may please your grace, that were not for mine ease: they are most of them my retainers, that are come to do me service at such a time as this, and chiefly to see your grace."
The king started a little, and said: "By my faith, my lord, I thank you for your good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws thus broken in my sight: my attorney must speak to you." The earl was prosecuted for thus seeking to flatter the vanity of his master, and compelled to gratify his avarice by a fine of 15,000 marks.
Whilst the king himself set so notable an example of extortion, we may be sure that his commissioners, spies, and tools of all sorts were not slack in this business of ferreting out and putting through the torture of their secret courts the unhappy subjects of every corner of the kingdom who had any substance to prey upon. The two ringleaders of this set of legalised robbers were a couple of the vilest fellows which pollute the annals of England, and are scarcely matched by the horrid lists of Italian or Spanish inquisitors. "The king," says Bacon, "had gotten for his purpose, or beyond his purpose, two instruments, Empson and Dudley, whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches and shearers: bold men, and careless of fame, and that took toll of their master's grist. Dudley was of a good family, eloquent, and one that could put hateful business into good language. But Empson, that was the son of a sieve-maker, triumphed always upon the deed done, putting off all other respects whatsoever."
Both these vile fellows were lawyers, and skilled in all the quirks and contrivances of oppression. There was no villany which they could not represent as legal if not right. "They turned," adds Bacon, "law and justice into wormwood and rapine." By the active vigilance of these bloodsuckers, every part of the kingdom, and every rank and class of people in it, were put upon the rack of an unexampled extortion. Where they could not by their ingenuity find an old offence, they invented new offences, so that they might levy fines. "These, and other courses," continues Bacon, "fitter to be buried in oblivion than repeated, they had of preying upon the people, both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves; insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance." When, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, we shall be astonished at the daring deeds of her great favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, we have only to remember his grandfather, Dudley, the extortioner of this time, in order to get rid of any astonishment.
To so low a degree of slavish prostration was the House of Commons fallen in 1504, that it chose this Dudley, the king's pincers, for its speaker; and, as might be expected, it passed any Acts that Henry chose. Amongst others, he demanded the aids which used to be paid in feudal times on the knighting of the king's eldest son, and marrying his eldest daughter. Henry had married his eldest daughter in 1502 to the King of Scots, and he had knighted his eldest son Arthur before his marriage, in 1501; and on these old occurrences he demanded a contribution from Parliament, and obtained £30,000, which was so arranged that £40,000 should be voted, and that he should remit £10,000—matters out of doors assuming an aspect which forced even from him some show of moderation.
The cruel and incessant oppressions of Henry's commissioners had now roused a deep spirit of resentment in the public mind. Everywhere there were murmurings and discontent. That Henry was well aware of all that his agents were doing, has been clearly shown by Bacon. Henry examined the accounts of Dudley and Empson with all the minute interest of a usurer. "I remember," says Bacon, "to have seen a book of accounts of Empson that had the king's hand almost to every leaf by way of signing, and was in some places postilled in the margin with the king's hand likewise, where was this remembrance:—' Item:Received from such a one five marks for a pardon to be procured, and if the pardon do not pass, the money to be repaid, except the party be some otherways satisfied.' And near against this memorandum, in the king's own hand, 'otherways satisfied.'" Such are the proofs that Henry was fully cognisant, and therefore fully guilty, of all that was being done.
Confident as Henry was that he could crush any resistance at home, there was an individual abroad on whom his jealous eyes were fixed with some degree of anxiety. This was Edmund de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk. He was the son of the late Duke of Suffolk, and younger brother of the Earl of Lincoln, who fell at the battle of Stoke. On the death of the Earl of Lincoln, Edmund de la Pole claimed the family honours and estates, as the next heir of his father; but Henry replied that he inherited from his brother, who died attainted; and that, therefore, those lands were forfeited. It was clear that Edmund inherited from his father, through the decease of his brother without issue, but Henry would not have it so, and compelled the young man to content himself with a fragment of the estate, and the minor title of earl, the rank of his brother. Besides grasping at the forfeited estates, Henry undoubtedly took pleasure in reducing this Yorkist family, and the young man's mind appears to have been embittered by the injury. He had the misfortune to kill a man who had excited his anger, and Henry seized the opportunity to further humiliate him. He was arraigned as a murderer in the Court of King's Bench, and commanded to plead the king's pardon. Suffolk, disdaining to do this, fled to the Continent in 1449, and took refuge in the dangerous Court of his aunt, the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy. To draw him from that focus of antagonism, Henry after a time permitted Suffolk to return, and at the marriage of Prince Arthur, like many others of the nobility, he involved himself in debt by his extravagant display, and soon after, again accompanied by his youngest brother, Richard de la Pole, he once more escaped to the Court of his intriguing aunt.
Henry now suspected something more in this resort to the Court of Burgundy than a mere escape from debt, and he employed his old scheme of coming at the truth. As he had done in Warbeck's case, he now sent over a spy, in the person of a gentleman. Then it had been Sir Robert Clifford, now it was Sir Robert Curson. Curson pursued the very same plan that Clifford had done. He professed to have excited the deadly enmity of the king, and the king completed the deception by causing the Pope's bull of excommunication, with all its curses on the rebels, to be read against the Earl of Suffolk and Sir
