act Henry's first parliaas ment, Jan uary, 1510, tonnage the Holy for life; Empson and Dudley were attainted; 2 and an was passed which mitigated to a great extent such evils their harsh and inequitable procedure had inflicted.3 From the time of Henry's marriage with Catherine the in- and poundage for life; fluence of Ferdinand became dominant in the English council chamber; and the king of Aragon was not slow to draw his he enters ardent son-in-law, who was thirsting for glory and conquest League and upon the fields of France, into the Holy League, which had breaks the policy of been formed in October, 1511, between Ferdinand, the pope, peace; and the Republic of Venice for the avowed purpose of freeing Italy from French domination. Henry's hopes were fed by the prospect of recovering the French provinces which had been lost by his ancestors, and when the campaign opened in 1512 it was with an open assertion upon his part of the old claims upon "our heritage of France." This new departure from the traditional policy of peace brought with it the inevitable consequence. Two demands for money were made in two dequick succession upon parliament, which were promptly met. money in The parliament in 1511 granted two tenths and two fifteenths, quick sucwhile in 1513 the clergy granted two tenths, and the laity a the parlia tenth, a fifteenth, and a poll tax, towards the prosecution of 1511 and the war. In order to provide a sum which the poll tax failed 1513; to produce, there was granted to the king in the next year a the general general subsidy of 6 d. in the pound, and if his needs should subsidy of require it, a second of the same amount. This grant is memo- a point in rable as marking the time from which it became the custom of taxato grant in the same act with tenths and fifteenths, and as a supplement thereto, a general subsidy, an income and a property tax, which continued to be used down to the Civil War.6 11 Hen. VIII. c. 20. With the proviso, however, that "these grants be not taken in example to the kings of England in time to come." See as to such grants, above, p. 16. 2 They had been already convicted by juries, but had been respited. rates after which the poll tax was fixed, 6"In form the Tudor subsidy was a personal tax charged upon two distinct classes of tax-payers: I, persons possessed of movables; and 2, persons possessed of land.”. Dowell, Hist. of Taxation and Taxes in England, vol. iii. p. 71. See also Ibid., vol. i. p. 130. Persons charged in respect to movables were not charged in respect of profit from land, and vice versa, "none are to be doubly charged.". Ibid., vol. iii. p. 71. "A subsidy was an income tax of 4s. in the pound upon the annual 5 Lords' Journal, i. p. 25. As to the value of land worth 20s. a year, and a 1 Hen. VIII. c. 3. The official Journals of the House of Lords (printed with a general index, and a special calendar from I Hen. VIII. to 30th August, 1642) begin with 1 Hen. VIII. The Journals of the House of Commons begin with 1 Edward VI. 4 Fadera, xiii. 306. mands for ments of 1514 marks the history tion; results of the heavy taxation; protest of During the campaign of 1513-14, not long after Henry's hopes had been lifted by an important victory in France and by a greater in Scotland,1 he was suddenly robbed of the fruits of success by the desertion of his allies, who ended the coalition by a sudden and unexpected peace with Louis XII. While the results of the war thus abruptly closed freed the papacy, broke the prestige of France, and lifted England from an humble to a high place in European politics, the cost to the island kingdom was enormous. Not only were the accumulated treasures of Henry VII. and the liberal subsidies granted pressure of by parliament exhausted, but trade was greatly disturbed by the heavy pressure of taxation, and by the disorganization of labor. Against the dangers and demoralization thus brought about by the fresh outbreak of the spirit of conquest, a proLearning against the test arose from the men of the New Learning, which was conquest. pointed by the solemn denunciations of Colet and by the bitter satires of Erasmus, the first of whom declared that "an unjust peace is better than the justest war," while the latter denounced all wars of ambition as sacrilegious madness.2 Nothing could have been farther removed from these novel and humane aspirations to which the New Learning had given birth than the worldly and ambitious spirit of the rising favorite, who was destined soon to strive, through diplomacy and war, to win for himself the chair of St. Peter, and for his master the imperial crown. the New spirit of Wolsey, 1515-29. 4. Amongst the new men who had lately grown into royal favor was Thomas Wolsey, the son of a wealthy townsman of Ipswich, and an ecclesiastic, who before the end of the last reign had become one of the royal chaplains. By the Bishop of Winchester, a leading member of the council, he had been property-tax of 2 s. 8 d. in the pound the inhabitants of the county or borough."- Gardiner, Hist. Eng., vol. i. p. 297 and note I. 1 The victory won by the Earl of Surrey at Flodden. 2 "It was the first time in modern history that religion had formally disassociated itself from the ambition of princes and the horrors of war, or that the new spirit of criticism had ventured not only to question but to deny what had till then seemed the primary truths of political order."-Green, Hist. Eng. People, vol. iii. p. 94. the seals as taken into the service of the crown, and soon after the beginning of the present reign we find him exercising the office. of royal almoner, which drew him near to the king's person.1 During the late war, as the active organizer of the forces in the campaign of 1513, Wolsey had rendered such services as secured his elevation in that year to the see of Tournay.2 Honors then fell thick and fast upon him. In 1514 he was his rapid made bishop of Lincoln, and before the end of that year he promotion was translated to the archbishopric of York. In 1515 Henry church; obtained from Rome his elevation to the office of cardinal,3 and in December of that year, upon the retirement of Warham, he received the seals as chancellor. In that office, although receives the unacquainted with the details of legal procedure, it was ad- chancellor mitted even by his enemies that his decrees were character- in 1515; ized by the greatest equity and good judgment. So popular was his administration, by reason of his capacity for expedition and justice, that his court became overcrowded with business, and four subordinate courts had to be established for its relief, origin of of which that presided over by the master of the rolls still master of survives. It was, however, in the wider field of continental the rolls; politics that the new minister, now supreme in the council, was to find a domain worthy of his ambition. Taking up the thread of diplomacy where the end of the late war had left it, Wolsey's first design was to turn Henry's resentment of Ferdinand's desertion of him to a good account by making it the means of freeing England from Spanish domination, as the results of the war had freed her from the menace of French ascendency. By the death of Louis XII. in 1515 the destinies of France had passed into the stronger hands of Francis I., while by the death of Ferdinand in the next year his grandson, Charles of Austria, had been able to add all Spain to his 1 It is from Polydore Virgil (663), who had been imprisoned by Wolsey, that we learn of the orgies which took place at his house when he happened to be visited by his royal master. 2 Fœdera, xiii. 584. 3 Raynald, xx. 192. 4 Fadera, xiii. 530. 5 See Lingard, Hist. Eng., vol. iii. p. 370, 5th ed. "The earliest mention of him as master of the rolls is in 11 Hen. VII. c. 18. . . . In the course of time, the office of diplomacy ing factor in European politics; latere; already vast yet widely scattered dominions. Out of the rivalry between these nearly evenly balanced powers arose Wolsey's Wolsey's opportunity to lift England to a position of the first makes Eng- importance by making her alliance with either the controlling land a lead factor in European politics. By the year 1518 the success of this policy seemed to be assured, and as a crowning reward Henry procured from the pope in July of that year the cardiappointed nal's appointment as legate a latere, a station in which his legate a jurisdiction extended over all bishops, suspended all special privileges and exemptions, while his court took the place of that of Rome as the final court for ecclesiastical appeals. In a word, the legatine commission conferred upon the cardinal, so far as England was concerned, nearly all of the prerogatives of the supreme pontiff himself.1 As the chief of both the home and foreign administration, as president of the council, as chancellor, and as legate, Wolsey now concentrated in his hands the power to direct and control the entire secular and the control ecclesiastical business of the kingdom. In this abnormal con concen trates in his hands of both secular and ecclesiastical business; French and centration of power in a single hand can be traced not merely a desire upon the part of the crown to exalt a subject, whose fortunes could be blasted by a frown, but rather the consummation of the new system of personal government which rested upon the notion that the supreme powers of the state were all vested in the council as the mere agent of the royal will. Under the system as thus organized and directed by Wolsey the country enjoyed eight years of peace without a parliament.2 Not until the beginning of the great French and Spanish war of 1521 was England again forced from her position of neutrality into open participation in a struggle in which Henry hoped, through a fresh alliance with pope and emperor, to accomplish at last the re-conquest of his French inheritance. Although years had passed by since the estates had been assembled, the first attempt to raise money for the war was made in the form of a fresh application of the old system of forced loans forced loans or benevolences. In March, 1522, commissioners of 1522; were sent into the shires to make assessments, and in the maritime counties to array all men between the ages of sixteen 2 There was no parliament from 1515 to 1523. 1 See Fadera, xiii. 734, xiv. 18. and sixty upon the pretext of an apprehended invasion.1 As a temporary expedient, a loan of £20,000 was exacted of the merchants of London, while the wealthiest citizens were cited to appear before the cardinal as royal commissioner, where they were required to give the true values of their estates, which were received "upon their honesties." 2 When all of these oppressive expedients had failed to produce a sum sufficient to supply the great quota of troops which Henry had promised for the war, a parliament was finally summoned to meet in April, 1523, out of whose subsidies all of the unwill- parliament ing lenders hoped for indemnity. The unprecedented demand of £800,000, which the king was compelled to make, Wolsey undertook to present in person, backed by all the prestige and power of the conciliar system. At the head of the representative branch of the parliament, the ancient foe of that system, now stood an historic figure, who embodied all that remained of the free spirit of the past. of 1523. More as Near the close of the preceding reign, a young lawyer by the name of Thomas More, the son of an eminent barrister, Sir Thomas had attracted public attention by daring to oppose in the par- popular liament of 1504 an unreasonable demand for money in a speech which resulted in the reduction of a proposed subsidy 1 Stowe, 316; Fœdera, xiii. 770. 2 Holinshed, iii. 680; Hall, 101, 102, 105; Herbert, 121, 122. Each person was required to contribute a ratable portion according to his admission, upon the royal promise of repayment out of the next subsidy. The promises or "privy seals," as they were called, were in form as follows: "We Henry VIII. by the grace of God, king of Eng land and of France, Defender of Faith, and Lord of Ireland, promise by these presents truly to content and repay unto our trusty and well-beloved subject the sum of which he has lovingly advanced unto us by way of loan, for defence of our realm, and maintenance of our wars against France and Scotland."- Instructions to the Commissioners in contemporary MS. in the possession of Mr. Hallam. See Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 19. When in 1526 another attempt was made to collect a forced loan through royal commissioners who demanded a sixth from the laity and a fourth from the clergy, such forcible resistance was made in several shires that the king was compelled to leader ; |