Given the sequence of risings and plots which Henry faced, and indeed the way in which he himself had come to the throne, it is hardly surprising that suspicion and insecurity are the keynotes of his reign (indeed suspicion, though not usually insecurity, was arguably the keynote of the entire dynasty). Henry was the first king of England to feel the need for a personal bodyguard. He founded the Yeomen of the Guard, who, sporting something like their original costume, still preside over the Tower of London. But suspicion and insecurity went far beyond mere concern for immediate personal safety. They affected every aspect of Henry’s government - finance, law and order, the nobility, and the Church - and made his style of politics very different from the traditional kingship of medieval England. This new style of governance has been subjected to sharply contrasting assessments. Generally it has been seen as ‘new monarchy’, as a policy deliberately and wisely setting out to replace the unstable baronial politics of late medieval England with a more centralised and elevated monarchy. But reassessments of late medieval politics (barons were not antisocial megalomaniacs who would rip the country to pieces unless restrained by the firm hand of the king, but were the king’s most natural supporters, having more invested in the security of the social order than anybody else) have resulted in a radically different view of his methods as unwise, ill-considered and even downright incompetent.
Henry did trust some people - mostly those whose loyalty and service to him dated back to Bosworth or beyond. For the most part, they were not from the peerage, but from the gentry and the clergy. The men whom Henry brought with him to England on his bid for the throne in 1485 were led by John Morton, the Bishop of Ely, whose loyalty was soon rewarded with appointment as Lord Chancellor and translation to the see of Canterbury (respectively in March and December 1486), and for whom he eventually secured the award of a cardinal’s hat (1493). The most direct insights we have into the cardinal come from the pen of Thomas More, who served in his household as a young boy. Morton is known in folklore from the eponymous ‘Morton’s fork’, a sort of Parkinson’s law of tax collection. The story goes that, in advising those who had the duty of assessing people’s capacity to contribute to a ‘benevolence’ (a kind of goodwill loan to the king), he posed the following dilemma. If people had an extravagant lifestyle, then they were obviously wealthy and could afford to give generously, and if they lived frugally, they were obviously stashing their money away and so were equally able to give. The dilemma is credited to Morton by Francis Bacon, writing a hundred years later, but More’s anecdotes about his former master show us a witty and intelligent man, hardly likely himself to have formulated such a policy. An earlier version of the story, told by Thomas More to Erasmus, credited it to Henry’s other great clerical minister, Richard Fox. The story itself is doubtless ben trovato, but it does not belie the reign which produced it. Henry and his advisers had a shrewd idea that there was a great deal more money out there than people wished to let on. They were right.
Richard Fox had also been with the king in exile, and proved one of his most effective servants. He became Lord Privy Seal in 1487, and was rewarded with a succession of ever wealthier bishoprics. Among the secular power-brokers of his reign, many had also joined Henry in exile. John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the foremost in rank, and was granted one of the highest military appointments as Admiral of England. Early companions from exile or from the days of the Bosworth campaign provided several of the ‘men of business’ whose activities in law and finance would underpin Henry’s tight regime. Men such as Edward Poynings, Reginald Bray, Thomas Lovell and Giles Daubeney dominated the first ten or fifteen years of the reign. But only Daubeney was promoted to the peerage as a reward. The second generation of his servants, including the notorious Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, were the kind of men who flourish under intensely suspicious conditions: ambitious, unscrupulous outsiders without strong ties among the families of the elite, working and answering directly to the king. Henry’s most favoured lay servants tended to earn knighthoods, in many cases the supreme form of knighthood represented in the Order of the Garter. The Garter, in fact, served as the ultimate accolade under Henry. Most of his leading lay supporters or servants were in time recruited to it, including his own mother, Lady Margaret.
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