by Charles Ross
Nevertheless, the government faced a constant shortage of ready cash, and this meant an equally constant recourse to borrowing. But it is a clear indication of a renewed confidence in the Crown’s financial credibility that hard-headed men of business now showed themselves far more willing to lend to Edward than they had been to shore up the shaky galleries of Henry VI’s finances. In particular, three important groups of lenders, who had been largely alienated by the Lancastrians, provided substantial backing. First, the Londoners, who had invested quite heavily in the Yorkists even before Edward’s victory at Towton. Apart from the large corporate loan of £11,000 in 1460–61, London merchants, either as individuals or in syndicates, lent the Crown no less than £35,852 between 1462 and 1475, more than three times their investment in Henry VI in the last decade of his rule. The Company of the Staple had a strong stake in the survival of Edward’s government, for only through him could they hope to recover the large sums they had advanced to the Lancastrians, and, in fact, between 1462 and 1475 they lent him £23,208. But the really dramatic rise in lending to the Crown comes with the third group, the alien bankers and merchants. These had lent only £1,000 to Henry VI in his last decade, but now proceeded to advance £38,128 to Edward before 1475. The principal source of loans was the Florentines, especially one of the king’s chief factors, Gerard de Caniziani, who lent £24,705. The Medici bank provided a further £5,000 and smaller sums came from Genoese and Venetian bankers.1 Edward was much more successful in winning the confidence of the Italians than any of his fifteenth-century predecessors, and, with the Londoners and the Staplers, they came to be the chief financial support of his government.
This success can be explained only by the fact that these lenders appreciated the real efforts the government was making to meet its obligations, despite its difficulties. It is true that wages and annuities often went unpaid for considerable periods. For example, John Convers, a king’s serjeant, was one of many minor officials who in 1466 had not received any payment of his stipend since the beginning of the reign. In March 1464 Geoffrey Gate, lieutenant of the Isle of Wight, was owed £377 8s for his own and his men’s wages, having served at his own expense from July 1461. Even the much more influential Walter Blount, Lord Mountjoy, was still awaiting payment in March 1468 of £3,436 spent by him on the king’s behalf, although promised it three years before; and he was said to be greatly troubled by suits from his creditors ‘if the king succour him not’.2 But in general failure to pay, or long delay in payment, never reached the proportions common under Henry VI, and the government was prudent enough to avoid the accumulation of very large long-term debts to powerful men. Similarly, it tried to avoid the constant defaults on promises to pay which had been so disturbing a feature of late-Lancastrian finance, and creditors seem to have been confident that they would be repaid in due course. The Company of the Staple in particular benefited from the sensible rationalization of the system of financing Calais enshrined in the ‘Act of Retainer’ of 1466 and its later modifications. Under Henry VI the garrison had been unpaid and mutinous, and had retaliated by seizing the Staplers’ wool and holding the Company to ransom. Now the Company was itself made responsible for the regular payment of the garrison and recovered the money from the profits of the customs duties on wool exports – an arrangement which suited all concerned.3
If Edward and his advisers could feel reasonably satisfied at having avoided the worst financial ineptitudes of the Lancastrians, it was not until 1475 and after that real solvency was achieved, royal debts were finally discharged, and the king became normally independent of financial assistance from parliament, the first English ruler to do so for more than a century. How was this achieved? A contemporary analysis by the Croyland Chronicler, from his vantage-point within the government, provides a good starting-point. First, he tells us, the king ‘resumed possession of nearly all the royal estates, without regard to whom they had been granted, and applied the whole thereof to the support of the expenses of the Crown’. Tighter customs control was ensured through the introduction of surveyors of the customs, ‘men of remarkable shrewdness, but too hard, according to general report, upon the merchants’. He continued to profit from his trading ventures. He began to enforce his feudal rights more sharply, and to draw revenues from vacant prelacies. Finally, he enjoyed the French pension of £10,000 from 1475 until the year before his death. ‘All these particulars,’ the Chronicler adds, ‘in the course of a very few years, rendered him an extremely wealthy prince.’1
Though the Chronicler’s assertions on almost all these points can be substantiated, they are far from providing a full picture of royal financial policies. It is doubtful whether even the third of Edward’s acts of resumption, that of 1473, did much to increase the revenues. Its purpose was primarily political, to undo the arrangements for the Crown lands made during the Readeption, and to check the power of the duke of Clarence.2 More important was a generally tougher policy towards retaining and exploiting lands under royal control. Though the gains of 1471 had been dispersed, Edward became notably less generous in his later years, as his avarice mounted.3 Some wards’ lands were now mainly kept in the king’s hands, and their revenues paid into the king’s chamber: thus portions of the estates of the earls of Shrewsbury and Wiltshire and of Lord Morley, during the minority of their heirs, provided up to £1,400 a year towards the rebuilding of St George’s Chapel at Windsor.4
Even in his later years, however, Edward proved far less grasping in such matters than Henry Tudor was to be. For instance, the estates of the Talbot earldom of Shrewsbury in wardship produced no more than £450 for the king, although worth in excess of £1,000 a year, largely because of his indulgence to William, Lord Hastings, who paid only £300 for lands of twice that value.5 Several lesser baronial inheritances, among them those of Lords FitzWarin, Say and Berners, were allowed to be farmed out by the exchequer at fixed rates instead of being incorporated into the royal system of land management.1 The first major estate to be appropriated and exploited directly for the king’s benefit was Clarence’s share of the Warwick, Despenser and Salisbury lands, which was worth about £3,500 a year in net cash.2 It also appears to have been the only one.3 In contrast, one finds Henry VII, after a similar period of eighteen years’ rule, administering all or parts of more than a dozen forfeited or escheated estates, and drawing a further revenue of £6,264 from wardships. This explains why his land revenue towards the end of his reign was of the order of £42,000.4 In comparing him with Edward IV, however, allowance must be made for his highly favourable family position, for by then his only dependent was his surviving son, Henry of York, who was not permitted to draw the revenues of the Principality of Wales. Edward, on the other hand, had to provide for his mother, his queen, his brother, Gloucester, and a large and growing family. According to the most recent calculation, lands under royal control at the beginning of Richard Ill’s reign were worth between £22,000 and £25,000 in net cash, exclusive of annuities, but whilst Edward was alive at least half this sum was absorbed by provision for the royal family, and it is possible that his actual income from land was much less than £10,000.5
Alongside the new methods of estate management introduced earlier in the reign, Edward’s later years saw a much increased concern with the exploitation of the king’s feudal rights. From about 1478 there was what Sir Robert Somerville has called ‘an intense activity over feudal dues’.1 This involved enquiries into profits due from tenants holding of the king by knight service, demands for fines for respite of homage or for withdrawal of suit of court, and the concealment of wardships, reliefs and outlawries. At the same time efforts were made to increase the efficiency of estate management by sending out special groups of officials, notably on the Duchy of Lancaster estates, to survey and inspect the condition of lordships and manors and devise measures for their reform. They had instructions to examine closely the condition of buildings, parks, herbage, timber, to increase rents and revise rentals, and generally to tighten up o
n the work of local officials, often in minute detail.2
Clearly such activity might produce substantial results. Following the official ‘progress’ of the Duchy of Lancaster council through Lancashire and Cheshire in 1476, there was a sharp increase in the receipts of Thomas, Lord Stanley, as the duchy’s receiver-general in Lancashire. From £347 in 1476–7, they rose to £800 in 1477–8, and finally climbed to £885 in 1481–2.3 How far was such improvement general? In the present state of our knowledge this is a difficult question to answer. Although an exact comparison is not possible, the gross yields of the northern parts of the Duchy amounted to £7,391 in 1463–4; in 1478–9 it was £6,696. The net profits, including arrears, were £3,647 and £3,484 respectively.4 Part of the reason for this state of affairs may have been the neglect and inefficiency of Duke Richard of Gloucester, as chief steward of the Duchy north of Trent, and local steward also of many northern Duchy lordships, since 1471. In 1482 the Duchy council roundly told him that he and his deputies, through sales of timber and other defects of administration, had brought his lordships into great decay.5 This letter is a remarkably outspoken criticism of a powerful royal duke, but one doubts whether Henry VII would have tolerated such a situation over twelve years.
Evidence from other royal lands or estates in royal hands suggests a similar conclusion. The lands of the Duchy of York in Somerset produced £348 in 1459–60 and £352 in 1477–8, whilst a group of Yorkshire manors which yielded £117 a year at the beginning of the reign was producing the same amount at its end.1 All the efforts of Yorkist administrators did not succeed in raising the revenues of the southern parts of the Principality of Wales to the levels reached during Henry VI’s minority. From about £2,000 a year in 1430–32 these had fallen to no more than £213 in 1456–7; under Edward they averaged between £700 and £1,000 a year. But Henry VII likewise had no great success in this region.2 In administering the Talbot lordship of Goodrich in Herefordshire, the royal officials were notably less successful than William, Lord Herbert, who extracted from it a revenue of £115 a year in the 1460s compared with a yield of only half as much when it was in royal hands during the next decade.3
Too often there seems to have been a gap between theory and practice in royal estate management. Alongside ‘the enterprising and reforming spirit’ noted by Sir Robert Somerville in the administration of the Duchy of Lancaster, there are many striking examples of failure to get things done.4 For example, in an effort to increase revenue from the Yorkshire honours, the Duchy council appointed commissioners to make new rentals in 1474, but found that nothing had been done when it visited the area in 1476, and the ministers’ accounts show that nothing had been done two years after that. In Michaelmas 1480 the officials of the Honour of Pontefract were still largely working on rentals first compiled in 1424–5 or 1420–21.5 One may well doubt whether Edward’s government was much more successful in its efforts to exploit the king’s feudal revenues. Here again the problem was recognized and remedies proposed, but the arrangements for enforcement lacked teeth. Thus in 1471 the escheator in Lancashire was particularly directed to enquire into the practice of tenants entering on their inheritances without livery or licence, but in 1479 the Duchy council noted that the practice continued. Similarly evasion of royal rights of wardship (admittedly an intractable problem) continued to be widespread.6
The idea that much slackness and inefficiency remained in Edwardian administration can be confirmed by the evidence of documents drawn up in the reign of Richard III. Among them is a ‘remembrance’ proposing improvements in royal financial methods.1 Among the faults it lists were the laxity and slowness of accounting procedures at the exchequer; the fact that stewards of royal lands were often self-seeking and ill-equipped for their positions; and the continuing practice of farming out royal estates, wardships and ecclesiastical temporalities in the king’s hands at fixed and unprofitable rents instead of administering directly for the king’s benefit. This final point is amply borne out by the evidence.2 Similarly, a set of instructions issued by Richard III to Sir Marmaduke Constable, steward of the Duchy Honour of Tut-bury, suggests that officials often failed to observe the standards of careful management laid down by the Duchy council.3 As in other matters, it was left to Henry VII to make these fully effective.
The appointment of surveyors of the customs noted by the Croyland Chronicler was the climax of a series of efforts by Edward’s government to improve customs revenue by preventing evasion. As early as 1466, Edward appointed powerful commissions in many ports to enquire into breaches of the statutes and to investigate customs administration in general. Similar commissions were appointed in 1473 and 1474, and in 1475 parliament approved an act increasing the penalties for fraud in the import of luxury textiles from a fine of double the subsidy to forfeiture of the smuggled goods.4 Meanwhile, individual surveyors of the customs were appointed from 1471 onwards, and this became a general system in 1478. The powers of these new officials were very wide, and the importance attached to their work is shown in the high rates of pay (up to 100 marks a year) which they received. The stringency with which these men operated produced a large crop of prosecutions, as many as thirty-six cases being presented by the king’s attorney in Trinity term 1478.5 Stricter customs control was matched by a vigorous and on the whole successful offensive against piracy. In both these areas of administration the Yorkist government displayed far more energy and efficiency than its Lancastrian predecessor.
More important than such measures in raising customs revenue was the gradual improvement in trading conditions after 1471. This owed something to greater political stability at home, but even more to the series of commercial treaties with all England’s trading neighbours which marks the 1470s, particularly the Treaties of Utrecht (1473–4) with the Hansards, of Picquigny (1475) with France, and with Burgundy (1478). All this made possible an increase, gradual at first but markedly gaining in momentum by 1480, in the volume and value of England’s foreign trade. In consequence, customs revenue rose to an average of about £34,000 after 1471, some £10,000 a year more than in the first decade of the reign.1
To these improvements in his most stable sources of revenue, Edward could add a total of £86,250 received from France, either as pension or the ransom payment for Margaret of Anjou, in the last seven years of his reign. Between 1471 and 1483 the clergy contributed £77,100 in taxation, and parliamentary lay taxation provided £93,000, although all of this latter sum was spent on the expedition of 1475.2 The Crown derived further money from the proceeds of benevolences and Edward’s private trading ventures, but we have no idea of the amounts involved.3 Taken together, and in combination with the very modest expenditure on the royal household following the reforms of the 1470s, we have no reason to doubt the claims of contemporaries that in his later years Edward was an extremely wealthy prince. By the end of 1478 he had almost entirely paid off his debts, and had even managed to accumulate a substantial treasure.4
Any calculation of Edward’s total annual revenue in the last eight years of his reign must of necessity be imprecise, by reason of the disappearance of the all-important chamber records. Disregarding taxation, the profits of benevolences, and unknown sums from trading ventures, it would appear that his revenue from regularly recurring sources was of the order of £65,000 to £70,00.5 This may be compared with the income of £104,863 which (according to the most recent calculation) Henry VII enjoyed in the last few years of his reign.1 The real measure of Edward’s achievement lies in his ability to achieve solvency, pay off debts, and maintain an impressive royal estate without having any recourse to parliament between 1475 and the last months of his life. Yet it was success bought at a price. The risk of losing his French pension hampered his diplomatic freedom of movement, and solvency was immediately at risk by any involvement in warfare. For Scofield, his ability to finance the Scottish war of 1481–2 from his own resources was his ‘most remarkable financial feat … it may even be considered the most remarkable fact of the king’s
career’.2 But this exaggerated claim seems to ignore the fact that the war involved Edward in some highly unpopular measures and finally forced him to seek aid from parliament once again. A recent judgement on Henry VII’s financial situation can be applied to Edward’s with equal force: ‘War is a terribly expensive business which no responsible king could face without the necessary ready cash in hand – and this he could never have saved from his ordinary revenue.’3
Historians’ judgements on Edward as a financier have varied from the mildly dismissive to the moderately enthusiastic.4 Certainly, his reputation has suffered from the inevitable comparison with Henry VII, the most money-conscious king in our history, who attacked the problem with a grinding application and a willingness to risk unpopularity for financial gain. By contrast, Edward was properly but not obsessively businesslike and often prepared to sacrifice financial to political advantage. He also managed to die a popular as well as a wealthy king, despite the fears of contemporaries that, given longer, he might have become ‘an hard and severe prince’; but this, as Polydore Vergil observed, ‘was prevented by the brevity of his life’.5 He did, however, face a much harder task than Henry. To rescue the Crown from the financial abyss into which the Lancastrians had plunged it was no mean achievement. To die solvent was something no other English king had achieved for more than two hundred years. Henry VII had the great advantage of being able to build upon the foundations laid by his father-in-law. Indeed, the best testimony to the quality of Edward’s financial policies is the degree to which the shrewd and calculating Henry held firm to them.
