Henry VII

by S B Chrimes

  The immense increase in the receipts and responsibilities of the chamber could not be handled without a development in the personnel and organization of the chamber itself. Once policy determined that the chamber should be not only revived but elevated into the chief financial office it was necessary to find the right men to head it, and to take such steps as might be necessary to free it from Household entanglements and complications. Henry, almost always felicitous in his choice of officers, had to find only two treasurers of the chamber for the whole reign. Richard III had formally appointed Edward Chaderton to the office in April 1484 in succession to the unfortunate Sir Thomas Vaughan whom he, as duke of Gloucester, had found it expedient to eliminate along with Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, on 23 June 1483. Chaderton continued in Henry VII’s service in various capacities, but was displaced as treasurer of the chamber by the redoubtable Thomas Lovell in the autumn of 1485.2 We may well believe that Lovell, with the financially ubiquitous Reginald Bray in the very near background, was the architect of the revived chamber system, and that these two between them prepared the ground so thoroughly that it was possible by 1492 for Lovell’s assistant accountant in the chamber, John Heron, to succeed him as treasurer and to retain the office for little less than thirty years, far into the reign of Henry VIII. Sir John Heron, as he became before April 1515,3 was destined to fulfil the role of a key figure in early Tudor financial administration; an accountant rather than a minister, but a civil servant, or at least a court official par excellence, without whose meticulously kept account books, scrutinized and initialled by Henry VII himself very frequently, we should be greatly impoverished (as indeed the king himself would have been).

  The gradual elevation of the chamber into the major financial bureau, with its treasurer becoming the principal financial officer and after 1492 the effective head receiver-general of all the newer Crown revenues, was facilitated by some reorganization within the Household and the chamber itself.1 The Wardrobe continued to be the nucleus of the Household, but its keeper became merely a court official, whilst a number of separate Household ‘chambers’ dealt with the financial arrangements for various branches of the Household. It was the king’s ‘privy chamber’ that was built up to cope with its enlarged business. It was staffed with a number of gentlemen, serjeants, yeomen, grooms, servers, messengers, ushers, and pages, resident at court and in close attendance in varying ways according to their status and capabilities. Some of them could be used to serve on general commissions, special missions, confidential enquiries, and administrative tasks. It was from this larger class of Household officials that the lesser Tudor ministers were drawn. Practically all the newer civil servants who attained the important stewardships, masterships, receiverships, and surveyorships prior to 1547 had risen from their ranks.

  The financial business of the chamber, however, was carried on by a comparatively small group of clerks and accountants under the treasurer. Before long the king’s Jewel House, the depository for cash and jewels associated with the chamber, grew so much in importance as its deposits multiplied that its keepership was separated from the treasurership. To the keepership Sir William Tyler was appointed, though the real work was done by the clerk, Sir Henry Wyatt,2 whose effective management and devotion to the king’s service in a variety of ways both enhanced the importance of the Jewel House as a sort of ‘private bank’ for the king, and advanced Wyatt’s own position. He succeeded to the office of keeper, probably in 1486, and retained the office for the rest of the reign, was continued in it by Henry VIII, who showed him much favour, and promoted him to the treasurership of the chamber in 1524.

  The process of development whereby the treasurer of the chamber became in effect the receiver-general of Crown revenues was a slow one. No doubt John Heron performed his functions for some years under the supervision of the two prominent financial administrators, Bray and Lovell, and remained overshadowed by these powerful personages. But the time came, by about 1500, when Heron was clearly the chief of the Receipt division of the chamber, the general receiver of all revenues of Crown lands and all forms of revenues not processed in the Exchequer, the controller of disbursements and the keeper of the accounts. He received the payments and accounts of the particular receivers of the estates of Lancaster, Cheshire, and other units of Crown lands, of Calais, Berwick, and the merchants of the Staple, of the chamberlains of Wales, the customers, the agents for the sale of offices, wardships and marriages, and the collection of fines for favours or grace, and of the agents who collected the profits from prerogative rights. In ‘Heron’s house within the sanctuary of Westminster’, i.e. the chamber office, were deposited all manner of financial documents, indentures, lists of debts, recognizances and obligations, tallies for uncollected sums, and the like. The profits of the Hanaper were paid in to him, and the proceeds of transactions with Italian and other financiers. Many of the sums paid into his hands were small, but some were large, and by 1505–9 the annual receipts were totally more than £100,000 a year.1 Periodically he submitted his accounts to the king himself, who personally scrutinized them. By 1506 it was possible to describe Heron as the ‘general receiver to our sovereign lord’.

  The monies paid into the chamber were mainly intended for immediate or speedy use. Sometimes advances were made to the Exchequer or Household departments; it constantly financed the private expenses of the king. It paid the salaries and wages of officials, disbursed alms, and rewards; paid the costs of espionage, defrayed the costs of regalia and clothing of the king’s navy and soldiers. The excess of income over expenditure was seldom great in any one year, but such surpluses were frequently invested in jewels and plate or used to float loans of one kind or another.

  John Heron’s handling of these large responsibilities was such as to earn him golden opinions for his efficiency and honesty. When the time came for Henry VIII to consider his position with regard to the chamber and its treasurer, he could hardly have paid a greater compliment to both than the one he adopted. He himself was not going to take the close personal interest in the accounts and business of the chamber that his father had done. But he in effect departmentalized the chamber and by a statutory declaration confirmed all the acts of ‘his trusty servant John Heron his general receiver’.2 Henceforth the treasurers of the chamber were officially also the king’s receivers-general, and the Exchequer officials could no longer attempt to contest the validity of chamber audits of accounts, as they had occasionally done in Henry VII’s reign. But the time would arrive later on when the Exchequer would come into its own again and the chamber and its system would sink back into a minor role.1

  Two of the interests and substantial sources of revenue falling within the scope of chamber finance were sufficiently specialized and coherent to inspire further departmentalism in Henry VII’s time. The proper exploitation of the profits of wardship could be lucrative. In the earlier years of the reign, up to as late as 1503, the disposal of wardships and marriages was handled in a haphazard fashion mainly either by Bray or the king himself, who disposed of many of them either by favour or by sale. For some years the proceeds remained small, only £350 in 1487, rising to £1,588 in 1494, but reaching £6,000 by 1506–7. Before then, in 1503, a special officer was appointed to supervise the management of the business, the master or surveyor of the King’s Wards, with Sir John Hussey as the first appointee, to be succeeded in 1513 by Sir Thomas Lovell.2 The foundations were now laid for the future statutory court of Wards set up in 1540.3

  The king himself retained a close interest in the evaluation and final dispersal of his rights in wardships and marriages, and he himself would often assess the relevant obligations and fines. But wardships and marriages were only one strand in the tangled skeins of the king’s prerogative rights, most of which sprang from the king’s ancient rights as feudal overlord. The deliberate intent to ferret out and exploit to the full the financial rights of the king arising from tenurial obligations was unquestionably a major feature of Henry VII’s fina
ncial policy,4 and must be considered later. Here we are concerned only to note that the legal problems and administrative complexities of the policy were great, especially after decades of comparative neglect consequential upon the civil wars and local disturbances. No doubt for these reasons in the early years of the reign no better device for reviving and exploiting the rights was resorted to than the appointment of numerous ad hoc commissions to enquire into concealed lands (i.e. lands legally held in chief of the king but concealed from the officials who should enforce the king’s financial interests therein), into escheats, reliefs, wardships, licences for the marriage of the king’s wards and widows, and the like. But though the growing revenues from the prerogative sources mostly found their way into the chamber, for many years no consolidated centralized machinery for the management of the business was devised until the last year of the reign. A precedent for the establishment of an officer specifically charged with these duties had been set in October 1499, when William Sever (or Senhouse), bishop of Carlisle, had been appointed receiver and surveyor of the king’s prerogative rights in the northern parts, i.e. Cumberland, Westmorland, and Yorkshire.1 Not until August 1508 was ‘a surveyor of the king’s prerogative’ set up, with an office organization and wide powers.2 Edward Belknap, an esquire of the body, who was to figure prominently in the financial administration of Henry VIII’s reign, was the first surveyor appointed. But although Belknap was not formally relieved of his office until 1513, it seems that the function of his post effectively ceased with the death of Henry VII. Whatever the reasons for this suspension of the short-lived activities of this particular organization may have been, the activities themselves were carried on in different ways.3 Henry VIII was not going to forgo the financial profits of his prerogative rights, even though he found it expedient at his accession to make modifications and provide scapegoats as concessions, more apparent than real, to the popular reaction against his father’s methods. The office of Wards remained to administer not only wardships, but the other prerogative rights, whilst after 1509 the general surveyors of Crown lands took over the supervision of all the chamber estates, including lands acquired by forfeiture and prerogative rights incidental to feudal tenure. Among the general surveyors appointed early in the new reign figure Sir Robert Southwell, Bartholomew Westby, and Belknap himself,4 all three of whom had been prominent in one capacity or another in Henry VII’s administration.

  Southwell and Westby had both emerged into some eminence in Henry’s VII’s financial affairs as auditors in the chamber system. Ad hoc audits of particular accounts, of units of Crown lands, of specific sources of revenues, were one thing; but it was quite another thing to provide for the audit of the accounts of the chamber itself. It seems clear that the ultimate auditor of these accounts was the king himself; this is the conclusion to be drawn from the frequent initialling of pages of chamber accounts with the royal sign manual. ‘Both Lovell and Heron as Treasurers of the Chamber presented their Chamber account “to the king’s highness”, who regularly examined them, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. When the accounts were thus accepted and signed by the king, the accountants were discharged without any other accompt or reckoning.’ But necessarily much preparatory work in auditing chamber accounts and in preparing ‘declarations’ of account needed to be done, and was done, by officers charged with the task. There is no evidence that such an office of Audit was part of the chamber itself, nor that the officers concerned were regarded as a ‘committee of the council’, though they might be deemed councillors or members of the Council Learned. Reginald Bray might perform the essential function himself in the early years of the reign, but the time came when the task was being undertaken regularly by the two officials, Bray’s former assistant Sir Roger Southwell, and Roger Leybourne, bishop of Carlisle (who was succeeded by Bartholomew Westby, a baron of the Exchequer, in 1509), and their activities were sufficiently regular and judicial in character as to become recognized as ‘a court of audit meeting habitually in the Prince’s Chamber at Westminster’. By February 1505 it was possible even for an indenture to be entered into between Southwell and Carlisle as the king’s principal auditors and the barons of the Exchequer to clarify the relative claims of the two parties to be the final auditors of certain accounts.

  The general accounts or declarations, three of which survive, were drawn up annually by Southwell and submitted to the king for final scrutiny. The under-treasurer at the Exchequer was also required to submit an annual summary or ‘declaration of the state of the treasury’, so that Henry VII was in a position to obtain knowledge of the state of his finances, at least in the later years of his reign.1

  In these tentative and somewhat informal ways, the problem of audit was solved in Henry VII’s time. That it worked reasonably satisfactorily seems assured by the fact that the court of Auditors continued to function until it was merged into the statutory court of General Surveyors of Henry VIII.2

  That Henry VII’s government succeeded in developing a chamber organization efficient in receiving and accounting for the great bulk of the royal revenue, and in making disbursements according to the king’s will, and the needs of the moment, whether for large expenses of State or for trivial purposes, can hardly be doubted. It is perhaps odd that it was thought proper for the treasurer of the chamber to record precisely every item of insignificant expenditure down to the last shilling or penny, little sums for the king’s losses at gaming, for small gifts and rewards, all lumped together with expenditure sometimes of thousands of pounds for the army and navy or foreign loans and payments. It is surprising that no attempt at analysing and classifying expenditure seems to have been made, and that Henry VII, so closely and intimately concerned with his accounts as he was, should not, apparently, have interested himself in what proportions of his income were being disbursed on what sort of expenses. A certain naivety and lack of sophistication seem to have been characteristic of his handling of financial affairs. It remains something of a mystery why it took so many years to establish the chamber system – if ‘system’ is the right word.1 It is not obvious why years passed before the arrangements became fully effective. It is not clear to us why the flow of revenues into the chamber could not have been increased much more rapidly and earlier in the reign than it was. The Yorkist precedents were there, and many of the officials employed by Henry VII must have been well aware of the advantages accruing to the Crown from the exploitation of these methods. But doubtless there were many obstacles to be overcome, difficulties to be ironed out, and time was required before Henry could know which officials and agents were trustworthy and reliable and what methods were practicable in the changed political circumstances. The reign of Edward IV and its useful examples was in any event separated in time by the interlude of Richard III’s usurpation, and although Richard’s financial administration had not differed materially from his brother’s, it must have been politically and psychologically difficult for Henry to follow too quickly and too closely the methods of the usurper. Caution and some degree of experimentation were no doubt imperative, apart from preoccupations with more pressingly urgent affairs for several years at least. In any event the sources of royal revenues were so diverse and miscellaneous in character, each encased in its own traditional usages and complications, that the problems of administration would have baffled a far more experienced financier than Henry VII. The chamber and its satellites were too close to and too dependent upon the king himself to survive the succession of a differently-minded king, and did not in fact survive more than a few decades. Moreover, although the chamber of Henry VII could cope with receiving, disbursing, and accounting, it was inadequate to deal with all the problems connected with the applications of financial policy1 and the exaction of debts to the king. It could not take punitive action; it could not haggle; it had not the legal expertise and authority to act in any sort of judicial or quasi-judicial capacity. For these sorts of activity Henry VII resorted to his Council Learned from 1500 at latest. The Council Le
arned acted not only as a court of law for the adjudication of cases, based partly on private suits, but mostly on government prosecutions. It was also a Royal debt-collecting agency. It could and did call upon Crown debtors to pay their debts or to appear and show cause why they should not. It used the weapon of the Privy Seal and applied the screw.2 Its two members most prominent in these connections, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, could be later called judices fiscales.3 It, or its members, could extract payments-down from debtors and impose bonds and recognizances for the later payment of balances. The debts it sought to collect were doubtless for the most part lawfully incurred, but its methods of collection were not known to the common law and were very open to abuse; its debasement of the dignity and authority of the King’s Council to such purposes was not likely to endear it to the public nor to enhance the prestige of the king’s highness. It did not survive the king himself, and the time would come when the old Exchequer, with its established judicial and accounting methods, supplemented by those parts of Henry VII’s ‘chamber system’ that could earn a statutory recognition, would revive.1