Henry’s relationship with the English aristocracy has elicited historical judgements as diverse as has his fiscal policy. On the one hand, he has been praised for humbling the nobility, for destroying those ‘overmighty subjects’ who had plagued the late medieval polity. On the other, he has been pilloried for cold-shouldering the nobility and magnates who were his natural allies, councillors and supporters in the regions. The one thing which is almost universally agreed is that his policy towards the nobility was very different from anything which England had ever seen before. Why, and with what effect, are more contested questions.
His new approach was most evident in his reluctance to restore or create noble titles. While the reign of Edward IV had been generous in this regard (he created or restored thirty-five noble titles), and the reign of Henry VI positively profligate in its inflation of the titled nobility, Henry VII was niggardly with his grants and restorations. His immediate relatives and closest supporters from 1485 received the bulk of these. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was restored as Countess of Richmond in her own right, while her third husband, Thomas Stanley, became Earl of Derby. His uncle, Jasper Tudor, was restored as Earl of Pembroke and later promoted Duke of Bedford. But as Henry himself was Margaret’s heir, and Jasper Tudor had no children, these grants were essentially short-term. John de Vere’s attainder was reversed, and he was restored to the earldom of Oxford. Giles Daubeney received a peerage. However, of those peers who lost their titles as a result of fighting against Henry at Bosworth or of treason thereafter, few were restored. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and heir to the duchy of Norfolk, was restored to his earldom in 1489, but paid for it through ten years of loyal service mostly in the northern Marches. He had to wait until the reign of Henry VIII to regain the duchy for his house. The English peerage remained depleted throughout Henry VII’s reign. Of 138 individuals attainted in his reign, only forty-six secured restoration in his lifetime. The peerage itself numbered fifty-five in 1485, but had shrunk to forty-two by 1509.
The motive for this grudging policy was, once again, suspicion. Henry VII simply did not trust the nobles and magnates, and had no wish to swell the ranks of those he seems to have viewed as potential rebels rather than as pillars of his regime. His fiscal policy converged with his suspicion of the nobility in the extent to which he used legal and penal sanctions to keep them under his thumb. Fines levied for offences real, imaginary, alleged or foreseen became not only a source of revenue but a political weapon, especially when suspended for the duration of good behaviour. ‘Bonds and recognisances’ were imposed on nobles (and on many others) by which they were obliged to perform or refrain from specified actions on pain of enormous fines, of which certain portions sometimes had to be deposited as guarantees. More than half of the peerage was bound over in this way at some stage of Henry’s reign, and only about a quarter of the peerage remained entirely free from attainder, punitive fines, or bonds throughout that period. One way or another, the vast majority of the peerage found itself firmly under Henry’s thumb. They certainly did not like it, but it severely curtailed their freedom of action and thus their potential to oppose the king.
The offences for which nobles and others could become liable to fines or subject to bonds were themselves evidence of the king’s distrust. For example, the practice of ‘retaining’ was central to the operation of the late medieval polity. Nobles and others ‘retained’ men as advisers, servants and muscle in order to fulfil their household, local, regional and even national obligations (in the extreme case, raising armed men to serve the king in war). While this practice was indispensable, it was obviously open to abuse, and fifteenth-century kings legislated to regulate it. But Henry VII put this regulation on a wholly new footing by securing a judicial interpretation which in principle made retaining for almost anything other than household purposes illegal (an interpretation he enshrined in statute in 1504). As it was virtually impossible for nobles to avoid breaching this law, it became a happy hunting ground for a regime keen to impose bonds and recognisances. The most notorious bond of the reign, in the sum of ?100,000 on George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, was imposed in the wake of an offence against this measure. There were many such prosecutions early in the reign, and thereafter many nobles and gentry compounded or undertook bonds in order to avoid prosecution. From one point of view, given the way Henry VII treated them, it is surprising that his nobles did not rise up against him. But from another point of view, the ruthless control which Henry set about imposing upon them from the start was precisely what whittled away their will and power to resist. Henry was, in short, following the course of action which, a generation later, Machiavelli would recommend to other ‘new princes’: ruling by fear rather than by love. Not that Henry needed Machiavelli to teach him what to do: on the contrary, Machiavelli could have taken his correspondence course.
Henry’s reduction in the power of the peerage led generations of historians accustomed to thinking of the barons as the rivals of the king and the bane of his subjects to conclude that his reign represented an important stage on the highroad of law and order towards modern civil society. Growing recognition of the central role of the nobility in late medieval and early modern English government has caused this traditional wisdom to be questioned in two ways. Some have argued that there was no reduction in the power of the peerage, but this looks like a triumph of hope over evidence. By 1509 there were fewer peers, with less landed wealth, less able to raise troops in their own name, and more strictly subject to royal supervision. There can be no doubt that their power, individually and collectively, was reduced during this reign. More realistically, questions have been asked as to whether a reduction in noble power was the same as an increase in law and order. Evidence has been found from the north and in the Midlands which suggests that the weakening of the customary control of a region by a powerful local magnate led to an increase in feuding among the gentry and to a reduction in the ability of the gentry (lacking magnate leadership) in their turn to repress banditry and disorder. Such evidence is hard to interpret, but what can certainly no longer be maintained is that Henry reduced the power of the nobility in order to improve law and order. He was probably worse placed even than us to assess the impact of his policy on law and order, but would probably have pursued the same policy irrespective of that impact. Quality of governance for the common people simply did not figure on his political agenda. His objective was to ensure that the nobility were not in a position to mount a challenge to his rule, and in this he succeeded.
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