Unfortunately, Prince Arthur died five months after his marriage. This jeopardized the Spanish alliance, the cornerstone of Henry’s foreign policy. Fortunately, or so it seemed at the time, King Henry had another son, also named Henry (1491–1547), whom he offered to Catherine. But Ferdinand, a cagey negotiator, demanded the return of Catherine’s dowry. Spain was now a major power and might hope for a more advantageous match; moreover, the Tudors, down to their last heir in the male line, did not look like such a good investment as they had done a decade earlier. The death of Queen Elizabeth early in 1503 further weakened Tudor prospects. But if Ferdinand was a hard bargainer, so was Henry VII. He stopped payment of Catherine’s allowance of £1,200 a year and stripped her of her household. Now a widower himself, he began to negotiate with other European powers for an alternative, not only for his son but for himself. In the end, Henry’s own death in April 1509 settled the issue. At the urging of his council, the new king, Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47), decided to go ahead with the marriage to Catherine. After a papal dispensation allowing Henry to marry his brother’s widow, the most fateful wedding in English history took place in June 1509. Thus, by the end of Henry VII’s reign, it appeared that England was surrounded by, if not friends, then, at least, relatives. Henry VII’s successful foreign policy, combined with his cultivation of good relations with the Church, ensured that, at the accession of his son, the new dynasty would have no great external enemies. What about its internal situation?
At this point, it might be useful to say something about the structure of English government at the end of the fifteenth century. At its center was, of course, the king, “the life, the head, and the authority of all things that be done in the realm of England.”8 In some sense, the whole kingdom was his property and a strong king set the agenda for his government, but this did not mean that his power was absolute. It is often popularly assumed that a medieval or early modern king’s word was law, that what he said “went,” and that there was little room for disagreement. This assumption is probably based upon bad historical films and our modern experience of living under powerful, omnipresent governments, with their multiple departments, vast military and naval forces, and “high-tech” methods of surveillance and coercion. English royal government during the early modern period was not, in fact, like that. First, it was small: perhaps 1,500 officials in Henry VII’s reign. Secondly, as we have seen, it was also poor: early modern kings were almost invariably in debt and had to ask Parliament’s permission to raise taxes. In part because it was so small and poor, in part because no one expected much from it, the responsibilities of early modern government were much fewer than those of its modern equivalent. There was no standing army, no Federal Bureau of Investigation or Metropolitan Police Force, no Internal Revenue Service or national postal service, no Medicare or National Health Service or government loans for deserving students.
Because his government was small and poor, a wise king sought the advice and cooperation of his greatest subjects. In times of emergency he might do so via Parliament, as Henry VII did seven times (1485, 1487, 1489, 1491, 1495, 1497, and 1504), but for day-to-day matters he turned to the king’s council. This consisted, before Henry VII’s reign, mostly of important landowners and department heads, the majority of whom were peers or bishops. Because so many wanted the honor of counseling the king, this body was often vast and unwieldy. As a result, late medieval and early modern sovereigns tended to rely upon a trusted inner circle of about 10 to 20 such councilors. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Tudors would institutionalize this smaller, more effective group as the “Privy Council.” In the meantime, the king’s council dealt with a wide variety of matters: the administration of royal lands, taxation and justice in the localities, the arbitration of disputes between powerful men, diplomacy, and the defense of the realm. Since the late Middle Ages it had also met as a court of law in a room at Westminster Palace known for its ceiling decoration as the “camera stellata” or Star Chamber. The Court of Star Chamber dealt with such matters as riot, conspiracy, forgery, defamation, and perjury. It was more efficient than other courts because it did not have years of tradition – or many privileges for the accused – to get in the way of swift deliberation. As a higher court, it could rule against the wealthy and powerful when lower courts might not dare; as a court of equity it was not strictly bound by the law. As a result, its justice could be swift – and arbitrary, which explains the modern, sinister, associations of its name. Royal decisions which had emerged from debate in council were later framed as Orders in Council, in part to demonstrate that the king had consulted with the most prominent people in the realm.
The king’s council was considered part of his court or household. At its most basic level, the household provided for simple domestic needs: food and drink, linen, fuel, etc. for the king, his family, those of his servants who lived at court, and guests. At the English court these functions were fulfilled by a department known as the Household Below Stairs, presided over by a great officer called the lord steward. But a court was far more than a domestic establishment. It was the epicenter of national political, social, and cultural life as well as the great stage upon which the theater of monarchy was acted. It was in the splendid halls and corridors of the king’s palaces at Westminster and elsewhere that political business, influence, and intrigue were carried on; the socially prominent (and those ambitious to be so) amused themselves and just “hung out”; the leading authors, artists, and musicians sought patronage and set the trends of fashion; and the sovereign staged splendid processions, feasts, and entertainments designed to remind his guests, foreign and domestic, that he was God’s lieutenant on earth. The Chamber, presided over by the lord chamberlain, oversaw the court’s ceremonial and artistic life. It employed numerous gentlemen, drawn from every part of the realm, whose job was to give their attendance in the court’s public rooms, especially the Hall (where the king’s courtiers and officers were fed) and the Presence Chamber (where he could be seen on his throne). Because everybody who thought themselves anybody flocked to these rooms seeking the sovereign’s attention and favor, late medieval kings found that they had little privacy. As a result, in the 1490s Henry VII created a new room and set of officials beyond the Presence Chamber called the Privy Chamber, to which he could retreat in search of peace, relative solitude, and, perhaps, greater safety from assassination. Unfortunately, the admiring throng pursued him and his successors even here. To provide additional security, as well as to increase the magnificence of his court, Henry also built on Yorkist precedent by creating a royal bodyguard, the yeomen of the guard.
Early in the Middle Ages most of the king’s business had been conducted by household servants acting in his name on an ad hoc basis. That is, the king’s treasure was stored in chests in his Chamber. His weaponry and munitions for war were purchased by the department which normally supplied his furniture, the Great Wardrobe. If he wished to make diplomatic contact with another ruler, or convey his commands to a powerful magnate in the localities, he sent a court officer. While this still happened, by the end of the fifteenth century many of these functions had “gone out of court.” That is, they were performed by separate departments with their own heads and chains of command according to fixed procedures. Among these offices was the Chancery, originally the king’s writing office. Here, the lord chancellor, often a bishop, kept the Great Seal of England, which was affixed to important documents such as acts of parliament and grants of land. But by 1485, the lord chancellor’s primary function was to preside over the court of Chancery, which administered equity jurisdiction where the common law (see below) was inadequate or in which a strict application of its rules would lead to a miscarriage of justice. That is, the court of Chancery existed to correct injustice stemming from the strict application of the law. No wonder the lord chancellor was called “the keeper of the king’s conscience.” Chancery clerical functions had been taken over by the office of the Privy Seal, which was a less
elaborate royal seal attached to grants of offices and pensions. The Privy Seal office, staffed mostly by clerks, was the clearing house for general government business.
The office which stored and accounted for the king’s money was the Exchequer, presided over by the treasurer (from the sixteenth century, “lord treasurer”). This office combined the functions of a private banker, tax-collecting agency, accountancy firm, and a law court to oversee taxation disputes. It received its name from the checkered cloth, like a checkerboard, upon which, during the Middle Ages, amounts of money received were marked by counters – necessary because many sheriffs, responsible for receiving and submitting taxation, were illiterate. By the late fifteenth century the procedures of the Exchequer were becoming stultified, full of pointless tradition and red tape. As a result, it took years to pass an account and it was virtually impossible for the king to know at any given time how much money he had. In response, Edward IV and Henry VII began to turn back to their household officers, in particular the treasurer of the Chamber, to handle their finances. By the early 1490s the Chamber was receiving over 90 percent of the king’s revenue and its treasurer was the most important financial officer in the kingdom. This was a less public system of government finance, but it gave these late fifteenth-century monarchs greater flexibility and more control than that afforded by the “official” government departments.
In addition to the courts of Chancery and Exchequer, there were in London common law courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, the former for cases, both civil and criminal, in which the Crown was involved, the latter for civil suits, especially those involving property, contract, or debt, between subjects. Common law was the body of law that had evolved out of judicial precedent and custom. It was uncodified, as opposed to statute law, which was created by acts passed by Parliament and approved by the king. As we have seen, Parliament consisted of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, both of which met at Westminster. Every male peer had the right to sit in the Lords, as did bishops and, before the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, abbots of great monasteries. This provided an upper house of perhaps 100 to110 members. The House of Commons may sound, from its title, more representative of the English people, but it was, in reality, only marginally so. There were two members of parliament or MPs (the abbreviation only applies to those in the lower house) for every county. These were called “knights of the shire.” In addition, every major borough, i.e., city or town, was supposed to be represented by up to two members. This yielded about 300 members in 1500, but by the end of the Tudor period in 1603 England’s expanding borough population would be represented by 460 members.9 That number would become more or less frozen thereafter. This meant that towns which grew into major cities in the seventeenth century might have no MP, while parliamentary constituencies which declined to few or no inhabitants retained theirs, leaving their landlords with the power to simply name their members. For example, the original site of the old city of Salisbury, called Old Sarum, was by 1500 a nearly vacant hilltop, but it still had the right to send two MPs to Westminster. As a result, its owner simply appointed those members, who, presumably, followed his orders. Such a member was said to be in his patron’s pocket – hence the term “pocket borough.”
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.
Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History Page 9