EHR, cxxvi. 519 (April 2011)

424 BOOK REVIEWS

The English Parliaments of Henry VII, 1485–1504, by P.R. Cavill (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2009; pp. xvi + 296. £55).

Original, insightful, elegantly written in a sparse style, this is a fine book, and, as the book of a thesis, an outstanding one. The author sets himself an arduous task. Henry VII’s Parliaments have proved difficult to place in their historical context; satisfactory, seemingly, neither as epilogue to the narrative of the ‘medieval’ Parliament, nor as prologue to that of the Parliaments of later Tudor monarchs. Here Cavill identifies a distorting perspective in the contrasting approaches adopted by medievalists of the McFarlane school, who, with their focus on the localities, view Parliament from the perspective of those it represented, and early-modernists of the Elton stable, whose view of Parliament takes as its standpoint the interests of the Crown. For the former, the exercise of kingship was informed and modified by the interests of the localities expressed in the Commons; for the latter, Parliament, above its other functions, amplified the power of those monarchs who had the ability to harness its potential. Cavill seeks to demonstrate that in Henry VII’s reign it did both. He shows how important Parliament was to the first Tudor monarch as he sought to establish his regime. In bringing the political nation physically together, it provided him with a public forum in the way that no other institution did. In the difficult early years of his reign, he exploited this opportunity to proclaim the legitimacy of his rule, publicly committing himself to marry Elizabeth of York in his first Parliament, staging her coronation in his second, and creating their son, Arthur, as Prince of Wales in his third. As the reign progressed, he made more sophisticated use of the assembly. In 1495, against the prevailing trend of parliamentary legislation as ‘casual rather than programmatic, reactive rather than proactive’ (p. 74), he put before Parliament a legislative programme prepared by his councillors and outlined by Chancellor Morton in his opening speech. Cavill sees this as an exercise in royal public relations, an assertion of the advantages of Henry’s rule in response to the threat posed by Perkin Warbeck. Later, however, Henry’s need for Parliament diminished as his dynastic and financial security increased, and this practical consideration explains why he summoned only one Parliament in the last twelve years of his reign.

When viewed from the Eltonian perspective of the Crown, the parliamentary history of the reign, in Cavill’s persuasive narrative, is thus straightforward. His arguments become necessarily more complex when he turns to view Parliament from the localities. In the absence of serious tensions between King and Parliament, the benefits of Parliament for the Crown are easier to delineate than its benefits for the realm at large. Cavill finds an answer in the strong correspondence between the interests of King and Commons in the making of new law. Here, in a significant change in the diplomatic of record-keeping, he discerns the one important new parliamentary development in the reign, namely, the completion of the long process by which the Commons were integrated into the legislative process. As the communes peticiones section of the parliament roll began to contain acts drafted as bills, there was no longer any ‘diplomatic means of differentiating legislation which originated with the crown from that promoted by its subjects’ (p. 222). This, in turn, emphasised ‘a syncretic

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EHR, cxxvi. 519 (April 2011)

view of law-making at the expense of one which emphasized the royal will’ (p. 223) and may have ‘fostered a sense that acts were not royal ordinances but collaborations between the king and his subjects’ (p. 228). The argument is an interesting and original one, expertly developed, although it raises questions the author does not entirely resolve. While it is easy to see how this development amplified the power of a government able to seize the legislative initiative, it is less easy to see how the interests of subjects were served. Here Cavill appears to take a more positive view than is justified by his evidence. He argues that statutes were ‘more than a royal imposition that sometimes by good fortune could resonate locally’ (p. 187), and that they might serve as ‘enablers, empowering local communities to act to resolve problems’ (p. 77). Yet, on his own admission, the enforcement of statutory trespasses, when employed as a means of adding to the Crown’s judicial revenues, was one of the ‘most unpopular and widely criticized aspects of Henry’s reign’ (p. 95). New legislation might thus be seen, from the subjects’ point of view, as more impoverishing than empowering. Further, there is a tension between this stress on the potential value of new law to local communities, and his implied contention that subjects would happily see Parliament dispensed with for years on end. A similar tension is also apparent in his discussion of representation. In support of the view that subjects might view Parliament as a ‘costly inconvenience’ with ‘the possibility of redress of grievances . . . outweighed by the likelihood of taxes being granted’ (p. 202), he cites the unwillingness to sit of the MPs elected for Bishop’s Lynn in 1489. Yet, drawing on his own extensive research in local record offices, he concludes that demand for seats ‘seems to have been growing, sometimes outstripping supply’ (p. 139).

These tensions in his argument are unnecessary. He refutes without them the Whiggish notion that the paucity of Parliaments in the later years of the reign reflected Henry VII’s distrust of the institution. Another Whiggish notion—that, under the early Tudors, Parliament was ‘a lifeless, cowed, and marginalised assembly’ (p. 246)—informs his search for signs of conflict in Henry’s relationship with Parliament. He argues that these signs are generally hidden from the modern observer. ‘“Quiescence”’, he remarks, ‘is not perhaps so much a comment on the actual nature of Henry’s parliaments as on the comparative scarcity of evidence’ (p. 11). His demonstration of the change in the nature of the parliament roll—the progressive exclusion of any matters that were not strictly legislative—might be taken to give some support to this view. Further, in the final Parliament of the reign, that of 1504, the Commons found sufficient confidence to defend against the Crown an important point of principle. Henry sought their approval for the levy of two feudal aids, an archaic form of taxation, but, after resistance, he accepted instead a subsidy of £30,000, the grant of which was justified on the traditional grounds of ‘defence of the realm’. Thus, although Henry almost routinely gained what he wanted from the assembly, he did so through compromise and negotiation rather than dictation. His success, together with the new legislative partnership between King and Parliament, prefigured the ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ of the 1530s.

S.J. PAYLING

doi:10.1093/ehr/cer036 History of Parliament

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