by S B Chrimes
It is very doubtful whether the loans invited by Signet letters can justly be called ‘forced’ in the modern sense of the term. For an individual to refuse a request under Signet was doubtless difficult, if not virtually impossible.2 But none the less these obligatory loans were in form made ‘by agreement’,1 the sums assessed could not be seized, they had to be asked for, with a reminder to the lender of his obligation to assist the sovereign, and there was plenty of precedent for requiring the subjects to aid the king financially in lieu of personal service. There is little or no evidence that these requests were resisted or aroused any particular resentment. The sums asked for were generally rather small, generally from people rich enough to pay without demur, and were usually repaid. But the costs of the efforts of the commissioners sent round in 1486 and 1489 were high and the net proceeds comparatively low.2 Far more substantial sums continued to be lent by individuals and the City of London, apparently without the persuasion of Signet letters.3
Even so, the king’s intention to invade France in person provided an opportunity to extract a ‘benevolence’ in July 1491, just as similar circumstances had provided the same opportunity for Edward IV in 1473, with the slight difference that in 1491 the individuals were asked for aid in person or by money gifts. This levy was sanctioned by a Great Council,4 and the commissioners set about extracting a benevolent ‘loan’ or rather gift from a substantial number of persons, notwithstanding the terms of Richard III’s statute purporting to abolish ‘the charge or imposition called “benevolence” and any similar charge’.5 Whether it was Morton’s or Fox’s ‘fork’ (which asserted that those who spent little must have saved and those that spent much must have means) that came in useful in this connection is not very significant, for this was but an echo of an analogous ‘fork’ invented in 1473–5.6 But whatever the legal position of the 1491 levy may have been,7 it certainly received retrospective parliamentary sanction in 1495, though in the context of statutory authority for the collection of arrears from both individuals and collectors, under heavy penalties.1 So that it cannot be doubted that the levy of the benevolence of 1491 was not as successful or as satisfactory as had been hoped and expected, and this may account for the apparent absence of any further attempt at this mode of raising money during Henry VII’s reign. By the time the next serious military need arose, against the Scots in 1496, another Great Council, reinforced by the presence of some merchants and burgesses, authorized the raising of a loan, but this was by way of anticipating a promised parliamentary grant.2
In the meantime, Henry VII’s finances had received a bonus from the results of his invasion of France in 1492, in the form of a handsome payment of debts acknowledged by the king of France. The Treaty of Étaples of 1492 provided that France would reimburse the costs of the war, the debts incurred by Anne of Brittany, the expenses of ambassadors, the arrears of the pension promised by Louis XI to Edward IV, amounting in all to the sum of about £159,000, which was regularly paid by Charles VIII and continued by Louis XII.3
To estimate the financial advantages of the loans and benevolence to Henry VII seems to be an impossible task, at least at present. Most of the short-term loans appear to have been repaid, and these therefore did not constitute any addition to his long-term revenue. Short-term lending in any case is alleged to have largely ceased by 1490, and if this was so, it can be assumed that he was by then or thereabouts able to meet normal expenditure from other sources. The benevolence of 1491 is said to have raised rather more than £48,000, but the cost of the invasion of France in 1492 is believed very nearly to have reached that figure, so that the surplus from this particular source can only have been very small.1
It is also useless to attempt to put any figure on the total or annual average of income from the profits of justice, fines and fees, and from the large number of miscellaneous rights which the king enjoyed as king. It is more profitable for us (as it was for Henry VII) to turn our attention to his profits from land and his prerogative rights as feudal overlord.
Whilst in theory it is possible to distinguish between the king’s income from lands of his own, and income from prerogative rights as overlord, in practice the distinction was a good deal blurred, especially in the reckoning of accounts; all in any event were profits from land, except that to some extent it became possible to extend the notion of the financial obligations of tenants-in-chief to tenants who held directly of the king rights other than rights in land. All were equally part of his ‘patrimony, his hereditaments, the issues of his kingdom’, or simply ‘his own’.2
If, however, for the sake of convenience we may first examine the position as regards revenues from lands in the king’s hands, whether permanently or temporarily, by inheritance or purchase or gift, or in consequence of forfeitures or escheats, we must consider by what means Henry VII could expect to improve upon the profits of such lands as he possessed on his accession. At that date he acquired whatever land estates were left behind by Richard III as king, as heir of York, of Lancaster, and duke of Gloucester and widower of Anne Neville, less such charges on the profits as he might think fit to maintain. Once these ‘Crown lands’ had been acquired it was open to him to improve the proceeds greatly by several different means. By acts of resumption he could extend their range; by acts of attainder he could make further extensions, not necessarily permanently; and by improved methods of management and accounting he could enhance the net proceeds from the whole.
His first parliament passed two acts of resumption which together regularized the basis of the Crown lands. The act of the first session roundly declared him to be the heir of Henry VI and of his own father Edmund Tudor.1 The act of the second session invited him to resume into his own hands all the lands and possessions legally vested in Henry VI on 2 October 1455 or at any time since. All grants of lands, offices, annuities, pensions, etc., made between that date and 20 January 1486, were declared invalid.2 The actual effect of this act, however, was not so substantial as has often been supposed. Henry VII indeed felt obliged to append no less than 461 clauses of exemption, a far greater number of exemptions appended than to any previous act of resumption, and the great bulk of these exemptions did not represent new grants by the king himself, but rather confirmations of grants by the Yorkist kings.3 Two further acts of 1495 were not so much acts of resumption as acts clarifying the king’s title to the lands which Richard III had held as duke of Gloucester, and to all the lands which the house of York had held by virtue of grants by Edward III and Richard II to Edmund of Langley.4
Naturally Henry VII could not retain for himself all the net proceeds of these territories, apart from the specific exemptions. Provision out of the York lands had to be made for the dowager duchess Cecily, and for Edward IV’s widow Elizabeth Woodville (subsequently diverted to Henry’s queen). Provision for members of the royal family had always been regarded as a proper charge on Crown lands and indeed a justifiable reason for alienation. Substantial grants were made to the king’s mother Margaret Beaufort and to his trusty veteran uncle Jasper Tudor, as well as to Sir William Stanley, who might be said to have saved the day at Bosworth. One reason, however, why Henry VII was able to obtain a heavy increase in his net profits from land in the later years of his reign was that the provision he was obliged to make for his family was small and diminished markedly.5 True, his mother outlived him by a short term, but Jasper died in 1495; the dowager duchess Cecily also died in 1495. The provisions made in Wales, Chester, Cornwall, and the North for Prince Arthur lapsed on his death in 1502, and for a time brought over £6,000 a year into the king’s hands, and when Prince Henry became Prince of Wales in 1504 the duchy of York that had been conferred upon him in 1494 reverted to the Crown.1 So far as Sir William Stanley was concerned, his attainder in 1495 brought most of his grants back to the Grown.
Acts of attainder did not necessarily result in the forfeiture of all of the attainted person’s lands, and such penalties were not uniformly enforced. Some attainders were repealed su
bsequently, although not necessarily with full restoration of lands. The substantial number of attainders of men of large property during Henry’s reign did however redound greatly to the advantage of the king’s landed revenues, and Henry VII went far to exploit these possibilities.2 Though comparatively lenient in his attitude towards the Yorkists defeated in 1485, he resorted to attainders very frequently. Only one parliament of the reign (1497) omitted to pass an act of attainder. The reign saw 138 persons attainted; eight-six of these attainders remained unreversed; only forty-six were reversed by Henry VII and six ultimately reversed by Henry VIII in favour of the heirs. His attitude towards the bargains which he allowed to be made with some of those attainted was ‘distinctly cynical’. In the case of noblemen he rarely allowed a complete restitution of their property. Parts thereof were often withheld for many years as an incentive to loyalty and good service, no doubt, but the king derived continued profit from those retained parts, and lesser men fared little if any better. The conditions under which restitutions were agreed were more severe than those imposed by Edward IV in like cases. Although it is not possible at present to put any figure on the total financial advantages accruing from the forfeitures following upon attainders, it is clear that these advantages were very considerable even though not necessarily permanent.3 Rewards for faithful service could be, of course, and often were, made by grants out of lands so forfeited.
The accumulation of lands in the king’s hands, by inheritance, purchase, gift, resumption, forfeiture, or otherwise would doubtless have augmented the royal income from this source merely by itself. The gap between the gross and the net proceeds and the assurance that the net proceeds would expeditiously and effectively find their way into the king’s coffers depended upon efficient management, collection, accountancy, and auditing. We have already seen in general terms the ways in which Henry VII sought to improve financial administration,1 and we need not repeat those generalizations here. A few points of special relevance to the management of landed revenues may, however, be emphasized.
It is quite clear that after a year or two of revival of the Lancastrian traditional methods of reliance upon Exchequer procedures in these matters, Henry VII deliberately decided to revert to the Yorkist system of appointing ad hoc receivers of groups of lands, who accounted in the chamber, and were exempted from Exchequer control, with audit of accounts either by specially assigned councillors or by the king. Books of summaries of accounts of some forty receivers appearing before the king and his group of councillors survive for some years of the reign, and these councillors or ‘general surveyors’ also heard a number of other accounts, and acted as the supreme board of management for almost all the landed revenues of the king. The board became the court of General Surveyors of Land Revenues, and was both very active and efficient. Herein ‘lies a major part of the explanation for the augmentation of such revenues for which the opening years of the sixteenth century were remarkable’.2
In all this, as in so much else, Henry VII showed that he knew how to take advantage of procedures that were essentially Yorkist in origin and initiation. The heir of Lancaster became the heir of York in more senses than one.
Before we try to see how great was the financial advantage to Henry VII of the exploitation of land revenues, we must turn to the field of prerogative feudal rights, for the ultimate proceeds of both were often lumped together and it is hard to be sure of the size of the profits from these two main sources. In this field of prerogative rights, Henry VII found a source of financial profit which offered large returns if the possibilities were more systematically and more ruthlessly exploited than had been the case in the past, even under the Yorkists. In this field, more than any other, it is possible to see Henry VII applying his legal rights for financial gain with a zeal and relentless application which earned him and his agents an unpopularity and a measure of odium which became marked towards the end of the reign and which might well have produced serious consequences for the regime if it had lasted longer. Here in this sphere, if in any, Henry VII might conceivably be described as ‘rapacious’, but whether or not he felt ‘remorse’ is a matter not germane to the present discussion.1
‘Henry’s determination to ascertain and enforce his traditional rights as feudal overlord, and particularly to collect his revenues thereto attached, was made clear early in his reign,’2 and commissions of enquiry of which there were to be many, were set on foot in his first year.3 Infractions of royal rights in the past decades, coupled with the determination to extract the profits of the rights to the full, led, as we have seen, in due course to the establishment of the office of the surveyor of the King’s Prerogative, and later in the next reign to the setting up of the statutory court of Wards.4 The whole system of enforcing the king’s lawful rights came to be put on a fresh footing. New methods of investigation were devised which by-passed the traditional services of the local escheators and the antiquated procedures of the Exchequer. The hearing of cases and the collection of debts from this source passed largely to what was in effect though not in name a conciliar court – the Council Learned in the law.5
The policy in this field was essentially to ascertain what the law was in regard to the highly complex mass of rights that sprang from the accumulation of feudal custom determining the financial obligations of tenants-in-chief towards their overlord the king. The more precise the definition of these rights, the greater was the inducement to increase the number of tenants-in-chief, and the more this could be done, the more worthwhile it became to enforce the collection of debts legally due, even if the methods adopted should prove to be unconventional and novel. The job was essentially one for lawyers and officials, and the work they achieved went far beyond the scope and vision of the old escheators, and beyond the strict text of the only extant legal statement of the overlord’s rights contained in the thirteenth-century text known as the Statute de praerogativa regis. Much of this text, which was not a statute but rather a declaration of common law,1 had become obsolete and misunderstood by the fifteenth century, but it provided a solid text which could be reinterpreted, glossed, and made to cover possibilities that were not orginally envisaged in the different economic and social circumstances of the thirteenth century. The vigorous new determination of Henry VII’s government to exploit the financial potentials of his feudal prerogative inevitably encouraged the lawyers to apply their wits and erudition to the task of elucidating and adapting the strict words of the Praerogativa regis, and it is no accident that whilst no readings on that text in the inns of court are known to antedate his reign, the first known is believed to be dated within the first three years of it, and that by 1495 two very full readings were given. The first of these2 was given in Lincoln’s Inn by Robert Constable in the autumn term of 1495, and the second in the Inner Temple by Thomas Frowyk in the same term and year. Evidently by then it was a promising theme for ambitious serjeants-at-law-elect to choose for their lectures, and their example was frequently followed throughout the Tudor period.3 If by any chance their learned arguments could still further extend the scope and therefore the proceeds of the sovereign’s prerogative rights, what more effective step towards favour and advancement could a reader take?
It was common doctrine that land held by tenants-in-chief directly of the king by military service owed him the customary feudal incidents. Thus, to mention the chief incidents, if the holder in capite died without heirs then the land escheated (or reverted) into the king’s hands permanently, unless regranted to someone else. If the heir was a minor, the wardship of the heir and the land came into the king’s hands, with its profits less the costs of maintaining the heir; if the heir was a woman then the rights to her marriage were disposable by the king; any succession to the land involved liability to the payment of a relief or fine. All tenants-in-chief were by custom liable to contribute to an aid to the king on the occasion of the knighting of his eldest son, the marriage once of his eldest daughter, and for the ransoming of the king’s body if cap
tured. Henry was never held to ransom, but as we have seen, in 1504 he got what he could out of the other two pretexts. The number of tenants-in-chief never remained static. There were numerous ways in which by the nature of things sub-tenants might find themselves elevated into the position of tenants-in-chief, and find themselves owing the full array of incidents.1 There was never any legal doubt about these obligations in regard to holdings of land. But the Praerogativa did not place any limitation upon the phrase ‘qui de ipso tenent in capite per servicium militari’. It was open therefore to Henry VII’s lawyers and officials to bring incorporeal things into the picture. Tenants-in-chief could be extended to include not only those that held land but also those who held any incorporeal thing,2 and it could be presumed that such things were held by military service if there were no specific indications to the contrary. The possibilities of expanding the sources of profit from prerogative rights were thus very great, and there is no doubt that every effort was made by Henry VII’s officials to exploit them to the full. The legal technicalities of the matter are too complex for us to attempt to unravel here, but we may perhaps agree with Professor Thorne that ‘though they (the commissioners of enquiry into the king’s prerogative rights) perhaps were prepared to resolve all doubts in the king’s favour, it is difficult to find evidence … that they … were engaged in extra-legal exploitation’. No doubt the ‘harsh, strict, and uncompromising actions’ of Empson and Dudley and other commissioners were responsible for the attack made upon them in Henry VIII’s first parliament, but the charges of extortion (made against Dudley in particular), had to be dropped, presumably for lack of evidence. The commissioners’ actions were not always upheld, and redress for exactions that could not be legally upheld could be obtained. Harsh and ruthless though the policy doubtless was, it was not pursued outside the framework of the law.3