Mountjoy identified himself first and foremost with the ranks of the king’s ‘natural counsellors’, and with the traditions and values of the ranks from which he came. But as the reign reached its final terrifying stages, these brittle, divisive contradictions were submerged beneath a shared fear and loathing of Henry VII, and of those occupying positions of power around the increasingly remote king.
PART THREE
A State of Avarice
11
Extraordinary Justice
According to the London chronicler, it was around the autumn of 1506 that things started to get really bad, when ‘much sorrow’ spread ‘throughout the land’. Elaborating, he described how many ‘unlawful and forgotten laws’, some of them hundreds of years old, were reactivated to the ‘great inquietness’ of the king’s subjects. This was something that had been going on for a while, he added, but recently, ‘and especially since Empson and Dudley were set in authority’, the situation had rapidly deteriorated.1
Two years had passed since Henry had given Empson the duchy of Lancaster seals, and with them the informal presidency of the council learned in the law. He had been impressed with the assiduity with which Empson worked, pursuing the king’s rights with a ruthlessness of which Bray himself would have been proud, and had confirmed him in his post, appointing him chancellor of the duchy.2 Under Empson, the council learned was becoming even more systematic, or rather, more indiscriminate. It pursued any and every case that was brought in front of it, irrespective of the reliability of the informers – often ‘simple persons of small reputation and little credence’, who were just out for what they could get, ‘for to have a bribe’ – who were motivated as much as anything else by personal animosity or personal gain.3
When hauled in front of the king’s counsellors, people were presented with one option: to ‘fall to agreement’, which invariably meant paying fines and accepting financial bonds. Many, in order to mitigate their own financial punishment, agreed to turn informer themselves.4 They had no choice. The council learned’s ubiquitous ‘letting and stopping of justice’ and use of bonds meant that once people had been informed against to the king and his counsellors, they had stepped outside a world governed by recognized judicial processes into one of nightmarish contingency, from which there was no escape: where the law was the king’s will, expressed by mutable committees that coalesced and fragmented, and in which paper trails vanished into thin air, into the duchy of Lancaster’s offices, into the boxes in Henry’s secret chamber – or into Edmund Dudley’s house.
Since his appointment two years previously, Dudley had become the king’s go-to man for legal and financial matters, from the dredging up of old debts and managing bonds to brokering Henry’s investments. Theirs was a curiously intimate relationship, one defined entirely by their mutual absorption with the law, and by Dudley’s ability to distort and twist it into baroque patterns. The evidence of their private discussions lies in Dudley’s account book – page after page of fines and payments for every conceivable offence and opportunity: the sale of export licences, wards, marriages, lucrative crown lands and ‘temporalities’, the sinecures that accompanied religious office; the king’s favour in everything from royal appointments to court cases; and, throughout, the sale of justice, fees for royal pardons for offences from illegal wool-trading and customs infringements to murder. At the bottom of each page, the king signed his monogram, the imprimatur to their decisions. One entry in Dudley’s book seems to sum up their relationship: a note about the ‘great book of jura regalia which I had of his highness’.5 In order to help his protege in his work, Henry had lent the counsellor his own book of sovereign rights. Of all Henry’s counsellors, Dudley understood his system best – he even talked of knowing the king’s ‘inward mind’ on the subject.
In 1506, Henry appointed Dudley president of the king’s council. Two years after becoming a royal counsellor, and still only an esquire, he was the first layman ever to be appointed to a post traditionally held by one of the great lords spiritual. Now in his mid-forties, he had reached the very top. Dudley’s promotion spoke volumes for Henry’s priorities, and for his own effectiveness. Since the reshuffle that had followed Bray’s death, the number of people in debt to the crown had soared, increasing by hundreds each year; the amounts owed on bonds and fines had also risen steeply and was rapidly climbing. For the calendar year of 1506 alone, debt due to the crown from financial sureties of one kind or another came to an unprecedented ?106,382, a sum that, if all those debts were to be called in, would more than double the king’s annual income.6
Something else had changed, too. It said something about the current atmosphere that even the days of Sir Reynold Bray had acquired a rosy glow. Bray, wrote the London chronicler, might have been ‘rough’ and intimidating, but at least he would never accept gifts, only food and drink. This, of course, was nonsense – Bray had made himself extremely rich through graft in the king’s name, as indeed the chronicler, immediately contradicting himself, pointed out. But although Bray did take gifts, ‘the giver was sure of a friend and a special solicitor in the matter’. Ultimately, the chronicler was saying, you had known where you stood with Bray: despite his harshness, he adhered to an accepted culture of lobbying, petitioning and palm-greasing, the sense of quid pro quo, favours bestowed for service rendered. Empson and Dudley, on the other hand, didn’t.
Like all royal servants, their own interests blurred indistinctly with those of the crown. Showered with bribes, cash and land in exchange for ‘secret labour’ with the king, they took every opportunity that came their way – and proved particularly adept at doing so. Empson took bribes and fat ecclesiastical sinecures as danger money, for ‘avoiding of his displeasure’; people paid him lobbying fees to further their legal cases, only to discover that he was also accepting money from the other side. When the Sussex gentleman Roger Lewknor was imprisoned for murder, Dudley sold him a pardon in return for the title deeds to his estates.7
These were men, the chronicler continued, who ‘spoke pleasantly’, in the smooth officialese that most of Henry’s counsellors were accustomed to deploy, but ‘did overthwartly’. In pushing the law to its limits, they lured people into making compromising statements and provoked them into seeking extra-legal ways of solving their
