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I. Henry VII: A Restatement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

G. R. Elton
G. R. Elton
Affiliation:
Clare College, Cambridge
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Extract

IN a vigorously argued paper, Mr J. P. Cooper has attacked my interpretation of Henry VII's reign.1 If the point at issue were only Mr Cooper's view of my methods and scholarship—or, for that matter, my view of his—I should feel neither justified nor inclined to trouble anyone again with these problems. But Mr Cooper is almost as much concerned to prove Henry VII rapacious as he is sure that I am wrong; and the truth about Henry VII's government deserves all the elucidation it may need. If, therefore, I reluctantly recur to an argument in which I have already had an extended say, it is because I believe Mr Cooper to be in error on a matter of first-rate importance; I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents.2 A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1961

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References

1 Elton, G. R., ‘Henry VII: Rapacity and Remorse’, Historical J. 1, 21ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. P. Cooper, ‘Henry VII's Last Years Reconsidered’, ibid, 11, 103ff. These two articles will be referred to by their authors' names only. All MSS. cited here (except original acts of Parliament) are at the P.R.O.

2 E.g. the line and a half quoted from Acts...of the Mercers in Cooper, n. 36, contains six errors; the last paragraph on p. 121 contains seven and fails to mark an omitted passage; the paragraph from the Great Chronicle on p. 107 omits two words and totals fifteen errors in under eight lines. These inaccuracies do not distort the sense, but Mr Cooper's penchant for cutting his quotations occasionally does even that. Thus when he says (n. 26) that my question with respect to the advice offered by legal counsel— to agree rather than to risk trial— is superfluous, he achieves his effect by reducing my remark by half. I asked whether this advice was due to accused's patent guilt or to the fact that the trial was rigged (the point omitted by Mr Cooper), and the double question retains its point even if counsel were afraid to speak in the cause.

3 Cooper, 104; Brodie, D. M., ‘Edmund Dudley: Minister of Henry VII’, Trans.R.Hist. Soc. 4th ser. XV (1932), 155f.Google Scholar

4 Cooper, 103.

5 Mr Cooper has ‘a’.

6 The last five words appear as ‘1503–5’ in Mr Cooper's version.

7 Richardson, W. C., Tudor Chamber Administration (Baton Rouge, 1952), 141, 145, 158, 212.Google Scholar

8 One would not suppose from Mr Cooper's article that I described Henry VII's policy vis-à-vis landowners as legal but so extreme ‘that one may question its legitimacy’ (Elton, 23), or that my remarks on the promoters speak of ‘false prosecutions and corruptions of every sort’ (ibid. 30).

9 Cooper, 107.

10 Cooper, 108 and n. 29. It is very hard to get facts concerning prosecutions under penal statutes, but the occasional example does not look to be concerned with obsolete legislation. Thus in 1505 a man was pardoned for an outlawry incurred by failing to pay a fine in a tamquam action arising out of the act of 1 Ric. Ill, c. 8 (C(alendar of) P(atent) R(olls), Henry VII, 11, 440).

11 Cf. Elton, 34f., and for informing, below, 6.

12 Elton, 23 f.

13 Cooper, 105 f.

14 Plumpton Correspondence (ed. T. Stapleton, Camden Soc. 1839), pp. cvi seqq., I47ff. Mr Cooper dates the disputed York assizes to January 1505 (p. 106, n. 16). This was the date of the attestation in Plumpton's interest; the assizes were held in September 1502 (Plumpton Corr. p. cx).

15 C 43/1/56.

16 Ibid. 32.

17 Cooper, 112ff.

18 C 202/H 64/30. General pardons for various offences occur often in the patent rolls; there are no signs that money was demanded for the majority though payment is recorded for some. No payment: e.g. C.P.R. Henry VII, 1, 291, 292, 295, 299, 310, 316; 11, 154, 156, 158, 164, 282–4, 557, 558–9, 570–1 (a list ranging from Oct. 1489 to June 1508). Payment: e.g. ibid. 1, 317, 403.

19 E 23/2.

20 E 23/3. This is the original of Astle's not altogether accurate edition.

21 C 66/594, m. 27 d.

22 No case of a complaint received is at present known, though it is possible that some of the traverses of the years 1504–5 (below, p. 29) were connected with the proclamation.

23 E 101/517/15.

24 Cooper, 115.

25 Mr Cooper (ibid.) misapplies the quotation from Coke who was talking about the traversing of inquests, not of outlawries. Fisher's funeral sermon proves that Henry VII had scruples of conscience, not that ills were manifold; and Polydore Vergil explicitly reports only the talk of the time of reaction (‘fertur’).

26 Cf. below, p. 12.

27 Great Chronicle of London (ed. Thomas, A. H. and Thornley, I. D., London, 1938), 258;Google ScholarSelect Cases in the Council of Henry VII (ed. Bayne, C. G. and Dunham, W. H., Selden Soc. 1958), pp. lvi–Iviii, lx-lxi, 70ff.Google Scholar

28 Cooper, 108.

29 Cases in the Council of Henry VII, 75.

30 Edmund Dudley, , The Tree of Commonwealth (ed. Brodie, D. M., Cambridge, 1948), 8.Google Scholar

31 Deputy Keeper's Third Report, App. 11, 226f.

32 Great Chronicle, 337; C.P.R. Henry VII, II, 564. Grimaldi's association with the Crown was not recent: the Great Chronicle makes him partly responsible for Capell's troubles in 1495–6 (p. 258).

33 plumpton Corr. pp. cvi seqq.

34 Ibid. 151; pp. cxi-cxiii.

35 The law is elaborated in Constable, R., Tertia Lectura on Prerogativa Regis (ed. Thorne, S. E., New Haven, 1949), 70ff. The simplest method, traverse, was ordinarily available and, to judge from the documents cited below, commonly used; a petition of right was required when the king claimed lands for felony or treason, and monstrance le droit (a petition of grace) if the petitioner's title was limited.Google Scholar

36 Ibid. p. xix.

37 C 43/1; Chester 7/3,5. Cf. the table, in chronological order, in the Appendix to this paper.

38 Cf. Richardson, W. C., ‘The Surveyor of the Prerogative’, Eng. Hist. Rev. LVI (1941), 52 ff., and for a summary Elton, 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 One of the early inquests (C 43/1/38) may in fact belong to 1507; cf. Appendix.

40 C 43/1/58. It is, of course, possible that of the twenty-nine contested cases some ended happily for the traverser.

41 Ibid. 32, 34, 16, 32*, 31.

42 Ibid. 43.

43 Calendar of Close Rolls 1485–1500, no. 574.

44 C.P.R. Henry VII, ii, 608, 618, 626, 627f.

45 C 43/2/23–32, 35, 37.

46 C 43/1/10, 30, 32*.

47 The bill, written by an unofficial scribe, was a petition addressed to ’the Right Honorable and discrett Commons’, asking that ‘yt may therfore please your discrett wysedomes humbly to be seche the Kynges grace that it may - - -,’a phrase corrected after acceptance into ‘wherfore be hit enacted’ (original act, House of Lords).

48 C 43/1/32*. On 12 November 1505, a jury found that Benstead had sold the manor to Edward IV for £5, on condition that the vendor died without heirs. Then, however, he enfeoffed four men with it, and on his death some other party still entered upon it. After the inquest, the commissioners naturally seized the manor into the king's hands; but the feoffees traversed the office, and on 8 July 1506 the attorney-general, presenting a royal warrant which stated that the office had been ‘but fayned’ and that the traverse had been proved ‘substancyall & good. - - - before our Counsell lernyd’, restored the manor to the petitioners.

49 Ibid. 29.

50 Contemporary misapprehensions are also strikingly reflected in Lord Chancellor Warham's attitude in 1510, as exemplified in a case cited by Mr Cooper (n. 17) from Keilwey's Reports. Long arguments by the judges, turning on the technical question of the form which a petitioner's interpleading should take, ended with a request for a special pardon, but Warham cut the knot by simply quashing the disputed inquest because he believed it to be one which Empson and Dudley had falsely procured. According to the reporter, this was at the time described as unlawful (contra legem). In other words, he had used the arbitrary powers of equity because he had a general suspicion that parties had suffered injustice, and his action seems to have been ill considered in this instance. The report as printed speaks of Empson and ‘Audeley’; no doubt Mr Cooper's tacit emendation to ‘Dudley’ restores the original meaning.

51 Great Chronicle, 334f.

52 This dating of a general grievance by an event in London's history underlines my point that the London chronicles were really concerned with the city's grievances only.

53 E.g. Cooper, 111f., 115.

54 For all this cf. Hastings, M., The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth Century England (Ithaca, 1947), 169ff. The old right to kill an outlaw on sight had lapsed. The whole business had lost the terror it had had in King John's time, though that king's doings tend to leap to the minds of historians and others when outlawry is mentioned.Google Scholar

55 Blatcher, M., ‘The Working of the Court of King's Bench in the Fifteenth Century’ (Unpub. London Ph.D. thesis, 1936), 184.Google Scholar

56 Hastings, op. cit. 171f., 176.

57 Ibid. 180f. The traverses of outlawry which the king licensed presumably pleaded one of the other ways of escaping outlawry: suing a writ of error, or challenge on grounds of misnomer. It does not seem unfair that a man who had long avoided his obligations but now under pressure claimed that the process was false should have to pay for his earlier neglect which affected law-enforcement and the rights of others.

58 4 Henry VIII; c. 4, in effect made permanent by 6 Henry VIII, c. 4.

59 Op. cit. 179, n. 43.

60 E.g. an entry book of outlawries proclaimed in Lines. (E 36/91) includes a proclamation for felony at the king's suit for men from Lancashire as well as Lincolnshire (p. 31: 1491), one for debt against men from Huntingdonshire (pp. 35 f.: 1491), one for debt against a Northumbrian (p. 57: 1499), and so forth.

61 Op. cit. 182.

62 E 101/517/14, Belknap's account for 1 July 1508 to 10 March 1509.

63 Richardson, Tudor Chamber Admin. 120.

64 E 101/413/2.

65 Acts (of Court) of the Mercers' (Company 1453–1527), (ed. Lyell, L. and Watney, F. D., Cambridge, 1936), 248.Google Scholar

66 C 43/1: in chronological order 63, 66, 59, 44, 71, 69, 72, 60, 61, 62, 68, 67, 45, 65, 70.

67 E 101/516/17. The bonds were taken of the principal and his sureties.

68 Letters and Papers...of Henry VIII (ed. R. Brodie), 1, 3226 (8); Richardson, Tudor Chamber Admin. 158. As late as the early 1520's a list of unremitted debts to the Crown contained many bonds taken by Henry VII {Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, iii,3694).

69 Pardons for outlawry are nearly all enrolled at the head of each year's patent roll and can be counted easily from C.P.R. A few additional ones are sometimes found later in the roll. A cross-check is possible from such Particulars of the Hanaper Accounts as survive. Though the figures do not tally exactly, they are close enough to show that the patent roll provides reliable evidence. Thus in 7 Henry VII thirty-six pardons paid fees in the Hanaper (E 101/218/4) and thirty-eight appear on the roll; forty-six paid in 1505–6 (Michaelmas to Michaelmas: E 101/219/8), with thirty-three on the roll (August to August).

70 E 101/517/14.

71 Belknap's accounts include one for outlawries and other matters ‘assessed by his high-nesse’ (E 101/517/15).

72 E.g. Richard Marten paid £20 (E 101/517/15, fo. 1) for the pardon of an outlawry for a debt of 40s., all other outlawries in which he stood, and the restoration of his goods and chattels (C.P.R. Henry VII, II, 600).

73 E.g. fines assessed on 11 Feb. 1509 totalled £193. 12s. 3d. of which £73. 3s. 5d. was paid in cash (E 101/517/15). Many of the assessments in this paper are crossed out and may have been remitted, but some of those crossed out appear in Belknap's comprehensive account (ibid. 14).

74 Cooper, 112 and n. 61.

75 C.P.R. Henry VII, 1, 309.

76 E.g. of the ten pardons agreed to on 27 January 1509, one concerned felony and one other may have arisen from a Crown suit; for the last three properly recorded years (1504–7), the patent roll shows three, three, and two outlawries at the king's suit out of twenty-five, thirty-three, and twenty-eight respectively. Henry Wodecock, secondary of the Counter in the Poultry, made a return of all exigents executed there during his term of office which practically covered the reign; of fifty-three listed only three were at the king's suit, and all these belonged to 1501–2 (E 163/9/9).

77 Cf. Miss Brodie's remarks in Tree of Commonwealth, 5ff.

78 Cooper, 120f; Brodie, Trans. R. Hist. Soc. 1932, 153f.

79 Ibid; Great Chronicle, 336.

80 Cooper, 109, 110, 126.

81 For the details cf. Cooper, no. The act of 1504 transferred control of guild ordinances from mayors and J.P.s to the king's officers. This measure at least said that it was promoted by the Commons and has always been regarded as a sensible attack on the disastrous selfishness of guilds and towns; the use of it in order to burden Henry VII would seem to require some explanation.

82 For Henry and London cf. also Pickthorn, K., Early Tudor Government (Cambridge, 1934), 1, 70.Google Scholar

83 Cf. Select Cases in the Court of Requests (ed. Leadam, I. S., Selden Soc. 1898), 7ff.Google Scholar

84 Cooper, 110, 117.

85 Clode, C. M., The Early History of the Guild of Merchant Tailors (London, 1888), 1, 347ff, 350.Google Scholar

86 Schanz, G., Englische Handebpolitik gegen Ende des Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1881), 1, 340ff.Google Scholar

87 Cooper, 109.

88 Ibid.

89 Gras, N., ‘Tudor Books of Rates’, Quart. J. Econ. XXVI (1912), 766ff.,CrossRefGoogle Scholar holds that the 1507 book did not raise rates. The customs figures of London, where alone the book applied, show no significant increase. Though the yield of the subsidy for 1507–8 is up a bit on the previous year, this is in accord with the national movement of the customs and clearly represents improved trade (Schanz, op. cit. n, 37, 46; Ramsay, P., ‘Overseas Trade in the Reign of Henry VII’, Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. VI (1954), 173ff.).Google Scholar

90 Cooper, 126.

91 Acts of the Mercers, 346f.

92 Ibid. 347: they do not want ‘to haue the Subside graunted after the extremytie, as it was in the tyme of Kyng Henry the vijth’. The point is clearly not, as Mr Cooper supposes, that they want to return to Henry VII's grant (1485): they want to offer less than that.

93 Ibid. 348 (8 Feb. 1510).

94 Ibid. 351; though it did not reach the Lords till the 23rd (L(ords') J(oumals), 1, 7a).

95 Acts of the Mercers, 326f.

96 Ibid. 348ff

97 Ibid. 350.

98 Ibid. 358ff

99 Ibid. 372

100 Ibid. 380f.

101 Ibid.118ff.., 152ff.

102 Ibid. 119.

103 Ibid. p. xix.

104 Elton, 37; Cooper, 116.

105 Cooper, 114.

106 Cooper, 113f.

107 It is also not true that all the warrants were made ‘two years or more after Henry's death’. Only two of them were, and the implied suggestion that this marks a considered rather than a hot-blooded reaction has no support. A good many recognizances were also cancelled because the debts had been paid (e.g. Letters and Papers, 1, 257 [63, 68, 84]); many of these documents were never called in doubt.

108 Great Chronicle, 336.

109 Cooper, 109.

110 Cooper, 117ff

111 C.P.R. Edward VI, 1, 75 ff.; Philip and Mary, 1, 276ff.

112 Ibid. Henry VII, 11, 29ff. Before his day general commissions were seemingly rare, though Henry IV on occasion appointed one for a single county (ibid. Henry IV, 1, 267f., 313).

113 Ibid. Henry VII, 1, 442.

114 C 66/574, m. 16d; 563, m. 16d.

115 C 66/576, m. 20 d.

116 KB 8/4/51, 9/453/69. Mr Cooper's description of the commission's powers is fair enough (pp. 117f.), though it is not clear why his macaronic rendering of the Latin original should appear as a quotation.

117 C 82/342/1/576.

118 Polydore Vergil, , Anglica Historia (ed. Hay, D., Camden Soc. 1950), 150: in the concordance.Google Scholar

119 C 82/343/1/615. Mr Cooper (n. 118) makes nothing of their names, but one of them was the notorious promoter Henry Toft.

120 KB 9/453.

121 Cases in the Council of Henry VII, pp. xcviii, 123ff.

122 KB 9/453/277 on 28 April 1509, and no. 24 in June 1509.

123 Plumpton's case of 1500 (ibid. 142) and the forcible seizure of May 1504 (ibid. 138), even if they show Empson acting in the king's service (which is not certain), cannot be used to substantiate Mr Cooper's case for a worsening of things in the last years; the charge of false imprisonment (ibid. 139) states no year.

124 Ibid. 461, 140.

125 Ibid. 154, 157–8, and cf. above, p. 6. This Hampshire commission certainly ran into trouble; of the traverses entered in 1 Henry VIII, four of the seven conceded dealt with its inquests (C 43/2/27–30). But the apparent offender, Sir Amyas Paulet, had caused annoyance as early as 1498 (Letter and Papers of Richard III and Henry VII, ed. J. Gairdner, 11, 76f.); perhaps it would be wiser to regard these cases, too, as private quarrels taking advantage of the machinery of the king's government.

126 I possess microfilms of the transcripts of Council records in the Huntington Library which Mr Cooper has used; though his printed version (pp. 121f.) contains many minor errors and I shall quote from the microfilm, his paper may be referred to for the sake of convenience.

127 C 82/342/1/576.

128 Cooper, 123.

129 Cited ibid. 121f.

130 Cf. Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government, 46ff.

131 Mr Cooper's gibe (n. 121) convicts me of overconciseness. The memorandum of 1531 (Tudor Revolution in Government, 162,438) shows clearly that ‘Thekinges learned Counsaille’ was regarded as potentially in existence, requiring only attention; their activities concerning penal laws and bonds taken ‘for any maner offence or forfaicture’ show their concerns to be those for which Dudley had employed them. While they were much less organized a body than under Henry VII, they did exist to the extent that they could order appearances by privy seal (ibid. 292, and cf. e.g. Letters and Papers...of Henry VIII, Add. 932). If the evidence seems thin, it should be remembered that but for the accidental survival of two entry books in the Duchy of Lancaster records we should still be as ignorant of Henry VII's Learned Council, as in fact we were until Mr Somerville's article appeared in the 1939 Eng. Hist. Rev.

132 L.J. 5b,6a,6b. According to Mr Cooper the Commons' bill granted only one year, but there is no evidence of this. Ibid. 5b only declares the Lords' opinion that the king should have four or three years, ‘pars contra partem in unum annum’.

133 Ibid. 8a.

134 House of Lords.

135 7 Henry VIII, c. 3.

136 1 Henry VIII, c. 5. This is the statute which remedied, in Mr Cooper's opinion (p. 109), a justified grievance in that native merchants had been caught under a law intended to prevent strangers from getting their goods customed at native rates.

137 L.J. 1, 5b, 6a.

138 Ibid. 66.

139 Original act (House of Lords), and L.J. 1, ya, jb, 8a.

140 Ibid. 46, 50, 76, 8a.

141 Original act (House of Lords).

142 Original act (House of Lords). The first and only mention of this act in L.J. (i, 8a) gives the impression that the bill had started in the Commons.

143 Above, p. 9.

144 Cooper, 126 and n. 133.

145 L.J. i, 6a, 66, 7a.

146 Cooper, 125.

147 The matter is very obscure, but it seems that the Lords wished to extend a prohibition to exercise these offices from those who lived in the locality to those who were born there (L.J. 1, 6, 7).

148 Original act (House of Lords) and L.J. I, 5b, 6a, 7b (1, 4, 19 Feb.).

149 One other act was vetoed: it permitted the killing of deer outside proper forest areas (cf. L.J. 1, 5a, 6a, 6b; 29 Jan., 4, 6, 7 Feb.).

150 The point is familiar: both Star Chamber and Requests really gained their jurisdiction from the demands of suitors, not by royal degree or use.

151 Above, pp. 9f.

152 Above, p. 12.

153 Above, p. 22.

154 Cooper, 116. Most of this evidence was taken into account by such earlier writers as Miss Brodie or Professor Dietz who arrived at more balanced conclusions.

155 Cooper, 116.

156 Cases in the Council of Henry VII, pp. cxiv, cxxvi. In an unsatisfactory summing up of prerogative jurisdiction (Cooper, 120: e.g. the Council tried title to land because it was pressed to do so by suitors, not because it wished to encroach on the common law), Mr Cooper relies largely on Bayne's attack on the Council Learned (Cases..., pp. xxvii-xxviii). This rests on some serious misunderstandings and such unconvincing arguments as that because Empson and Dudley were charged with oppression, of which there is no sign in the Exchequer records, they used the Council Learned improperly, even though there is no explicit evidence of such doings in its records either.

page 29 note 1 If 3 Henry VII in the record is a mistake for 23 (quite possible), this inquest belongs to 1507.

page 29 note 2 Sic.