Manuscript Details Disbursements From King’s Secret Treasury : Professor Uncovers Long-Lost Ledger of Henry VIII

A professor at the College of William and Mary has identified one of the most important documents ever found on the history of the Tudor monarchy--the complete account of a vast hoard of money disbursed by Henry VIII from a secret treasury at Westminster Palace.

Dale Hoak, a historian of Tudor government and society, experienced a scholar’s ultimate delight when, at the end of a day of routine search at the British Museum in London in late 1985, he opened a tube containing the magnificent 440-year-old manuscript.

“I knew what I was looking at,” Hoak said, “although at first I could hardly believe it, since historians of Henry’s government had assumed that the record of payments from this secret treasury had not survived the king’s death.”

The 25-foot roll of vellum, in the formal hand of a court scribe, or financial clerk, tabulates every penny and ha’penny of around quarter of a million pounds sterling that passed through the king’s private coffers between 1542 and 1547, the last five years of Henry VIII’s reign.

Book Planned

Hoak, a member of the Royal Historical Society, was asked to present his findings to the history faculty of Jesus College at Oxford University last fall. He is now working on a book about the mid-Tudor court, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The roll is located in the collection of Lansdowne papers at the British Library, part of the British Museum complex. Such rolls, or “charters” as they are now called, came to the museum after the acquisition of the more numerous folio volumes, and were not listed in the standard printed catalogue of Lansdowne manuscripts.

“This fact apparently threw most scholars off the track,” said Hoak, for the roll could only be located in a little-used 19th-Century handwritten list of such charters.

One other scholar, the Oxford historian H.M. Colvin, briefly noted the existence of the document in 1982, but his published reference to “History of the King’s Works, Vol. IV: 1485-1660” gave no hint of the overall significance of Lansdowne Charter 14 for the history of Henry VIII’s regime. Hoak had not known of Colvin’s reference when he, too, noticed the entry for the roll in the 19th-Century list.

The account reveals how Henry VIII spent much of the fortune he plundered from the church following his dissolution of the English monasteries. “The manuscript provides much detailed new information on the operations of Henry’s government,” Hoak said.

Crucial Part of Research

The discovery of Henry VIII’s secret account forms a crucial part of Hoak’s research on the organization, administration and personnel of the English royal household, or privy chamber, the center of a Tudor monarch’s private circle. According to Hoak, under Henry VIII and his son, Edward VI, the privy chamber constituted a nearly invisible agency of government, “the rough equivalent of a financial department of state.”

Henry VIII’s privy chamber controlled huge sums of money. “The king essentially channeled the money from state treasuries such as the exchequer into his private apartments,” Hoak explained. “Some of the money he actually kept in huge iron chests in his bedchamber.

“In the early 1540s these sums represented 50% to 80% of the amount collected by the state treasuries,” Hoak said. In modern terms, he added, it would be like the President “diverting receipts from the U.S. Treasury to the White House in order to build up his own secret expense account.”

Henry VIII spent much of this income on military affairs, paying for the soldiers and war equipment that he used to invade France in 1544. “As a percentage of available resources, Henry VIII spent more on war in the 1540s than any British government before or since,” Hoak said.