Introduction

The books of the King’s chamber of receipt and expenditure, alongside the associated financial memoranda, known colloquially as the Chamber Books, are a source of unique significance for the history of late fifteenth and early sixteenth century England. They are the only surviving personal account of medieval monarchs; although earlier kings did channel significant sums through more direct channels than the bureaucratic Exchequer, such as the Wardrobe, these lack the detail and immediacy of the Chamber Books, which also match such sources in noting state expenditure, sometimes on a massive scale. The Chamber records of Edward IV, on whose system Henry VII’s chamber was based (and improved), would have been presumably comparable but these do not survive. Thus, the Chamber Books record unparalleled insight into the hobbies, interests, personal and professional relationships, health, and habits of Henry VII and to a lesser extent that of Henry VIII, as well as information about their court, diplomacy and statecraft. 

Henry VII has never caught the popular interest in the way his predecessor or successor have. He has traditionally been seen as a liminal king – his reign an adjunct to studies of the medieval monarchy and/or the Wars of the Roses or as a precursor to the fully fledged Tudor state and the Tudor revolution in government.[2] This lack of attention to the king is reflected in the academic historiographical lacuna that exists for his reign, notably on the politics of the reign and more personal aspects of his kingship. The focus has traditionally been on Henry’s statecraft, the machinery of government and the creation of conciliar methods to improve efficiency and revenue collection; this is not to denigrate classic studies such as those by Dietz or Richardson, nor more recent scholarship on these topics.[3] To take one example, the biography of Henry VII in the Yale Monarch Series, by Stanley Chrimes, first published in 1972, has 200 pages covering the personnel and the machinery of government and statecraft, with only 100 pages devoted to Henry’s career pre-Bosworth, his early years as king and the problem of security, while 24 pages cover the king’s personality and interests, though the latter is widely acknowledged to be very well done.[4] Few biographies of the king have been published in the years since, compared to, for example, the numerous ones on Richard III in the past decade, though it is noticeable that the personality of the king is more to the fore in recent years in studies by Sean Cunningham and Thomas Penn.[5] The politics of the king’s reign or his interests were never entirely neglected but were not prominent themes in the historiography.[6] There has, however, been something of revival of academic study on the reign in recent years, with significant new studies of Henry’s parliaments, his New Men and of a range of aspects of his kingship and policy in the last decade or so.[7]

The early years of Henry VIII’s reign, perhaps more surprisingly, have suffered from similar neglect. Whilst much has been written about the king’s marital problems, schism with the papacy and descent into tyranny, there has been comparatively little focus on the early years of his reign.[8] The first half dozen years of Henry VIII’s reign saw the dominance of the more able and less predatory of his father’s ministers, evolving only half-way through the decade into a distinctly different pattern with the rise of Thomas Wolsey as chief minister; arguably Wolsey has had as much attention as his royal master from scholars writing about the 1510s and 1520s.[9] In this period, Henry was happily married and though international wars and spectacular ceremonies in the name of peace have caught the interest of historians, it is perhaps only from the 1520s, with the rise of resistance to taxation in 1525, the issue of Anne Bolyen and the divorce and the fall of Wolsey, that Henrician scholarship rises exponentially.[10]

Part of the problem for this historical neglect lies in the transitional nature of the underlying source material, a point made by both Steven Gunn and Christine Carpenter.[11] The chronicles and usual Crown-generated records utilised by medievalists begin to dwindle, and the letter collections and State Papers that are the staple of the Tudor historian are in a foetal state for Henry VII’s reign, though there are several collections of edited documents of all types, while the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII are certainly thinner for the early years of Henry VIII’s reign than later.[12] Both Gunn and Carpenter acknowledge briefly the sources of the royal chamber. Yet perhaps the value of the Chamber Books needs greater emphasis, coming both through individual items of expenditure, many of which are known and discussed though others have yet to bear fruit (as can be seen in the case study on Henry VII below), but also the collective accumulation of material across the 4,300 pages of the books transcribed by the Winchester project, which can now be searched.

With the broadening of the scope of study on Henry VII in recent years, this project, as an examination of the Chamber Books that lie at the heart of the administrative system of Henry VII and Henry VIII, might seem to cement the tradition of firmly tying the old king to his bureaucracy and the young king to an initial continuation of his father’s administration. To an extent this cannot be avoided: the Chamber Books naturally provide insight into Henry VII’s financial modus operandi and the development of the Chamber finance system over the course of John Heron’s tenure as Treasurer of the Chamber. Yet, they are a source that can shed light on an astonishing array of topics, expected and unexpected, and certainly well beyond administrative topics.

The research findings of the Winchester project are still in progress, both a study of Kingship and Political Society by Ross and Cunningham, to be published by Oxford University Press, and it is also hoped that a number of the papers presented at the Early Tudor Court Culture conference in September 2018 will be published. This article complements these intended outputs by illumination two aspects of the research of the project, tangentially related. Firstly, in its proper place alongside the digital edition, is the first full analysis of the Chamber books, setting them in the context of the King’s Chamber and the administrative structures that produced them.[13] This contains a detailed study of the two types of books – the receipt books and the books of payments (also containing various financial memoranda) – setting out the process of composition, their ongoing annotation through addition of marginalia and the importance of understanding the layers of use that this demonstrates. It also summarises the archival history of the records of the chamber, including the loss of several chamber books, and the historiographical use of the Chamber Books. The Editorial Method of the production of the digital edition of the Chamber Books is outlined elsewhere on this website.

Secondly, a synopsis of Henry VII and his life at the court highlights the level and detail of what can be discovered through sustained analysis of the chamber books, and the potential for further research.  It looks at Henry’s habitual piety and plans for memoralisation, the rhythms of the court year both in terms of social events and religious observation, as well as annual celebrations, reviews the evidence for Henry’s leisure time, briefly looks at Henry’s extra-familial relationships and friendships, and concludes with an analysis of the staff of the royal chamber in daily attendance on the king.

Together these topics are suggestive of a framework for understanding the Chamber Books and their further use as well as highlighting their potential for future research in many areas of early Tudor history. The edition of the Chamber Books on this website is for all to use; part of the value of such digital humanities projects is the way such resources can be used that were not considered by the project team.

There is always a danger of placing the Chamber Books on a pedestal. The books are good at providing secure chronological scaffolding for an age short on narrative sources, or for which original material has had its natural order disturbed.  They are reasonably good at answering ‘how much?’, but less consistently good at answering the questions ‘for what?’, or ‘for whom?’, while they can be frustrating in not always answering the ‘why’ question.  A reference is made below to a requiem for Henry VII, whose obit was always inconveniently near St George’s day, and in some years had to be postponed to allow proper celebration of Easter.  The Books specify the payment and the reason for the offering.  They do not actually name the king – that has to be supplied.  It is offered here as an uncontroversial example of an exercise, often more difficult of execution, that has to be repeated many times over.  There is non-verbal information in the books that will not be rescued in any computer search, but has to be recovered visually. Wherever possible, it is there, on the database, by virtue of dedicated tagging.[14]  For the student of history the books still offer ‘an adventure; a detective story’, with likely ramifications [15]  There is of course always also the danger of taking interpretation too far.