A Study of the Taxation, Tax Resistances, and Inheritors in King Henry VIII

Abstract

The first noticeable action in King Henry VIII begins by the news of ‘loud rebellion’(29) in Act 1, scene 2. This was a tax strike against heavy taxation, called “Amicable Grant”(1525) that Thomas Wolsey imposed to solve the financial difficulties of Henry VIII who wanted to have costly wars with France. Discontent and exasperation burst forth across the England because the forced ‘Loans’(1522-3) had not been repaid and the ‘Subsidy’(1523) was still being collected. In Suffolk, around 10,000 protesters gathered, and finally King granted a “free pardon to each man that has denied”(1.2.100) to pay the tax and cancelled it. This failure, however, brought about Wolsey’s downfall before long and made the disappointed king seek for other methods to secure tax revenues. After Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell led the tax policies of Henry’s government. Cromwell made ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus’, an evaluation report on the church properties, and submitted the bills of Statute of Uses, Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535 & Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1539, in succession. All the monasteries and their properties in England and Wales dissolved by two Suppression Acts were sold off through the Augmentation Court to fund Henry’s military campaigns in the 1540s. The disposed lands enhanced the social status of the gentry who purchased the lands. These processes are strewn in the characters and dialogues of the work which I tried to find them out. At the last scene of this work, another heir(5.4.41) of Elizabeth who is Henry’s heir is described as “a mountain cedar”(53). This image of a cedar reminds the audience of the tree whose twigs, “bark” and “timber” were “hacked”(96) and suffered by heavy taxation in Act I, scene 2. Through merging the “every tree”(1.2.96) into the “every man”(5.4.33) who shall eat and sing “[u]nder his own vine” and into “[o]ur children’s children” who will “be and make new nations”(5.4.54, 52) by and with the cedar, Shakespeare makes them all the inheritors of King Henry.