Part 2

For the concentration of power, effective power, in the king’s hands, money was essential; while to keep the general population contented, it was necessary that their purses should not be subjected to too severe exactions, which must fall elsewhere. Henry directed them against the nobility. The nation at large had no objection; the king’s treasury was filled and the power of the nobles curtailed by the same operation. Thus the king eliminated the disturbing factor, or allowed it to eliminate itself. When noblemen got themselves mixed up with treasons, they could not complain if their lives were spared and their goods paid the forfeit. They had been wont to maintain great households, every man having in his service the nucleus of an army. These crowds of retainers were forbidden by law, as being, for obvious reasons, a public danger. If noblemen, accustomed to over-ride the law, chose to keep up their households in despite of it, they could not expect sympathy when they were called upon to pay in cash the penalty of breaking the law. These measures were not only thoroughly defensible as being entirely free from any taint of injustice; they also served directly to relieve taxation, to fill the royal coffers, and to make wanton insurrection difficult.

Yet, while keeping within what might be called legitimate bounds, as he habitually did while Morton was alive, the king undoubtedly permitted himself to apply methods which savoured of trickery. He made great parade of a war with France, appealing to national patriotism to supply the funds. The appeal was successful, but there was no corresponding expenditure on the campaign. Excellent reasons for inactivity were of course forthcoming, but it is none the less certain that no activity was ever contemplated. All that was intended was a demonstration which might induce the French monarch to buy the English king off with solid cash--as he eventually did. The whole transaction was eminently profitable, but Henry had certainly got his money out of his own subjects by false pretences. The same plea was resorted to, to get benevolences authorised, when the famous dilemma traditionally--but as it would seem quite unjustly--attributed to Cardinal Morton was applied. People who lived handsomely could obviously afford a contribution by curtailing their extravagance; people who did not live handsomely must have wealth laid by. In either case, there could be no inability to serve the king’s need. The spirit which prompted the invention of that dilemma is illustrated in a story reported by Bacon as traditional. Henry paid a visit to the Earl of Oxford at Henningham, where he was sumptuously entertained, and on his departure passed out through a lane of the earl’s retainers drawn up to do him honour. “These, no doubt, are your menial servants,” observed the king. The earl demurred; they were not menials, but retainers, who had turned out to do him credit when he had so distinguished a guest. Whereupon “The king started a little, and said, ‘By my faith, my lord, I thank you for my good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must speak with you.’ And it is part of the report that the earl compounded for no less than fifteen thousand marks.” It is obvious that such a story might have been developed out of some really quite justifiable incident; but it is tolerably certain that it was not only in his closing years that Henry displayed what we may call an unkingly acquisitiveness.

In passing, however, it may be remarked that this was a family trait. Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s prejudice against spending a shilling that could be kept in her purse, or neglecting any plausible pretext for attracting coin into it. She also inherited his business principle of repaying every loan he contracted with unfailing punctuality. Henry VIII. did not indeed practise economy, but he could haggle over a money bargain as keenly as his father or his daughter, and his generosity, when he indulged it, was usually at the expense of another pocket than his own. The art of appropriating in the public eye credit to which he was not in the least entitled, was one of which he was a past master; it was one the value of which his father, who certainly neglected any efforts to make himself personally popular, somewhat underrated. Thrift is a virtue; for Henry VII., a particularly necessary virtue; but it is not one that under any circumstances helps to make him who exercises it attractive. When it assumes a sordid aspect, it becomes definitely repellent.

That did not trouble Henry; he wanted money, and during the greater part of his reign he got it without flagrant extortion; with such success, too, that in his later years he was able almost entirely to work without calling Parliament: the skill with which he conducted his foreign negotiations on the same cash principles contributing not a little to this result.

IV

COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY

It was characteristic of Henry, and somewhat unfortunate for his reputation, that he cared nothing at all about investing his policy with any showiness unless some specific end was to be gained thereby. The objects his government had in view were essentially prosaic: commonplace they cannot be called, because in a mediæval monarch they were eminently original. It was customary for kings to interfere in commercial affairs chiefly when they saw their way to collect by so doing contributions to the exchequer, or when it seemed worth while to make enactments in favour of capital as against labour. Henry has the credit of being the first English king who clearly recognised commercial development as a primary care of government: which hitherto only the oligarchical city-states of Italy and the German free-towns had done. It is true that he was quite ready to subordinate the commercial to a political end; to attack those who sheltered his enemies, not with pikes and culverins but with commercial restrictions only less injurious to English trade than to that of the antagonist. He did so without suffering from the illusion that the loss of the foreign merchant was the gain of the English. In these cases he weighed the economic loss against the political gain. In mediæval practice, the economic consideration would have counted for practically nothing in the scale. In the eyes of some politicians to-day, no political advantage would be worth counting as against an economic inconvenience--and it is usually extremely difficult to show that a political advantage will accompany an economic inconvenience. But Henry was only just emerging from mediæval conceptions. The remarkable thing is that he realised commerce as an object of policy at all, not that he rated its importance lower than Adam Smith: that he relaxed the mediæval theory, not that he did not discard it altogether.

This argument is not to be misunderstood. It has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of any economic theory, but only with the place of economics in the whole scheme of government. Henry thought it worth while, as every king before him would have done, almost to cut off England from her best market for her most paying product, wool, if he could thereby force the archduke’s government to withdraw its effective countenance from Perkin Warbeck. But he made it a constant object of his policy to negotiate the opening of fresh markets for that commodity, and when he came to terms with the archduke, the commercial benefits to be secured by the treaty known as the _Intercursus Magnus_ were his first care.

As Henry was the first to give commercial considerations a leading place in his system, so he is to be distinguished for the attention he gave to shipping; on which head Bacon has a rather remarkable note, to the effect that he deserves praise for perceiving that in this instance it was worth while to diminish commerce for the sake of developing the marine--to subordinate the economic loss to the political gain. If Bacon read Henry’s mind aright, he was not under the delusion that the protection of English shipping interests by his successive Navigation Acts was of direct economic advantage; but he did see that it was worth while to pay the price in order to give England such a mercantile navy as in Bacon’s own day enabled her to win the supremacy of the seas. Those Acts, restricting the importation of foreign goods to English ships, raised the price of imports without benefiting any English industry at all except that of the shippers; but the impetus given to shipping provided the country with a fighting force at sea which ultimately enabled her to challenge the might of Spain. The naval development of England was the work of the Tudor dynasty, though Edward I., Edward III., and Henry V., had ideas. Whether the Navigation Acts really did give the impetus attributed to them--as to which economists may dispute--the intention is unmistakable, and the foresight which deliberately set up naval development as an end to be pursued is a very clear mark of Henry’s statesmanship. The creation of the English navy is generally credited either to King Alfred or to Henry VIII.; but the latter certainly inherited the conception from his father.

It is matter for regret, but hardly for reproach, that the king did not apply his ideas of maritime expansion more actively in another field, that of oceanic exploration. Portugal and Spain were allowed to take the lead. Yet it was so well known that the English king was favourable to such enterprises that it appears only to have been an accident which placed Christopher Columbus in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella instead of in Henry’s. How history might have been affected if the West Indies had fallen in the first instance to England instead of to Spain, is an interesting subject of speculation. But Spain won the prize. The sailors who put out from Bristol port tried their chance in more northerly latitudes; the territories they discovered were very unpromising; and after the outset the Genoese (or Venetian) Cabots, sailing in command of English crews, naturally enough got little support from the king. But at the outset--that is, before it seemed probable if not certain that Spain and Portugal, by right of priority backed by a Papal Bull, had, so to speak, staked out a claim to all that was worth having--Henry gave material encouragement to the exploring spirit.

There was, indeed, one important economic problem--with concomitants--at grappling with which no serious attempt was made. This was the growing agricultural depression: due in part to legitimate and in part to illegitimate action on the part of landowners. There was a very large demand for English wool for foreign looms. Sheep-breeding was seen to be highly lucrative, whereas tillage was not. The landowner saw no sufficient reason why he should be called upon to provide employment for a quantity of labour which brought him in a small return, when the employment of a very little labour over the same area would bring him a large return. Therefore he converted his arable lands into pasture for sheep. Economic history abounds in cases of the displacement of labour by the decay, temporary or permanent, of some industry which is ceasing to be lucrative: it abounds also with examples of legislative attempts to maintain the decaying industries, and to compel some one or other to provide employment for the displaced labour. Such attempts appear to be doomed to failure. No remedy has yet been found except the development of fresh industries which in course of time absorb that displaced labour. Even in the twentieth century, that is a process which might take years to accomplish; in the period which we are considering, the rural displacement took a century to remedy. Political altruists, like More or Somerset, tried to set legislation to work, but with the usual want of success. The encouragement of commercial enterprise which begets new industries was the only hopeful direction to work in, and to that Henry’s policy tended; but it was not till Elizabeth’s government pursued the same policy that the industrial situation was appreciably affected. Legislation did a little towards checking the rapidity with which small holdings were being absorbed into great estates, and great estates were being converted into sheep-runs, but it never amounted to more than a very feeble brake. The problem is one which still awaits a satisfactory solution.

V

JUDICATURE

Bacon enumerates with applause a variety of good laws enacted by Henry. He was not in fact remarkable as a legislator, but his modifications of the law were all save one in the nature of removal of abuses. There are, however, two of his enactments which demand special attention. The first of these was the Act of 1487, which gave statutory recognition to judicial functions which had for some time been exercised by the Privy Council or a committee thereof, sitting in a room known as the Star Chamber. In later days, this Court of Star Chamber was perverted into an instrument of tyranny; in Henry’s time, it was the only judicial body which was out of reach of the fear or suspicion of being terrorised by a powerful noble. It had come into being because the Sanction of the ordinary law was inadequate to deal with barons who chose to over-ride the law. The Privy Council could make and enforce its decrees without fear. Under these conditions, the powers it had assumed were necessary to the assertion of the royal authority against offenders who contemned the normal Courts.

Without the confident maintenance of the king’s authority against such offenders, the recurrence of the anarchy of the last fifty years would have constantly threatened; but it is obvious that the powers needed to that end might be misused for the ends of tyranny. Yet for more than a century the Court exercised its functions unmistakably for the public weal. Henry’s Act is notable, not as creating the Court, but as formally recognising and regulating its duties; a sound step, tending to prevent its abuse, not to introduce its use.

The other Act, however, that of 1495, is not capable of any such defence. It was abused from the beginning, and was the great instrument of those exactions by the notorious Empson and Dudley, which so stain the record of the latter half of Henry’s reign. Its repeal was one of the first and most popular acts of his successor. It is to be remembered, however, that though Empson and Dudley were not slow in getting to their evil work, their grosser activities were exercised in the last decade of the reign after Cardinal Morton’s decease. Henry was never generous; but the thrift and “nearness” of his earlier days took some time in developing into the grasping sordidness of his later years. More than half his reign had passed before the term extortionate could be applied to him without exaggeration. The Act, when it was passed, purported to be, and probably was, intended to prevent offenders against the law from escaping justice through lack of an accuser. It permitted judges to institute in their own Courts, on information laid by a resident in the district, proceedings for offences not involving penalties affecting the life or limb of the guilty party. Such men as Empson and Dudley, however, had no difficulty--with partial if not complete connivance from the king--in procuring information which would enable them under colour of law to impose extortionate fines for the king’s benefit and incidentally to extract from the victims very handsome perquisites for themselves.

VI

FOREIGN POLICY

The reign of Henry V. had made the English king as powerful a monarch as any in Europe. The sixty-three years that intervened between his death and the accession of Henry VII. saw England lose her pride of place among the nations. On the other hand, the attempt of Charles the Bold to create a central Burgundian kingdom had failed, while, partly on the wreck of his schemes, Louis XI. had consolidated the French monarchy, and the kingdom he left to Charles VIII. required for its completion only the effective absorption of Brittany. The union of Aragon and Castile by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had raised Spain to a new position, which in like manner lacked but one thing, the conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada, for its complete establishment. Maximilian, “King of the Romans,” heir to Austria and practically heir to the Imperial crown, had strengthened his own position by marrying the Duchess of Burgundy, Charles the Bold’s daughter, and thus acquiring a paramount interest in the wealthy Netherlands. England, with her internal turmoils and her lost military prestige, had for the moment lost all weight in the counsels of Europe. Even had the immediate termination of civil discord been assured, she was too much exhausted to recover her place by force of arms; and as long as there was a Yorkist Pretender at large, civil discord could not be regarded as conclusively at an end. Nevertheless, even during the years while his dynasty was threatened, the king’s diplomatic skill completely changed the relations of England and the Continental Powers; while his policy towards Scotland kept the normal hostility of the Northern kingdom in check, and bore ultimate fruit in the union of the crowns, a century afterwards. He did not, like Wolsey--his disciple as far as methods were concerned--achieve or aim at a dominant position; but when English interests were concerned, the voice of England could not in his later years be neglected, as at the beginning of the reign.

He worked not by exploits in the stricken field but by diplomacy, therein illustrating his modernity. He sent armies into Brittany and Picardy, but they were intended to threaten, not to strike. He found a kindred spirit in Ferdinand of Aragon: of whom Louis XII. in later years complained that he had once cheated him. “He lies,” said Ferdinand, with pride; “I have cheated him three times.” Ferdinand’s respect was reserved for Henry, whom he could not cheat at all, or even out-wit, which is not quite the same thing. Henry did not cheat--that is, he did not break faith; but his engagements were always so carefully hedged that the smallest evasion on the part of an ally could be made an adequate ground for complete evasion on his own. He could not prevent the absorption of Brittany; but the French king, as soon as he turned his ambitions towards Italy, found that Henry could hamper him so seriously that he willingly bought him off. Maximilian remained impecunious--harmless, therefore, unless he could persuade some one else to finance him--since the Netherlands declined to recognise his authority. As for Ferdinand, Henry fought him with his own weapons; and evenly matched as they were, the Englishman did not prove less adept than the Spaniard. Their first treaty seemed a very one-sided affair; but Henry in fact won by it that recognition which was of the first importance to him at that early stage, while he appeared to render in return a great deal more than he actually gave. In 1495, the Spanish sovereigns attached so much value to his alliance that in spite of haggling they were obliged next year to concede him his own terms, which, though not extravagant, were much higher than they liked, and very much higher than he would have ventured even to propose six or seven years earlier. But they could still regard the betrothal of their daughter Katherine to the Prince of Wales as something of an act of grace on their part. Four years later, it is evident that they thought Henry could better afford to break that marriage off than they could themselves: and again a little later, when Prince Arthur died, they were not a whit less desirous than Henry himself of betrothing the young widow to the new Prince of Wales. This restoration of status Henry achieved at the cost of nothing more than some military parade which was very much more than recouped out of the French treasury.

The key to Henry’s success is to be found just in the fact that the most astute of his rivals was quite unable to trick him; secondly, in his skilful avoidance of any measures which committed him to a position from which he could not retreat without loss of prestige. His value to Spain lay chiefly in his ability to hamper France. Presently Spain awoke to his capacity for restricting the hampering process precisely within the limits which were convenient to himself, which might be very much narrower than suited her. Presently again it appeared that he might find it still more convenient to join hands with France, which would minimise the use to be made of Maximilian. Instead of Henry being in need of assistance against France, which might be doled out at the convenience of Spain, Spain had to supply inducements to keep England on her side. As a matter of fact, Henry to the last needed Ferdinand quite as much as Ferdinand needed him, but succeeded in giving a different impression.

VII

CHARACTER

Our survey so far seems to show conclusively that for some two-thirds of his reign Henry conducted the business which had devolved upon him not only with remarkable practical success but without at all justifying the sinister impression of his character which is indubitably prevalent. Yet, even without the record of his later years, as to which something remains to be said, this unattractive impression is not unnatural. We feel that a great ruler of a great nation ought to have something about him, majestic, splendid, heroic. We even forgive a man for evil deeds done in a grand style; we do not feel our admiration stirred even by good deeds done in a pedestrian style. Magnanimity loses its flavour when we scent policy in it. We are offended with a king who is not kingly, and kingliness demands those Aristotelian virtues which are generally rendered as Magnanimity and Magnificence. They are attributes in which the seventh Henry is conspicuously deficient.

A phrase at the beginning of the foregoing paragraph was employed with definite intention. Henry treated kingship as a business. He entered upon it very much as a new managing director might enter upon the conduct of a great concern which demands re-organisation. He knows that the retention of his position depends on his successfulness; that success is possible only if he has a free hand, while his board likes to think that it is exercising the real control. He has to establish confidence in himself within, and to re-establish confidence in the house without. He avoids palpable injustice; no one can call him dishonest; he knows exactly how far he can trust clients, and rely on the co-operation of other establishments in a joint policy; and he makes that business a distinct success--but he is not very likely to make himself personally popular, or in any sense an object of enthusiasm. For that, something is needed over and above a strict and capable attention to business; and the something over and above was wanting in Henry Tudor. In keenness of intelligence, he was more than a match for the most astute of living statesmen. The general rectitude of his aims was commendable; the moderation of his methods was meritorious. He did good service to the nation over which he ruled. He was not cruel; he was not capricious; he was never guided by prejudice or passion; but he remains hopelessly and irredeemably unsympathetic.

Yet had he died within a year or two of his best minister, his portion would have been cold praise, but still praise. He outlived Morton by nearly nine years, whose baleful shadow is over his whole career, turning a negative into a positive dislike. For in those years every baser quality of which there is any hint in the earlier days becomes intensified.