As Dudley said at a later date, from the hindsight provided by a prison cell, ‘the pleasure and mind of the king’s grace was much set to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure, wherefore diverse and many persons were bound to his grace in great sums of money’. Dudley also confessed that he had illegally extorted money on the king’s behalf from eighty victims. The king had in effect established a financial autocracy, an absolutism all the more feared because of exorbitant fines and the threat of endless imprisonment. This was the legacy that he left to his son and heir, who became Henry VIII. He kept notebooks in which he jotted down his caustic or suspicious thoughts and observations about those around him; when a pet monkey tore up one of these books, the courtiers were according to Francis Bacon ‘almost tickled with sport’.
It could be said that, like Scrooge, Henry VII feared the world too much. Certainly, like Scrooge, he tried to protect himself with a wall of money. Yet he was avaricious with a purpose; he told one of his councillors that ‘the kings my predecessors, weakening their treasure, have made themselves servants to their subjects’. He did not intend to beg or borrow, only to extort with menaces. In the process the annual royal income increased by approximately 45 per cent, and he was one of the few monarchs in English history to clear his debts and to die solvent. He was also the first king since Henry V to pass on his throne without dispute.
Money was power. It enabled the king to protect his throne and his dynasty; Henry told the Spanish ambassador that it was his intention to keep his subjects poor because riches would only make them haughty. He may have become more harsh, and more rapacious, in his last years; but it is equally likely that his natural tendencies were reinforced by age. He was in declining health, and in the final three years of his reign he was more or less an invalid. In his will he declared that 2,000 Masses should be said for the sake of his soul, within the space of one month, at sixpence a Mass. He died at his palace of Richmond on 21 April 1509, to general relief if not open rejoicing. ‘Avarice’, one noble wrote, ‘has fled the country.’ Yet the days of royal avarice were just beginning.
A conclusion
When we look over the course of human affairs we are more likely than not to find only error and confusion. I have already explained, in the course of this narrative, that the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.
So the great movements of the period, as described in the present narrative, may seem to be without direction and without explanation except in terms of day-to-day expediency; in that sense they are without historical meaning. What seem to be, in retrospect, the greatest and most important changes tend to go unnoticed at the time. We may take the slow progress of the English parliament as an example. The government of king with parliament was not framed after a model; the various parts and powers of the national assembly emerged from occasional acts, the significance of which was not understood, or from decisions reached by practical considerations and private interests. The entry of knights and townsmen, later to become known as ‘the Commons’, provoked no interest or surprise. It was a matter of indifference.
Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress or evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the ‘development’ of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition. It should be noticed, in a similar spirit, that most of the battles fought in medieval England were governed by chance – a surprise charge, or a sudden storm, might decisively change the outcome. This should come as no surprise. Turmoil and accident and coincidence are the stuff of all human lives. They are also the abiding themes of fiction, of poetry and of drama.
One result of historical enquiry is the recognition of transience; the most fervent beliefs will one day be discredited, and the most certain certainties will be abandoned. Opinions are as unstable and as evanescent as the wind. We may invoke, with George Meredith, ‘Change, the strongest son of Life’.
