loans or on money-lending in general was illegal. Hence a statute of the year 1487, forbade the receiving of interest, “that is to say, if any one for £100, which he receives in goods or in any other way has to pay £120 or to give security for the amount.” A penalty of £100 was laid on every transgression, and as these occurred mostly in towns which had privileges of jurisdiction, the duty of inquiry and passing judgment against the offenders was not left to these towns, but was undertaken by the Crown, and entrusted to the chancellor or to the justice of the peace of a neighbouring county, except that to the Church was reserved “the healing of souls, according to her laws.”

This measure apparently did not meet with much success, for at the opening of the Parliament of 1495, the Chancellor Morton expressly brought forward the subject of avaricious money-making and usurers; and a new law declared, somewhat less bluntly than the former one, that by usury was to be understood lending money on interest, taking advantage of the necessitous condition of another, and buying back from him more cheaply within three months goods which had been sold to him, the taking of land and other things in pledge or drawing an income from them, until the sum lent had been repaid; the penalty was to amount to half the value of the things held in pledge.

To hold to such antiquated views, and to oppose for any length of time necessary economic advance was, after all, useless trouble. The intention of the legislator, however, was a good one, for he was anxious to do away with a supposed danger to steadiness and fair dealing in commercial intercourse. Measures such as these had their origin in the same solicitude which Henry also displayed about the external instruments of commerce, and which formed a not inconsiderable portion of his commercial and economic policy. In the foreground, naturally, stood the most important medium of commerce—money, both with regard to the quantity to be drawn into the country for purposes of exchange, and to its quality. It was everywhere an evil that the small supply of the precious metal was never equal to the amount required, and England suffered from this as much as other countries. It was not therefore from any theory of mercantile principles, but from the urgent claims of necessity, that every means had to be adopted to preserve and increase the invaluable store of precious metals. England’s own production could scarcely count for anything, and yet Henry tried, in 1492, to meet in some measure the difficulty by reviving the neglected mining industry, and gave to the merchants of the Metal Staple of Southampton a compre­hensive licence for working mines, with special rights and privileges.

The importation of the precious metals was above all deemed essential, and to promote this an effort had previously been made by the decree that every merchant must bring home in return for his exported goods a certain quantity of bullion; but this decree could not be enforced, and was allowed to drop. In its place Henry VII pursued the more judicious and ultimately successful course of increasing the exportation of English goods, and by law forbidding the export of the money thus brought into the country. Though for political purposes Henry paid out considerable sums, he compensated for this by his successful financial treaties, but accomplished most by his peaceful policy, whereby he put an end to the wars hitherto waged by the kings of England on the Continent, which had drained the largest amount of money from the country.

If the English merchant could no longer be compelled, without imposing too great a restriction on commerce, to bring back with him money in return for his exported goods, the foreign merchant might at all events be prevented from taking money away with him in exchange for his goods. In this Henry followed closely the example set by his predecessors on the throne, except that he expanded their laws and made them more severe. The original statute, which included all previous regulations, was issued in 1478 in the reign of Edward IV; it forbade the exportation of gold and silver, without an express permission from the king ; an alien was compelled to expend again on other commodities the money he had acquired by the sale of his goods, and to take a receipt for it. Edward’s law had expired at the end of seven years; in 1487, the last-named article in it was renewed for an indefinite period, and extended to traders from Ireland and the Channel Islands. In the year 1490, a new law prohibited the exportation of all coins and precious metal for twenty years; no native was allowed, either by purchase or money exchange, or in any other way, to give money or any precious metal to a foreigner, who was only permitted to take ten crowns in cash out of the country. In 1504 it was forbidden to take away more than six shillings and eightpence to Ireland.

These laws were strictly enforced, and attained their object. Our Italian narrator speaks with enthusiasm of the wealth in silver plate possessed by private persons in England, and particularly by the Church ; he admires the great number of goldsmith’s shops. Polydore Vergil also lays great stress on “the enormous quantity of gold and silver’’ which was brought into England by traders during Henry’s reign.

The quality as well as the quantity of money was a subject of constant anxiety, and Henry resorted to severe measures for the purpose of preventing the serious increase in the amount of debased coin. The greatest difficulties arose from technical imperfection in the stamping, from the influx of foreign money of inferior value, and the fraudulent depreciation of coins by clipping. Since, owing to the deficient supply of the coin of the country, foreign money could not be excluded, its circulation was permitted within certain limits. Henry’s third Parliament, however, considered it necessary to enact that the forging of foreign coin as well as of that of the country, should be punished as high treason. The bad Irish small coin caused much annoyance, and its acceptance was repeatedly prohibited. Hitherto the principle was strictly adhered to that current coin did not lose in value by wear, although owing to the bad minting this wear was very great; pieces therefore had to be accepted in payment “even when they were small and light.” With regard to silver coins especially, there was general confusion and uncertainty ; the difficulties here were great, owing to clipping, counterfeit coin, and the importation of bad Irish pieces. Parliament therefore, in the year 1504, took seriously into consideration the whole question of the coinage.

A statute declared that gold coins were only to be accepted when of full weight, but the silver coins stamped in England, the groats (four pence), half groats, and penny pieces might be passed even when imperfect, provided they bore the royal stamp; clipped pieces were to be refused. For the future new coins were to be stamped with a circle round the edge to prevent clipping. On the strength of this law, Henry proceeded with real reforms, over which his panegyrist André goes into ecstacies, without, unfortunately, in spite of all his flow of words, vouchsafing us definite information. A royal proclamation of the 27th of April, 1505, made death the penalty for clipping coin; the value of clipped coin was to be determined by its weight, and it could be only exchanged at the Mint in Leadenhall, London. It was about this time that a false coiner of the Tower was hanged at Tyburn as a warning and example.

Concerning the gold and silver used for purposes other than coinage, the law also laid down certain fixed regulations, for whenever there was scarcity in money, many articles made in the precious metals had often enough to find their way to the Mint. In order therefore to keep some hold on workers in silver, they were made to conform to the regulations issued from the Royal Mint. Henry no doubt, in framing these enactments, as also in the matter of the exchange, tried to secure some advantages for himself; but when, in May, 1499, Ayala reported of him that he kept all the good gold pieces for himself, and paid only with bad coin, we suspect this usually favourable witness had just been somewhat annoyed by Henry’s stubbornness over the commercial negotiations. Ayala had, in fact, even spoken of a diminution in the royal revenues, and a falling off in the trade of England. Had Henry been guilty of such an attempt, it would soon have been put a stop to by his own law, which required full weight for every coin in circulation. It is possible, however, that Henry’s activity in accumulating treasure had had a perceptible effect on the otherwise slender store of money in the country.

More serious than the question of the coinage was the uncertainty in weights and measures, for when Henry came to the throne, their condition was chaotic. A law passed by his fourth Parliament of 1491, repeated the ordinance often issued since the Great Charter, that one standard of measure and weight should be adhered to. The confusion was attributed to the standard measures not being sufficiently known, and the Commons begged the king to have these made in metal at his own cost, and sent to the larger towns in order that the measures in use there might be altered in conformity with them. But for some reason or other the Government retained these standard measures until the Parliament of 1495 gave orders that they should be distributed by the members of the lower House throughout their own electoral districts. It happened, by some mistake, that for bushels and gallons, incorrect standard measures had been made; but in 1497 these were called in by order of the Commons, and replaced by correct ones. Thus the difficulty had been firmly grappled with, and confusion and uncertainty removed by definite legislation. But the chief gain lay in the better means of enforcing the laws, now that a strong authority existed at the head of a better organised administration.

When speaking of the media of commerce, we must not forget the roads by which commerce travelled, and these certainly at the beginning of the reign were very insufficient. Henry’s attention was devoted almost entirely to the great continental trade, and for it the sea, that general road for intercourse, lay ready. England herself, moreover, possessed her great estuaries, navigable for all large vessels for some distance up into the country. The seafaring merchant was exposed, however, not only to the dangers of the sea, but also to the piracy which was carried on on all sides, often in quite a recognised way. In all complaints and grievances, injury inflicted by piracy always stood foremost. Henry did his best to ensure safety in the Channel, and compelled the merchants of the Staple to contribute to this purpose. No doubt the frequent calling out of the little royal navy had the same object in view. We hear occasionally of men being enlisted to ensure safety on the sea.

In his commercial treaties, Henry made agreements for mutual obligations of protection and compensation, especially with France and Spain. Of course he had only his own subjects’ safety in view, for they themselves carried on the existing practice of piracy just as much as the others; and possibly Henry often permitted, and even encouraged it in the pursuit of political or politico-commercial interests, as he did for a while against the Netherlands, the Hanse merchants, and Denmark, when at variance with them.

That the care taken to foster trade within the country was small, as compared with that bestowed on the foreign trade, is evidenced by the condition of the roads. The maintenance of high-roads and bridges devolved upon the parishes or else on the whole county. When the drying up of the arm of the sea between the mainland and the Isle of Thanet had advanced so far that in the marsh thus formed the ferry-boat had scarcely sufficient water to float it, the king allowed the neighbouring inhabitants to build a bridge, but at their own cost. The authorities of the towns had also to be looked after, to see that they kept in good condition the principal streets used for the traffic which passed through them. Winchester and Bristol received a reminder on the subject from Parliament, and four years later the latter complied with the order.

Little care was taken about other roads, most of them were very unsafe, and assaults, robberies, and murders were of daily occurrence. This seems to have been the case especially in the south-west; for in January, 1506, Quirini the Venetian, cast on shore at Falmouth, preferred to wait there several months for Philip, rather than to trust himself alone on the dangerous road to London. It was often necessary, when the king was on his journeys, to make roads for him, and he even caused works of the kind that were urgently needed to be undertaken at his own expense, but this was generally not very serious. He also left in his last will a sum of £2000 for the construction of good roads and bridges between Windsor, Richmond, Southwark, and Canterbury; they were to be sufficiently wide for two waggons to drive abreast.

The harbours and estuaries were used only for the foreign trade. When the merchants of Southampton complained of the stopping up of the harbour by bars and other arrangements for the fisheries, the right was conceded to each person to remove such hindrances (1495), and to replace them was forbidden under threat of punishment. A law also enacted that the navigation of the Severn should be kept free.

The king seemed himself to put obstacles in the way of the trade of the country, when he allowed such an extraordinarily high customs duty to be imposed on an export commodity like wool. Financial considerations, especially the importance of protecting Calais, could certainly not have been the sole motive for this, for it is striking to note, that while 33,1/3- and even 70 per cent, on the value of the goods were exacted as the duty on wool, a duty of only 7 to 9 per cent, for foreigners, of 1 to 9 per cent, for natives, and even for the Hanse merchants only 1 to 7 per cent, was levied on exported woollen cloth. The Italian narrator explains shortly, and to the point, the reason of this high duty on wool. “ Such a high duty was imposed in order that wool might not be exported in an undressed state, but that cloth might be manufactured in the kingdom.” A good part of Henry’s commercial policy, and still more of his customs policy, was in the interests of English manufacturers. We have already often noticed this, and especially the way in which Henry fostered the cloth industry, and gave it his support in its competition with foreign countries.

The protective measures Henry adopted for this purpose were not the result of new ideas. We find them mostly to be the further development of earlier measures, which, at first mere experiments, had often been remodelled, and were now energetically and successfully carried out. But Henry’s commercial policy, devoted also to the interests of English industry, and destined to open up new fields of traffic for English woollen cloth, was altogether his own. We must remember the bitter struggle carried on on this account with the Netherlands and with the Hanse towns, especially with Dantzic.

It was Henry’s custom to make a move in several quarters at the same moment. While trying to extend the area of trade, and to lighten the conditions of the market, he endeavoured also to facilitate and increase production.

Woollen cloth was always the special object of his care. By extreme taxation he checked the exportation of the raw material, wool; and furthermore kept in force a statute of Edward IV’s of the year 1467, which restrained foreigners and naturalised aliens from exporting unwoven worsted, and also cloths which had not been previously fulled in England. This law he extended in 1487, enacting that the carding and shearing of cloth must also take place in England. As he himself subsequently declared, though he included Englishmen under this restriction, he was ready to grant exceptions. The stipulation that the cloth must be sheared formed one of the special grievances of the Hanse merchants, who alleged that the cloths were spoiled by the English shearmen, and the price unduly raised ; also that cloths were sheared which were not fit to stand it.

English spinners and weavers gained an important advantage from the statute of 1489, as it reserved for them for a period of ten years, from the 1st of March, 1490, the right to purchase unshorn wool, or the right to purchase before­hand until the 15th of August wool growing for the following year, and at the same time prohibited the foreign merchant from purchasing shorn wool from the time of shearing till the following 2nd of February, so that there should only remain for him what the English merchants had discarded. This was simply an extension, with trifling alterations, of a law of Edward IV, although the fact is nowhere stated in the statute. To the Venetians alone was permission given, by the decree of the 1st of May, 1506, to purchase wool at any time after the 15th of August

Attempts were made by special legislation to meet the case of local cloth industries. The centre of the English cloth industry was the county of Norfolk, and in order to check the decay of the worsted industry in the chief town of Norwich, an exception was made in its favour to the stringent law of Henry VI concerning apprentices, which had only allowed the children of rather well-to-do parents with a yearly rental of one pound to enter the trade. Parliament removed this restriction in 1495, so far as Norwich was concerned, and in 1497 for the whole county. However, a heavy visitation befell Norwich about ten years later, when in May and June, 1508, two conflagrations reduced almost the entire town to ashes.

Silk weaving was a kindred industry possessing at that time some importance, and was apparently sufficient to meet the requirements of native consumers. As far back as 1455, in Henry VI’s time, silk weavers both male and female, had made bitter complaints of the excessive competition in the trade, especially from the Italians, and for a while the import of silk was entirely forbidden. After a long interruption of this prohibition, a statute of Edward IV again forbade the importation of silk goods for four years; Richard III extended it to ten, and Henry, in his first Parliament, to twenty years. It was expressly stated by the Parliament of 1504 that this enactment only concerned certain definite fabrics already specified in the earlier statutes, and that all other silk, manufactured or raw, should be free. The statute was to hold good for an indefinite period. This restriction aroused bitter feeling? among the merchants of the Hansa, especially at Cologne, which was the most affected, but all complaints were in vain.

Meanwhile Henry was careful not to give in to the wishes of his own subjects for heavier restrictions on the foreigner and on foreign products. The extravagant regulations of Edward IV and Richard III, which checked the importation of articles in which the English manufacture was still far inferior to the foreign, were not adhered to by him, for in this matter he protected the consumer, and allowed native industry to be stimulated by foreign competition.

Henry was guided especially by a desire to protect the consumer whenever the commercial and industrial classes displayed an inordinate greed for gain, such as in the attempt at monopoly made by the Londoners, and by the branch of the merchant adventurers in the metropolis. In the same way he set himself against every effort for independence on the part of the guilds. The position acquired by the guilds in England was by no means the same as that they held in Germany; a statute of Henry VI (1437) interfered materially with their rights of self-government, and required them to submit their charters and every by-law to be issued by them in the future to the approval of the authorities of their town and county. This law had expired, and the selfishness of the guilds made its loss occasionally felt. Thus in the year 1501, in consequence, it was said, of fraudulent dealings on the part of the bakers, a great scarcity of bread arose, although there was a sufficient supply of wheat, and the price of corn did not stand specially high. What the bakers exactly did we do not know, but their action possibly recalled to men’s minds the forgotten law, which was accordingly renewed in the Parliament of 1504, with a reference to many guild by-laws issued in the interval, and with this noteworthy alteration: that the control of the guilds and other companies should no longer be entrusted to the authorities of the town, but to the Chancellor, the Treasurer, and chief justices, or to the judges of assize when on circuit. By this means all companies were placed under State inspection, and the by-laws they issued had to receive the sanction of the Government. This was the first I step towards depriving them of all independence, and making them mere instruments of the king.

The inspection of industries by the State was not, however, first introduced on this occasion, for Government had for a long time exercised a control over wares and the prices of wares. With regard to the cloth industry, in particular, Henry had merely to adhere to the statutes of his predecessors, especially those of Edward IV and Richard III, which had determined the size, weight, and quality of the cloth, and had regulated the work of inspection. Henry only removed, at least for a time, the penalties attached to Richard’s ordinances, which had been found to interfere too much with the industry. When the entry of apprentices was made easier into the trade of the worsted shearmen of Norwich, the same law provided that no one might become a worsted shearman who had not served a seven years’ apprenticeship. The control, at first confided to the masters, was afterwards taken away from them, in 1504.

The mode of manufacture was also considered by the law, as, for instance, when the simpler and much-used method of singeing off was forbidden for fustians; and as early as Henry’s first Parliament, regulations were made about the work of the tanners, and the division of labour between them and the leather-dressers. Even the stuffing of beds attracted the attention of king and Parliament. On the complaint of two London parishes in the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s, of the poisoning of air and water by the butchers close by, butchers in every town, with the exception of Berwick and Carlisle, were forbidden to exercise their trade within the walls. The cloth-workers and tailors were accused of claiming too large profits in the retail trade; and for the hat and cap manufacturers the law set a limit on prices, which was certainly far below their demands. On the other hand, protection was afforded to stationary handicrafts against the hawker’s trade.

In many of these industrial Acts of Henry VII’s, the express aim was to discourage sloth and idleness, and this was insisted on when the licence for mining was granted on the 25th of June, 1492, and yet still more strongly in his agrarian legislation.

In the reign of Henry VII that great agrarian revolution first made itself really felt, which in the following century was to culminate in a most serious crisis, notwithstanding all the efforts of legislators to avert it. Of all the productions of English husbandry, wool was the most important. The favourable conditions of the English climate for grazing and the breeding of live­stock, gave it an important advantage over all other countries. We have seen already how English wool commanded the market. From the “Italian Relation” we learn that agriculture was only carried on for home consumption; “because were they to plough and sow all the land that was capable of cultivation, they might sell a quantity of grain to the surrounding countries”; but the deficiency was made up for, by the great abundance of cattle, “especially they have an extraordinary number of sheep, which yield them a quantity of the best wool.”

Besides the constant need for wool on the Continent, it was also now in demand for the cloth industry at home, which was fostered in every way by the State. The rapid rise of England as an industrial and commercial State, based chiefly on the production and export of wool and cloth, necessarily affected English agriculture. In a country with an open line of coast, accessible on almost every side, with rivers navigable far inland, and few natural hindrances to intercourse in the interior, the same change affected larger districts with greater ease than was the case elsewhere.

Little wonder that all husbandry tended in that direction which promised the highest profits, especially as another circumstance contributed to the same change. In England the dues on the land were already converted into money charges, and the landlord naturally preferred to collect his rent from a few larger farmers than from many small ones. Much land was now enclosed, by throwing together small pieces of ground into larger farms, and this, coupled with the change to a style of agriculture, more suited to the special circumstances of England, could only have been regarded as a blessing, where the land was divided into a number of small holdings, if the small copyholder had not been thereby pushed out. Unfortunately, in consequence of the attractive profits to be obtained from breeding live-stock, the land hitherto arable was at the same time converted into pasture. Land was thus withdrawn from both plough and ploughman, the small owner was not only thrust out of his former holding, but work and livelihood were taken away from the agricultural labourer in general, since the keeping of stock only necessitated a small amount of man’s labour.

In the first years of Henry’s reign, the evil consequences of this change had already made themselves felt. From the Isle of Wight came complaints that houses and villages were razed to the ground, fields hedged round and converted into pasture, and that farms which formerly were divided among several, now came into the hands of one man; that the island, so important for the protection of England, was becoming depopulated, and inhabited only by cattle. From all parts of the kingdom came reports of the great evils produced by the demolition of dwellings and the conversion of ploughland into pasture, “whereby idleness, the cause and root of all evil, begins daily to grow.” In some places, where formerly two hundred men found occupation, now there were only two or three herdsmen.

Henry’s third Parliament, during the session of January and February, 1490, enacted that no one in the Isle of Wight should occupy a farm at a rental of more than ten marks, that contracts not in accordance with this should be annulled, and that throughout the kingdom the owners of houses, which in the course of the last three years had been let with twenty or more acres, should be compelled to keep up those houses.

Henry, in the interest of agriculture, made strenuous efforts to restrain the keeping of live-stock; the heavy duties on wool were designed for the same object, as were the restrictions on the purchase of wool. His aim was to lower the price and to make its production less remunerative; only where the English cloth industry was concerned was freedom permitted and development encouraged. But this, as well as subsequent still more stringent enactments, serve only to show how futile is the attempt to stem the tide of a great economic movement, progressing by natural laws, by combating its consequences without inquiring into its deeper causes. It was necessary that England should pass through this crisis, with its mighty social convulsions.

The amount of production was gradually becoming insufficient to meet the increasing demand for wool; keeping stock was, besides, not only cheaper than growing corn, but also more lucrative, on account of the lowness of the normal price of corn. This low standard of prices, partly accounted for by improved methods of farming, shows that, in spite of the enclosures and the newly converted pasture land, England still produced a sufficient quantity of bread-stuffs for her own consumption. Legislation did not concern itself about these economic causes, for the new movement was not inspired by a desire to provide sustenance for the people, but was actuated, as it expressly stated, by social and political considerations. These, too, were the motive of Henry’s attempt to facilitate the entry of the superfluous agricultural population of Norfolk into the wool industry.

As an export, corn was not an article of great importance; as yet, under normal conditions, the countries of Europe had not needed any importation of grain. Export from England was legally free; only once did a royal edict forbid it, when, in 1491, war was imminent, and, owing to a bad harvest, the price of corn rose high. Strange though the policy appears on the part of a government which aimed at the encouragement of agriculture, the export of corn seems sometimes to have been subject to restrictions, otherwise it would not have been necessary for the Pope, in 1504, when there was a dearth in the States of the Church, to beg for a special permission that corn might be exported from England, which was granted readily enough. The request was repeated in the following year. The export of horses was strictly limited, that of mares entirely forbidden, as also, we are told, the export of cattle.

The object was to retain in the country its own material for breeding stock, a matter of special importance with regard to English sheep. A statute of 1423 had interdicted their export without special license from the king; but Edward IV abused this right to grant permission, when he allowed his sister, the Duchess Margaret of Burgundy, to export annually, without paying any duty, not only one thousand oxen, but also two thousand rams. He was subsequently accused of having allowed the breed of Spanish sheep to be improved by English sheep, so that their wool was able to compete with the English wool. Henry was hardly likely to follow Edward’s example in this, and the license to Margaret was in his reign withdrawn. But one case has come under our notice, which occurred during the first years of his reign, when he allowed a certain William Tyll to export to Picardy, in English ships, a hundred oxen and six hundred sheep. At other times also sheep were, as a matter of fact, exported.

True, the policy was often vacillating and contradictory, the means employed frequently in opposition to the end in view; but, in all these measures, certain leading ideas were always prominent. In all the legislation, especially in that relating to agriculture, social and political considerations were always recurring with peculiar significance; besides the maintenance of a rural middle class, there was the desire to keep the king’s subjects from idleness, and to take care that “the poor common people might get work and occupation,” and that not so much for the support of life, as on account of the demoralizing influence which idleness, the mother of all vices, has on men.

Mendicity, vagabondage, and crime abounded in England. In spite of all the severe penalties, there was no country in the world, according to the “Italian Relation,” “in which there are so many thieves and robbers as in England, so that few can venture out in the country except in the middle of the day, and still fewer at night in the towns, especially in London. People here are taken up every day by dozens, like birds in a covey, yet, for all this, they never cease to rob and murder in the streets.” The struggle against vagabondage was an attempt to close up one of the sources of crime. The laws against vagrants were of old date, but the severe punishments which were imposed by a statute of Richard II., in 1483, in re-enactment of an ordinance of Edward III, were done away with by Henry in 1495. The vagrant who had been taken up was to be set in the stocks for three days, and fed on bread and water, and then to be released; if he returned, he would be punished by six days of the stocks. Every beggar incapable of work was compelled to return to the hundred “where he has last resided, or where he is best known or was born,” and there to remain without begging out of the said hundred; scholars, soldiers, and sailors were required to show a certificate from their University, their superior officers, or other authorities. These regulations were improved upon by the statute of 1504, which adjudged to the vagabond who had been taken up, only a day and a night in the stocks, and also carried out more definitely the idea of a house for relief. The vagrant was made to return to his native place, or to the place in which he had lived for three years; the relief, however, merely consisted in the permission to beg. The overseers were threatened with punishment for any carelessness, and the crown officials and the judges were given the supreme control.

This greater leniency towards vagrants, who were not criminals, was in accordance with Henry’s endeavour to meet the evil not only by prohibition and punishment, but by definite measures of reform. Various statutes already mentioned were framed with the object of providing opportunities for work—such as the Navigation Act, for sailors; the measures for the protection of industry, for artisans ; the laws against enclosures, for agricultural labourers. At the same time an attempt, though in strictly dictatorial fashion, was made to promote the interests of the workman himself, by regulations with regard to labour, hours, and wages.

On the whole, the condition of a workman in the fifteenth century was not an unfavourable one when we remember the low price of the necessaries of life, especially of corn. Wages remained almost stationary for more than a century, at a fair “living” rate, which was nowhere exceeded except in London. Attempts to restrict by law anywise in wages were not a novelty. Similar attempts had been made, about the middle of the fourteenth century, under Edward III, and had been frequently repeated, though without success. A statute of Henry VI, which only aimed at adjusting wages to the standard which prevailed outside London, exercised no visible influence. This also regulated the relations between master and servant; no servant was allowed to leave one situation without having first secured another. As a supplement to this statute, the Parliament of 1495 undertook a fresh measure. The normal rate of wages was somewhat raised ; though the summer wages, fixed at 6d. daily for carpenters, masons, and brick­makers, tallied with the average of the preceding three years. A male domestic servant was to receive annually, in addition to money for clothes, 19s. 8d.; a female servant, 14s.; a child under fourteen, 12s. 8d.; 2d. were deducted from a labourer’s daily wages for his board.

These were the highest wages generally allowed. In places where the usual wages were lower they had to remain so. Every workman who was not distinctly otherwise occupied, was compelled to work for the legal wage, and half-days were to be paid only as half, holidays not at all. Whoever left unfinished any work he had engaged to do, was with exceptional severity punished by one month’s imprisonment and a fine of one pound.

The law is especially interesting in its endeavour to regulate work, and to punish those workmen who did not earn their wages, who came too late and left too early, sat too long over meals, and spent too much time in sleep. From the middle of March to the middle of November each workman had to be at work at five o’clock in the morning, half an hour was allowed for breakfast, an hour and a half for the midday meal, while work did not cease till between seven and eight o’clock in the evening; in winter it lasted from daybreak till dusk. A penalty was incurred not only by the workman who demanded higher wages, but by the master who pay them. There was not much object in regulating the rate of wages, when, without such regulations, they had for a long time remained so extraordinarily steady, and Henry seems soon to have come to this opinion. As early as the Parliament of 1497 the clauses on wages in the earlier statute were repealed, although enactments about compulsory labour and hours of labour remained in force.

Thus the workmen, and especially the domestic servants, were kept in strict dependence and discipline. This was the case also with the apprentices during their seven years’ apprenticeship. Moreover, the law deprived them of most amusements. Games, such as cards, dice, and ball, were only allowed them at Christmas under the supervision of the master and in his own house; offenders were to be set in the stocks for a day. The apprentices, servants, and day-labourers had by no means an enviable lot; they were kept for the most part very closely to work by their employers. One result of this severity and of the specially long period of dependence for the apprentice, always struggling after liberty in his work, was that he burst through this constraint as soon an opportunity offered. The storming of the Steelyard in y 1493 is an instance of this, when the apprentices opened the ' attack, although we do not know how far their masters may have secretly aided and abetted in the riot against the hated foreigner.

Existing relations were strained rather than improved by this legislative interference, which bore the stamp of Henry’s policy with regard to workmen, and was carried out consistently in all his enactments. The aim of the legislator was to give as far as possible full opportunity for work, and then to threaten idleness with punishment, while those incapable or unwilling to work were to be despatched to the place where they were known and could be watched. Diligence and X industry were to be awakened by increasing the supply of work and compelling all to labour. This was not, however, to show a care, for the workmen in the modern sense. The lower classes were to be kept steady and obedient in their proper place in the State, and compelled to work for the benefit of industry and agriculture, for which their services should be obtainable at as cheap a rate as possible. Henry’s social policy was in its nature distinctly educational. Besides aiming at the promotion of industry and public order, he was careful to consider what was then regarded as the moral welfare of the lower classes, and to these ends severe restrictions on their exterior well-being were held to be necessary.

All the care bestowed by the State upon trade, industry, and agriculture, upon the medium of exchange and the regulation of industry, as well as upon the condition of the worker, started from one point of view, and, except for occasional deviations, worked for one end. It is true that this solicitude bears often a twofold aspect; it opens new paths, and at the same time clings to traditional prejudice; as a whole, it constantly endeavoured to hold to existing usage, and to construct by enlarging upon it. Into all branches of labour this activity on the part of the State thrust itself, now promoting, now restraining. The Government created for itself in those matters where hitherto it had possessed no power—as in the case of the guilds and the legislation on usury—a possibility of immediate legal interference: and this idea may have had some influence in the organisation of the merchant adventurers into a closer corporation. Everywhere, along with this increasing activity of the Crown in all branches of economic life, their dependence upon the Crown was made the more complete.

MONARCHICAL REFORMS IN JUDICIAL PROCEDURE.

The legislation of Henry VII, with regard to the administration of justice, was one special outcome of his monarchical policy. We must here refer to what has been already said. Even throughout the period of the civil wars the laws and regulations of England had, it is true, been preserved, though the strength to enforce them had been wanting. They had been compelled to give way before the violence of a powerful nobility. War and internal disorder had, in fact, constantly favoured the supremacy of the nobles; individual lords kept in their pay bands of armed retainers, wearing their own particular badge, with whose assistance they formed a most serious obstacle to all orderly exercise of the law. In league with the sheriff, they had, by an arbitrary packing of the juries, by the corruption, and still more by the intimidation of the jurymen, overawed the county courts.

This disorder had now in a great measure ended in its own destruction, for in the sanguinary battles of the Wars of the Roses, the English nobility had been well-nigh exterminated. It was very important now to gain security against a renewal of this state of things. As the laws of the realm, and especially the courts entrusted with their preservation, had shown themselves powerless, some reliable substitute must be found to supply this deficiency in the law, and these shortcomings in the exercise of justice. Ah Act passed by Henry’s second Parliament in 1487, which is generally considered to be the origin of the Court of the Star Chamber, supplied this want, and became the groundwork of all further reforms in justice.

Neither this court, nor its name, were new. For a long time the Privy Council “in the Star Chamber” had exercised an extraordinary jurisdiction, in addition to that possessed by the Chancellor. Their duty was to intervene where the common law had failed. The Commons, however, repeatedly raised objections to this judicial court, depending as it did upon the king alone. They did not deny the general necessity of an extraordinary jurisdiction, but merely demanded the co-operation of Parliament, and especially the abolition of the abuse of bringing up before the Council cases which fell under the common law. In the year 1483 a statute was passed requiring that persons who, “on account of serious disturbances, extortions, oppressions, and great crimes against the peace and the laws,” were summoned by the king to answer for the same before the Council or the Chancellor, should be compelled to appear, under heavy penalties; but this law was only in force seven years, and “no case amenable to the laws of the land” was allowed to be dealt with in this manner.

This royal jurisdiction, which had hitherto only rested on custom, and had only once been confirmed, in an indefinite way and for a limited period, by the Act of 1453, was now, by Henry’s statute of 1487, placed upon a firm legal basis, and given a definite shape, within definite limits. The new statute entrusted to a special committee alone, and not to the whole Council in the Star Chamber, the hearing of judicial causes. The Chancellor, Treasurer, and Keeper of the Privy Seal, or two of them at least, were to act as judges in this new tribunal, and were to add as their colleagues a bishop and one temporal peer from the Privy Council and the Chief Justices of the Courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, or two other judges as substitutes. They had the right to summon, examine, and punish in the same way as if the accused “ had been convicted by the ordinary legal procedure.” Just those abuses which had been felt in the past came within the cognizance of the court; that is, the maintenance of retainers in livety, the neglect of duty on the part of the sheriffs, as in the empanelling of the jury, the bribing of jury­men, rioting, and illegal assemblies. Speaking generally, they were the same crimes against which Henry had endeavoured to guard by the oath he had compelled his Commons and barons to take in his first Parliament.

The new statute itself did not, it is true, make use of the name of Star Chamber, yet it laid the foundations of the legal existence of the later court of justice permanently called by that name. As it addressed itself to the evils that were most severely felt, Henry could be certain that the Commons would cheerfully acquiesce in it. The real importance of the Star Chamber statute is not, after all, of a judicial, but of a political nature, for beyond its immediate object—the subjection of the aristocracy—it became the legal foundation-stone of the structure of monarchical supremacy in the State.

The Star Chamber Act had dealt with the untrustworthy sheriffs, and the subsequent Parliaments went still further in this energetic control of the officers of justice. For all royal suits the judges were to examine the lists of jurymen drawn up by the sheriff, and to demand any alterations that might be necessary. Sheriffs and their subordinate officers, who made use of their authority in an unlawful way, for the purpose of enriching themselves, were threatened with penalties ranging from £20 to £40. In the same way penalties were attached to carelessness in the . execution of the law of vagrants by the sheriff, or in the superintendence of prisons, which was entrusted to him, and for breach of duty in the punishment of those concerned in riots and conspiracies. In this last enactment the justices of the peace were also included, against whom a stringent statute had been passed, in case they should fail to carry out the laws, and thereby do harm to the subjects of the king ; “for nothing is more agreeable to the king than to know that his subjects live at peace under his laws, and increase in riches and well-being.” Whoever had a complaint to make against a justice of the peace was to address himself for satisfaction to the justice himself; and, failing him, to the judges y of assize on circuit, or to the king and Chancellor; the offending justice of the peace was to be dismissed from his office. The law was to be announced publicly in the usual manner.

By these severe threats of punishment—which, however, were not new—a more strict administration of justice was insisted upon, and the official was thereby made to feel more strongly his dependence upon the Crown. Improved discipline was thus secured, and at the same time the officers of justice were brought more strictly under the control of the royal power. Not only was the administration of justice to be more dependent on the Government, especially on the court of the Star Chamber, as the representative of the king, but the decisions of the courts themselves seemed likely to be brought under the same control.

The Parliament of 1495 created a permanent final Court of Appeal, from which each man, who believed himself injured in his rights by the packing of the jury or by their verdict, could get justice. The mode varied in civil and criminal cases. Hitherto, in a civil case, any appeal against the verdict of a petty jury had been extremely lengthy and expensive; for the future, in suits involving £40 and upwards, everyone was free to appeal from the petty jury to another jury specially summoned for the purpose, which had the right to reconsider the decision of the petty jury. If the special jury reversed the verdict of the petty jury, each member of the latter was fined £20, and could never again be sworn before a court. The law was renewed by the subsequent parliaments, so that it still stood in force at the time of Henry’s death.

In criminal cases the law, with regard to the jury, was different. If, in a cause instituted in the interests, or in the name of the king, or by private individuals, a party felt himself aggrieved by the judgment pronounced, he should, within a period of six days, address himself with his complaint to the presiding judge, who had to forward the complaint to the Chancellor; the Chancellor summoned the accused before him, before the Treasurer, the Chief Justice, and the Clerk of the Rolls for examination and punishment. As a previous statute had already provided against a culpable delay in the execution of a sentence caused by the demand for a fresh trial, so here the complainant, if non-suited, was punished.

All these laws were only to hold good for a limited period; the last was not even renewed in 1504. This statute had, in fact, been a further step onwards in the same direction as the law of the Star Chamber, which had already dealt with the bribing of jurymen; for, as in the case of the control over sheriffs and justices of the peace, an appeal against the verdict of the jury was referred to the Court of the Star Chamber. A vicious circle was thus formed; in causes affecting the Crown, appeal was to be made to a court entirely dependent upon the Crown; that is, to the Crown itself. Every question concerning any interest of the king was, so long as this law was in force, from the first referred to the Star Chamber for its final decision. In practice this was carried still further, for quarrels, as, for instance, those between the merchant adventurers and the staplers, as also civil causes, were brought before this court. Finally, it was to the Star Chamber, including in itself also the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, that the execution of the laws against usury and the control of the guilds were committed.

The tendency of this judicial legislation was to increase the prerogative of the Crown, but this was a blessing for the country; after all the disorder in the kingdom, a firm power again existed which could enforce the exercise of law and justice. Here, as with Henry’s legislation in general, the question how far he adopted or altered existing laws is not essential, but it is important to note that they were remodelled on a uniform principle, and executed with energy.

Henry strove earnestly to do away with the evil of insecurity in matters of law, and one of his most important and fair measures for this object was the first statute of that Parliament which met in October, 1495, after Perkin Warbeck’s attempted landing. Not only were Henry’s adherents, but far more the former adherents of the House of York, to be secured against prosecution, if they remained loyal to the new government. And it may be regarded as an assurance of his own conciliatory intentions that Henry, about this same time, caused the tomb of his fallen rival, Richard, at Leicester, to be erected, if not in a splendid, at least in a suitable style.

Henceforth the aristocracy, kept in check by the law of the Star Chamber, could not easily disturb the peace and order established by the king; but there still remained the Church, the one power in the State which was able to interpose serious obstacles to the execution of his laws. We have already seen that Henry’s relations with the Pope were satisfactory; at the same time the old English desire for independence of Rome had been kept alive, and was displayed from time to time in the judgments which the judges delivered upon the complaints made by the Pope X on the subject of the trade in alum. Otherwise Henry respected the rights of the clergy; his first Parliament even strengthened the judicial power of the bishops over immoral clerks. Only on two points was any objection raised—the so-called benefit of clergy, and the right of asylum.

Benefit of clergy consisted in the privilege of being handed over by the secular judge to the bishop, except in cases of treason. As in the Middle Ages a knowledge of reading was for the most part limited to Clerical the clergy, the ability to read was accepted as a proof that a man was a cleric, and this still continued even when education was much more widely diffused. Whoever could read asserted his claim to benefit of clergy. It followed, therefore, that a serious obstacle was put in the way of the execution of justice, and an Act of 1490 drew attention to the fact that people who could read were encouraged to commit murder, robbery, and theft, because on every repetition of the offence they were again admitted to the benefit of clergy. The law accordingly provided that every man who did not directly belong to the clerical order could only profit by clerical privileges once; but if he were indicted for murder, he was to be branded with a letter M on the ball of his left thumb, for other crimes he was to be marked with a T (thief). If, on a repetition of the offence, a man branded in this manner could bring forward no testimony from his superior that he belonged to the clerical order, he was to lose the privilege.

In the same way the Parliament of 1491 disputed this benefit of clergy for deserters during the preparations for war against France, on the grounds that their offence was directed against the welfare of king and realm; and a law of 1497 enacted the same in the case of any one who had murdered his lord or master.

And yet, in spite of restrictions such as these, a state of affairs was suffered to continue, in which an assurance of almost complete immunity for the first offence positively encouraged a special class of men to crime. If, notwith­standing the more strict administration of justice, robbery and murder were still rife in England, the fault must in great part be ascribed to this antiquated privilege. That some consciousness of this existed in men’s minds may be seen in the first restrictions; and it is said that the very first of these laws was suggested by Henry himself, and that he had been moved thereto by what he had seen in France.

The right of asylum in ecclesiastical houses was just as serious an abuse. Every church afforded to the fugitive its protection for forty days, specially favoured places did so for his whole life. The ordinances which Henry succeeded in obtaining from Popes Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, and Julius II concerned solely the abuse of the right of sanctuary by criminals, who made the sanctuary serve as a place of refuge whence they might start again upon a fresh career of crime. Thus Innocent VIII’s bull of the 6th of August, 1487, confirmed by Alexander VI on the 3rd of August, 1493, provided that, should a robber or murderer seek refuge in the sanctuary a second time in consequence of a fresh crime, he could be taken out by the officers of the king; a man suspected of high treason should be watched from the very first, in order to guard against further crimes. This enactment was, by the bull of Julius II, dated the 20th of May, 1504, extended to all criminals, who, moreover, when they quitted the place of refuge, were neither to be readmitted to that or to any other sanctuary. The right of asylum had also been abused by fraudulent debtors, who made a show of handing over their property to a third party, and lived in a sanctuary on their income, leaving their creditors unsatisfied; an Act of Parliament of 1487 declared therefore that such assignments of property were illegal.

The strongest opposition to ecclesiastical privileges proceeded from the judges. Though in a few cases, as in the laws against usury, ecclesiastical jurisdiction received especial respect in the legislation, the privileges of the Church were in the main disliked, nay, hated. The judges especially alluded to them in their decisions with disrespect and open contempt, and ruled, where possible, against the principle of such privileges. They did their best to set aside ecclesiastical jurisdiction even in those questions that belonged to it of right, and whenever they could overrule an appeal to the right of asylum, they indulged in specially cruel punishments. We know, for example, the sentence on Humphrey Stafford in the year 1487, when the judges rejected the plea of right of asylum, as powerless to protect the traitor.

On the question of the claims of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the judges stood forward as champions of the royal authority, and in this particular supported Henry’s endeavours to strengthen the prerogative of the Crown. As the English judicature had failed directly the strong support of a monarch had been withdrawn, it was undoubtedly a blessing for the country, that an impartial royal power should again take law and justice under its protection, and be able to execute them with its own strong hand. But as soon as this impartiality no longer existed, and the power of the Crown was misused to serve the personal interests of the king alone, then the most serious and most profound apprehensions could not fail to be awakened. Unfortunately this was the case during the reign of Henry VII.

In the Parliament of 1495—a fruitful one in legislation— a noteworthy statute was passed. It stated that many excellent laws had been made, but were not kept, and the prosecution of offenders was hindered by the corruption of the jurors at the sessions. Wherefore the judges of assize and the justices of the peace were empowered on the information of any private individual to decide upon the initiation of judicial proceedings; and the judge who authorised these then referred the matter to his own court, and again awarded punishment according to the measure of the violation of the law. It was only required that the informer should be resident in the county, and should, if his information was proved to be wrong, pay the costs of the defendant. Treason, murder, and the more serious crimes in general, involving loss of life and limb, were excluded from this Act, as also cases involving for­feiture of property to the informer.

It was a revolutionary law, directly in opposition to the fundamental principles of English jurisprudence; the legal officer, dependent on the king, took the place of the grand jury—he was public prosecutor and judge in one person. Here again Henry introduced into England a custom with which he had become acquainted in France ; for the technical expression “information” used in France for the same pro­cedure was adopted. If the system thus begun had been continued in England, a purely bureaucratic criminal prosecution by officials would have been established here, as it has been in France. It was the first step towards doing away with the jury.

This law was at once put to the worst possible use, for the king’s advantage. Polydore Vergil, who reports things on his own personal observation, describes the method pursued as follows. Having found himself unable to take money from his richer subjects illegally, it occurred to Henry that almost every one of them might be convicted of offending against existing laws. He began therefore to impose on such offenders light money penalties. For this he appointed two Exchequer Judges, the lawyers, Richard Empson, whom he subsequently knighted, and Edmund Dudley. These now gathered round them a crowd of informers, eager to compete for the king’s favour, “and in their greed for money, paid too little heed to their duty, to their own danger, or to humanity, although they were often admonished by persons of importance that they should act with more moderation.” Polydore Vergil also characterises, as strange in the telling and lamentable in reality, a procedure which was called by the name of justice, but was rather a criminal abuse made possible by the corruption of the courts. A completely unsuspecting person was accused before the judge, and if he did not respond to the summons—of which very often, as he lived at a distance, he had no knowledge—he was condemned, his goods were confiscated, and he himself put in prison; his property, however, was not forfeited to the informer, but to the king. “Men thus condemned were marked for the future as outlaws, that is, deprived of every civil right which the law gives to man.” The result of this procedure is obvious enough; large sums were extorted for the benefit of the royal treasury, and all sorts of possible or impossible claims for the royal prerogative could by the help of easily procurable accusations be brought forward and established. The character of this law is best described in a statute of Henry VIII’s first Parliament, by which it was repealed, on the grounds that, as was well known, many dishonest, cunningly devised, and false accusations had, on the authority of this Act, been made against various subjects of the king to their great damage and wrongful vexation.

We are acquainted with some cases, which aroused especial attention. One of these was the action taken against the London alderman, William Capell, of the Clothworkers’ Guild, who from 1489 to 1490 had been one of the sheriffs of the city, and was subsequently knighted. Five years later he was charged with having sold goods to foreigners without requiring in return immediate payment in money or in other goods, and “thereupon condemned by the king to pay £2744, which fine was subsequently reduced by the royal mercy to £1615 6s. 3d., of which £732 were to be paid at once, and the rest within three years.” Even then Capell was by no means free, his riches had attracted too much the attention of the exchequer officials ; but no legal pretext to touch him could be found until he became Lord Mayor of London (1503-1504). It was a disastrous year for the town, as many destructive fires had taken place; we do not know, however, for what failure in the execution of his official duty it was that Capell, towards the end of 1507 or the beginning of 1508, was arrested at the suggestion of Empson and Dudley, and delivered over into the charge of the sheriffs. Shortly before this, these two had caused Thomas Kneysworth, of the Fishmongers’ Guild, the Lord Mayor for 1505-1506, to be put in prison with his two sheriffs, Shore and Grove, until they purchased their freedom for £1400. It is possible that André is referring to Kneysworth when he relates that in July, 1508, a former Lord Mayor with his two sons died, according to some from grief of heart at the loss of their wealth, according to others, from a disease then prevalent. Capell this time remained obdurate, in spite of the attempts made to coerce him, by taking him from the charge of the sheriffs and shutting him up in strict confinement in the Tower, where he remained until the death of the king restored him to liberty. Henry’s death appears also to have been the salvation of Sir Lawrence Aylmer, the Lord Mayor who was taken into custody with his sheriffs at the end of his year of office, in 1508. We can form an approximate idea of the number of notes of hand thus extorted, from the fact that quite half a hundred of them, all dating from the last two or three years of Henry VII, were declared null and void in the first two years of his son’s reign. The sums in question were from £50 to £100; the Earl of Northumberland, however, was fined £10,000, of which Henry VIII remitted £5000; it is not known if he was compelled to pay the other half of this enormous sum. Two townsmen had made themselves answerable for 9000 marks, of which 2450 had already been paid, and Corsy, the farmer of the money exchange, had to disburse considerable sums. In many of the orders by which such bonds were cancelled, these significant words are found—that obligations had been incurred on the unreasonable instigation of certain counsellors of the king, “against law, right, and conscience, to the evident over­burdening and danger of our late father’s soul.”

Henry VII himself had felt some qualms of conscience. On the 19th of August, 1504, a royal decree was addressed to the sheriffs, to the effect that the king, having always striven to deal justly towards his subjects, and never to lay claim unfairly to any one’s property and goods, announced, for the unburdening of his conscience, that any man who felt himself aggrieved might, within two years, present his complaint in writing, whereupon he should receive all reasonable satisfaction. We do not hear of any fulfilment of this promise—in fact, the evil rather grew worse during the last two years ; and the chronicler Hall remarks that the execution of this design having been prevented by Henry’s death, which, however, did not occur till five years later, it was repeated in the king’s will; “but in the meane season many men’s coffers were emptied.”

Empson and Dudley by no means always acted in the interests of the king. They were far more often concerned with their own private advantage, making for that purpose a most unscrupulous use of the king’s name and influence. They certainly did not always adhere to the principles of the law of 1495, but managed in every way to make the courts serve to their own profit. An example of this, and of the tenacity and energy with which they dogged their victims, is afforded by Empson’s legal proceedings against Sir Robert Plumpton, as far as can be gathered from the somewhat complicated story preserved in the family correspondence of the Plumptons and in other papers. It is not possible to follow it in detail.

In February, 1497, the first signs were visible that Empson—of course as the legal representative of others who had claims on Sir Robert—had some design in view. On the 2nd of May, 1499, the knight was dispossessed of various portions of the Plumpton family estate, by order of the king’s council; in November, 1500, he was threatened with a lawsuit at the next assizes, and was advised to gain over the sheriffs and other friends in the various counties in which his estates lay; these included besides Yorkshire, Nottingham, Derby, and Stafford. Some sympathy was felt in the fate of the persecuted man. “ May God give you the power to resist and withstand the utter and malicious enmity and false craft of Master Empson and such others your adversaries, which as all the great parte of England knoweth, hath done to you and yours the most injury and wrong, that ever was done or wrought to any man of worship in this land of peace.”

Empson’s legal machine, however, worked too well, and in 1501, Sir Robert was deprived of his domains in three of the four counties, York being excepted, and, in 1502, of Plumpton also; Empson received as his reward the estate of Kinalton, and married his daughter to the son and heir of his successful client.

But the knight was not disposed to give in quietly. At the first the complainants stood somewhat in fear of his and his servants’ vengeance; having lodged an appeal, he tried to assert his rights by force, and evicted the farmers who refused any longer to pay him their rents. At the same time Plumpton tried, as a last resource, to appeal to the king’s mercy, and begged that Henry, his Council, or two judges, might pronounce the decision; although he had already been warned that he would “get little favour.” He was so far successful that Henry appointed him a Knight of the Body, and thereby protected him from personal imprisonment, and, further, insured to him the usufruct of his manors of Plumpton and Idle. The lawsuit continued. The family were completely ruined through all the expense and pressure they had had to bear, and in Henry VIII’s reign, the unfortunate Sir Robert, now no longer protected by his position at court, was consigned to a debtor’s prison, where for a long time he ate his scanty fare in a dungeon. Not till his hard-hearted opponent Empson had met his death on the scaffold, was an agreement entered into between the two parties.

In the whole case there had been no question of the interests of the Crown; the advantage accruing to it consisted solely in the dues to be paid. Probably this may have been the reason why the Under-Treasurer, Sir Robert Lytton, deaf to all entreaties for delay, exacted from Plumpton the payment of his debts. This was one case among many, possibly a bad one; but it is obvious that a misuse of the power of the law, as exercised against the London citizens and Plumpton, could not fail to have aroused much bitter feeling. Though the heaviest guilt lies on the two assistants, much still attaches to the king himself. Nothing could be more serviceable to the country after the Wars of the Roses than a severe and rigorous administration of justice; on the other hand, nothing could more undermine all respect for the law than the financial abuses which Henry allowed to be carried on by Empson and Dudley, under the legal authority of the king. In Henry’s administration of justice there may be traced an irreconcilable contradiction, for ideas which y were good and sound in their conception degenerate in his latter years into mere caricature. This is identically the same change which we have observed in his general policy; and it is just this discrepancy in his conduct at the close of his reign, which has contributed so much to the harsh judgment passed on his whole mode of government. The only result of these abuses of the law was, that his successor found himself obliged to sacrifice to the popular clamour a statute so important to the power of the king as that which, in the interests of judicial reform, made the judge, who was dependent on the Crown, take the place of the jury. Empson and Dudley fell victims to the same popular hatred, and lost their heads on the scaffold. The wrongs of men who, like Sir R. Plumpton, Capell, and Kneysworth, had been by them almost done to death, were thus avenged.

ADMINISTRATION OF FINANCE.

The fiscal oppressions associated with the names of Empson and Dudley are the darkest spot, not only in the judicial administration, but also in the financial financial policy of Henry VII, and the judgments of posterity on him have thereby been prejudicially influenced. Still, if we compare what we know of Henry’s commercial and industrial policy with the reckless ideas on finance, which in these questions guided the monarchs of the Middle Ages, the contrast between them is evident. Where the public interest and his own financial interest were alike concerned, the former was regarded by Henry as the most important, and determined in the main his course of action.

No doubt Henry was consulting his own interests in departing from the policy of Richard III towards foreigners, and forcing them, with the exception of the Hanse merchants, to pay far heavier customs. And yet, if the question of the customs duties had been paramount with him, he would not have tried at the same time to supplant the foreigners by his own English trade, the efficiency of which was constantly on the increase. The high duty on wines imposed on the Venetians served solely for Henry’s navigation policy, and was at once reduced when that end had been accomplished. The raising of the customs duties, so often objected to by the Spaniards in the interest of their merchants, was certainly beneficial to the royal treasury, but it also served Henry materially as an expedient for furthering the other political demands he was making from Spain ; and these having been secured, the duties were reduced.

It is only in the support of the Staple and of the high duty on wool that any advantage to the Crown seems to stand out prominently. This most secure source of customs revenue was, however, exclusively devoted to the object of preserving Calais—an important one to the State—and the heavy charges laid on wool had for their principal object, even in the eyes of contemporaries, to further the cloth industry. Had Henry herein allowed himself to be swayed by purely fiscal considerations, he would hardly have issued enactments which were intended to restrict the purchase of wool by foreigners, and especially to limit the production of it.

Henry had promoted commerce, even from his own funds. For instance, he contributed to Cabot’s expeditions to the West, and gave help to merchants on other occasions by advances out of his own private purse. No doubt his far-seeing commercial and industrial policy operated so far to his own advantage, that, with the growth of trade, the whole receipts from customs increased. For the rest, we cannot insist too strongly on the point that Henry’s economic policy was determined by other political interests—as, for instance, with regard to the Netherlands—rather than by any tem­porary and shifty financial interest of the Crown.

We must the more acknowledge this, since the creation of an independent, secure, and well-regulated system of finance was one of the most important and difficult tasks of Henry’s reign, for the fulfilment of which any useful expedient would be welcome. He had to make good the deficit of the preceding decade, ruin in the exchequer as well as everywhere else. The revenues of the Crown had to be regulated, the sources from which they were derived made as productive as possible, new ones opened, and those which had been diverted from the Crown in the civil war, recovered. These were tasks which, added to the claims put forward on all sides upon the king, were as easy to undertake as they were difficult to perform.

Of the ordinary revenues of the king, the most important, the amount of which could also be most exactly estimated, were those derived from the landed property of the Crown. Next to these, stood the varying but yet usually lucrative customs duties, then the taxes less certain in amount—such as the still-surviving feudal dues—the judicial fines, the profits from the Mint, and the business of exchange. Among the extraordinary revenues, the grants made from time to time by Parliament stood first, and to these were added the benevolence levied once by the king, confiscations of the property of outlaws, and the payments agreed upon by international treaties. The revenues from confiscated property, besides those payments made at intervals to Henry by France after the treaty of Etaples, must also be added to his regular income.

To render this secure, and to increase it, was an important object with the king. The revenues from his landed property formed the bulk of his capital. The possessions of the Houses of York and Lancaster, the property which, after the ruin of so many families, had fallen in or had been confiscated, were all collected together in the hands of Henry VII. Much had been squandered away in the time of Henry VI Henry VII’s first Parliament required the restitution of all the Crown lands which had been given away since the 2nd of October, 1455. The Parliament of 1495 went still further; the fiscal .agents even went back to the times of Richard II and Edward III, to recover such alienated property. In spite of all limitations, these laws resulted in great harshness and frequent perversion of justice. An attempt was made in 1495 to increase the revenues of those portions of the property of the Prince of Wales which were farmed out; contracts which had till then held good were simply repudiated. It was a harsh and severe system of retrenchment, after the disorderly extravagance of the preceding period. The total income from the private property of the Crown, to which belonged that of the Prince of Wales and of the duchies of York and Lancaster, amounted—according to the reckoning of the Italian narrator—to 547,000 crowns, or £109,400. Proscriptions had contributed much to increase this source of Henry’s income; he seems also occasionally to have added to his landed property by purchase?

Next came the much smaller revenues from tonnage and poundage, and from the customs. Formerly these had only been granted to the kings for stated periods and definite objects. Henry V, after his victory at Agincourt in 1415, was granted them for the remainder of his reign; Henry VI, not till 1453; Edward IV, in 1465; and Richard III, in 1484. We know that the first response made by the Commons in Henry VII’s first Parliament, to their speaker’s address, was to confer their grant on the king for his lifetime. By this means the customs were converted for the lifetime of the reigning king into an assured revenue for the Crown; and the result of Henry’s commercial policy—if we take the yearly average of three periods of eight years each since his accession—was that these customs rose from £32,600 to £37,700, and finally to £42,000, that is, by quite twenty-eight per cent.

A far more assured source of revenue—though from its nature variable—was afforded by the old feudal dues, especially from the king’s right of wardship over the children still under age of deceased vassals, from the administration and usufruct of their estate, and from the “ relief” upon the acquisition of the fief, and the dues on the marriage of the heiress. Henry insisted very strongly that the freeholder with a land-rental of £40 should receive knighthood and pay fees for the same. The frequent repetition of this order issued to the sheriffs shows that it was evaded whenever possible, and that it must have been a question of considerable importance to the royal revenue. It was part of Empson’s duties to hunt out defaulters in this particular, and bring them up for punishment. Twice over the law enjoined not only the duty of money payments, but also that of serving in the army, on all holders of offices and estates conferred by the Crown.

Included in the king’s income were also the revenues from the Annates on appointments to bishoprics, although Henry often resigned these in the newly appointed bishop’s favour; the revenues from coinage and the farming-out of the exchange business, and occasional payments on the bestowal of offices, even when at the same time Henry granted compensation for official expenses.1 Finally, we must not forget the imposition and extortion of judicial fines, which led at last to such crying abuse.

Henry endeavoured to augment these ordinary revenues as much as possible, that he might thereby provide for all State expenses, and be relieved from the necessity of drawing upon parliamentary grants—the principal source of his extraordinary revenues. We have already noticed these various grants and the object of them. In 1489, on the occasion of a vote of £75,000 for the war, the usual form of levy was departed from; out of each man’s yearly income a tenth part was to be paid, and on personal property of ten marks and upwards, 1s. 8d. on every ten marks capital. The assessment and collection proved so faulty that only £27,000 came in, and perhaps this was the reason why the old form of a fifteenth and tenth was reverted to. A “fifteenth and tenth” was originally a levy to these amounts on personal estates; since the time of Edward III it was understood to mean a sum of £37,000 to £38,000, fixed portions of which were to be contributed by each separate parish in the counties and towns. By this means a definite standard of taxation was obtained, and, when required, many fifteenths and tenths were granted. In* the last Parliament of 1504, when no special reason for making a demand on Parliament existed, Henry bethought him of claiming the old English feudal aid due on the knighting of his eldest son, and the dowry of his eldest daughter, although Arthur’s knighting had already taken place on the 30th of November, 1488, and the prince himself had been dead nearly two years. It is said that to this demand a serious opposition was raised, under the leadership of young Thomas More, which resulted in a con­siderable reduction of the original amount, and that Henry revenged himself for this in a somewhat undignified manner on More’s father, by condemning him, on some pretext or other, to a fine of £100, and keeping him in the Tower until he paid. In the end, however, a show of polite accommodation was arrived at; the Commons offered £40,000, and the king took only £30,000. During the twenty-four years his reign lasted, Henry did not demand more than five parliamentary grants, of which the second was merely to supply what was needed to bring up the first to the required estimate, and of these grants only two were made from 1492 to 1509, a period of nearly eighteen years.

The disorders, which on two occasions were associated with the levying of these direct taxes, show how unpopular they were, and this led Henry, in the autumn of 1491, before the French war, to resort to a benevolence, an imposition pressing solely on his wealthier subjects. Various obligations then incurred not having been fulfilled, the Parliament of 1495 granted him the power of collecting the arrears of these so-called voluntary presents to the Crown, in the same way as with assessed taxes, under severe punishment for the refractory. It looks very much like extortion, that Henry, after having granted privileges to London, on the 21st of May, 1498, which then brought him in £5000, should, scarce seven years later, demand the payment of five thousand marks for a fresh confirmation of these privileges. To his extraordinary revenues must be added the profits which he made from mercantile ventures, undertaken on his own account, in wool, tin, and wine.

Temporary money difficulties Henry met by loans. In the very first year of his reign he asked for £4000 from the city, but had to be content with half that sum; in the following year he borrowed smaller sums from private persons, and did the same on the occasion of the preparations for Elizabeth’s coronation. In this case the king showed that he was to be trusted, and two loans obtained from the city, in the third year of his reign (1487-88), together amounting to £6000, were also punctually repaid in the following year. When in November, 1496, he wished for a loan in advance of £10,000 for the Scottish war, in anticipation of the grant to be made by Parliament, the city only gave him £4000; but loans for £40, £20, or even £10 were at the same time raised in different parts of the country, from a great number of wealthy persons, to whom the king addressed himself in a special letter, signed by his own hand, promising to each punctual repayment before the following 30th of November. His commissioners did not receive everywhere the sum demanded, sometimes not more than the half, but yet the considerable sum of £58,000 was collected, and, as far as we can see, duly repaid. Henry justified the credit which he enjoyed. Among his items of expenditure, payments of debts of this kind are often noted, but the creditor is never named, and only sometimes the purpose of the payment. The queen also was often obliged to borrow money; she applied to strangers as well as to her husband, who, even from her, required punctual repayment.

Only in sudden emergencies did Henry resort to larger loans of this kind, or to grants from Parliament or to benevolences. That he was enabled to free himself more and more from all these external aids, especially from the necessity of calling parliaments, he owed in the first place to his firm policy of peace; next, to the increase of his ordinary revenues; lastly, to the severely economical administration of his finances. The arrangement he adopted was as follows: for important expenditure recurring regularly, certain fixed and permanent revenues were assigned, as we have seen, in the appropriation of the Staple customs to the maintenance of Calais. In the same way, for the protection of the north against Scotland, certain revenues were apportioned by law to Berwick and Carlisle; the safety of the northern bishopric of Durham was to be provided for out of the revenues of the bishopric, on which account Henry left the see vacant for a long time, and, when the appointment was made, diverted, with the approval of the Pope, a portion of the income of the see towards its defence.

The oppressions connected with the maintenance of the royal court when in progress were a grievance of long standing. After Edward III’s time judicial measures promised a remedy, but these were never carried out, and the complaints continued. The court officials took from the surrounding inhabitants more than was necessary; they used compulsion and extortion, and forgot to pay. In Henry’s first Parliament, the Commons protested against the “constant appropriation of property and cattle for the expenses of the royal household, for which the owners do not receive satisfactory and proper payment.” Henry, who was endeavouring to secure popularity for his new dynasty, adopted a more effectual measure for redress, by getting Parliament to grant ,£14,000 a year for the expenses of the royal household, and assign for the purpose definite sources of revenue, such as land dues and customs. By this means the king guaranteed as it were the possibility of payment, which up to that time had de­pended on bare promises, and likewise managed to separate the expenses of the royal household from those of the State. In 1495 the Act underwent modification in certain particulars. It was on the same principle that £2105 19s. were appropriated for the king’s wardrobe.

Expenditure was thus from the first regulated in detail, but Henry nevertheless kept a strict eye over all the accounts, both of State and court. Among the printed and unprinted records bearing on the history of Henry VII, a remarkable number of statements of accounts are to be met with, often drawn up in a very neat and ingenious fashion. The king demanded an exact account for everything, and we can well understand that officials, to whom this strictness was irksome, should find fault with him for his avarice. That these accounts are not exactly on the pattern of modern book-keeping does not in the least diminish their importance.

Among the most interesting of these are the accounts of the Privy Purse expenses for the years 1491 to 1505, which have been preserved and published, though in a somewhat Inadequate form. These fragments, however, are quite sufficient to enable us to gain an insight into the variety of matters which occupied the king’s mind, and especially to note and admire his careful and orderly method. Ayala relates, though with a certain amount of exaggeration, that Henry employed all the time he did not spend in public or in his Council, in writing down his accounts with his own hand. This was not approved of by the Spaniard, who thought Henry was too fond of money. But this reproach of avarice against the king rests, for the most part, on a confusion between careful orderliness and avaricious niggardliness. There is no doubt that Henry often showed signs of parsimony, even on occasions when it was out of place, as in the marriage treaty with Scotland, but the failing was not one which belonged to his real nature. It was simply the result of that carefulness he was obliged to exercise, in order to establish a sound system of finance, after the extravagant prodigality of former times.

At the right moment Henry was quite ready to deal out money with unstinting hands. We need only recall the magnificence of his court festivities, the lavish splendour with which he received King Philip in 1506, the profusion of precious household possessions which he displayed on such occasions. Henry himself also had many expensive tastes. In the privy purse accounts the sum of £110,000 is set down for jewels alone; and for political purposes he expended without hesitation very considerable amounts, as, for instance, on Maximilian in 1503, and in 1505 on Philip. We cannot but respect that strict orderliness which noted with equal care sums of thousands of pounds and the three or four shillings which the king had disbursed in alms or on a small present or salary.

The energy with which Henry imposed this exactness on himself and on his officials met with its reward. It is an evidence of the financial independence which he gained for himself at the cost of such laborious and continued effort, that he could carry on the whole current administration, and provide for court expenses out of his regular income, while at the same time he commanded without difficulty considerable sums for special purposes, and yet made his income largely exceed his expenditure. Of no single prince of his time could the same be said.

Nevertheless it is certain that England was not then rich either in population or resources. It stood below France, for example, in both respects. The levy of a tax, which after all only produced £27,000, pressed so heavily that it caused that outbreak in the north, in which the Earl of Northumberland lost his life, and the levy of two fifteenths and tenths in the year 1497, was sufficient to stir up the Cornish insurrection. On the other hand, we find that Henry alone was able to disburse large sums in quick succession, £4000 on the 16th of September, 1502, £10,000 on the 1st of October, and £30,000 on the 16th of December. His privy purse was not generally burdened with the costs of government, but yet from it were made payments to foreign Powers and for entertainment of foreign guests, and from it alone, in the financial years 1495-1496, upwards of £25,000 was paid out; in 1497-1498 over £72,000; in 1499-1500 over £46,000; in the following year about £48,000; and in 1502-1503 as much as £90,327. 

Sums such as these are the best evidence of the success of Henry’s financial system, supported as it was by his whole policy. Our otherwise excellent Italian observer had allowed himself to be deceived by his informants, when he estimated Henry’s entire expenditure for himself and his court at £20,000. In this matter the king had taken care not to show his hand.

As to the amount of Henry’s accumulated treasure, we have no reliable information. This did not consist of coined money alone. The treasure in jewels which he amassed, and his enormous wealth in gold and silver plate display, were not only intended for pomp and display, but formed at the same time a secure fund of capital, a part of the royal treasure which could at any moment be realised. These treasures served especially to spread throughout the world rumours of King Henry’s riches, which no doubt were of great use to him. Much exaggeration was also afloat on the subject; Ayala asserts that any gold pieces which found their way into the king’s coffers never came out again, and the ambassador of the Duke of Milan estimated Henry’s treasure, even in 1497, at £1,350,000, and what he put by yearly at £112,500. Peter Martyr also calls him the richest of all kings in money. He is spoken of in the same way at Venice, and Duke George of Saxony received from Brussels, at the beginning of 1509, the information that Henry “is described as the wisest and richest lord that is now known in the world.”

No one recognised more clearly than King Henry that in the political life of nations money is all powerful. From the outset therefore he bent his mind on creating, by means of his finances, a broad, independent, and solid foundation for his royal authority. Here too he worked so that everything should contribute to one end, and in the whole conduct of his policy he took special care not to endanger this financial security, which he had with such trouble created. By this means he became more independent, especially of grants from Parliament, than any English king before him. His financial policy was thoroughly monarchical. Upon it rested to a great extent the independence and power of the newly established Tudor sovereignty. 

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AN ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM.

The life’s work of the first Tudor king was constantly, and to the very last, directed towards one great object—the restoration of the monarchy by the establishment of royal absolutism in the English Constitution. If therefore, in conclusion, we wish to treat of this king’s monarchical policy as a whole, we must glance back again for a moment over the history we have been relating.

By the help of a strong monarchy alone could the England of the Wars of the Roses be saved from falling into utter ruin. Edward IV and Richard III had alike failed to create such a monarchy, and it was left for that man to accomplish, who overthrew the revolutionary throne of the House of York. Thus England became the prize of that Tudor dynasty which had brought her deliverance. Henry was able to make the most of his first success, and to use it to secure for the Crown a position of authority such as had long been unknown, because he always understood how to link closely together the interests of king and State, never promoting the one to the detriment of the other. In this consisted the significant character of Henry’s personal rule. It was the same with his great contemporary, Ferdinand the Catholic; with both of them dynastic interests no longer existed apart from the interests of the State. For this reason no king ever accomplished more for himself and his own position in the State than this Tudor monarch.

He renounced all thoughts of a return to that mediaeval policy of conquest, of which kings before and even after him dreamed, as the highest aim of their ambition; he never sought to extend his royal authority beyond the borders of England and Ireland. He realised that the strength of the island kingdom, girdled about by the sea, lay in the isolation of its natural position, that any possessions on the Continent which would bring it into immediate contact with the Powers there in conflict, instead of adding to its strength, as they might appear to do, would in reality diminish it. Fleets no longer sailed with armed hosts against France; under Henry’s rule, the ships of England bore the English merchant and English products to foreign lands; it was they who carried out his new policy of conquest. The one outpost beyond the sea was Calais, maintained at great expense, since it was necessary to the trade with the Continent, and for holding supremacy in the Channel. To this insular policy of Henry’s, which cannot be too much commended, belongs also his constant endeavour to bring about a lasting peace with Scotland, and the remark with which he is credited on the possible future union of Scotland with England, as the result of the Anglo-Scottish marriage alliance he had brought about, already contains the idea of that union of Great Britain, which was one day to spring from that marriage.

No doubt, at first, the exigencies of the time in England were his best allies, as they afforded him the opportunity to exercise his power in re-establishing peace and order in the kingdom, in protecting it permanently from all who might create disturbance, and finally, after many unsuccessful beginnings, in gaining for his kingdom an independent and honoured position in the eyes of foreign Powers. But besides these political duties, belonging properly to the functions of the Crown, the king had interfered in the wider field of commerce and industry, where the English spirit of enterprise was more than usually astir. Here from the first he had taken the guidance into his own hand, and had promoted or restrained according to his own views. He aimed at being the leader of the State in all foreign relations, as well as the master and guide of all the forces at home. Thus from the Crown came that new life which now throbbed throughout England after many years of disorder. Whatever of their prerogative the kings in earlier times had been compelled to relinquish in consequence of their own weakness, or for the sake of obtaining help from their subjects to carry out their policy of war, Henry won back to the full for the monarchy, in the work he did for the State.

Not only in all his actions was he indirectly working for himself and his royal authority; but he allowed no opportunity to slip of directly furthering the power of his dynasty. We see this clearly in his policy with regard to those marriage alliances which he so assiduously endeavoured to promote. By their means the royal upstart of still apparently doubtful origin would be entitled to take his place on an equality with the other royal families, and what his dynasty gained in Europe thereby and by the further success of his political schemes, it gained at the same time, and to a far greater degree, in England itself.

When Henry began his reign, he was obliged to revert to very primitive safeguards for his throne. He surrounded himself at once with a bodyguard, which he subsequently retained, but which never exceeded the number of two hundred men. Our Italian authority states that never before Henry’s time had the Tower been so well guarded, that it was plentifully provided with material of war, especially with bows and crossbows. Against those chance dangers which in former times menaced the English kings, Henry was resolved “to protect himself by strongholds,” which should also serve for protection within the country, and among these he reckoned the border towns of Calais and Berwick. From other sources we learn that Portsmouth likewise received a garrison, and Henry’s endeavour to keep his forts as in­accessible as possible is shown by his order to the governor of Scarborough, to allow no foreigner residing in the town to have access to the castle. We also hear occasionally of the presence of German mercenaries in the kingdom.

Henry was the first to protect his royal power by mercenaries and strong places. Means for the purpose he obtained by clever administration of his finances, and this he subsequently contrived to develop still further into one of the securest supports of his kingly independence. His legis­lation furnished another pillar of the royal authority; more especially that which dealt with judicial procedure, and the statutes which brought the guilds and other companies directly under the power of the Crown, or withdrew the administration of certain laws, as of those concerning usurers, from municipal jurisdiction.

This policy, contrary as it was to every custom of the country, shows very plainly the influence which Henry’s residence in France before his accession had exercised upon him. It must have been there that he formed those theories of personal government, which he tried to introduce into the English Constitution; from thence he borrowed the idea of strengthening the defences of the country; thence those judicial reforms, which aimed at the abolition of juries. Indeed, his desire to transplant French institutions into English soil went still further, as we are told by Ayala, “He would like to govern England in the French fashion, but he cannot do it.”

All, however, that Henry had accomplished would have remained still of doubtful advantage, if he had been unable to protect his newly established monarchy against the two greatest rivals which confronted it in England. The most difficult part of his policy was to assert his royal authority against the two Estates assembled in Parliament—the Lords of the Upper House, and the Commons in the Lower.

It was reserved for Henry VII to put an end for ever to the fierce struggle between the Crown and the aristocracy. We know that the Wars of the Roses, the last and the furious outburst of this long struggle, had struck down deep to the very roots of both parties. And while Henry had only to grapple with a few isolated members of the rival royal House, it was but the remnants of the old nobility that were left to oppose him. To keep them in subjection, and especially to prevent them from ever rising to fresh power was not only imperative in the interests of the Crown, but also necessary for the peace and prosperous development of the country.

In the very first years of his reign, Henry began to take vigorous measures. It is noteworthy that of the three friends on whom he conferred peerages after his victory, only one was not already a peer, and he was always careful not to augment to a dangerous degree the ranks of the nobility. In his first Parliament he exacted from the assembled lords, spiritual and temporal, a special oath that they would loyally keep the peace, while his second Parliament, by its law of the Star Chamber, put into his hand a most powerful weapon against the nobles and their excesses. By this law the aristocracy were delivered over, not to the courts of the realm, but entirely to the Crown, and the Crown then had to show that it possessed the power to execute the law effectively.

The men who stood foremost by the king’s side to help and advise him in this as in other matters, were not chosen from the ranks of the great nobles of the realm. We meet in the highest offices with the names of the churchmen, John Morton, Richard Fox, William Warham, and the laymen Sir Reginald Bray, Sir Giles Daubeney, who was not created a lord till later, Richard Edgecombe, Edward Poynings, and Sir Thomas Lovell, with whom eventually were associated such men as Empson and Dudley. Except the king’s own relatives, the only members of the aristocracy who can be named as occupying positions of influence are the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of Surrey, Lord Treasurer, and even they stood in importance far below men such as Morton, Fox, Warham, and Bray. The hereditary nobility had to make way before the talent of the statesman. In this Henry set the example to his successors, for the leading statesmen of the Tudors were men of low origin.

The part which the high aristocracy had played in politics was over. The estates of the old families had passed into other hands; most of them, by attainders and confiscations, had fallen to the Crown. In the Upper House the aristocracy found themselves confronted by the spiritual peers, who outweighed them in number, and amongst these the leading men were Henry’s firmest and most faithful supporters, whom he had thrust into high places in the Church. We scarcely hear anything more of the Upper House. The supreme court of justice, formed of the peers of the realm, sank into an unimportant tool in the hands of the Crown.

The members of the nobility henceforward became the mere ornaments of the court; they surrounded the king on festive occasions, and solemn embassies, which did not involve any diplomatic difficulty, were confided to them. As was natural, the principal part still was theirs whenever there was a call to arms, but Henry was careful that this should take place as seldom as possible; and as to the conduct of a campaign, such as that in France in 1492, no one could have been less enlightened than the noble lords, who then took the field. Court festivities and tournaments were henceforward their principal field of action, service at court the only mode in which they could fulfil their feudal duties. For to appear at court was their duty. Andre, the court historiographer, considered it especially necessary to note and justify the long absence of a few lords from the court. And yet this nobility, which had sunk to a position of such political insignificance, still retained its prominent social position, and it was only by promotion to the highest ecclesiastical dignities that statesmen such as Morton, Warham, and Fox could be placed on a level of equal or superior rank. Thus the old and powerful aristocracy of England was already in Henry’s reign turning into a nobility of court and office, required for the sole purpose of enhancing the splendour of the Crown, but unable any longer to threaten its position. 

In Henry’s attitude towards the aristocracy he could be certain of the approval and support of all those who had suffered under the oppressions of powerful nobles. Polydore Vergil declares that Henry “was the firmest protector of justice, whereby his people were much beholden to him, as they could now live their lives free from the vexations of the mighty.” Thus at the very outset he pressed on the legis­lation which should give greater authority to the king, because it insured for the weak the powerful protection of the law against the violence of the strong. The Commons took sides with the king; they were protecting themselves when they increased the prerogative of the Crown.

We may remember that any advance in power gained by the Lower House had taken place under the rule of strong monarchs who were able to repress the nobles; the same might be expected under the rule of and the Henry VII. His reign seems most to resemble that of the first Lancastrian, Henry IV, who, having won the throne by the sword, likewise grounded his claim on the sanction of Parliament, and thenceforth found in the Commons support against foes within and without. But, unlike his predecessors, unlike Edward I and III, Henry IV and V, the Tudor king knew how to compel the Lower House to keep idly in its scabbard that weapon which it had so often made use of to resist any extension of the royal prerogative—its claim to grant or withhold money. It was to the constant need for money of those earlier kings that the Commons owed all the steps they had gained; but the Crown’s financial need ceased with Henry VII. He was independent of his Lower House, because his financial policy made it possible for him to avoid any dangerous conflict with it; and accordingly he was able, with one exception, to abstain from summoning Parliament during the last twelve years of his reign.

We see, therefore, that Henry did not afford the classes represented in the Lower House an opportunity of expressing their opinion on political matters much more often than the peers of the Upper House. Yet his whole solicitude was directed to the interests of the industrial middle classes, and to the smaller landowners, who were for the most part repre­sented in the Lower House. He knew that by raising and strengthening them, he would lay the best foundation for his dynasty. For them, therefore, was the protection of justice undertaken by the king, for them his many measures to promote commerce and industry, for them the agrarian legis­lation in the interests of the peasants and tenant farmers, for them, in fact, his whole endeavour to guard the kingdom and, in his own words, to advance it in “rest, peace, and wealthy condition.”

One peculiar economic principle of Henry’s should here be noted. Polydore Vergil remarks that he did his best to keep down his burghers, especially the economic richer among them, because he well knew that, as they grow richer, men become overbearing, and allow their actions to be controlled by money interests alone. To the Spaniard Ayala Henry had, in fact, said almost in the words of the chronicler, that he tried to keep his subjects down because riches would make them insolent. In this, however, Henry did not show an inconsistency with his general views; he certainly wished to see England rich and flourishing—that was the very aim of his state and economic policy—but this wealth was to be diffused as widely as possible, and not to be amassed in the hands of individuals. While shattering the hereditary power of the great nobles, Henry sought to check the rise of others, whose new power was founded on their wealth, and who seemed to him just as dangerous. Men who were influential either from their birth or their riches were, in his opinion, likely to be tempted to stir up or to support a fresh contest for power, and cause fresh confusion and disorder in the kingdom. It was from this point of view that he restrained the efforts after monopoly made by the London merchant adventurers, and resisted the increase and consolidation of large landed properties. Viewed from the standpoint of a struggle with capital, his fiscal abuse of justice, if not excused, is somewhat freed from the reproach of personal avarice, and appears in a more generous light. Polydore Vergil, in fact, connects those cruel exactions, which resulted in the ruin of many individuals, with the principle mentioned above. Henry acted thus, he says, in order to stifle the restless spirit of party in the country, not from greed for money, although the sufferers complained, that they were not so much the victims of severity as of covetousness. Henry even gave a helping hand to those who had been severely bled by his judges, as if, having been once plucked, their feathers could be made to grow again. “Certain it is that the prince, so moderate himself, did not rob his subjects above measure, he who left his kingdom in every respect in the greatest prosperity.”

The policy of Henry is clear enough; he wished for a comfortable, well-to-do commonalty, a numerous and wealthy middle-class, as much as possible on an equality, by whom the dependent labourer, kept by law at work and under discipline should be employed. Interfering in all the details of life, controlling and regulating according to his own supreme will, the king should stand over all, without too many intermediate links formed either by a powerful aristocracy or by individual citizens, influential by their wealth.

Thus Henry’s endeavour to establish the sole sovereignty of the Crown, unmolested by any other power in the State, stands out very obviously. Whoever raised himself above what was, in Henry’s opinion, his proper sphere, was at once energetically suppressed, even though he might have hitherto enjoyed the royal favour. Hence, as we have seen, the king extended his influence to the utmost in his legislation. And that he made real use of this newly acquired prerogative, as, for instance, in dealing with the trade guilds, is shown by the occasional experience of the Londoners.

On the 6th of January, 1503, Henry bestowed on the London Tailors’ Guild, together with a new charter, the name of the Merchant Taylors, and aroused thereby great discontent among the other companies. This feeling was displayed at the election of sheriffs in the year 1505, when Fitzwilliam, the candidate of the Taylors’ Guild, was un­successful. In the next election of 1506, Henry in consequence interfered. When on the 30th of September the customary presentation of the sheriff's took place before the lords in the Star Chamber, one Thomas Johnson, who had been legally elected, was not admitted to take the oath ; and on the 10th of October came an order from the king to the Lord Mayor to set about a fresh election, and Edmund Dudley appeared in Guildhall with the express command that Fitzwilliam should be elected sheriff, “which took place at last after great difficulty.”

The Parliament of 1495, took from the inhabitants of the lordships of North and South Tynedale on the Scotch Border, those privileges under cover of which they had, in company with the Scots, done many deeds of violence. Henry, in like manner, interfered in the municipal government of Leicester, where there had often been disturbances on public occasions, as on the election of mayors or members of Parliament. Thus rights and privileges were set aside, even with the assistance of Parliament, if they were contrary to the welfare of the State; and of this the king was sole judge.

Henry did not directly attack the constitutional position of Parliament; even under his rule the judges stated expressly that a statute, to be legally binding, must have passed through “the full assembly of commons, lords, and king.” He did not suppress the expression of adverse opinions in the Commons, although he is said to have taken revenge afterwards for any opposition that was distasteful to him. But the petitions from the Commons which he granted, coincided so strikingly with his own ideas and wishes, that we can hardly be mistaken if we seek the real originator of the petition in the person to whom it was addressed.

He did not injure the form of the Constitution, for after all, he found it pliant enough even when he carried measures which violated its spirit; and in this was most clearly illustrated the real strength of his kingly authority. Only men who were agreeable to him were chosen as speakers of the Lower House, Richard Empson, in 1491, and in 1504, even Dudley, when public hatred was already strong against both him and Empson. The name of the “obedient Parliament” can best be applied to the Parliament of 1495 ; it carried back further than any other the restitutions of Crown lands which it granted to the king, it raised the benevolence imposed by the king to the same level as a tax voted by Parliament, and it was in this Parliament that Henry passed his judiciary laws, in particular the statute, afterwards so notorious, for the partial abolition of the indictment by jury. One step to be noted was gained by him when the Parliament of 1504, under the pretext of the limited time at its disposal, granted him the right to reverse on his own authority all the attainders which had taken place in Parliament during Richard III.’s time and his own; in this instance the Parliament abandoned for the life­time of the king that fundamental law by virtue of which statutes passed by king and Parliament could only be repealed or modified by the same authority.

Thus Parliament supported the absolutist policy of the king, who, although without outward powers of compulsion, had succeeded in raising the Crown to its new and commanding position. Our Italian observer, comparing the English of the time with the Scotch, declares that only a few of them were loyally devoted to their king, “generally they hate the living king and praise the dead one.” Yet this same writer testifies emphatically to Henry’s success. “From the time of William the Conqueror to the present, no king has reigned more peaceably that he has ; his great prudence causing him to be universally feared.” From other sources also we hear that Henry held the people in subjection, as had never before been the case; “his crown is unassailed and his rule strong in every respect.” A Milanese writer, who confirms the opinion that the kingdom for many years had not been so obedient to any sovereign as it was to Henry, expresses his astonishment that the king, in spite of the small number of his body-guard, was able to reside in open and unprotected places in the forest districts.

The above are the opinions of contemporaries before the opening of the new century. The monarchy, having fallen into decay with the weakness of those who held it, now rose up again with renewed strength, when a real master stood at the head of the State. It would be an idle question to discuss, when determining the causes of the royal success, whether the creative ideas originated with the king himself or with his counsellors ; the will to carry into effect remained always with the wearer of the crown. But the question is by no means unimportant when we are passing judgment on the persons concerned in this success, though the answer, which in the case of Henry’s successor is perfectly clear, with him is doubtful and obscure.

In the year 1498, Ayala asserts that Henry had been governed by the members of his council, but that he had already shaken off some of them, and had to a great extent freed himself from this control. Nine years later, according to Puebla, Henry no longer had any confidential advisers; and Polydore Vergil, who was only acquainted with these later years, characterises his mode of government shortly and to the point. “No man enjoyed so much consideration with the king that he could venture to do anything of his own will.” Henry desired that “he might not wrongly be called a ruler, but be one who would rule and not be ruled.”

So far as a general survey of Henry’s reign allows us to form an opinion, it seems clear that the more he became himself initiated into his kingly office, the more he grew independent of his councillors. One cause of this, however, was that the men whom he chiefly trusted, had preceded him to the grave.

On the 12th of October, 1500, died John Morton, the Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, who, in Puebla’s opinion “left no statesman behind him, to be compared with him,” and whom the London Chronicle extols as “a man worth of memory for his many great deeds, and specially for his great wisdom, which continued to the time of his disease, passing the years of eighty and odd; in his time was no man like to be compared with him in all things. Albeit that he lived not without the great disdain and great hate of the commons of this land.” Above all, More, who when a boy lived in the house of the cardinal, bears in his Utopia, splendid testimony to Morton’s worth : he was a man “not more honourable for his authority, then for his prudence and virtue. He was of a meane stature, and though stricken in age, yet bare he his body upright. In his face did shine such an amiable reverence, as was pleasant to behold, gentile in communication, yet earnest, and sage. He had great delight many times with rough speech to his sewters, to prove, but without harm, what prompted wit and what bold spirit were in every man. In the which, as in a virtue much agree with his nature, so that therewith were not joined impudence, he takes great delegation. ... In his speech he was fine, eloquent. In the law he had profound knowledge, in wit he was incomparable, and in memory wonderful excellent. These qualities, which in him were by nature singular, he by learning and use had made perfect. The king put much trust in his counsel, the weak public also in a manner leaned unto him. For even in the chief of his youth he was taken from school into the court, and there passed all his time in much trouble and business, being continually tumbled and tossed in the waves of divers misfortunes and adversities. And so by many and great dangers he learned the experience of the world, which so being learned cannot easily be forgotten.”

Such was the man whom we first learnt to know as the most faithful of Henry’s adherents in the early days of his exile, and who, soon after his accession, held, as primate and chancellor, the highest ecclesiastical and the highest secular dignity in England, and died a cardinal of the Church of Rome.

Morton’s death took place on the threshold of the new century; three years afterwards, on the 5th of August, 1503, died Sir Reginald Bray, whom Morton himself had brought into the service of Henry before his accession. It certainly is more than a mere coincidence that from this period is to be dated that decline in so many directions, which we have noticed in Henry’s policy. We meet now with no new idea, for we cannot know how long beforehand the few laws passed by the Parliament of 1504 had been in preparation, during the intermission of Parliament. The Spanish and the Scotch marriage treaties were still being concluded, the subsequent marriage treaty between Charles and Mary remained therefore the one success amid a mass of hopeless and unfruitful projects ; on the other hand, it was then that Henry’s almost incomprehensible action with regard to Ferdinand and Katharine began; then that the unfortunate commercial treaty of 1506 took place with Philip. Then, too, occurred that sudden and temporary episode in the relations of England and the Hansa, when Henry for a while gave way. To this period, finally, belong the abuse and discredit of the administration of justice, when Henry allowed Empson and Dudley to rule. 

All this happened after the death of Morton. The old tact and the old firmness seemed to have vanished; the evil for the most part consisted in the degeneracy of ideas that in themselves were good. Whoever may have originated these ideas, Henry had made them completely his own, although he was now mistaken in his mode of carrying them out; it is possible that this deterioration in his latter years was connected, not only with a decay of his physical, but of his mental powers.

Nothing, however, can diminish the fame of King Henry as the restorer of the English monarchy. Since William the Conqueror no power so absolute had existed in England as that which Henry bequeathed, on firmly fixed foundations, to his successors. It was not a new edifice, like that feudal sovereignty which the powerful Norman had erected in the place of the shattered Anglo-Saxon kingdom, but an arbitrary yet constitutional monarchy, constructed with consummate art, within and upon the already existing Constitution. A new epoch had begun in England—THE PERIOD OF AN ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM UNDER THE TUDORS.

 

HENRY’S PERSONAL CHARACTER AND DEATH.

 

When a monarch of such individuality and force of character as the first Tudor forms the central figure of a State which is advancing by strides to a new and important position, the historian cannot fail to take an interest in that monarch’s personality. The pictures of him by Mabuse and the bronze figure by Torrigiano on his tomb, depict for us Henry’s form and features. Neither in figure nor countenance was he handsome: his thin form was somewhat above middle height, his face was furrowed, his eyes serious, but with a soft expression. His features bear far more strongly the impress of a certain mildness of character, than of that tenacious and energetic determination which he displayed throughout life. His hair was thin, and his mouth disfigured by loss of teeth; but when he spoke, his grave countenance, it is said, would light up. The cares and anxieties of his reign showed themselves in his outward appearance; he was old for his years, but yet “young for the sorrowful life he has led.” As we gaze upon him in the picture at Hampton Court Palace, in long robe, raised on a step behind his son, who, in short doublet, stands with outstretched legs before him, there seems something priest-like about the appearance of the king.

Yet, though cautious and deliberate in life as in his policy, he was not always reserved. He was of a ready wit, and loved to make a joking repartee, and was quick at times in showing pleasure or annoyance. There was no doubt of the impression he made on men, for the fame of his prudence and sagacity was far more than a mere courtly compliment. Good evidence of this is supplied by the Spaniard, Ayala, who, conscious that the king, for all his amiable manner, had cleverly over-reached him on commercial questions, burst out with the half-angry words, “He is so clever in everything, and in this matter displays it so much, that it is a miracle.”

There was much judicious calculation in the manner in which Henry showed himself to people. He was careful to guard his dignity, and in no way to lower it, “ for he knew that his life was observed by many, and that therefore the sovereign must excel all others as much in wisdom as in power.” Henry was desirous to be thought a wise and great man; he anxiously avoided yielding to any weakness, and made use of every opportunity to show himself to the best advantage. He wished not only to make an impression, but also that men should speak of it; still it is possible that, in spite of the high opinion generally formed of him, his success in this respect fell below his somewhat lofty expectations. Such a desire was quite in accordance with his general monarchical policy, where it was important that the per­sonality of the monarch should stand high in the respect and consideration of men.

In the whole outward life of his court, as well as in his personal demeanour, Henry kept this end in view, displaying on State occasions his wonderful riches and magnificence. Great sums were expended on costly materials, furniture, and jewels, and he himself took pleasure in the arrangement of festivities. He instituted for these a special and solemn ceremonial, and when we read how the Church festivals, St. George’s Day, Arthur’s christening, his promotion to be Prince of Wales, his knighting, his wedding, and finally his obsequies were solemnised, we cannot doubt that Henry thought seriously of the dignity and solemnity of his position as king. Added to this, he kept a liberal table, and was hospitable host.

In Henry’s opinion, all this belonged to his calling and to his duty as king ; his own inclinations were more simple, and he was personally very frugal. Still he showed himself not averse to the more serious or to the lighter joys of life. For this side of his character we have but one source of information—the king’s account-book. Its dry entries, however, give us many glimpses into his private life and that of his family, and present us even with a vivid picture.

We meet there often with the names of the king's relatives, who in State affairs played a not very prominent, and at the most a passive, part. It was, indeed, asserted that he influence of Henry’s mother, Margaret, upon her son had been important, but this can scarcely have extended to political matters, for although she outlived the king, she had been unable to prevent the absurd and unworthy matrimonial projects of his latter years. Within the court itself it was otherwise; there the aged countess had an influential voice in the organisation of ceremonial, and took the lead over the king’s wife, Queen Elizabeth. Yet it was to the queen, who was usually kept in the background, that the sympathies of England were directed; her favour with the people was to be attributed in great measure to her lack of influence with the king, who, on the whole, was not beloved. Their domestic life seems to have been irreproachable, and, on the occasion of Arthur’s death, husband and wife displayed a certain warmth of affection.

Henry found his greatest delight in the freedom of a country life. He was passionately fond of the chase; ambassadors had frequently to follow his travelling camp from place to place, and he would sometimes send word to them that, if their business was not very urgent, they might wait, as he did not wish to be disturbed. In his last years he was more addicted to sport than ever; in September, 1507, he was in the country hunting, and “going from forest to forest, from one mountain to another; he did not remain a single day quiet in the same place.” He also encouraged knightly exercises among his subjects, anxious at the same time that they should keep up their skill in the use of arms. As there were fears of a decline in the art of shooting with the long bow—that national weapon with which the English excelled—he called in the aid of legislation to keep down the price of bows, and to restrain the use of the cross-bow, which was coming into vogue.

The capital Henry visited with reluctance, and only for a short time together, he preferred rather the neighbourhood, and his favourite seat was the charming palace at Sheen, the later Richmond, where, from a slight eminence, a wide view is obtained over a beautiful landscape of wood and meadow, amidst which the Thames winds its way.

Sometimes Henry gave himself up entirely to those pleasures that were congenial to him. We learn what were the usual occupations of both king and court, besides work and the chase, from his accurately kept account-book. From that, too, we get to know many of the persons belonging to the king’s household; his physicians, Dr. Holand, Master Ralf Sintclair, and Vincent Wolff, who, judging by the amount of his salary, must have been specially skilful; and the queen’s physicians, Master Lewes and Robert Taillour. To a good preacher the king would occasionally give a pound: his preference for France is sometimes shown in these presents, for if the preacher had the good fortune to be a native of that country, he would receive two pounds. Music was a favourite recreation with Henry and his family; he often bought instruments organs, and also lutes, especially for the Princesses Margaret and Mary. He bestowed regular though limited salaries on minstrels and organists, as well as on the “king’s pipers.” For a change, the wandering musicians of the queen or the princesses, would perform before the king; and again his purse was opened freely, when on one occasion, the minstrels of the Queen of France appeared before him. He also gladly rewarded solo performers on the organ, harp, violin, or horn, as well as the trumpeters who greeted him upon the Thames, and the children who pleased him with their singing in the church or in the garden. Composers and painters, and among poets the “Walshe rymers” in particular, received substantial recognition of their works; one Spanish musician received at one time ten pounds, and an Italian poet even twenty pounds. For his library, Henry caused some books to be procured from abroad, others to be copied; the court bookseller, Quintin, was charged with the copying of the books, and their proper get-up and binding. He encouraged the new art of printing, and gave the printer Pynson an advance of ten pounds to print a mass book. Considerable sums were often paid for books; occasionally two pounds for a single book, for several together from ten to twenty pounds, and in one entry to a Frenchman, as much as twenty-five pounds. As to numbers of volumes and titles, the account-book is, unfortunately, silent; once only does it add the detail, that one Anthony Verard received six pounds for two books entitled the “Gardyn of Helth.”

Lighter recreations were not neglected. Henry was fond of games of dice, and, above all, cards—which were strictly forbidden by law to the poor apprentice boys: he often lost quite substantial sums; how much he won he does not inform us. Jesters, jugglers, and clowns seem to have afforded him special amusement; when he went to any house as a guest, his host would be careful to provide for him this sort of entertainment; and if a pretty young girl danced before the king, he was ready to reward her liberally; jugglers of various kinds, skilful swimmers, conjurors, rope-dancers, and fire­eaters had to be content with less. Henry seems to have kept a whole troop of jesters at his court; we read of “the foolyshe due of Lancastre,” of Dego, the Spanish jester, as well as of Thomas Blackall, and Scot and Dick ‘the master fools.’ ” These jesters received from the king their appropriate costume; to the Spanish fool, Dego, he also presented a horse, with a saddle and bridle. Besides jugglers and jesters, men with physical peculiarities seem to have found favour with him; the “grete Walshe child,” “Alen the litell Scottisman,” “the grete woman of Flaunders”; possibly the “Greek with a beard  might be reckoned among these. For rare animals, such as lions, leopards, wild cats, and foreign birds, he was willing to pay, as well as for human monstrosities; for a common nightingale he once paid a whole pound.

Thus, with the help of the royal account-book, we can take a glance into the life of the narrow court circle, and into the favourite relaxations of the monarch. On the same pages on which are recorded large sums for political, military, and similar objects, we find, accurately entered, a bow for Prince Arthur, new hose for Prince Henry, and the wages of the royal barber. The king’s own purchases are also found, such as a weather-glass, an ornamental sword, a dagger, an artistic glass, or a silver fork. He supported an alchymist, who practised his art within the Tower, rewarded the monk who manufactured gunpowder, and the constructor of the first paper-mill in England. But he would pay just as much to a woman who brought him cherries and strawberries in April, to a girl who offered him flowers, or to another who supplied him with refreshment on a journey. Many a small but interesting trait of character is here to be traced, showing, as also do his alms to the poor and injured, that the king was not wanting in kindly feeling, and through all there is that ' touch of humour, which we see him display in his intercourse with men.

And yet his almsgiving, especially for religious purposes, was rather the expression of his devotion to the Church, and of that piety which, in his latter years, Henry liked to exercise, in accordance with the precepts of the Church. Amongst the persons who had received presents, we find on one occasion, a heretic at Canterbury; this gift is said to have been a sign of Henry’s satisfaction at having himself induced him to retract. It would seem, however, that the wretched man was burnt after all. Unfortunately in this matter Henry inherited the views of the Lancastrian kings ; and many times during his reign heretics perished at the stake at Smithfield. Exposure on the pillory and other milder punishments for heresy were also frequent. Heroic endurance was often displayed by these martyrs. On the 24th of April, 1494, a woman of upwards of eighty was burnt; her heresies comprised nine articles; “and never wold she turne from the said heresys for noon Exhortation, but in the said false and heronyous opynyons dyed.” Henry promised the Spanish ambassador that he would persecute with severity the Spanish Jews, who had fled to England.

A unique present was made to the king by the French statesman, Cardinal d’Amboise, who sent over a precious relic, the thigh-bone of St. George, enclosed in silver. On St. George’s Day, the 23rd of April, 1505, Henry went in solemn procession to St. Paul’s, where the holy relic was displayed before a devout multitude. The Convocation of Canterbury, when sitting in August, 1504, bestowed upon the king a spiritual favour—he was to participate in all the Church’s acts and good deeds in England during his lifetime, as well as after his death, and at the Mass in every large church, the celebrat­ing priest was to pray for the king’s salvation.

The devotion of the king and his family to the Church was shown in religious foundations of various kinds. The Franciscans he especially favoured. For the Observants, a branch of this order of friars, he founded three houses, at Canterbury, Newcastle, and Southampton ; for another, that of the Conventuals, three, at Richmond, Greenwich, and Newark. These he evidently continued to bear in mind, for on one occasion he made a valuable present of books to the friars at Greenwich for their library. We hear of chapels founded by Henry’s wife and mother. He himself built the Savoy Hospital, near Charing Cross, in London, destined to afford shelter for one hundred poor persons; and in the last year of his life he determined to erect at Bath a large hospital, on the model of the one in Paris. For these and similar foundations he appropriated the revenues of ecclesiastical institutions which were falling into decay, and thereby diverted them to better uses. To John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, he gladly gave permission to abolish an ancient nunnery, and to found in its stead a college at Cambridge. His mother in like manner founded Christ’s and St. John’s Colleges in the same University, and the Bishops of Lincoln and Winchester one each at Oxford.

Henry’s activity both in sacred and secular building bears testimony to his feeling and love for architecture. On the evening of the 21st of December, 1497, a fire broke out  in the palace which he had built for himself at Sheen, and in less than three hours the greater portion of the building, and the whole of its valuable contents, were destroyed. A splendid new building was at once begun, and was almost completed by the year 1501; but in consequence of the disaster the old name seems to have become distasteful to Henry, who therefore called the place Richmond, after his former title as earl. He also rebuilt Baynard’s Castle, in London, and took in hand alterations at the palace at Greenwich, which he often visited.

But the most splendid monument of the architecture of the Tudor king is the chapel in Westminster Abbey that is called by his name. At first Henry’s design was to found a chapel at Windsor, to be dedicated to the Holy Virgin, in which he intended one day to be interred, and to which should be attached a hospital for the support of the needy. To this plan Pope Alexander VI. gave his consent on the 4th of October, 1494, and allowed at the same time that the revenues of two decayed priories in the dioceses of Winchester and Lincoln should be devoted for the purpose. In the matter of granting indulgences, this new chapel was to have the same privileges as the “De Scala Coeli ”at Rome. The works for the king’s tomb had already been begun at Windsor, when he changed his plan and removed his new foundation to Westminster. New bulls were obtained from Alexander VI and Julius II, and the arrangements for the chapel and hospital were drawn up in detail; other benefices were appropriated to endow it, and the new foundation was to be placed under the immediate protection of the papal chair. In January, 1503, the demolition of the surrounding buildings having been completed, the foundation-stone was laid.

Then began to rise, at the east end of Westminster Abbey, the chapel of Henry VII, which was completed by the son of the founder, and remains to this day one of the most beautiful ecclesiastical buildings in London. The chapel is built in the Tudor style, with its characteristic low-pitched arch, and seems in the luxuriant richness of its ornament to defy all the stricter rules of constructive form. The principal lines of the building, which in the Gothic style stand out clearly, are here obscured by this overhanging fretwork of stone, and the architectural form is made use of for the indulgence of the most exuberant play of fancy. Yet the architect has not carried this freedom too far. He has kept within the limits of good taste, and all is blended into a most artistic, beautiful, and har­monious whole. At the east end of the chapel stands the sarcophagus of the royal pair, brought from Windsor and completed later, on which lie the bronze figures of both the king and queen, the whole being surrounded by an iron screen.

This chapel is a splendid monument raised for himself by the founder of a dynasty, after he had successfully passed through all dangers and all struggles and established the security of his throne. It stands, before the world as an enduring symbol in stone of the solidity and power which distinguished the new sovereignty of the Tudors.

This taste for architecture the king shared in common with his most eminent ministers, Morton and Bray. Morton was a true Maecenas. A whole series of edifices were, after his death, attributed to him, among which the most important are the archiepiscopal palaces of Canterbury and Lambeth. He also entertained the idea of converting into a harbour that arm of the sea which was gradually closing up between the island of Thanet and the mainland. Reginald Bray, who moreover had had a share in the education of Prince Arthur, was not only a patron of architecture, but himself an architect. He laid the foundation stone of the chapel at Westminster, and to him is attributed the design of that chapel, and also the rebuilding of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor; the resemblance between these two edifices is no doubt striking. Bray died on the 5th oft August, 1503, a few months after the laying of the foundation stone at Westminster. He had gained wealth in his official position, and had bestowed bountiful gifts on the chapel at Windsor.

There were others also who vied with Henry and his ministers in this work. The London Chronicle gives us a glimpse of the munificent public spirit of wealthy citizens, who erected churches and public buildings in London and other towns. The aldermen, John Trite, Hugh Clopton, Ralph Austry, Kneysworth, and others, hereby distinguished themselves.

Henry VII had while on the throne led a life of incessant and fruitful work, and thus he soon became old beyond his years. Towards the close of the century, when he had victoriously passed through all the dangers, domestic and foreign, which had beset him on all sides, he began to get more anxious, he attached importance to gloomy prophecies, or feared some new misfortune, should they become known among the people. His more strict observance of religious duties seems to have begun about this time. At last his health began visibly to decline. Early in life he had begged for dispensation from fasting, on account of weak health; it was not until later that he became more strict in this as in all other ordinances of the Church. On the occasion of Suffolk’s rising, a rumour was circulated that the king was in declining health and had not much longer to live, but it is not till the first months of the year 1507 that we hear of a severe illness. Then, however, he was in great danger. In the summer he regained his strength by taking frequent bodily exercise; but in the following February, attacks of gout kept him to his room at Greenwich, and it was not till the end of March that he slowly recovered. In June, Henry was still very weak. All idea of his getting well again was then abandoned—in fact, he never really recovered; and after a fresh attack, in March, 1509, all hope disappeared.

The king indeed continued to speak of his recovery, and occupied himself with the affairs of State, but at the same time he made preparations for his end. His last will, no doubt made long beforehand, bears the date of the 30th of March, 1509. He desired to rest by the side of his wife, before the high altar in his chapel at Westminster. To complete the building, he left £5000 to the abbot, and ordered masses for his soul, the distribution of alms, and the satisfaction of the just claims of all those who might have any grievance against him. He remembered his counsellors and servants, the completion of his religious foundations, also the conclusion of the most important political treaty of his last years—the marriage of the Princess Mary with the Archduke Charles. His mother’s name headed the list of those trusted friends who were commissioned to carry out his last will and testament.

To appease Heaven, a last general pardon was  granted and pilgrimages were undertaken for the king’s recovery, but the end could not be averted. On the 21st of April, 1509, in his fifty-third year, Henry VII died at his beloved Richmond.

On the 8th of May, a Tuesday, his body was brought by land along the south bank of the Thames to London. In the gloom of the evening, lighted up by countless torches, the long procession passed in mournful state over London Bridge. In front rode the sword-bearer and the vice-chamberlain of the town, and among the great crowd that followed them were the trumpeters and minstrels of the king, the foreign merchants, and officials of the court. The sheriffs and aldermen each carried two white roses in their hands, on horseback came two heralds-at-arms, a knight on a horse with black trappings with the king’s standard, dignitaries of the Church, and the chief justices of the royal courts of law. The friars walked along chanting, with the canons of London, and the choir of the king’s chapel. The lords followed them on horseback, the temporal lords on the left, the spiritual lords on the right. Sir David Owen carried a steel helmet with a gold crown upon it; Sir Edward Howard wore the king’s armour, with an open vizor, in his hand the battle-axe, the head bent downward resting on his stirrup ; one knight displayed on rich armour the arms of England. Alone, in front of the car, with his mace in his hand, rode the Lord Mayor of London.

Seven large horses, with trappings of black velvet, drew the car, on which lay an effigy of the deceased king, clothed in his rich robe of state, with the crown on his head, the sceptre and golden ball in either hand. Over it rose a canopy of cloth of gold. At the side of each horse marched a knight, and four lords at the side of the car, each one with a banner in his hand. Then followed the knights of the garter, according to their rank, one lord, five earls, and three barons, led by the Duke of Buckingham; esquires bore the swords and caps sent by the successive popes; Sir Thomas Brandon, the Master of the Horse, led a horse, with velvet trappings, on which were the arms of England ; Lord Darcy rode at the head of the bodyguard; gentlemen, members of the trade guilds, and others in great numbers, formed the remainder of the procession.

At the west doors of St. Paul’s Church, where the Bishop of London was waiting in full canonicals, the procession paused.

Amidst clouds of incense, twelve men of the guard lifted the heavy coffin with the effigy lying on it, from the car, the Duke of Buckingham and five earls walked at the side and . laid their hand on the coffin, four barons held a rich canopy over it, till it was set down before the high altar. After a solemn dirge by the Bishop of London, the procession left the church, and knights and heralds kept guard over the corpse. On the following day three masses were sung, and the Bishop of Rochester preached. About one o’clock, after the midday meal, the coffin was borne out of the church, and the procession went in the same order as on the previous day, through Fleet Street to Charing Cross, where the Abbot of Westminster, with three abbots and the monks of the abbey stood, and incensed the corpse. In the same way it was received at the west door of the abbey by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, whilst the Abbey Church was lighted up with a costly and curious light. Here also knights kept guard by the coffin throughout the night.

On Thursday, the 10th of May, took place the interment. After three masses had been celebrated, and a solemn requiem by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the offerings were made with befitting solemnity; four heralds received the king’s coat of mail, shield, sword, and the crowned helmet; then Sir Edward Howard rode in full armour, but without a helmet, into the church, sprang from his saddle, and, led by the earls of Kent and Essex, stepped up to the archbishop before the altar; two monks then led him into the sacristy, where he took off his armour. He appeared again in a black garment, and presented his offering, where upon all, according to their rank, followed him with their gifts. Meanwhile the Duke of Buckingham and the knights accompanying him, carried in palls with slow and solemn step, and spread them over the catafalque. The Bishop of London preached the sermon; then they raised the image of the king from the bier, and the choir chanted the psalm, “Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis.” Again the corpse was incensed, and the insignia were taken from the coffin, upon which lay, on black velvet, a large cross in white satin.

Thus they bore King Henry to the vault. The prelates pronounced the absolution, the Archbishop of Canterbury threw earth upon the coffin, the Lord Treasurer and the Lord Steward broke their staves and threw them into the vault, and the other state officials did the same. The vault was then closed, and a pall of cloth of gold was spread over it But the heralds took their tabards from their shoulders, and hung them on the railing round the catafalque, and cried out in French the lamentation, “The noble King Henry VII is dead!”. Then they put their tabards on again, and with loud voices uttered the joyful cry, “Long live the noble King Henry VIII”

A new reign had begun.

 

the end