VI. The Tudor Despotism and the Beginnings of the Reformation (1497-1528)
The last twelve years of the reign of Henry VII. present in most respects a complete contrast to the earlier period, 1485-1497. There were no more rebellions, and—as we have already seen—no more plots that caused any serious danger. Nor did the king indulge his unruly subjects in foreign wars, though he was constantly engaged in negotiations with France, Scotland, Spain and the emperor, which from time to time took awkward turns. But Henry was determined to win all that he could by diplomacy, and not by force of arms. His cautious, but often unscrupulous, dealings with the rival continental powers had two main ends: the first was to keep his own position safe by playing off France against the Empire and Spain; the second was to get commercial advantages by dangling his alliance before each power in turn. Flanders was still the greatest customer of England, and it was therefore necessary above all things to keep on good terms with the archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian, who on coming of age had taken over the rule of the Netherlands from his father. The king’s great triumphs were the conclusion of the Intercursus Magnus of 1496 and the Intercursus Malus (so called by the Commercial treaties. Flemings, not by the English) of 1506. The former provided for a renewal of the old commercial alliance with the house of Burgundy, on the same terms under which it had existed in the time of Edward IV.; the rupture which had taken place during the years when Maximilian was backing Perkin Warbeck had been equally injurious to both parties. The Malus Intercursus on the other hand gave England some privileges which she had not before enjoyed—exemption from local tolls in Antwerp and Holland, and a licence for English merchants to sell cloth retail as well as wholesale—a concession which hit the Netherland small traders and middlemen very hard. Another great commercial advantage secured by Henry VII. for his subjects was an increased share of the trade to the Scandinavian countries. The old treaties of Edward IV. with the Hanseatic League had left the Germans still in control of the northern seas. Nearly all the Baltic goods, and most of those from Denmark and Norway, had been reaching London or Hull in foreign bottoms. Henry allied himself with John of Denmark, who was chafing under the monopoly of the Hansa, and obtained the most ample grants of free trade in his realms. The Germans murmured, but the English shipping in eastern and northern waters continued to multiply. Much the same policy was pursued in the Mediterranean. Southern goods hitherto had come to Southampton or Sandwich invariably in Venetian carracks, which took back in return English wool and metals. Henry concluded a treaty with Florence, by which that republic undertook to receive his ships in its harbours and to allow them to purchase all eastern goods that they might require. From this time forward the Venetian monopoly ceased, and the visits of English merchant vessels to the Mediterranean became frequent and regular.
Nor was it in dealing with old lines of trade alone that Henry Tudor showed himself the watchful guardian of the interests of his subjects. He must take his share of credit for the encouragement of the exploration of the seas of the English navigators. Far West. The British traders had already pushed far into the Atlantic before Columbus discovered America; fired by the success of the great navigator they continued their adventures, hoping like him to discover a short “north-west passage” to Cathay and Japan. With a charter from the king giving him leave to set up the English banner on all the lands he might discover, the Bristol Genoese trader John Cabot successfully passed the great sea in 1497, and discovered Newfoundland and its rich fishing stations. Henry rewarded him with a pension of £20 a year, and encouraged him to further exploration, in which he discovered all the American coastline from Labrador to the mouth of the Delaware—a great heritage for England, but one not destined to be taken up for colonization till more than a century had passed.
Henry’s services to English commerce were undoubtedly of far more importance to the nation than all the tortuous details of his foreign policy. His chicanery need not, however, be censured over much, for the princes with whom Foreign policy of Henry VII. he had to deal, and notably Ferdinand and Maximilian, were as insincere and selfish as himself. Few diplomatic hagglings have been so long and so sordid as that between England and Spain over the marriage treaty which gave the hand of Catherine of Aragon first to Henry’s eldest son Arthur, and then, on his premature death in 1502, to his second son Henry. The English king no doubt imagined that he had secured a good bargain, as he had kept the princess’s dowry, and yet never gave Ferdinand any practical assistance in war or peace. It is interesting to find that he had for some time at the end of his reign a second Spanish marriage in view; his wife Elizabeth of York having died in 1503, he seriously proposed himself as a suitor for Joanna of Castile, the elder sister of Catherine, and the widow of the archduke Philip, though she was known to be insane. Apparently he hoped thereby to gain vantage ground for an interference in Spanish politics, which would have been most offensive to Ferdinand. Nothing came of the project, which contrasts strangely with the greater part of Henry’s sober and cautious schemes.
On the other hand a third project of marriage alliance which Henry carried out in 1503 was destined to be consummated, and to have momentous, though long-deferred, results. Marriage of James IV. of Scotland and Margaret Tudor. This was the giving of the hand of his daughter Margaret to James IV. of Scotland. Thereby he bought quiet on the Border and alliance with Scotland for no more than some ten years. But—as it chanced—the issue of this alliance was destined to unite the English and the Scottish crowns, when the male line of the Tudors died out, and Henry, quite unintentionally, had his share in bringing about the consummation, by peaceful means, of that end which Edward I. had sought for so long to win by the strong hand.
All the foreign politics of the reign of Henry VII. have small importance compared with his work within the realm. The true monument of his ability was that he left England tamed and orderly, with an obedient people and a full Character of Henry’s internal rule. exchequer, though he had taken it over wellnigh in a state of anarchy. The mere suppression of insurrections like those of Simnel and Warbeck was a small part of his task. The harder part was to recreate a spirit of order and subordination among a nation accustomed to long civil strife. His instruments were ministers of ability chosen from the clergy and the gentry—he seems to have been equally averse to trusting the baronage at the one end of the social scale, or mere upstarts at the other, and it is notable that no one during his reign can be called a court favourite. The best-known names among his servants were his great chancellor, Archbishop Morton, Foxe, bishop of Winchester, Sir Reginald Bray, and the lawyers Empson and Dudley. These two last bore the brunt of the unpopularity of the financial policy of the king during the latter half of his reign, when the vice of avarice seems to have grown upon him beyond all reason. But Henry was such a hard-working monarch, and so familiar with all the details of administration, that his ministers cannot be said to have had any independent authority, or to have directed their master’s course of action.
The machinery employed by the first of the Tudors for the suppression of domestic disorder is well known. The most important item added by him to the administrative machinery of the realm was the famous Star Chamber, The Star Chamber. which was licensed by the parliament of 1487. It consisted of a small committee of ministers, privy councillors and judges, which sat to deal with offences that seemed to lie outside the scope of the common law, or more frequently with the misdoings of men who were so powerful that the local courts could not be trusted to execute justice upon them, such as great landowners, sheriffs and other royal officials, or turbulent individuals who were the terror of their native districts. The need for a strong central court directly inspired by the king, which could administer justice without respect of persons, was so great, that the constitutional danger of establishing an autocratic judicial committee, untrammelled by the ordinary rules of law, escaped notice at the time. It was not till much later that the nation came to look upon the Star Chamber as the special engine of royal tyranny and to loathe its name. In 1500 it was for the common profit of the realm that there should exist such a court, which could reduce even the most powerful offender to order.
One of the most notable parts of the king’s policy was his long-continued and successful assault on the abuse of “livery and maintenance,” which had been at its height during the Wars of the Roses. We have seen the part which Suppression of livery and maintenance. it had taken in strengthening the influence of those who were already too powerful, and weakening the ordinary operation of the law. Henry put it down with a strong hand, forbidding all liveries entirely, save for the mere domestic retainers of each magnate. His determination to end the system was well shown by the fact that he heavily fined even the earl of Oxford, the companion of his exile, the victor of Bosworth, and the most notoriously loyal peer in the realm, for an ostentatious violation of the statute. Where Oxford was punished, no less favoured person could hope to escape. By the end of the reign the little hosts of badged adherents which had formed the nucleus for the armies of the Wars of the Roses had ceased to exist.
Edward IV., as has been already remarked, had many of the opportunities of the autocrat, if only he had cared to use them; but his sloth and self-indulgence stood in the way. Henry VII., the most laborious and systematic of men, Personal rule. turned them to account. He formed his personal opinion on every problem of administration and intervened himself in every detail. In many respects he was his own prime minister, and nothing was done without his knowledge and consent. A consistent policy may be detected in all his acts—that of gathering all the machinery of government into his own hands. Under the later Plantagenets and the Lancastrian kings the great check on the power of the crown had been that financial difficulties were continually compelling the sovereign to summon parliaments. The estates had interfered perpetually in all the details of governance, by means of the power of the purse. Edward IV., first among English sovereigns, had been able to dispense with parliaments for periods of many years, because he did not need their grants save at long intervals. Henry was in the same position; by strict economy, by the use of foreign subsidies, by the automatic growth of his revenues during a time of peace and returning prosperity, by confiscation and forfeitures, he built himself up a financial position which rendered it unnecessary for him to make frequent appeals to parliament. Not the least fertile of his expedients was that regular exploitation of the law as a source of revenue, which had already been seen in the time of his father-in-law. This part of Henry’s policy is connected with the name of his two extortionate “fiscal judges” Empson and Dudley, who “turned law and justice into rapine” by their minute inquisition into all technical breaches of legality, and the nice fashion in which they adapted the fine to the wealth of the misdemeanant, without any reference to his moral guilt or any regard for extenuating circumstances. The king must take the responsibility for their unjust doings; it was his coffers which mainly profited by their chicane. In his later years he fell into the vice of hoarding money for its own sake; so necessary was it to his policy that he should be free, as far as possible, from the need for applying to parliament for money, that he became morbidly anxious to have great hoards in readiness for any possible day of financial stress. At his death he is said to have had £1,800,000 in hard cash laid by. Hence it is not strange to find that he was able to dispense with parliaments in a fashion that would have seemed incredible to a 14th-century king. In his whole reign he only asked them five times for grants of taxation, and three of the five requests were made during the first seven years of his reign. In the eyes of many men parliament lost the main reason for its existence when it ceased to be the habitual provider of funds for the ordinary expenses of the realm. Those who had a better conception of its proper functions could see that it had at any rate been stripped of its chief power when the king no longer required its subsidies. There are traces of a want of public interest in its proceedings, very different from the anxiety with which they used to be followed in Plantagenet and Lancastrian times. Legislation, which only incidentally affects him, is very much less exciting to the ordinary citizen than taxation, which aims directly at his pocket. It is at any rate clear that during the latter years of his reign, when the time of impostures and rebellions had ended, Henry was able to dispense with parliaments to a great extent, and incurred no unpopularity by doing so. Indeed he was accepted by the English people as the benefactor who had delivered them from anarchy; and if they murmured at his love of hoarding, and cursed his inquisitors Empson and Dudley, they had no wish to change the Tudor rule, and were far from regarding the times of the “Lancastrian experiment” as a lost golden age. The present king might be unscrupulous and avaricious, but he was cautious, intelligent and economical; no one would have wished to recall the régime of that “crowned saint” Henry VI.
Nevertheless when the first of the Tudors died, on the 21st of April 1509, there were few who regretted him. He was not a monarch to rouse enthusiasm, while much was expected from his brilliant, clever and handsome son Henry VIII. Henry VIII., whose magnificent presence and manly vigour recalled the early prime of Edward IV. Some years later England realized that its new king had inherited not only the physical beauty and strength of his grandfather, but also every one of his faults, with the sole exception of his tendency to sloth. Henry VIII. indeed may be said, to sum up his character in brief, to have combined his father’s brains with his grandfather’s passions. Edward IV. was selfish and cruel, but failed to become a tyrant because he lacked the energy for continuous work. Henry VII. was unscrupulous and untiring, but so cautious and wary that he avoided violent action and dangerous risks. Their descendant had neither Edward’s sloth nor Henry’s moderation; he was capable of going to almost any lengths in pursuit of the gratification of his ambition, his passions, his resentment or his simple love of self-assertion. Yet, however far he might go on the road to tyranny, Henry had sufficient cunning, versatility and power of cool reflection, to know precisely when he had reached the edge of the impossible. He had his father’s faculty for gauging public opinion, and estimating dangers, and though his more venturous temperament led him to press on far beyond the point at which the seventh Henry would have halted, he always stopped short on the hither side of the gulf. It was the most marvellous proof of his ability that he died on his throne after nearly forty years of autocratic rule, during which he had roused more enmities and done more to change the face of the realm than any of the kings that were before him.