Was Henry VII a Unscrupulous Money Grubber?

Even when he was king, Henry VII had the reputation of being a vile, unscrupulous money grubber. That reputation has largely stayed with him ever since. He ascended to the throne of a financially distressed realm, decimated by the War of the Roses, and died reputedly the wealthiest monarch in Europe.

Even the paragon of social historians, James Thorold Rogers, not known to succumb to popular opinion, could not help but share it as regards Henry VII. But he does so in the strangest of ways as can be seen in the following excerpt from his Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1909).

Henry called but few Parliaments and asked for few grants. But he was penurious and avaricious, greedy and mean. He practised severe economy in his household,—I have studied his accounts,—and he involved his people in no foreign wars of importance. His reign, as far as the materials of ordinary history go, is sordid and uneventful. But his people prospered. Food is plentiful and cheap. In the last year of his reign, wheat falls to a price which had not been known for 222 years, when two years of similar plenty prevailed. Nor do I imagine that Henry was unpopular with the mass of his subjects, although it was still possible, since the ferment of the great war of succession had not entirely ceased, for adventurers and pretenders to disturb his quiet. But with the noble and wealthy he was odious. He seems to have been the first English king who improved his revenue by expedients which would have been discreditable to a low sharper or a pettifogging attorney. He began the practice of setting his agents to ferret out any claim which the Crown could make and a subservient judge would affirm. The Stuart kings improved on the meanness and knavery of Henry’s expedients, and they added this much, that by beginning the practice of making their judges’ patents depend on the royal pleasure, they made their lawyers the cringing, rapacious, and unprincipled crew, who dishonoured the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with very rare exceptions, and could not, as a profession, be made tolerably honest, except by giving them well paid freeholds in their offices. The judges of the Plantagenet kings used their office for the best ends,—the maintenance of civil rights and the extension of liberty. Those of the Tudors and Stuarts, under the teaching of the crafty adventurer who won at Bosworth, were the persistent and malignant enemies of all right and all liberty.

Henry believed, and he lived and died in the belief, that private interest was the one thing to which people are faithful. The commercial relations of England and Flanders had been intimate since the days of Arteveldt and Edward III., and were interrupted only to the injury of both, and by the ambition or passions of princes. It would be well, he argued, if these interests were enlisted for the safety of princes. Hence the king concluded that he could protect his government and dynasty—for Henry was an affectionate father — by associating with his own ends the material advantage of Englishman and Fleming.

The great Intercourse (I suppose this is Bacons own name for the treaty of commerce with Flanders executed in 1496) is sensible and practical, and some of its provisions have been acknowledged as part of that comity of civilized peoples which is called international law in very modern times only. The particulars are to be found in all works which deal with the true history of human civilization, and are, therefore, seldom studied But the effects of this treaty were marked. It led, despite some modifications which Henry made in this treaty in 1506, to a continuance of friendly relations between England and the Low Countries for more than a century, and predisposed England, though in a halting and imperfect, perhaps a higgling fashion, to aid in the heroic struggle for independence which those Lowlanders fought for and part of them won,...

Rogers describes the king as a despicable man while admitting that all of his acts reined in the out-of-control noble families that had taken control of the kingdom. Henry passed laws that limited the size of their entourages and enforced the laws vigorously levying large finesupon violators that went into his royal treasury. This returned power to the monarchy and resulted in clear benefits to the common people. It left Henry with the resources and the power to forge expert foreign treaties and to maintyain such peace that the merchant and agricultural sectors could thrive to a level they had rarely if ever seen.

Not only that but he was a king who never fought a war. He levied troops to strengthen his hand in international negotiations and to support his European allies but never put them to use.

True this all made him enormously rich and powerful. But the benefits were not incidental. It was all designed also to reinvigorate the common people of England after decades of civil war. Rogers describes a despicable ikng who was a loving family man and benefited his common subjects like no other.

As for Henry's son Henry VIII, Rogers took a much less popular position.

Henry Tudor died, and his son came after him. Never was a contrast more violent than that between father and son. Tne one was penurious as no other English king had been, the other was extravagant to such a degree that he succeeded in ruining the unfortunate people over whom he reigned. The foreign policy of the father was cautious, prudent, and, on the whole, successful, that of the son was reckless, blundering, and disastrous. Henry VIII. succeeded to a position of great strength. He held the balance of power in Western Europe. At the conclusion of his reign, England was of no more account in the political system of the time than Portugal or Naples. Sovereign and people were alike impoverished. The wastefulness of Henry was incredible. The establishments of each of his infant daughters were more costly than the whole annual expenses of his thrifty father. He had fifty palaces, whims of the hour, in which profusion was constantly going on. He was incessantly building, altering, pulling down, by day and night, on Sundays and festivals, from year to year. As Wolsey said of him, “ Rather than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom.” By the conclusion of his reign he had endangered the whole of it.

Henry VIII threw a great war and a great party. He was vastly more popular than his father but was pretty thoroughly a disaster.

Source: Rogers, James E. Thorold. Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour (1909). 318-21.

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• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

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