by S B Chrimes
1 F. C. Dietz, English government finance, 1485–1558 (1921, repr. 1964), was insufficiently aware of the Yorkist precedents and consequently exaggerated the novelty of Henry VII’s Chamber organization. The indispensable background and correctives are provided by B. P. Wolffe, ‘The management of English royal estates under the Yorkist kings’, E.H.R., LXXI (1956), 1–27; and ‘Henry VII’s land revenues and Chamber finance’, ibid. LXXIX (1964), 225–54; and now more fully in his The royal demesne in English history (1971).
1 See extracts from the account books of the chamber, as printed by S. Bentley, Excerpta historica (1831), 85∼133; passim; and below, Appendix E. On these accounts, most of which are still unpublished, see W. C. Richardson, Tudor Chamber administration, 1485–1547 (Louisiana, 1952), App. Ill, 463–6. Professor Richardson’s monograph is invaluable for the whole subject, even though over-weighted with detail and somewhat repetitive in arrangement. A. P. Newton’s pioneer essay, ‘The King’s Chamber under the early Tudors’, E.H.R., XXXII (1917), 348–72, is still a valuable short survey.
2 Sir John Fortescue, The governance of England, ed. C. Plummer (1885), 119–20.
3 B. P. Wolffe, ‘Henry VII’s land revenues’, loc. cit. 239. A useful short account of Exchequer methods is contained in G. R. Elton, The Tudor revolution in government 1955), 20–30.
1 Wolffe, loc. cit. passim.
2 See above, p. 107.
3 Richardson, op. cit. 67, 100.
4 ibid. 44n, 86, 100n, 107; and Wedgwood, Hist. Parl.: Biographies.
1 Wedgwood, Hist. Parl.: Biographies.
2 The text is printed in Chrimes and Brown, Select documents, No. 304, pp. 358–60, from L. & P., ed. J. Gairdner, I, 81–5. The document is discussed by B. P. Wolffe, ‘The management of royal estates’, loc. cit. The memorandum is perhaps too terse to be fully intelligible. Mr T. Brynmor Pugh has made the suggestion that the memorandum may in fact have been composed in the early years of Henry VII’s reign, on the grounds that the implication in the text may be that the duchy of Norfolk was forfeit at the time. But this is hardly a conclusive argument, even if the implication can be sustained.
1 As W. C. Richardson, op. cit. 41–57.
2 Materials, I, 217–19.
3 R.P., VI, 403, cited by B. P. Wolffe, ‘Henry VII’s land revenues’, loc. cit. 233.
1 R.P., VI, 405.
2 Materials, I, 324. Dietz, op. cit. 26, failed to note that Bray’s commission related only to the duchy of Lancaster.
3 C.P.R., I, 230.
4 B. P. Wolffe, loc. cit. 234–5.
1 ibid. 241.
2 ibid. 240–4.
1 B. P. Wolffe, loc. cit. 237–8.
2 W. C. Richardson, op. cit. 93, 111–12.
3 ibid. 114–16. The difficulties of ascertaining the date when Heron actually became treasurer of the chamber are however brought out by J. R. Hooker in his valuable article, ‘Some cautionary notes on Henry VII’s Household and chamber system’, Speculum, XXXIII (1958), 69, 75. Lovell was still being referred to in some records as the chamber treasurer as late as 1505–6, notwithstanding his appointment to be treasurer of the Exchequer in 1492. The evidence suggests that Lovell remained the chamber treasurer, whilst Heron, whose salary continued to be paid as a ‘servant’ from the chamber until 1506, and kept the accounts all the time, acted as Lovell’s deputy in the chamber from 1492 until he was appointed treasurer of the chamber in 1506.
1 ibid. 58–78, 84–109.
2 ibid. 99.
1 W. C. Richardson, op. cit. 114–16, 161, 217–19.
2 St. 1 Henry VIII, c. 3; S.R., III, 2. ‘Wher as the Kyng oure Souveraign Lorde entendythe that divers Revenues and Duetys dewe and to be dewe to hys Highness shalbe payde to his trusty servant John Heyron his general Receyvor and to other Persones by his Highness hereafter in lyke office to be deputed and assigned as in the tyme of the late Kyng of famus memory Henry the VIIth hath been used. …’
1 W. C. Richardson, op. cit. 414–41.
2 ibid. 166–75.
3 St. 32 Henry VIII, c. 46; S.R., III, 802–7.
4 See below, p. 209 ff.
1 W. C. Richardson, op. cit. 136–9. He was translated to Durham in 1502, and was succeeded by Roger Leybourne at Carlisle.
2 C.P.R., II, 591.
3 ibid. 192–214; and ‘The surveyor of the King’s Prerogative’, E.H.R., LVI (1941), 52–75. Professor Richardson’s valuable account of this office is somewhat coloured by his mistaken conception that ‘the prerogative rights’ in question had some equivalence to later ideas of ‘sovereignty’. The prerogative rights however meant at this time little more than either the king’s financial interests in the criminal law or in the incidents of feudal tenure.
4 On Southwell, see W. C. Richardson, Tudor chamber administration, App. II, 455–462, 177–9; on Westby, ibid. 251–3; on Belknap, ibid. 201–5.
1 See generally, ibid. 176–91.
2 ibid. 257 ff; St. 27 Henry VIII, c. 62; S.R., III, 631–2.
1 Some of the difficulties in regarding Henry VII’s chamber organization as a clear-cut system are rightly emphasized by J. R. Hooker, loc. cit. Mr Hooker calls attention to Professor G. R. Elton’s well-justified observation (Tudor revolution in government (1957), 9) that Professor W. C. Richardson’s term ‘chamber system’ covers too much when he uses it to describe all the administrative changes of the first two Tudors and that he speaks too definitely of ‘offices’ (Audit office, office of Wards) where it may be preferable to speak of individuals working in a somewhat unorganized and haphazard manner. Mr Hooker appears to be right when he says (loc. cit. 75), ‘One should hesitate to conclude that men administered because they occupied certain posts. In fact they administered because Henry authorized them to do so and not by virtue of powers inherent in specific offices. So much depended upon personality and proximity to the throne, that it is impossible to separate performers from performance.’
1 For financial policy generally, see below, ch. 11.
2 Many Privy Seal writs exist ordering the payment of monies to John Heron, treasurer of the chamber, often of unspecified amount but all described as a debt due to the king, or else to appear before the Council Learned on a certain day (Somerville, loc. cit. 435). Dudley’s account book of sums received by him, presumably mainly as a member of the Council Learned, for the use of the king, from 9 September 1504 to 28 May 1508, survives in B.M. Lansdowne MS. 127. The entries for each day are initialled by Henry VII himself; cf. Dietz, op. cit. 38.
3 P.V. (ed. Hay), 133 fn.
1 Henry VII himself took steps to improve the machinery of the Receipt of the Exchequer at least by 1504–5, if not earlier. The under-treasurer and teller took over custody of money from the Treasury chamberlains, who became more specifically honorific in character. The multiplicity of rolls kept was reduced. The Issue rolls were abolished and two of the Receipt rolls; transactions were recorded in the tellers’ rolls only and these were the basis for the compilation of the annual Declaration of the state of the Treasury from at least 1504–5. cf. G. R. Elton, op. cit. 24, citing an early seventeenth-century description in B.M. Lansdowne MS. 151, fos 104–6.
Chapter 7
PARLIAMENTS AND GREAT COUNCILS
Little or nothing of much significance occurred in the history of parliament in the reign of Henry VII; or, in other words, parliament as an institution was not in any way notably different at the dissolution in 1504 of Henry’s seventh parliament from what it had been at the meeting of his first parliament in 1485. The precedents already set over the previous century or so were followed; there were no significant innovations in procedure, so far as we know; no change in composition or electoral arrangements; few legislative measures enacted were of any great importance. No change in the relations between the king’s government and any part of parliament occurred. The summonses of parliament were infrequent, only seven in the whole reign, and in the assembly of 1504, the king expressly stated that he was not minded for the ease of his subjects to summo
n another for a long time without ‘grete and necessarye and urgent causes’.1 Throughout the twenty-three years and eight months of the reign, parliaments sat for about seventy-two weeks in all.2 But Great Councils, lords without the commons, were summoned five or six times, and the continued existence of these assemblies has to be borne in mind if the consultative activities of Henry’s government are to be assessed.3
For certain purposes, however, Henry VII, like his predecessors for more than a hundred and fifty years, could not do without the representative parliament. First and foremost, he could not do without financial grants in parliamentary form, and each of his seven parliaments made some kind of fiscal contribution.4 He must also have parliamentary assent to numerous acts of attainder5 and of restitution for those previously attainted; and for the substantial acts of resumption that it was his policy to obtain. Inevitably the measures of importance to the government were initiated by the government, and the attempts that have been made to distinguish between official bills and commons bids as the sources of statutes, in so far as the attempts are not illusory, have not resulted in any very significant conclusions.1 Few of the statutes that emerged from Henry VII’s parliaments can be regarded as of major importance; many are little more than administrative improvements; some are trivial or transitory; few amended the common law.2 Undoubtedly the commons could have initiated bills that might have become important statutes, but in fact they did not do so. At best the government procured some measures which seemed to it sufficiently worthwhile to procure parliamentary sanction for them. But it is difficult to believe that the reign of Henry VII was particularly notable for its legislative activity.3
As yet no one spoke of the ‘Houses of Parliament’, though references to ‘Parliament House’, and ‘Common House’ are quite frequent, and the latter expression had already some years earlier come to bear a certain institutional as distinct from a merely locative sense.4 The ‘Common House’ was sometimes called the ‘lower house’, an expression which would imply the existence of an ‘upper house’. The phrase ‘Higher House before the Lords’ did appear as early as 1454, but remained rare. There was as yet no such term as the lords’ house or House of Lords.5 There was no need for such a term, for the lords’ house was the Parliament House. A contemporary document expresses the realities neatly when it uses the expression ‘in the comen Howse besyde the parlement house of the kynges grace and the lordes’.1 Such terminology is in no way surprising, for as yet there was no such thing as a ‘House of Lords’ in any sense of the term. The Commons House came into existence, in a locative and an institutional sense, long before the House of Lords could do so, because the commons met outside the Parliament House, and had a fixed electoral composition, whereas to the Parliament House came, except on the formal occasions, only such persons, councillors, prelates, lords, lawyers, and others, as the king thought fit to summon individually and personally. ‘A plague on both your houses’ is a poetic malediction that might well be adapted and applied to historians of the early English parliaments, for to see two houses of parliament where none or only one existed is merely to make confusion worse confounded.
The injury to a realistic history of the Commons caused by anachronistic thinking is by now generally understood and guarded against. But the damage done to the history of the Lords by the effects of the doctrines of modern peerage law still vitiates many attempts at sketching that history. It is perfectly plain, as J. C. Wedgwood pointed out more than thirty years ago, that a personal summons to parliament did not necessarily create a prescriptive right even by 1509, and that some persons attended for whom no writs of summons were endorsed on the Close rolls, and for whom no writ appears ever to have existed. Some who might be said to possess an hereditary peerage were not summoned to some parliaments, even though the persons were available; it was common practice not to summon those who were known to be unavailable, by reason of absence on service at home or abroad, infirmity, or even poverty. It is more than likely that some were summoned by word of mouth, but certain that no one would come and be admitted unless the king was willing. It has been pointed out that Henry VII’s first parliament was ‘perhaps the first occasion on which names had been omitted from the list of summons on grounds of partisanship’.2 Nor can it be denied that Henry VII showed himself to be extremely reluctant to create dignities that can rightly be called ‘new peerages’. He has often been credited with having made seven, or even nine of these new creations, but the number really dwindles to one or two, and if he imagined that in other cases he was creating new hereditary peerages, he was singularly unlucky; nor, in most of the instances, was he creating a new ‘baron’ – he was issuing a personal summons to particular parliaments.
But an hereditary presumptive right to a summons, did, indeed, exist in the case of many of the ‘peerage’ families, and Henry VII was prepared to recognize this, unless there were reasons to the contrary, and to recognize the principle to the extent of summoning a descendant or relative of a person who might be said to have had some sort of claim; and this kind of summons accounts for at least six of the so-called nine new creations.1 Thus John Ratcliffe de Fitzwalter was summoned in September 1485, in the ‘right’ of his mother, but he was destined to be attainted and subject to forfeiture in 1495. A viscounty was created in 1485 for John Welles, the king’s half-uncle, but he was an heir to a ‘barony’, and the viscounty became extinct in 1498.2 Robert Willoughby de Broke received a writ of summons in November 1488, but he was descended from an old established barony, and he died in 1503, was succeeded by his son and heir in 1511, who died in 1522 without male heir, and the barony remained in abeyance until 1696. The position of Thomas Ormond de Rochford was peculiar; he was already eighth earl of Carrick and seventh earl of Ormond when he was summoned as Thomas Ormond de Rochford, chevaler, in November 1488. It was not the practice to summon the Irish earls to the English parliament, but for personal reasons Henry VII decided to summon him. Ormond died without male heir in 1515 and the ‘barony’ supposedly created in 1488 remained in abeyance. The case of Charles Somerset also had its unique features. He was knighted at Milford Haven in 1485 and presumably therefore had joined Henry in exile, which is not surprising, for he was a natural son of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and therefore Margaret Beaufort’s cousin and Henry VII’s second cousin. He married Elizabeth, the only daughter and heiress of William Herbert, earl of Huntingdon (by his first wife, Mary Woodville, the Dowager Queen’s sister), the son and heir of William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, who had been Henry VII’s guardian. The creation of Charles Somerset by patent as Baron Herbert of Ragland, Chepstow, and Gower in November 1506, and the continuance of his summons in 1504 and 1511 as Charles Herbert, chevaler, can hardly be regarded as the creation of a ‘new peerage’. The fact that he was created earl of Worcester in 1514 does not, of course, affect the position under Henry VII. Thomas Darcy de Darcy was certainly summoned to Henry VII’s first parliament, and may have been summoned in 1504, but he was the great-grandson of the fifth baron Darcy of Knaith, and was destined to be attainted, beheaded, and forfeited in 1537, although his son was restored ten years later.
We are left then, with Thomas Burgh, Giles Daubeney, and John Cheyney. There is evidence of an intention to create a barony for Thomas Burgh, who was descended through a junior line from Hubert de Burgh, earl of Kent, but there is no evidence that he received more than a writ of summons in September 1487, or that he ever attended; his eldest son and heir, however, was of unsound mind and was never summoned, but his brother and his heirs were summoned from 1529 until 1597, after which the heir died in infancy and the barony went into abeyance.
John Cheyney was summoned by writ in September 1487, but died without heirs in 1499. Of all these nine persons, only Giles Daubeney was given a barony by charter, to him and his heirs male, in March 1486 (and even he could be deemed to be the heir of the Ralph Daubeney who had been summoned in 1342, but neither he nor his intervening heirs had been thereafter so summoned). B
ut this new barony became extinct in 1548. The redoubtable Giles Daubeney had, however, been clearly singled out for a mark of special honour, granted to him in most laudatory terms.
Henry VII was therefore extremely restrained in adding to the personnel of the secular lords. He did give some recognition to presumptive hereditary claims to a summons, but at the same time he kept as free a hand as possible in committing himself to the implications. It is open to doubt whether he thought in terms of creating additions to an hereditary peerage by issuing a few personal summonses, except in the case of Daubeney. The circumstance, remarkable at first sight, is that he did not think in terms of rewarding his most distinguished and faithful servants with ‘peerages’, as would have been the case in a later generation. But in reality many of his intimate associates, as councillors, or as elected members of parliament, or as both, were necessarily present at parliaments, to do the king service; their rewards were in the tangible form of grants of office and lands and profits, and when it came to dignities, it seems clear that the Garter rather than anything that could be called ‘a peerage’ was the ultimate mark of honour favoured by Henry VII, and for men of comparatively modest birth and beginnings who had climbed solely by service to the king, the honour was great. He created no fewer than thirty-seven knights of the Garter, of whom more than half were men who were among his closest associates in government or in war.1
The number of persons known to have been summoned to Henry VII’s seven parliaments remained remarkably constant.2 The normal number of archbishops and bishops was twenty-one, but this figure varied from seventeen to twenty-one according to circumstances; the number of abbots and priors was a constant twenty-seven; the total number of lords temporal varied only slightly, from thirty-four in the first parliament to forty-three at most, made up of two dukes, or one prince and one duke; one marquis from the third parliament (when the marquis of Dorset had again secured a writ), from nine to twelve earls; two or three viscounts, and from twenty to twenty-seven ‘barons’. The men of law summoned varied from nine to twelve. At its smallest (in the first parliament) the total number of persons summoned was eighty-eight, and at its largest, 101. The variations in the totals are accounted for by prevailing circumstances and material causes, including the king’s pleasure, but even allowing for the probability that a few persons may have been summoned verbally or without surviving evidence, it is clear that Henry VII’s attitude in the matter was extremely conservative, and apparently devoid of any particular policy beyond the continuance of existing practice and avoiding more than minimal additions to the personnel either of his parliaments or of the ‘hereditary’ peerage. It is as well to recall Professor Roskell’s cautious but carefully chosen phrases when he wrote: ‘it would perhaps not be going too far to say that, in practice, parliaments were called in order to get together a full meeting of the ordinary council, afforced by as large a number of other lords as possible, and so that they should meet the elected commons’.1