Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

Such a record would have entitled Henry to praise as a prince of unparalleled magnanimity, but for its common-sense accompaniment of fines and confiscations. But in fact, to penalise rebellion in some sort was an absolute necessity; not to have done so would have jeopardised the throne. The method adopted might not be heroic, but it was supremely practical; inasmuch as it wrought the minimum of positive injury to the punished, while at once depriving them of power to harm and supplying the king himself with the sinews of government, of which he was sorely in need. It was dictated quite as much by policy as by magnanimity, but the mere fact that Henry recognised it from the outset as sounder policy than any precedents, recent at any rate, suggested, is testimony to the acuteness of his moral perceptions as well as to the keenness of his intelligence. Nor is it fair to deprive Henry of the credit of magnanimity, merely because the magnanimity paid. To realise that it did pay and prove completely successful, we have only to observe that after the battle of Stoke there was no baronial rising in England. Warbeck got all his support either from the exiles or from foreign courts: when he tried to raise the West of England on his own account, he collapsed ignominiously. It is true that an army of Cornish insurgents had marched to Blackheath just before, and had there been broken up; but that was a purely popular rising in protest against taxation, and its chiefs were a blacksmith and a lawyer.

III
THE TUDOR ABSOLUTISM AND THE EXCHEQUER

It was not sufficient, however, merely to secure the sceptre in the hands of a strong king; it was necessary further to establish a strong system. For half a century the great power and estates of individual barons had enabled them to keep the country in perpetual turmoil. The idea of universal obedience to the established government simply because it was established had vanished from the military and political classes: the idea even of concerted government by one class, guided by its interests as a class, had disappeared; it was only the personal factor, personal interests, that counted. Below the baronage, the gentry who bordered on the baronage, and their retainers, townsfolk and country folk stood aloof from the fighting, and lived as peacefully as they might—all things considered, with a wonderful freedom from disturbance. But standing aloof from the fighting, they had perforce stood aloof also from the business of government, which fell to the military faction that happened for the time being to have the upper hand. They were in short ready to support and profit by a government which gave promise of peace and stability, order and justice; but they were not ready to organise such a government for themselves, or to take a prominent part in conducting it. Under such conditions, the Yorkists had established a despotism, as the only workable form of government. But their despotism was one that rested almost exclusively on the personal forcefulness of the ruler. It was Henry’s task to keep the effective power concentrated in the King’s hands, but to give it a constitutional colour—to make the nation feel it as a government by consent. It was therefore necessary to eliminate factors which naturally tended to disturbance—in other words, to deprive the individual barons of the power of aggressive self-assertion; and at the same time, so to treat the naturally orderly elements of society as to keep them on the side of the government.

This was the root-principle of the Tudor Absolutism, devised and put into practice by the first Tudor king, and systematically carried out by his son and grand-daughter. The system carried England to the first place among the nations. But it broke down when the Stuarts ignored its fundamental principle, and so treated the naturally orderly elements of society as to turn them against the government. For under the system, those elements acquired the power of organisation and self-protection, as the accompaniment of the prosperity they enjoyed increasingly; and it followed that the system could only remain stable so long as there was essential harmony and sympathy between the monarch and his subjects.

For the concentration of power, effective power, in the king’s hands, money was essential; while to keep the general population contented, it was necessary that their purses should not be subjected to too severe exactions, which must fall elsewhere. Henry directed them against the nobility. The nation at large had no objection; the king’s treasury was filled and the power of the nobles curtailed by the same operation. Thus the king eliminated the disturbing factor, or allowed it to eliminate itself. When noblemen got themselves mixed up with treasons, they could not complain if their lives were spared and their goods paid the forfeit. They had been wont to maintain great households, every man having in his service the nucleus of an army. These crowds of retainers were forbidden by law, as being, for obvious reasons, a public danger. If noblemen, accustomed to over-ride the law, chose to keep up their households in despite of it, they could not expect sympathy when they were called upon to pay in cash the penalty of breaking the law. These measures were not only thoroughly defensible as being entirely free from any taint of injustice; they also served directly to relieve taxation, to fill the royal coffers, and to make wanton insurrection difficult.

Yet, while keeping within what might be called legitimate bounds, as he habitually did while Morton was alive, the king undoubtedly permitted himself to apply methods which savoured of trickery. He made great parade of a war with France, appealing to national patriotism to supply the funds. The appeal was successful, but there was no corresponding expenditure on the campaign. Excellent reasons for inactivity were of course forthcoming, but it is none the less certain that no activity was ever contemplated. All that was intended was a demonstration which might induce the French monarch to buy the English king off with solid cash—as he eventually did. The whole transaction was eminently profitable, but Henry had certainly got his money out of his own subjects by false pretences. The same plea was resorted to, to get benevolences authorised, when the famous dilemma traditionally—but as it would seem quite unjustly—attributed to Cardinal Morton was applied. People who lived handsomely could obviously afford a contribution by curtailing their extravagance; people who did not live handsomely must have wealth laid by. In either case, there could be no inability to serve the king’s need. The spirit which prompted the invention of that dilemma is illustrated in a story reported by Bacon as traditional. Henry paid a visit to the Earl of Oxford at Henningham, where he was sumptuously entertained, and on his departure passed out through a lane of the earl’s retainers drawn up to do him honour. “These, no doubt, are your menial servants,” observed the king. The earl demurred; they were not menials, but retainers, who had turned out to do him credit when he had so distinguished a guest. Whereupon “The king started a little, and said, ‘By my faith, my lord, I thank you for my good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must speak with you.’ And it is part of the report that the earl compounded for no less than fifteen thousand marks.” It is obvious that such a story might have been developed out of some really quite justifiable incident; but it is tolerably certain that it was not only in his closing years that Henry displayed what we may call an unkingly acquisitiveness.

In passing, however, it may be remarked that this was a family trait. Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s prejudice against spending a shilling that could be kept in her purse, or neglecting any plausible pretext for attracting coin into it. She also inherited his business principle of repaying every loan he contracted with unfailing punctuality. Henry VIII. did not indeed practise economy, but he could haggle over a money bargain as keenly as his father or his daughter, and his generosity, when he indulged it, was usually at the expense of another pocket than his own. The art of appropriating in the public eye credit to which he was not in the least entitled, was one of which he was a past master; it was one the value of which his father, who certainly neglected any efforts to make himself personally popular, somewhat underrated. Thrift is a virtue; for Henry VII., a particularly necessary virtue; but it is not one that under any circumstances helps to make him who exercises it attractive. When it assumes a sordid aspect, it becomes definitely repellent.

That did not trouble Henry; he wanted money, and during the greater part of his reign he got it without flagrant extortion; with such success, too, that in his later years he was able almost entirely to work without calling Parliament: the skill with which he conducted his foreign negotiations on the same cash principles contributing not a little to this result.

IV
COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY

It was characteristic of Henry, and somewhat unfortunate for his reputation, that he cared nothing at all about investing his policy with any showiness unless some specific end was to be gained thereby. The objects his government had in view were essentially prosaic: commonplace they cannot be called, because in a mediæval monarch they were eminently original. It was customary for kings to interfere in commercial affairs chiefly when they saw their way to collect by so doing contributions to the exchequer, or when it seemed worth while to make enactments in favour of capital as against labour. Henry has the credit of being the first English king who clearly recognised commercial development as a primary care of government: which hitherto only the oligarchical city-states of Italy and the German free-towns had done. It is true that he was quite ready to subordinate the commercial to a political end; to attack those who sheltered his enemies, not with pikes and culverins but with commercial restrictions only less injurious to English trade than to that of the antagonist. He did so without suffering from the illusion that the loss of the foreign merchant was the gain of the English. In these cases he weighed the economic loss against the political gain. In mediæval practice, the economic consideration would have counted for practically nothing in the scale. In the eyes of some politicians to-day, no political advantage would be worth counting as against an economic inconvenience—and it is usually extremely difficult to show that a political advantage will accompany an economic inconvenience. But Henry was only just emerging from mediæval conceptions. The remarkable thing is that he realised commerce as an object of policy at all, not that he rated its importance lower than Adam Smith: that he relaxed the mediæval theory, not that he did not discard it altogether.