Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (14 page)

As noted in the Introduction, any male owning land worth 40 shillings (£2) annually could vote for his county’s knights of the shire. In most boroughs, the vote was restricted to an inside group of civic leaders (the corporation) or those who lived in a certain part of town. These restrictions varied from constituency to constituency; overall, a bit less than 3 percent of English and Welsh males, perhaps 30,000 people, had a vote. As a result, most members of the lower house were not so much elected as
selected
by a dominant local landowner, or a few leading townsmen. Contests between candidates were rare. The MPs themselves tended to be prominent members of the classes who selected them: great landowners, wealthy merchants or, in a few cases, leading attorneys or professional men. Thus, “election” to Parliament was usually a sign of local social status, not a career move. As a result,
both
houses of Parliament tended to represent the views of the upper class, not the common man or woman.

Parliament’s very existence was entirely at the sovereign’s will. That is, only he could summon a parliament to meet, prorogue it (suspend its meeting until needed again), or dissolve it (send the members home and call for elections to a new parliament). Indeed, many historians refer to parliaments in the plural for this period, to emphasize that it was more of an event than an institution, with no claim to existence beyond the monarch’s whim. Given that a sitting parliament had the right to petition the sovereign for redress of grievance and to impeach (try) his ministers for misconduct; and that, in the fifteenth century, its members had often criticized those ministers (and, by implication, the monarch himself) for conduct of foreign policy, corruption, incompetence, or courtly extravagance, one might wonder why a late medieval or early modern ruler would ever summon such a body? The chief reason was money. Kings were notoriously short of it, yet could not impose a tax without parliamentary approval. Moreover, such approval could be useful to a king pursuing a controversial policy, such as a war or a trade embargo, because it could be offered as evidence that the nation had been consulted. Still, late-fifteenth-century rulers kept such occasions to minimum: Parliament sat, on average, only 24 days a year under the Yorkists, 18 days a year under Henry VII. After 1495, Henry called only two parliaments, which sat for an average of just eight days a year.

When parliaments did meet, government officials took the lead by spelling out royal policies and needs, while members raised grievances. Either could result in petitions for legislation. Whichever house originated a petition debated it. If approved by a vote, it was then engrossed as a bill. Each bill had to undergo two readings, each one also subject to debate and vote, before it could be sent to the other house to repeat the process of engrossment, readings, debates, and votes. If a bill was approved through each of these steps it was said to have passed and was then submitted to the sovereign, who could attach his seal to it, by which it became an act of parliament (a law or statute); or veto it, in which case it was lost at least until the next session.

Once passed, a law had to be administered and enforced. In the country at large, the king employed up to 40 administrators of Crown lands (who supervised an army of stewards, bailiffs, keepers, and wardens) and up to 90 Customs officials to collect his revenues. He also appointed traveling assize judges to provide royal justice in major felony cases, biannually, to the shire court of each county. Since the king did not otherwise have bureaucrats “on the ground” to enforce his will or a standing army to coerce obedience, he had to rely on the cooperation of his most important subjects for everything else. We have already seen that in frontier areas, such as the Welsh Marches, the Anglo-Scottish border, or the Irish Pale, late-medieval kings depended on powerful local magnates and their affinities to enforce order. In fact, they relied on the local nobility to keep a watch on every county, a duty which would, by the mid-sixteenth century, evolve into the office of
lord lieutenant
of the shire. Such magnates also held numerous other local posts: as constables of royal castles, keepers of royal forests, stewards of royal manors. These positions paid well in both money and prestige for very little work, and were therefore eagerly sought by ambitious noblemen.

Supporting these locally significant nobles were the gentry, whose members might serve as sheriffs or justices of the peace (JPs). The sheriff collected taxes, impaneled juries for shire courts, and, early in the period, raised the militia. He was unpaid and the position, though honorific, was also onerous – not least because he was liable in law for taxes which he had failed to collect. In 1461, most of his law enforcement powers were transferred to JPs. Most counties had scores of JPs, acting as judges in legal and economic disputes, including less serious felonies, twice a year at the assizes, four times a year at meetings of the shire court called quarter sessions, and, on a more ad hoc basis as needed, at petty sessions. In cities the king relied on the corporation – the mayor and aldermen – whose power he had granted by means of the borough’s charter. In all these roles, since he could not afford to provide salaries, he depended on the good will of those he asked to serve. That good will might not be forthcoming if local officials or their neighbors thought the monarch’s requests unreasonable. This explains why the king of England did not always get his own way.

Henry VII adopted and improved the structure of government that he inherited from the Yorkists to make it a more efficient and effective instrument of rule. He did this by reviving three old principles of medieval kingship, long forgotten by the Lancastrians and revived only briefly by the Yorkists:

The king must be strong.

The king must govern with consent.

The king must live of his own.

First, the king must be strong. Henry had, of course, demonstrated his strength by defeating Richard III and later usurpers in battle. Away from the battlefield, he was a vigorous, hard-working king. As indicated above, he often bypassed normal channels (such as the Exchequer), running government personally out of his household. He could innovate, as when he created new subgroups of the council such as the Council Learned in the Law to prosecute disloyal or feuding aristocrats. Above all, he sought to keep the nobility, of whom he was exceedingly wary, in check. Unlike Henry VI, he was very sparing in distributing titles, honors, and lands. Unlike Edward IV, he avoided over-reliance on a few mighty peers like a Warwick or a Gloucester. Rather, he revived a different Edwardian strategy by encouraging Parliament to attack noble affinities through a Statute Against Liveries in 1487, renewed and amplified in 1504. These laws outlawed unauthorized private noble armies (whose uniforms were referred to as liveries). He also used attainder, the threat of attainder, or his power to forgive an attainder as a way of keeping over-mighty subjects on probation and off balance. As the reign wore on, he increasingly imposed on offending nobles exorbitant recognizances or bonds requiring them to pay huge sums of money (sometimes thousands of pounds). These would not necessarily be collected; rather, they would be kept on file as a noble pledge – and a royal threat – against future rebellious behavior. By the time of the king’s death in 1509, some three-quarters of the peerage were, or had been, laboring under an attainder, recognizance, or some other financial penalty. According to one of his closest advisers/enforcers, Edmund Dudley (ca. 1462–1510), the king wished “to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure.”
¹⁰
This led contemporaries to accuse Henry of greed and vindictiveness and goes far to explain why, at his death in 1509, he does not appear to have been much lamented. But it is difficult to argue with the results of his policies: the restoration of royal authority and political order, the elimination of effective aristocratic opposition and violence, and the firm establishment of the new dynasty.

If Henry was strong, he nevertheless sought advice and support for his policies, though not necessarily from his nobility. As the Statutes Against Liveries suggest, Henry was careful to secure parliamentary support of controversial measures. He was also careful to follow Edward IV’s precedent of summoning a large council of 20 to 30. He did this, first, so that no one would dominate but himself; and, second, in order to include gentlemen, merchants, and attorneys. His closest advisers and henchmen tended to be lawyers of gentry background, like the aforementioned Dudley, Sir Reginald Bray (ca. 1440–1503), or Sir Richard Empson (ca. 1450–1510). As under Edward, this had multiple virtues. First, such men were not sufficiently powerful in themselves to pose a challenge to the king’s rule. Second, they could offer practical advice on the economy, the law, and other matters. Third, because they owed everything to the king, they could be counted on to do the dirty work of revenue collection, surveillance, and intimidation. Along the same lines, Henry VII increased the power of his JPs against that of the more socially prominent (but not always honest or efficient) magnates and sheriffs. In particular, he authorized them to seek out unlawful retainers and to investigate complaints of extortion by government officials. Finally, Henry’s revival of court ceremonies and entertainments indicates that he understood the propaganda value in securing an appearance of consent and approval for royal policies. This is not to imply that he had to deal with a free press (it did not exist), public opinion polls, or public opinion itself in the modern sense. Rather, in this context, consent meant that people were reasonably satisfied with his rule and unlikely to seek out or support an alternative.

One reason for that satisfaction was Henry VII’s financial probity. Theoretically, the king owned so much property and received so much money out of rents and Customs duties that he should have been able to live “of his own.” That is, his “ordinary” revenue was supposed to be sufficient for him to run his household, pay the salaries of his officials, and pursue domestic policy without having to call a parliament to vote him any “extraordinary” revenue in new taxes. Such extraordinary revenue was only to be raised in emergencies, such as a state of rebellion or war. Unfortunately the previous century, with its recurrent rebellions and wars, had often seemed like one long emergency. The Lancastrians, in particular, had repeatedly asked Parliament for tax increases to pay for the Hundred Years’ War and their part in the Wars of the Roses. Moreover, the Crown lands and Customs revenue had been so devastated by these wars and so poorly administered by corrupt officials that those monarchs had to ask for additional parliamentary funds just to keep their domestic establishments running. As a result, the English taxpayer and his representatives in Parliament were increasingly hostile to new taxes, as indicated by the Cornish rebellion.

Henry VII was shrewd enough to see that this had to stop. He sought to live almost entirely on his ordinary revenue by exploiting carefully its four sources. First, he increased the amount of Crown lands. As king he inherited both the Lancastrian and Yorkist estates, and he brought Tudor lands with him. Rather than dispense these to his nobility as previous kings had done, his parliaments passed five acts of resumption
revoking
previous grants of royal land. He also pursued feudal escheats, that is, lands which were supposed to be forfeit to the Crown on the deaths of their holders. Finally, his aggressive policy of seeking acts of attainder against his principal enemies brought yet more land into his hands. By 1504, the clear yield from Crown lands (that is, the profits from rents and the sale of crops and minerals) had risen from about
£
29,000 a year to
£
42,000 a year.

An equally important component of the ordinary revenue was the yield from Customs duties on wool and other commodities. This, too, had fallen during the previous century, largely because the wars had wrecked trade. Henry rectified the problem by embracing a mostly peaceful foreign policy and trade agreements with foreign powers, as we have seen. This sent the Customs yield from £33,000 a year to over £41,000 a year. Third, Henry pursued more aggressively dues and fines owed to the Crown as its feudal right, including fees on inheritances,
wardships
, and the marriage of underage or widowed royal tenants. The annual yield from these sources rose from a mere £343 in 1491 to £6,000 in 1507. Fourth, his more efficient administration exploited legal fines and fees. Finally, Henry VII, like Edward IV, was not above investing in trading voyages, accepting a pension from the French king, or extorting loans and “benevolences” from his subjects without their permission. As a result of these policies, Henry VII’s total revenue rose to about £113,000 a year, the vast majority of it raised from ordinary sources, by 1502. Consequently, he rarely had to call Parliament during the last years of his reign.

Henry VII died in 1509, leaving his successor a full treasury, an efficient government, a stable regime, a potential wife, and – despite the grumbling of a subdued nobility – a loyal nation. While he was neither beloved nor even popular, he commanded the respect and fear of his subjects. The first Tudor king had succeeded in establishing his dynasty. Unfortunately, he left that achievement in the hands of his 17-year-old heir – Henry VIII.