Edward IV, 1461-1483
Under Edward IV, whose reign dates from 1461, the forms of taxation by authority of Parliament were indeed gone through with. In that respect his reign was typical of the period. His early taxation, levied while the struggle with the Lancastrians was still in progress, was not particularly heavy; but being laid by Parliaments sympathetic with the Yorkist cause, Edward had little difficulty in exerting supreme influence over it. Four years after his accession, he was given the subsidy on wool and tunnage and poundage for life.[263] Beside these, Parliament granted him frequent fifteenths and tenths. Not content, however, with the grants made by Parliament, he had recourse to a new form of extortion known by the euphemistic title of benevolence. The benevolence was a gift made to the king by individuals or groups of them, ostensibly in charity, but in reality under enforcement. It differed from the forced loan, the exaction of which is mentioned in the list of charges leading to the deposition of Richard II, in that by it the king incurred no obligation for repayment. Henry VIII in later years proved himself a genius Benevolences and forced loans at obtaining both of these means of income. Edward found also that the revival of obsolete statutes and the laying of fines for breaches of them could be turned to profit; the collection of ancient debts due to the crown, and the utilization of the royal power to advance his own mercantile interests, Edward pushed to the extreme in order to supplement the not infrequent regular grants of Parliament.
Dowell retells the story given in Hall’s Chronicle of Edward and a certain rich widow to whom he applied in person for a benevolence. In his younger days Edward was one of the handsomest men in the land, and the widow received his advances with favor. He asked her for a gift and she promptly gave him £20.
“By my troth,” says she, “for thy lovely countenance thou shalt have even twenty pounds.”
Edward, who had “looked for scarce half that sum, thanked her and lovinglie kissed her.” Thereupon the lady doubled the benevolence, paying him a second £20, either, as the Chronicler remarks, “because she esteemed the kiss of a king so precious a jewele” or “because the flavour of his breath did so comfort her stomach.” Such was a fifteenth-century conception of royal courtesy.[264]
Upon Edward’s death in 1483, the crown for a moment rested on the head of his young son, Edward V, only to be snatched away Richard III, 1483-1485 in favor of the lad’s uncle Richard III. Richard received from Parliament in 1484 a grant of tunnage and poundage and the subsidy on wool for life.[265] His death on Bosworth Field the next year gave the world no opportunity to see what use he would make of the freedom which Parliament thus gave him.
During the brief three years of Richard’s ascendancy, however, there occurred an assertion of right and its complementary statute which assume great importance in the light of later events.Prohibition of benevolences, 1484 When Richard was invited to become king, he was presented with a remarkable address, which, among other things, cited the benevolences of the late reign as “extorcions, ... agenst the Lawes of God and Man,” and as more intolerable than “jopardye of deth.”[266] At his only Parliament, held in 1484, benevolences were declared unlawful, and were to be “dampned and annulled forever.”[267]
The Tudors
Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, ascended the throne upon the successful issue of the battle of Bosworth. The wonder of the era which he introduced lies not in any increase in the powers of Parliament, but rather that they existed at all when the period closed. The one hundred and twenty years of the Tudor epoch exhibits no progress toward the realization of parliamentary supremacy; on the other hand, the trend was in the opposite direction. The Tudors were not tyrannical enough to rouse opposition to the fever heat as did John; they knew rather how to bridle their despotism in time to check revolt, and especially how to make unlawful acts assume the aspect of legality. Furthermore, the immense activity of commerce, the progress of literature, the religious reconstitution during the sixteenth century, were in themselves reasons for slow advance in matters of government; the stress of trade consequent upon the discovery of a new world, the absorbing interest in new subjects for thought, the intensity and magnitude of new religious conceptions, engaged the minds of men on subjects other than those of Parliament and king. As long as these worked in apparent harmony and the results did not greatly offend, men were content to let well enough alone. So it was that the Tudors, surrounding themselves with a new nobility attached to the throne by reasons of their very origin and continuance, were able to follow their own devices and raise money almost as seemed to them good.
In all the twenty-four years of Henry VII’s reign he called Parliament only seven times, and six of the seven Parliaments sat within the first eleven years of his kingship. Each was the occasion of a demand for money. At his first Parliament, that of 1485, he received a grant of tunnage and poundage and a subsidy on wool for life.[268] Parliaments of Henry VII The “new-found” subsidy Three years later, however, the consequences of heavy taxation were disastrous. Need arising for the enlistment of an army with which to aid the Duke of Brittany against the King of France, a tax was devised which not only exacted a tenth of incomes from freeholders, but applied as well to movables, laying imposition upon articles used in trade and even merchants’ stocks. This “new-found subsidy” proved so intolerable to the lower classes that a great insurrection broke out in the north against it.[269] The king with Tudor wisdom, remitted some £48,000 of the £75,000 which the tax was designed to raise, and Parliament gave him in return a fifteenth and tenth. In 1497, a similar rebellion occurred in Cornwall against a tax levied for the Scotch War.