8 STATUTE OF FINES. CHAP. I. of Tudor came, not certainly to an absolute, but a vigorous prerogative, which his cautious, dissembling temper and close attention to business were well calculated to extend. 66 The laws of Henry VII. have been highly praised by Lord Bacon as deep and not vulgar, not made upon the spur of a particular occasion for the present, but out of providence for the future, to make the estate of his people still more and more happy, after the manner of the legislators in ancient and heroical times." But when we consider how very few kings or statesmen have displayed this -prospective wisdom and benevolence in legislation, we may hesitate a little to bestow so rare a praise upon Henry. Like the laws of all other times, his statutes seem to have had no further aim than to remove some immediate mischief, or to promote some particular end. One, however, has been much celebrated as an instance of his sagacious policy and as the principal cause of exalting the royal authority upon the ruins of the aristocracy; I mean the statute of Fines (as one passed in the fourth year of his reign is commonly called), which is supposed to have given the power of alienating entailed lands.3 § 7. The two first of the Tudors rarely experienced opposition but when they endeavoured to levy money. Taxation, in the eyes of their subjects, was so far from being no tyranny, that it seemed the only species worth a complaint. Henry VII. obtained from his first parliament a grant of tonnage and poundage during life, according to several precedents of former reigns. But when general subsidies were granted, the same people, who would have seen an innocent man led to prison or the scaffold with little attention, twice broke out into dangerous rebellions; and as these, however arising from such immediate discontent, were yet a good deal connected with the opinion of Henry's usurpation and the claims of a pretender, it was a necessary policy to avoid too frequent imposition of burdens upon the poorer classes of the community. He had recourse accordingly to the system of benevolences, or contributions apparently voluntary, though in fact extorted from his richer subjects. These, having become an intolerable grievance under Edward IV., were abolished in the only parliament of Richard III. with strong expressions of indignation. But in the seventh year of Henry's reign, when, after having with timid and parsimonious hesitation suffered the marriage of Anne of Brittany with Charles VIII., he was compelled by the national spirit to make a demonstration of war, he ventured to try this unfair and unconstitutional method of obtaining aid; which received afterwards too much of a parliamentary sanction by an act enforcing the payment of arrears of money which private men had thus been prevailed upon to 3 See NOTE at end of chapter, on the intention and effect of this Statute. promise. The statute, indeed, of Richard is so expressed as not clearly to forbid the solicitation of voluntary gifts, which of course rendered it almost nugatory. Archbishop Morton is famous for the dilemma which he proposed to merchants and others whom he solicited to contribute. He told those who lived handsomely that their opulence was manifest by their rate of expenditure. Those, again, whose course of living was less sumptuous, must have grown rich by their economy. Either class could well afford assistance to their sovereign. This piece of logic, unanswerable in the mouth of a privy councillor, acquired the name of Morton's fork. Henry doubtless reaped great profit from these indefinite exactions, miscalled benevolences. But, insatiate of accumulating treasure, he discovered other methods of extortion, still more odious, and possibly more lucrative. Many statutes had been enacted in preceding reigns, sometimes rashly or from temporary motives, sometimes in opposition to prevailing usages which they could not restrain, of which the pecuniary penalties, though exceedingly severe, were so little enforced as to have lost their terror. These his ministers raked out from oblivion; and, prosecuting such as could afford to endure the law's severity, filled his treasury with the dishonourable produce of amercements and forfeitures. The feudal rights became, as indeed they always had been, instrumental to oppression. The lands of those who died without heirs fell back to the crown by escheat. It was the duty of certain officers in every county to look after its rights. The king's title was to be found by the inquest of a jury, summoned at the instance of the escheator, and returned into the exchequer. It then became a matter of record, and could not be impeached. Hence the escheators taking hasty inquests, or sometimes falsely pretending them, defeated the right heir of his succession. Excessive fines were imposed on granting livery to the king's wards on their majority. Informations for intrusions, criminal indictments, outlawries on civil process, in short, the whole course of justice, furnished pretences for exacting money; while a host of dependents on the court, suborned to play their part as witnesses, or even as jurors, rendered it hardly possible for the most innocent to escape these penalties. Empson and Dudley are notorious as the prostitute instruments of Henry's avarice in the later and more unpopular years of his reign; but they dearly purchased a brief hour of favour by an ignominious aeath and perpetual infamy. The avarice of Henry VII., as it rendered his government unpopular, which had always been Stat. 11 H 7, c. 10. Bacon says the benevolence was granted by act of parliament, which Hume shows to be a mistake. The preamble of 11 H. 7 recites it to have been "granted by divers of your subjects severally;" and contains a provision that no heir shall be charged on account of his ancestor's promise. 10 ACCESSION OF HENRY VIII. CHAP. I. penurious, must be deemed a drawback from the wisdom ascribed to him; though by his good fortune it answered the end of invigorating his power. By these fines and forfeitures he impoverished and intimidated the nobility. The earl of Oxford compounded, by the payment of 15,000 pounds, for the penalties he had incurred by keeping retainers in livery; a practice mischievous and illegal, but too customary to have been punished before this reign. Even the king's clemency seems to have been influenced by the sordid motive of selling pardons; and it has been shown that he made a profit of every office in his court, and received money for conferring bishoprics. It is asserted by early writers, though perhaps only on conjecture, that he left a sum, thus amassed, of no less than 1,800,000 pounds at his decease. This treasure was soon dissipated by his successor, who had recourse to the assistance of parliament in the very first year of his reign. The foreign policy of Henry VIII., far unlike that of his father, was ambitious and enterprising. No former king had involved himself so frequently in the labyrinth of continental alliances. They naturally drew the king into heavy expenses, and, together with his profusion and love of magnificence, rendered his government very burthensome. At his accession, however, the rapacity of his father's administration had excited such universal discontent, that it was found expedient to conciliate the nation. An act was passed in his first parliament to correct the abuses that had prevailed in finding the king's title to lands by escheat. The same parliament repealed the law of the late reign enabling justices of assize and of the peace to determine all offences, except treason and felony, against any statute in force, without a jury, upon information in the king's name. This serious innovation had evidently been prompted by the spirit of rapacity, which probably some honest juries had shown courage enough to withstand. It was a much less laudable concession to the vindictive temper of an injured people, seldom unwilling to see bad methods employed in punishing bad men, that Empson and Dudley, who might perhaps by stretching the prerogative have incurred the penalties of a misdemeanor, were put to death on a frivolous charge of high treason.5 § 8. The demands made by Henry VIII. on Parliament were considerable, both in frequency and amount. Notwithstanding the servility of those times, it sometimes attempted to make a stand against these inroads upon the public purse. Wolsey came into the house of commons in 1523, and asked for 800,0007., to be raised by a tax of one-fifth upon lands and goods, in order to prosecute the war just commenced against France. Sir. Thomas More, then 5 They were convicted by a jury, and not executed for more than a year after afterwards attainted by parliament, but the king's accession. But the sum speaker, is said to have urged the house to acquiesce. demanded was so much beyond any precedent that all the inde-. pendent members opposed a vigorous resistance. The debates lasted fifteen or sixteen days. A considerable part of the commons appears to have consisted of the king's household officers, whose influence, with the utmost difficulty, obtained a grant much inferior to the cardinal's requisition, and payable by instalments in four years. But Wolsey, greatly dissatisfied with this imperfect obedience, compelled the people to pay up the whole subsidy at once. No parliament was assembled for nearly seven years after this time. Wolsey had already resorted to more arbitrary methods of raising money by loans and benevolences. The year before this debate in the commons he borrowed twenty thousand pounds of the city of London; yet so insufficient did that appear for the king's exigencies, that within two months commissioners were appointed throughout the kingdom to swear every man to the value of his possessions, requiring a rateable part according to such declaration. Such unparalleled violations of the clearest and most important privilege that belonged to Englishmen excited a general apprehension. Fresh commissioners, however, were appointed in 1525, with instructions to demand the sixth part of every man's substance, payable in money, plate, or jewels, according to the last valuation. This demand Wolsey made in person to the mayor and chief citizens of London. They attempted to remonstrate, but were warned to beware, lest "it might fortune to cost some their heads." Some were sent to prison for hasty words, to which the smart of injury excited them. The clergy, from whom, according to usage, a larger measure of contribution was demanded, stood upon their privilege to grant their money only in convocation, and denied the right of a king of England to ask any man's money without authority of parliament. The rich and poor agreed in cursing the cardinal as the subverter of their laws and liberties; and said, "if men should give their goods by a commission, then it would be worse than the taxes of France, and England should be bond, and not free." Nor did their discontent terminate in complaints. The commissioners met with forcible opposition in several counties, and a serious insurrection broke out in Suffolk. So menacing a spirit overawed the proud 6 Roper's Life of More. Hall, 656, 672. This chronicler, who wrote under Edward VI., is our best witness for the events of Henry's reign. 7 I may notice here a mistake of Mr. Hume and Dr. Lingard. They assert Henry to have received tonnage and poundage several years before it was vested in him by the legislature But it was granted by his first parliament, stat. 1 H. 8, c. 20, as will be found even in Ruffhead's table of contents, though not in the body of his volume; and the act is of course printed at length in the great edition of the statutes. That which probably by its title gave rise to the error 6 H. 8, c. 13, has a different object. 12 ACTS RELEASING THE KING CHAP. I. tempers of Henry and his minister, who found it necessary not only to pardon all those concerned in these tumults, but to recede altogether upon some frivolous pretexts from the illegal exaction, revoking the commissions, and remitting all sums demanded under them. They now resorted to the more specious request of a voluntary benevolence. This also the citizens of London endeavoured to repel, by alleging the statute of Richard III. But it was answered, that he was an usurper, whose acts did not oblige a lawful sovereign. It does not appear whether or not Wolsey was more successful in this new scheme; but, generally, rich individuals had no remedy but to compound with the government. No very material attempt had been made since the reign of Edward III. to levy a general imposition without consent of parliament, and in the most remote and irregular times it would be difficult to find a precedent for so universal and enormous an exaction; since tallages, however arbitrary, were never paid by the barons or freeholders, nor by their tenants; and the aids to which they were liable were restricted to particular cases. If Wolsey, therefore, could have procured the acquiescence of the nation under this yoke, there would probably have been an end of parliaments for all ordinary purposes, though, like the states general of France, they might still be convoked to give weight and security to great innovations. But the courage and love of freedom natural to the English commons, speaking in the hoarse voice of tumult, though very ill supported by their superiors, preserved us in so great a peril. § 9. If we justly regard with detestation the memory of those ministers who have aimed at subverting the liberties of their country, we shall scarcely approve the partiality of some modern historians towards cardinal Wolsey; a partiality, too, that contradicts the general opinion of his contemporaries. Haughty beyond comparison, negligent of the duties and decorums of his station, profuse as well as rapacious, obnoxious alike to his own order and to the laity, his fall had long been secretly desired by the nation, and contrived by his adversaries. His generosity and magnificence seem rather to have dazzled succeeding ages than his own. But, in fact, his best apology is the disposition of his master. The latter years of Henry's reign were far more tyrannical than those during which he listened to the counsels of Wolsey; and though this was principally owing to the peculiar circumstances of the latter period, it is but equitable to allow some praise to a minister for the mischief which he may be presumed to have averted.. Had a nobler spirit animated the parliament which met at the era of Wolsey's fall, it might have prompted his impeachment for gross violations of liberty. But these were not the offences that had forfeited his prince's favour, or that they dared bring to justice. They were not |