Abstract
The public finance of the reign of Henry VIII has remained a Cinderella subject amongst historians. The ugly sisters, the Tudor Revolution in government and the politics of the Henrician court have been to the ball not once but many times. Public finance awaits not only its prince, but its fairy carriage too.
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Bibliography
A short bibliographical essay on this subject is, of necessity, short. As has already been said, the ur-source upon which historians have relied is F.C. Dietz, English Government Finance 1485–1547 (University of Illinois, 1921), repr. as vol. 1 of English Public Finance 1485–1641 (1964). The task for the next generation of historians is to replace this. P. Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) ch. 2 (‘The Financial Resources of Government’) is an excellent introduction in a wonderful book. A quite different work is P.K. O’Brien and P.A Hunt, ‘The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485–1815’, HR, 66 (1993) which puts a 38-year period firmly in context.
Most of the work which has been published since the Second World War has been essentially institutional, that is concerned with the develop ment of accounting institutions, their staff, procedures and their relationship with the monarch and household. Sir Geoffrey Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge UP, 1953) has had a quite remarkable run and wears well: but see now C. Coleman and D. Starkey (eds), Revolution Reassessed. Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) in which the ‘younger’ generation with differing degrees of success try to challenge the master on his own turf. But one reads all this material with a sense that financial considerations are at best secondary to other arguments.
The other institutional historian whose work has not always worn well is W.C. Richardson. Richardson produced two valuable works on the chamber and the Court of Augmentations: Tudor Chamber Administration 1485–1547 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1952) and History of the Court of Augmentations (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1961). Both are marked by a strange allergy to figures: neither contains the analyses of the accounts which one would expect to find there.
The various financial reserves are discussed by Starkey in his contribution to Revolution Reassessed and D. Hoak, ‘The Secret History of the Tudor Court: the King’s Coffers and the King’s Purse, 1542–1553’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987).
Other areas of public finance are very poorly covered. There is no financial or economic account of the crown lands before 1558 comparable with R.W. Hoyle (ed.), The Estates of the English Crown, 1558–1640, (Cambridge, 1992), although I hope in time to go some distance towards supplying this deficiency. B.P. Wolffe, The Crown Lands, 1461–1536. An Aspect of Yorkist and early Tudor government (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970) is essentially an institutional study and not at all of the crown as landowner. A great deal of work was done in the 1950s on the sale of crown lands as an aspect of the gentry controversy, for instance J. Youings, ‘The Terms of Disposal of the Devon Monastic Lands, 1536–58’, EHR, 69 (1954) and Sir John Habbakuk, ‘The Market for Monastic Property, 1539–1603’, EcHR, 10 (1958). For the Wards after 1540 see J. Hurstfield, ‘The Profits of Fiscal Feudalism’, EcHR, 8 (1955). For the Wards before that date, there are some useful comments in H.E. Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge UP, 1953) and in Richardson, Tudor Chamber Administration. For the administration of taxation the classic account is R.S. Schofield, ‘Parliamentary Lay Taxation, 1485–1547’, Cambridge PhD thesis, 1963. (Schofield’s thesis is now [1994] in course of publication.) Much of the recent work on taxation is quasi-constitutional in approach and elementary questions about the role of taxation in public finance have not been asked. The debate prompted by Elton’s 1976 ‘Taxation for War and Peace in early Tudor England’, most conveniently in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (4 vols, Cambridge UP, 1974–93) III, 216-33, continued in G.L. Harriss, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s “new principle of taxation”’, EHR, 93 (1978); J.D. Alsop, ‘The Theory and Practice of Tudor Taxation’ and Harriss, ‘Theory and Practice in Royal Taxation: Some Observations’, both EHR, 97 (1982); Alsop, ‘Innovation in Tudor Taxation’, EHR, 99 (1984). I will not be universally thanked for reviving this debate; R.W. Hoyle, ‘Crown, Parliament and Taxation in Sixteenth Century England’, EHR, 109 (1994). M.L. Bush in his ‘Tax Reform and Rebellion in early modern England’, History, 76 (1991) is one of the few historians to appreciate that people may not have warmed to paying taxes and behaved accordingly. For clerical taxation we have J.J. Scarisbrick, ‘Clerical Taxation in England, 1485–1547’,JEH, 11 (1960) until the work of Patrick Carter becomes available.
All discussions of the mint and the currency in general defer to C.E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester UP, 1978).
There is little on the spending departments which is helpful here. D. Loades, The Tudor Navy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992) maintains the Eltonian tradition of indifference to figures. We still lack a full study of the financing of the household.
The best account drawing together war, politics and finance is G.W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in early Tudor England. Henry VIII, Wolsey and the Amicable Grant of 1525 (Brighton: Harvester, 1525)
which is chronologically wider in scope than its title suggests. There is nothing equivalent for the 1540s. Two pieces by W.C. Richardson,’ some Financial Expedients of Henry VHF, EcHR, 7 (1954) and his Stephen Vaughan, Financial Agent of Henry VIII (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1953) are narrowly conceived but for the moment indispensable.
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© 1995 R. W. Hoyle
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Hoyle, R. (1995). War and Public Finance. In: MacCulloch, D. (eds) The Reign of Henry VIII. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24214-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24214-6_5
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