Henry VII Page 20
1 G. R. Elton, The Tudor revolution, 30–1; England under the Tudors, 11–13; ‘The problems and significance of administrative history in the Tudor period’, Journal of British Studies, IV (1965), 18–28; and The Tudor constitution, 116–19; cf. S. B. Chrimes, An introduction to the administrative history of mediaeval England, 3rd ed. (1966), Epilogue, 241–70.
1 See above, p. 106.
2 G. R. Elton, The Tudor revolution, 30.
3 See D.N.B.; Emden, Biog. Reg, Oxf., sub nom.; J. Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary and the Signet office in the fifteenth century (1939), 155, 177–8; cf. above, p. 109.
1 For references, see above, p. 109. He was also the founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to which he bequeathed a very large number of books and MSS. He was interested in humanism and corresponded with Erasmus; cf. Emden, Biog. Reg. Oxf., sub nom.
2 For the office in the period before 1485, see J. Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary and the Signet office in the fifteenth century (1939); and F. M. G. Evans, The Principal Secretary of State (1932), ch. I.
3 He was succeeded as French Secretary by Stephen Fryon until 1490, when Francis Dupon, a former secretary to the duke of Brittany, was appointed, with John Meautis as an assistant, who from 1491 took the office and retained it until 1522. See J. Otway-Ruthven, op. cit. 104. A Latin secretary was appointed from 1495, with Peter Carmeliano as the first appointee; ibid. 190–1, and below, p. 307.
4 See Otway-Ruthven, op. cit. 102–4, 155, l56, 159, 178–9; D.N.B.; and Emden, Biog. Reg. Camb., sub nom.
5 Cal. Venetian P., I, 691, 712, 722.
6 Emden, Biog. Reg. Oxf., sub nom; cf. D.N.B., sub nom. That Henry VII thought well of him is suggested by the fact that he supported him in the unsavoury episode in which Sherborne was alleged to have forged the papal bull providing him to the see of St David’s; cf. G. Williams, The Welsh church from the Conquest to the Reformation (1962), 298, 306; Emden, Biog. Reg. Oxf., III, 1686; L. & P., I, 246; II, 169. He was not only extensively employed by Henry VII on foreign missions, but was used for the more undiplomatic task of extracting ruthless pecuniary penalties from Warbeck’s adherents (P.V., 108).
7 L. & P., I, 132, 405, etc.; Cal. Venetian Papers, 795, 799.
1 Emden, Biog. Reg. Oxf., sub nom.; D.N.B.
2 J. F. Baldwin, The King’s Council, 424, where the name given is erroneously Hatfield; F. M. G. Evans, op. cit. 17. From the time of Thomas Cromwell, secretary from 1533, all the king’s secretaries were to be laymen.
3 Bayne, op. cit. 1, 8, 14, etc.
4 ibid. 18.
5 ibid. 32, xxv.
6 ibid. 32.
7 ibid. 38.
Chapter 6
FINANCIAL ADMINISTRATION
No man succeeded to the throne of England with such a total lack of financial experience and resources as did Henry VII. Unlike any of his predecessors, Henry VII succeeded to the crown without any personal experience of estate management, or any knowledge of financial administration. All he had had personally was dependence upon his guardian’s provisions as a boy, and thereafter penury and dependence upon the charity of the duke of Brittany and of the government of France during his years of exile. The impecuniosity of his early years doubtless to some extent explains his assiduous attention to his financial interests for the rest of his life, the meticulous fostering of his revenues, and the prominence of his trusted financial agents during his reign. He could not do other than rely greatly upon those who had had experience of financial management in the past, necessarily for the most part under the Yorkist regime, and although time was needed for the due consideration of the problems and possibilities, it was not long before the usefulness of Yorkist methods of improving the royal finances was appreciated, and these methods adopted, adapted, and carried to a much higher degree of efficiency. There was to be little that was entirely novel in Henry VII’s financial administration.1 Nearly all of its methods were derived from Yorkist or even Lancastrian precedents; many of the new king’s financial officers and agents, whether they had joined Henry in exile or not, had been trained and acquired their expertise in previous reigns. What was to be new was the degree of the king’s sustained personal supervision and stimulus in financial matters, and the measure of success attained in rehabilitating the royal revenues. The time came when annually the rate of expenditure was substantially less than the annual income, and the Crown obtained an unwonted spell of solvency. Henry VII undoubtedly enjoyed his personal affluence. It was not just that he could and did maintain his court in magnificence and thereby impressed his subjects and foreign powers; he could and did display liberality in pecuniary gifts (all meticulously recorded by his clerks) to a great variety of those who pleased him in important or in trivial matters, or who sought his charity.1 Much more than a question of personal affluence was involved; it was a question of adequately financing the king’s government in nearly all its aspects. Whether or not Henry VII had ever imbibed Fortescue’s wise views on ‘the harme that comyth off a kynges poverte’, passed on perhaps by Jasper Tudor and John Morton, he certainly acted in the spirit of the Lancastrian chief justice’s conclusion that ‘we most holde it for undoubted that ther mey no reaume prospere, or be worshipfull, under a poure kynge’.2
Inevitably in the circumstances of his accession, it took time for Henry VII to obtain knowledge of the financial procedures that were open to him, and to consider and devise the arrangements that were to prove to be the most advantageous and eventually to be characteristic of his reign. Necessarily at first he could not do other than rely mainly upon the Exchequer for the administration of his revenues. The Household of Richard III ceased to exist with the death of the king, and with it the financial organization of the chamber upon which the Yorkist kings had pivoted their financial innovations. It was not possible at first to exempt from Exchequer audit and divert from Exchequer coffers the large land revenues that for many years had been collected by special receivers and paid direct into the chamber. The pressing necessity was to get in the proceeds of the parliamentary grants of 1485 and 1486 of such landed revenues as existed, augmented by the fruits of the acts of resumption of 1485–7, as quickly as possible, and to provide for the immediate needs of the government. It was the Exchequer,3 therefore, that received a sudden and substantial increase of income from the endowed revenues soon after the accession of Henry VII, and for some four years the Exchequer was not only by far the most important financial agency but seemed to be well on its way to recovering the accounting supremacy it had enjoyed before the Yorkist magnification of the chamber. For the first ten years of the reign the land receipts in the chamber remained small and less than the total attained under the Yorkist kings. But in the course of the second ten years the total greatly increased and almost the entire revenues were handled by the chamber. But the process of reviving Yorkist policy and carrying it out further in practice took time; suitable financial officers had to be found; the advantages of diverting accounts and cash away from the Exchequer to a chamber organization close to the king himself had to be appraised. But the time came when the fullest effect was given to that policy, and the supervision of the bulk of the revenues was brought to the king himself or his immediate nominees.1
We have seen the remarkable continuity in the tenure of the office of treasurer of England, with Lord Dinham and Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, as the only holders of the office for the whole reign, after the first few months.2 The same observation has to be made regarding the office of under-treasurer. Two holders of that office, of more practical importance than the treasurership in Exchequer business, spanned almost the entire reign. Two holders certainly, but perhaps one should add a third, and that one no less a person than Reginald Bray, who as early as 16 October 1485 was being described as ‘under-treasurer of England’, as well as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.3 He continued to be so described from time to time, but no formal appointment has ever been found. If Alfred Cornburgh, who was Richard III’s under-treasurer, re
mained in office after Bosworth, the probability is that Bray was appointed informally to keep an eye on him and the Exchequer, and to keep a grip on that side of the financial administration, for a period. But what exactly that period was remains unknown at present. Alfred Cornburgh had been a servant of the Crown from 1455, as a yeoman of the chamber and controller of mines, as a sheriff, and as a soldier by land and sea. He served Edward IV well and became under-treasurer by April 1485 and remained in that office until his death in 1487, and was keeper of the Great Wardrobe as well during his last year. He was a member of parliament at least five times, but was essentially the permanent official, whose career survived and bridged all the political vicissitudes from 1455.4
His successor in the office, Robert Lytton, knighted in 1494, was another survivor of the Yorkist regime, who had been a clerk of the Exchequer from 1470, clerk of the Issues, 1478, promoted to be under-treasurer and councillor from 1487, apparently until his death in 1505, keeper of the Great Wardrobe from 1492, and treasurer at war 1501–2.1 As for the chancellorship of the Exchequer, this office was held for the whole reign by Sir Thomas Lovell and he combined it with the treasurership of the Household for very nearly the whole reign. Only five persons appear to have been appointed chamberlains of the Exchequer during the reign. These were such prominent figures as Sir William Stanley, Sir Richard Edgecombe, Sir Richard Guildford, Giles, Lord Daubeney, who replaced Guildford at the end of 1487, and Sir Sampson Norton, who had been master of the Ordinance and a soldier, who replaced Sir William Stanley after his dismissal and execution in 1495.
These then were the high officials in the Exchequer of Henry VII, and if, as we are given to understand, it was the under-treasurer of England who was the effectual head in practice, then there can be no doubt that Sir Robert Lytton was the key man, but of him little is at present known. But it is evident that Henry VII could have experienced little difficulty in imposing on the Exchequer whatever policies and procedures he wished to adopt, even though there might be friction between the barons of the Exchequer over the question of ‘foreign accounts’, and equally clear that the time came when he decided to reverse the process whereby the Exchequer in the early years of his reign had regained its financial preeminence, and to revive the dominance of the chamber.
Whether or not Henry VII carried out completely the plans for the reform of financial administration envisaged by Richard III,2 there can be no doubt that the Yorkist policy of making special arrangements for the management and accounting of revenue from crown lands had produced results sufficiently promising to induce Henry VII, when he had had time to appreciate the advantages, to emulate these arrangements and to carry them further with a drive and vigour exceeding anything that the Yorkists were able to use. The need to tackle the problem was all the greater because the circumstances of the reign
magnified the extent of the territories in the Crown’s hands. Further acts of resumption, forfeitures following upon numerous convictions for treason, and determined exploitation of feudal rights, all combined to make the Crown lands a potential source of large revenues. It was not a question of desiring to undermine the Exchequer system as such; it is misleading to speak of ‘a breakdown of the Exchequer system’.1 The fact was, as the Yorkists had realized, that the Exchequer had at no time been competent to organize the effective administration of Crown lands, to enhance their profitability, or to cope with the immensely detailed work of estate management, most of which necessarily had to be done locally. The Exchequer could, in its laborious and slow ways, audit the accounts of receivers and such agents, if routine so required, but mere audit was not enough. The responsibility for management, collection of revenues and accounting must be pinned down upon carefully selected agents and the results of their labours supervised by persons close to the king, or even by the king himself, if the king were to be satisfied that he was actually receiving all that could be obtained from these sources. Once the advantages of side-tracking the Exchequer in these processes had been grasped, it doubtless followed inevitably that the actual cash accruing should also be diverted away from the Exchequer of Receipt and paid into ‘a counting house’ very close to the king himself, and all the precedents for this purpose pointed to the chamber of the Household. It was not difficult to provide for the resumption of a normal flow of cash from the Exchequer to the Household departments, including the chamber, for current expenses, as well as for the payment of the wages of the king’s officials in general, and this was done under letters of Privy Seal as early as 24 December 1485.2 But it took longer to attempt the task of appointing ad hoc receivers of Crown lands. The preamble to the act of resumption of 1487 admitted the fact. Henry, it was stated, had been so busy for the defence of the Church of England, his own royal person and his realm since the beginning of his reign that he and his council had so far not found time to ‘set, make nor ordain Receivers, Auditors … and other officers accountants, such as should be to his profit and avail, nor providently make leases, grants … by occasion whereof, his honours, manors, lands, tenements, possessions and inheritances be greatly fallen in decay, and further in decay shall daily fall: if remedy in this behalf be not provided …’.3
The crisis ending with the battle of Stoke was now passed; the act of resumption itself brought much business in land into the Crown’s purview, and the forfeitures after the battle added to the accumulation. Soon steps were taken to remedy the deficiencies in administrative mechanism in these connections. The same act annulled all grants of office of receivers and auditors, etc. and revoked all leases on the royal manors and lordships to enable new leases to be made for the king’s ‘most profit and approvement of his revenues’. In 1495 similar action was taken as regards leases in the principality of Wales.1 This action was doubtless the result of Reginald Bray’s advice, for as early as 28 February 1486 he had been given a commission to look into the whole problem of the landed revenues in the duchy of Lancaster. The king, it was said, had been given to understand that he and his progenitors had suffered great loss in the duchy by negligent feodaries, receivers, and bailiffs. Bray, therefore, was instructed to discharge, with the advice of the council of the duchy, all officers who should fail to act diligently and profitably and to appoint others in their place.2 The experience gained by Bray as chancellor of the duchy presumably stood him in good stead as one of the chief financial advisers of the king, and he was in a very strong position to guide the royal policy in the right directions. Once again, as in the past, the experience acquired in the estate management of the duchy could be turned to royal advantage.
By 17 May 1488 the point was reached of appointing a commission under the terms of the act of resumption of 1487 with authority to nominate auditors and receivers, farmers, customers, ulnagers, and other accounting officers in England, and to let to farm all castles, honours, and lordships to sufficient persons according to the value thereof. The commissioners, who were thus given large power to overhaul the management of Crown lands, were Richard Fox, bishop of Exeter, the keeper of the Privy Seal, Dinham, the treasurer, Robert Lytton, the under-treasurer, Sir William Hody, the chief baron of the Exchequer, Sir Reginald Bray, and Thomas Savage, clerk.3 No list of all the officers appointed or reappointed by these commissions has so far been compiled, but enough names have become known to make it clear that some of the most experienced Yorkist appointees were among them.4 Many of these men had in previous years been accustomed not to have to account at the Exchequer, but to conciliar or ad hoc auditors, and to see the revenues they collected paid direct into the chamber. The advantages of such methods could hardly remain concealed from the king’s chief financial advisers, nor therefore from the king himself, and before very long, even though gradually, these well-tried methods were being revived. By 2 March 1493, for example, Bray himself, with two others, receivers of the Warwick, Salisbury, and Spencer lands, and of lands lately belonging to William, marquis of Berkeley, Lord Morley, and Earl Rivers, were instructed by the king, on the advice of his
council, to pay their issues into the king’s own hands and nowhere else, and submit their accounts to be ‘overseen and examined’ by the king and his council. As from Michaelmas 1491, the barons of the Exchequer were commanded to cease all process against these receivers and were restricted merely to requiring delivery of accounts for custody into the Exchequer from the ‘foreign auditors’ only after they had been determined by the king and council.1
No general rule exempting receivers of Crown lands from Exchequer process seems ever to have been made. Each case appears to have been considered on merits, and receivers had to earn Henry’s approbation by reputation and efficiency before such exemptions were made, and then granted only to the individuals concerned. Numerous examples of such exonerations exist, but little specific information is available as to who the auditors were – ‘the king and some councillors’ is as precise a description as can be given. But a number of the resulting ‘declarations of account’ survive, and ‘there can be no doubt whatsoever that the work of all these receivers, foreign auditors and conciliar surveyors was under the closest personal supervision of the king’.2 All the relevant documents reveal the immense personal labour in which the development of his chamber of Receipt, fed by these officials, relentlessly involved Henry.
The effect on the amount of receipts in the chamber of the diversion to it of general income and land revenue can be shown from the chamber books that survive. These run from 4 July 1487 to 4 July 1489; from 30 September 1489 to 1 October 1495; and from 1 October 1502 to 1 October 1505. The first book shows that Thomas Lovell, the treasurer of the chamber, had no balance in hand on 4 July 1487 (he must however have had some receipts during the preceding period and a reference is made in this book to an earlier book), but received £10,491 during the next twelve months. The yearly average receipts for the period covered by these three books were: total £17,000, land revenues £3,000; total £27,000, land revenues £11,000; total £105,000, land revenues £40,000. These figures were still smaller than in the late Yorkist period, but they were to increase substantially over the remaining years of the reign and it has been calculated that some four-fifths of the total average annual revenue of about £113,000 (c. £42,000 from land revenues) found its way into the chamber.1