240 Chapter 13
exploitation of his domain, and encouraged the devel-
opment of trade. His Welsh connections—he had been
born in Pembrokeshire and was partially of Welsh de-
scent—secured him the cooperation of the principality
and laid the groundwork for its eventual union with
England in 1536.
The greatest threat to Henry’s regime was the bel-
ligerence of the great nobles, many of whom continued
to maintain private armies. He dealt with this menace
through prerogative courts, including the Court of
King’s Bench and the Star Chamber, so called because it
met in a room decorated with painted stars. Staffed by
royal appointees, these bodies levied heavy fines for a
variety of offenses against the crown that eventually de-
stroyed the military power of the great families. Para-
doxically, Henry may have been aided by several pre-
tenders to the throne who claimed to be one or another
of the missing princes and who enjoyed the support of
disgruntled Yorkists or other “over-mighty” subjects.
The fines, confiscations, and executions imposed after
each of these episodes added to the royal domain and
further reduced the number of his enemies.
When Henry died in 1509, the treasury was full
and the kingdom at peace. Many of the old feudal fami-
lies were either impoverished or extinct, and a new elite
composed largely of servants of the crown was begin-
ning to develop. The authority of the crown, in other
words, was great, but the state as a whole remained de-
pendent upon domain revenues. The later Tudors
would find this dependence limiting. The Stuarts would
be destroyed by it.The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire of the later Middle Ages
should be regarded as a confederation of cities and
principalities instead of as a territorial state that failed.
German parallels to the growth of Spain, France, or
England may be found in states such as Brandenburg,
Saxony, and Bavaria, not at the imperial level. Their
rulers sought, with varying degrees of success, to en-
hance domain revenues, control representative bodies,
and impose new taxes. The imperial office was an un-
likely vehicle for this type of development because it
was elective and because it lacked several of the more
important attributes of sovereignty.
The century before the Black Death had been one
of imperial paralysis and decentralization, caused in
part by papal interference. The turning point came in
1355 when Charles IV renounced his Italian claims and
turned his attention to reorganizing what would soon
be called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Na-
tion. The Golden Bull of 1356 regularized imperial
elections by placing them in the hands of seven perma-
nent electors: the archbishops of Trier, Mainz, and
Cologne, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Branden-
burg, the count of Palatine, and the king of Bohemia. It
further declared that the territory of these princes
would be indivisible and that inheritance in the secular
electorates would be by primogeniture.
These measures strengthened the electors and
made consolidation of their territories easier, but they
did little to create a more viable imperial government.
No incentive existed to increase the power of the em-
peror, and the lesser states feared the growing influence
of the electors. Efforts to create an electoral union orIllustration 13.1
Henry VII of England.This portrait by an unknown Flemish
artist was painted c. 1505. Shrewd, cynical, and devoid of chival-
ric illusions, Henry was typical of a generation of monarchs who
transformed their kingdoms into something resembling the mod-
ern state.