by Charles Ross
1 RP, V, 622; Ruddock, 67–8; Rymer, Foedera, XI, 571–2; G. Connell-Smith, Forerunners of Drake, 31–2.
2 Gray, ‘English Foreign Trade’, in Power and Postan, op. cit., 30.
3 Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Venturers, 275–8; Expansion of Exeter, 8–9; Gray, op. cit., 28–9; J. W. Sherborne, The Port of Bristol in the Middle Ages (1965), 21–2.
1 Scofield, I, 430–1; Rymer, Foedera, XI, 591–601, 605–13.
2 Scofield, I, 467. Her claim does not appear to be supported by the terms of the treaty. The subject-matter of various diets at Leyden and Lille in 1469, 1473 and 1478 to discuss commercial differences between England and Burgundy was not the cloth ban but the Staple ordinances and matters of exchange. Both Maximilian’s instructions to his ambassadors, 4 July 1478, on the eve of the treaty, and Edward’s on 2 May, specifically state that these had been the subjects of the diets, and the treaty regulated them in great detail. (Power, ‘Wool Trade in the Reign of Edward IV, 29–30; Rymer, Foedera, XII, 66–8, 76–86.) It is inconceivable that no reference would have been made during the discussions to a cloth ban had one still been in force, and a ban continued over ten years would have produced a much greater and more publicized protest among both English and Burgundian commercial groups. Bans of this kind were difficult to enforce and were often quietly allowed to lapse (Munro, ‘An Economic Aspect … of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance’, 227; Kerling, op. cit., 80). Scofield also believed that the 1467 treaty was unpopular in England because of the continuance of the cloth embargo, but the only direct evidence of its unpopularity is Monypenny’s report of gossip in the London taverns in January 1468, cited above, p. 124; and her reference to ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’, 238, does not support this claim. Finally, her view is almost impossible to reconcile with the improved trade figures cited below. See also the comments of H. van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy, II, 83.
1 Van der Wee, op. cit., II, 83; Touchard, op. cit., 225.
2 Scofield, I, 196–7, 271–2, 465; Postan, ‘England and the Hanse’, in Power and Postan, op. cit., 132–3; Hanserecesse von 1431–76, ed. G. von der Ropp, II, vi, no. 97.
1 Warkworth, Chronicle, 12; Postan, op. cit., 134–6; and for the effects on trade, see Gray in Power and Postan, op. cit., 27.
2 For this, and what follows, I am indebted to the work of my former student, Miss M, Meehan, ‘English Piracy, 1460–1500’ (unpublished M.Litt. thesis, Bristol, 1972). For a somewhat different view, see C. L. Kingsford, ‘West Country Piracy’, in his Prejudice and Promise, 78–106.
1 Meehan, thesis cited above; Kingsford, op. cit., 105–6; Pocquet du Haut-Jusse, Franfois II Due de Bretagne et I’Angleterre, 183–8; CPR, 1467–77, 492. It is, however, noticeable that Edward did not proceed to extremes against Henry Bodrugan (for whom see pp. 410–11), accepting an offer of 3,000 marks for himself and 3,000 for distribution amongst the victims of his piracy.
1 Chrimes, Henry VII, 235–7.
2 Acts of Court of the Mercers’ Company, 145.
3 Gray, in Power and Postan, op. cit., 27. Hanseatic cloth exports, which had averaged 6,000–7,000 between 1462 and 1468, fell to 3,000 in the years of war, mostly exported by the Cologners, and rose by 1475 to 9,133, and then to 13,907 a year in 1479–82.
4 Gray, 31–2; Carus-Wilson, Expansion of Exeter, 8–9; Sherborne, Port of Bristol, 21–2; Touchard, op. cit., 225 ff.
1 Rymer, Foedera, XI, 775–6 (Denmark, 1473); XII, 145 (Portugal, 1482); XII, 148 (Castilian province of Guipuzcoa, 1482).
1 See Table.
2 Chrimes, Henry VII, 219–39; Wernham, Before the Armada, chapter V (‘Sea Power and Trade, 1485–1509’), 62–76.
Chapter 16
THE KING’S FINANCES
Under the majority rule of Henry VI the revenues of the English Crown had fallen to an unprecedentedly low level. The king’s wasteful dispersal of royal lands and patronage; the decline in customs revenue caused by a major trade recession; the reluctance of parliament to grant taxes – all these conspired to worsen the state of the king’s finances. Real revenue – so far as it is revealed by exchequer sources – fell to less than £24,000 a year in the last five years of Henry VI’s reign, as compared with about £90,000 under Henry IV. Meanwhile, current charges and outstanding debts mounted from £225,000 in 1433 to £372,000 in 1450. Wages and salaries went unpaid for years, and large debts accumulated even to important creditors like Duke Richard of York. The government was forced into borrowing at ruinous rates of interest, which may sometimes have been as high as 33 per cent. Yet as debts increased so lenders became more reluctant to invest in an insolvent regime, and loans became more difficult to find as confidence in the Lancastrian government ebbed away. The financial weakness of the Crown reflected and exaggerated its general lack of prestige. For the new king in 1461 the restoration of some degree of solvency and financial credibility was a task of the greatest urgency.1
Edward’s approach to this problem during the first decade of his reign was marked by that mixture of intelligence and inconsistency so characteristic of his policies. He could not count on parliamentary taxation for anything save ‘extraordinary’ expenses. Taxes voted by the commons between 1461 and 1470 yielded a total of £93,000, but this cannot be regarded as equivalent to £10,000 per annum of ‘normal’ revenue. The larger part of it was necessarily spent on the repression of rebellion and urgent defence needs. Even relatively small-scale and isolated military operations could prove very expensive. Thus in November 1468 Edward recognized a debt of £5,521 to William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, for his services in Wales, chiefly for the costs of besieging Harlech Castle.1 Lay taxation was supplemented by the fifteenths and tenths voted by the clergy, through the convocations of Canterbury and York, which produced a further £7,000 a year during the same period.2
But these sums were quite inadequate to meet even the regular demands on the royal purse. The royal household could not be effectively financed on less than about £11,000-£12,000 a year.3 General administrative expenses, such as the wages and salaries of royal officials, both local and central, and the costs of diplomacy, absorbed a similar sum, quite apart from the unknown amounts paid out each year in annuities to royal supporters and servants.4 The maintenance of England’s regular military establishment accounted for even more. The major item here was the financing of the garrison and fortress of Calais, which cost about £10,000 a year in peacetime.5 The policing of the northern marches towards Scotland also proved a heavy burden. When John Nevill, Lord Montagu, took on the wardenship of the East March on 26 May 1463, he was to be paid at the rate of £6,000 a year in wartime, and £3,000 in time of peace or truce, and by March 1465 he had already expended £8,000 on the wages and rewards of his troops.6 On the West March his elder brother, Warwick, was serving from 1462 at rates of £2,500 in wartime and £1,250 in time of peace or truce.7 Provision for members of the royal family was another unavoidable charge on the royal revenues. Though established on a smaller scale than was allowed to her queenly predecessors, Elizabeth Woodville’s household in 1466–7 was costing her husband just over £4,500. Much land had been set aside for the dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, the former in particular with a guaranteed 5,500 marks a year, being generously provided for. 400 marks a year had to be provided for Edward’s sister, Margaret of York, and after 1466 allowances made for his own children.8 Together these regular charges involved the king in an annual expenditure of some £50,000 a year. Even this makes no allowance for heavy if irregular charges for particular purposes. Thus the dowry of Margaret of York in 1468 was to cost her brother £41,666 13s 4d, of which £10,000 had to be paid on her wedding day, and a further £2,450 was spent on her trousseau, her cash-in-hand (£500), and the cost of transporting the bride and an appropriate escort across the Channel.1
To meet these heavy demands Edward had two steady sources of revenue. First was the customs duties, which he collected from the beginning of the reign without any specific authority u
ntil granted them for life in 1465. Unfortunately, this source of revenue was adversely affected by the continuing depression in English trade, largely due to war and to bad relations with England’s commercial neighbours. For a time in the middle years the customs produced about £30,000 a year, but the average over the whole decade was some £25,000 a year, or about the same as in Henry VI’s reign.2 Not until trading conditions were improved by the commercial treaties of the 1470s and better foreign relations could much be done to boost customs revenue.3
Of greater immediate and potential value to the Crown were the royal estates, now swollen by dynastic change and forfeiture. The great array of forfeited estates after the act of attainder of 1461 included the lands of two dukes, five earls, one viscount and six barons, as well as several dozen gentry inheritances. Nor was this all. The king could now draw upon his own paternal inheritance – the broad acres of the Duchy of York and the Earldom of March – and on the Principality of Wales, the Duchy of Cornwall, and the Earldom of Chester, forfeited from the Lancastrian Prince Edward. In addition, he enjoyed the wardship of several baronial estates in the hands of minors, the most valuable being those of Duke Humphrey of Buckingham and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury.4 No precise estimate could be given of the total annual value of all this, but £30,000 would be a conservative guess, or rather more than Henry VI’s supposed revenue in his later years.
Much has been written recently in praise of the ‘Yorkist land-revenue experiment’, described at length in the writings of Dr B. P. Wolffe.1 Basically, it involved removing lands in the king’s hands, whether by reason of inheritance, forfeiture or wardship, from the control of the exchequer, which was ill-equipped to manage them efficiently. Its old-fashioned system of farming them out at fixed rates benefited the farmers rather than the king. Instead, they were now to be placed under the direct control of specially-appointed receivers and surveyors administering convenient and contiguous groups of properties, their duties and methods being modelled on the practice of the great private estates, including the Duchy of York itself. These men, Wolffe tells us, were no mere rent-collectors but officials of the highest responsibility and trust, and among them were a number of experienced estates administrators like Sir Richard Fowler, Sir Richard Croft, Peter Beaupie, Nicholas Sharpe and Nicholas Leventhorpe, who served the king throughout the reign. They were now made to account not to the exchequer but to the king’s chamber within the royal household, and the revenues they brought in were now made immediately available for the king’s use. This development coincided with the rise of the chamber as both a revenue-collecting and spending department, which long before the end of the reign had superseded the exchequer as the chief financial office of the state. Apart from land revenues, it began to receive such things as temporalities of vacant sees, the profits of the exercise of royal prerogative rights, the French pension, benevolences, even the proceeds of parliamentary taxation, including, it would appear, the war taxes of 1472–5. The exchequer was deprived of much of its control of the process of auditing accounts, now carried out in the chamber, and had to be content with verbal declarations from the king that accounts had been duly discharged. The exchequer was made to transfer large if irregular sums to the chamber of the household, especially in years of heavy spending like 1467–8 and 1471, when the transfers totalled over £21,000 in each year. By the end of the reign, however, the exchequer had become so starved of money that it became necessary for the chamber to subsidize it by transfers in the other direction.
The advantages of the scheme lay in its providing a more speedy and flexible system of getting and spending and in the fact that it was under the direct and immediate personal control of the king and trusted and experienced officials directly answerable to him. Once again it is worth emphasizing the degree and continuity of the king’s personal involvement. In 1469 he could tell the treasurer, Richard, Earl Rivers, that he should be discharged of all sums expended by him ‘such as we expressed unto you by word of mouth’ and ‘of the which we remember that ye never had warrant nor discharge’, widiout any need for further accounting in the exchequer.1 In 1478 one of the estates officials, John Hayes, was said to be quit of monies ‘paid and delivered unto our own person in the Chamber’ and he made other payments ‘by our commandment given by our own mouth’. It was here in the chamber that the king made bargains for the sale of forfeitures and wardships, appointed officials, often again by word of mouth, and supervised the financial business of the realm. It was probably also in his chamber, as well as in council, that some of the many administrative changes and innovations, especially affecting the king’s finances, were decided upon and formulated. These included the programme of appointing commissions to enquire into neglected or usurped prerogative rights of the Crown, first attempted in the early years of the reign, but becoming more general from 1478 onwards; the series of economical reforms in the royal household between 1472 and 1478; changes in the exchequer, such as the overhaul of the system of enrolments, involving the abandonment of the Issue Rolls and the purging of extraneous and minor matters from the Foreign Rolls, leaving an orderly roll concerned exclusively with non-estate business; the careful scrutiny of fees and annuities charged on the exchequer and on local revenues, and the drawing-up of new lists of farms, wards and marriages at the king’s disposal, both aimed at providing him with a more precise knowledge of the overall state of his revenues; and the series of measures to tighten customs control and port administration.2 Here was a spirit of enterprise and reform under the guidance of a king for whom the accumulation of wealth became more important in his later years, and with the aid of a body of experienced and skilful administrators. Already by 1483 there had emerged a system of highly personal financial control, centred on the chamber, which anticipates in all essentials the structure once thought to have been created by the early Tudors.
These new methods have an obvious importance as a major step towards economical reform and good business management, but their importance should not be overestimated in the context of improving the king’s revenues, especially in the decade 1461–70. Wolffe believed that the revenues of the great landed acquisitions were brought under the new system of Yorkist estate management for the benefit of the king’s finances.1 But closer enquiry reveals that they were largely alienated from the Crown within a short space of time. The dispersal of the inheritance of that arch-enemy of the York family, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire and Ormond, provides a good example of the scale and speed of these alienations. In the late spring and summer of 1461 a number of receivers, surveyors and auditors were appointed to administer these estates, but immediately after the act of attainder of 4 November 1461 made it possible for the king legally to dispose of the estates, the partition began. By August 1462 almost all of the earl’s fifty-one manors and lordships in England, spreading over twelve counties from the west of England to East Anglia, had been granted to beneficiaries like the earl of Kent, Hastings, Herbert and Howard, and lesser royal servants such as John Donne, esquire, Richard Fowler, and Fulk Stafford. By the end of that year it appears that no more than four manors were still under royal control. A similar fate overtook most of the other forfeited estates, and the new officials were left to administer a mere fragment of the lands originally entrusted to them.2 Such royal open-handedness ensured that the king’s finances benefited little from forfeitures and wardships during the first reign. Because of the disappearance of the chamber records, we have no means of assessing how much land revenues contributed to the king’s coffers, but it was clearly very much less than it might have been had Edward chosen to adopt a different policy. Before 1471 he showed no consistent intention to accumulate or retain lands in his own grasp, in sharp contrast to the tenacity with which Henry VII clung to his landed acquisitions. With the partial exceptions of the childless Jasper, duke of Bedford, and John de Vere, earl of Oxford, Henry saw no need to endow and reward his supporters with land on anything like the scale adopted in the 1460s.3 For Edward IV,
his judgement of political expediency and his personal generosity overrode financial pressures.
All the sources of revenue so far discussed did not suffice to keep the government solvent. Financial stringency is reflected in the use of a variety of fund-raising devices, some distinctly arbitrary and of dubious legality. In March 1464, with the advice of his council, Edward ordained that all of his subjects to whom he had granted land, annuity, fee or office worth 10 marks a year or more, must pay one-quarter of their annual value to the king, in order to assist him in reducing the northern strongholds to obedience.1 In the same year he put pressure on the clergy to grant a subsidy of 6d in the £, in response to Pope Pius’s appeal for the launching of a crusade. Though called a ‘gratuitous subsidy’, it was clearly made under compulsion from the Crown, abetted by Archbishop Bourchier, and the proceeds were handed over to royal agents. Probably most, if not all, of this subsidy remained in the king’s hands. There was at least sufficient suspicion of this for the rebels in 1469 to include it amongst their charges of royal mismanagement.2
A more legitimate, if scarcely more popular, device was the re-coinage of 1464–5. The official proclamation on this measure gave as its reason the acute shortage of gold and silver in the realm (which was true), and claimed that all was being done for the weal of the realm, blandly ignoring the king’s opportunities for profit from the operation. It was in fact the most drastic devaluation of the English coinage since the introduction of bimetallism in 1343.3 Edward increased by 25 per cent the nominal value of the coin coined from a pound of metal, but without increasing the amount of alloy. Thus the face-value of the gold noble rose from 6s 8d to 8s 4d, and 1 lb of silver now produced 450 as against 360 pence. This decision ‘many men grudged passing sore, for they could not reckon that gold not so quickly as they did the old gold’.4 In April 1465, therefore, the government introduced a new gold coinage based upon a noble (often called a rose-noble or a royal) valued at 10s, a half- and a quarter-noble, together with two coins in money of account, an angel worth 6s 8d and an angelet of 3s 4d. The result was a handsome and much-copied gold currency.1 But in the process the king gained a minting charge increased out of all proportion – 47s 8d instead of 3s 4d for gold, and 3s 4d instead of 3d for silver, less fees paid to the king’s officers. This brought him a handsome profit of at least £17,500 in the two years between September 1464 and September 1466, and smaller amounts thereafter.2 The re-coinage may not have been very successful in stimulating the amount of currency in circulation, but the consequent devaluation helped to stimulate demand for English goods on foreign markets.3 By this time, too, Edward was also actively seeking to improve his finances by personal trading ventures. The records unfortunately do not permit us to discover how much profit the king derived from this source, but it seems likely to have been considerable, judging by the scale of royal commercial operations.4