international trade and which swarmed with ‘sharp spies’ from ‘all parts of the world’, their luxurious palazzi exuded wealth and international political influence. Crammed with fine imported soft furnishings and interior features that reminded them of home – under-floor heating, Roman baths, hot-and-cold running water – these informal ambassadorial residences figured forth the power of the banking houses that they represented and the vast capital flows they controlled. Dudley could have hardly helped notice, too, the tensions between London’s companies and the foreign merchants – especially the Italians, who seemed to get all the best contracts, supplying the royal wardrobe with silks, satins and cloth-of-gold – and between the Guildhall and the king.21
Though he may have been poor, comparatively speaking, Dudley had his connections. The head of the great wardrobe, the man who handed out fat contracts on the king’s behalf and who handled an annual budget of thousands of pounds, was his brother-in-law, Sir Andrew Windsor. And there was another family friend who had a particular influence on his career: Sir Reynold Bray.22
While still a London under-sheriff, Dudley had first started working for Bray, investigating and enforcing the king’s rights in his home county of Sussex; he had, too, popped up in Kent, taking bonds with Sir Richard Guildford. In Dudley, Bray saw a valuable combination of legal sharpness and worldly know-how – particularly as far as London was concerned. Of late, the king’s relationship with the city, always one of guarded suspicion, had moved into a more aggressive mode. Dudley, Henry and Bray felt, could be a key to unlocking the city’s closely guarded independence once and for all.
When Dudley resigned from his post of under-sheriff to further his legal career, he was given a golden handshake by a grateful city, which was undoubtedly aware that he was destined for great things. But in autumn 1503, about to take up a prestigious post as sergeant-at-law, one of the highest legal offices in the land, he abruptly changed course. A parliament had been called for the following January, and Dudley had been chosen as Speaker.23 Though elected by the commons, the Speaker was nominated by the king and was a mark of considerable favour. It was, as Dudley knew, a gateway to the sunny uplands of royal service, as a glance at the previous incumbents under Henry VII, all common lawyers, showed: they included Thomas Lovell, John Mordaunt and Richard Empson. The parliament of January 1504 would be a testing baptism for Dudley and a watershed for Henry’s reign. It would also be the last parliament the king would ever call.24
On 25 January, Parliament assembled in the Chamber of the Cross in Westminster Palace, crowded with magnates and bishops, with Henry enthroned under his cloth of estate. The new archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor, William Warham, stepped forward to preach the opening sermon that set the tone for the parliament. Neither his theme of justice, nor his selected text – a verse from the Book of Wisdom beloved of lawyers everywhere – was particularly novel, but then, tradition and authority were precisely what Warham wanted to evoke. Weaving together quotes from Cicero, Aristotle and Augustine, he painted a comforting picture of society, stressing the importance of the nobility and landowners in the natural order, everything in its right place – all held together by the law. For without justice, he said, citing Augustine, ‘what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?’25 This made what followed all the more alarming. Henry, it quickly became clear, was fundraising with a vengeance. And he was doing it in a way that involved a sweeping extension of royal power into the lives of his subjects. It was no wonder that Dudley, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the prerogative, was in the Speaker’s hotseat.
When kings came to Parliament to ask for taxes, it was as compliant as they got. Taxation provoked widespread resentment and, often, unrest. For that reason, taxes were generally granted in and for exceptional circumstances: for defence of the kingdom, or for war. If a king asked for taxes in peacetime or for other reasons, it was a clear sign of his lack of financial prudence – and, if he did so repeatedly, it almost invariably backfired on him. Ever since Henry VI’s hopeless inability to manage his money in the 1450s, kings had soothed Parliament’s anxieties by promising not to overburden it with demands, while at the same time exploring ever more creative ways to squeeze money out of their subjects. This, in particular, was what Parliament found disconcerting about Henry: it was not just about how much money he asked for, but how he wanted to levy it.
From early in the reign, the king’s commissioners had trawled the country assessing individual wealth, something that people used to the fixed tax rates, in place for over a hundred and fifty years, resented hugely. This new, invasive system became known as ‘Morton’s Fork’, after Henry’s chancellor: if you looked wealthy, then you could obviously afford to pay up; if, on the other hand, you had a frugal lifestyle, you probably had money salted away. Henry had trod a fine line. Like Edward IV, he had levied a tax for a war, in 1492, which he never fought – his commissioners continued to collect money even after he had returned home having pocketed a massive French pension. Five years later, the aggressive demands of his collectors triggered the Cornish uprising, which fell just short of toppling his regime.26
Now, in his latest demand for a tax, Henry dusted off an ancient prerogative right called a feudal aid. This was a goodwill tax, a ‘benevolence’ given by the king’s subjects to cover major royal events – in this case, to cover the costs of Prince Arthur’s knighting way back in 1489, and his daughter Margaret’s marriage to James IV. No king had asked Parliament to help out with expenses like this for over a century – and even then, in 1401, when it had been levied for the first time in living memory, it had met with widespread anger. But it was entirely typical of Henry’s persistence in sniffing out his rights, as attested by the ‘note to self’ he had scribbled in the margin of his accounts, next to the payment for his daughter’s wedding, reminding himself to claim it back. Arthur’s knighting, meanwhile, had taken place fifteen years ago; besides which, he was dead. Although the demand was technically legal, it was, to say the least, a tenuous way of raising cash. And its repercussions were potentially huge.
For, in asking for the feudal aid, Henry was effectively seeking Parliament’s approval to deploy his fiscal agents in a new, comprehensive round of information-gathering needed to levy the tax – information that could then be used in all sorts of other ways in the future. The commons knew exactly what was going on. The aid, they said, ‘should be to them doubtful, uncertain and great inquietness’. Parliament erupted.27
Looking on interestedly at the robust exchanges that followed was one of Henry VII’s secret servants. A trusted administrator, well equipped to follow the cut-and-thrust of recondite legal debate, William Tyler had evidently been briefed by the king to report on progress. The eloquent resistance of one young MP in particular was said to have caught Tyler’s eye. Now enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn, the twenty-six-year-old Thomas More had abandoned his plans to take holy orders and was following in his father’s footsteps as a London lawyer; he had, too, been elected to his father’s parliamentary seat of Gatton in Surrey. As his son-in-law and biographer William Roper later recounted, More made ‘such arguments and reasons’ against the feudal aid that the bill was ‘clean overthrown’. After the vote, Tyler took himself off to the king, to tell him that ‘a beardless boy’ had ‘disappointed all his purpose’.28
Roper, whose hagiographic account portrayed More’s life as one long preparation for his eventual martyrdom, had particular reason to glorify this otherwise undocumented episode. But there was a perfectly good reason why More should have waded in. The king’s manipulation of his rights looked suspiciously like the ‘exquisite’ – or exceptional – ‘means of getting of good’, against which the eminent common lawyer Sir John Fortescue had warned kings back in the 1470s – which was probably what the young More thought, along with the rest of the commons.
Parliament eventually granted Henry’s tax – but crucially, and pointedly, it shifted the goalposts. Defined as a defence tax rather than a feudal aid, it was to be levied in the traditional way, with no chance for the king to let his financial agents off the leash. The commons had slammed the door in his face.
Henry, of course, had first-hand experience of how taxation could get out of hand. With his anxieties over Suffolk, over the disturbances in Kent and elsewhere, and with the spectre of the Cornish rebels lingering in his mind, he acquiesced gracefully. And towards the end of March, as the parliament drew to a close, he announced that he did not intend to call Parliament again ‘for a long tract of time’. The reason he gave was the ‘ease of his subjects’ – and the commons, no doubt, were relieved. Parliament was, for most, an expensive, time-consuming process in which MPs were expected to stay in London for months, and pay Westminster’s inflated prices. For Henry, it was an obvious crowd-pleasing gesture. But there was another, more pertinent reason, too. The king had in place a system that would allow him to extract money from his subjects. If Parliament would not allow Henry to raise funds on his own terms, he would simply go round it. And he had marked Thomas More’s card, too.29
June came, and with it the hottest summer in living memory: three months without rain. After years of bad harvests, men watched anxiously as rivers and ponds receded and dried up, and cattle were driven miles in search of water; a relentless sun burned pasture and meadow.30 Late in the month, Henry finally settled on Bray’s replacement as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster: not Richard Empson, but his colleague John Mordaunt.
