Free Great Tales from English History, Book 2 by Robert Lacey

New World immigrants were spotted by a chronicler
     strolling around the Palace of Westminster,‘apparelled after the manner of Englishmen’. They were no longer‘brute beasts’,
     he admitted —‘I could not discern [them] from Englishmen.’

FORK IN, FORK OUT
1500

    F OR MORE THAN HALF HIS REIGN , HENRY VII’s chief minister was Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the great church statesmen who shaped
     England’s story during the Middle Ages. Often of lowly birth, these clever individuals rose through the meritocratic system
     of ecclesiastical education to make their names — in Morton’s case, via the challenging task of national fund-raising.
    When collecting money for the King, Morton’s commissioners are said to have confronted their targets with a truly undodgeable
     means test. If a likely customer appeared prosperous, he obviously had surplus funds to contribute to theKings coffers. If, on the other hand, he lived modestly, he must have been stashing his wealth away. Either way the victim
     was compelled to pay — impaled, as it were, upon one or other of the twin prongs of a pitchfork.
    Like many of history’s chestnuts, the facts behind what came to be known as‘Morton’s Fork’ are not quite as neat as the story.
     It was more than 130 years later that the statesman-philosopher Francis Bacon coined the phrase, and the documents of the
     time make clear that Morton did not wield the pitchfork personally. But the cardinal certainly did work hard to satisfy the
     appetite of a money-hungry monarch. As well as helping Henry to tighten up parliamentary taxation, he presided over the collection
     of‘benevolences’ —‘voluntary’ wealth taxes that invited subjects to show their goodwill towards the King. Not surprisingly,
     these forced loans soon became known as‘malevolences’, and Henry himself developed a reputation as a miser.‘In his later days,’
     wrote the normally loyal Polydore Vergil,‘all [his] virtues were obscured by avarice.’
    Henry VII’s account ledgers would seem to bear this out. At the foot of page after page are the royal initials, scratched
     by the careful bookkeeper monarch as he ran his finger down the columns. But Henry could spend lavishly when he wanted to,
     particularly when it came to making his kingship visibly magnificent. In November 1501 he spent £14,000 (over £8 million today)
     on jewels alone for the wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral of his eldest son Arthur to Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand
     and Isabella of Spain. Ten days of tournaments were staged at Westminster and the feasting went on night after night beneath
     the hammerbeam roof of the Great Hall, the walls hung with the costliest cloth of Arras.
    Two years later Henry splashed out again when he sent his daughter Margaret north to marry King James IV of Scotland, with
     an escort of two thousand horsemen, a train of magnificently clad noblemen and £16,000 (another £9 million or so) in jewels.
     Henry VII’s marriage-broking proved portentous. It was Margaret’s marriage that would one day bring the Stuart dynasty to
     England, while Katherine of Aragon, following the death of Arthur in 1502, would be passed on as wife to his younger brother
     Henry, with equally historic consequences.
    Henry VII had done well by England when he died, aged fifty-two, in April 1509. You can see his death mask in Westminster
     Abbey, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes sharp and his mouth shut, concealing the teeth which, according to contemporary
     description, were‘few, poor and black-stained’. He lies in splendour in the magnificent chapel that he built at the south
     end of the abbey — another notable item of dynastic extravagance. Beside him lies his wife Elizabeth of York, and not far
     away, his mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had schemed so hard and faithfully to bring her Tudor son to power.
    The soaring stone pillars of the chapel are decorated with