No fear, no favours
When Henry VII took power in 1485, he was likewise constrained by the need not to antagonise the great nobles. The constant battles over the throne during the previous century had produced a feeling of insecurity and legal chaos among the landowners. Deaths in battle and executions had shattered the great feudal houses; their lands had been confiscated and restored again and again. The survivors were in constant danger of losing their estates by actions in the law courts started by their enemies and based on past allegiances and treacheries.
All this was dangerous to Henry, because insecure landowners might be tempted to support another usurper. So Henry passed legislation stating that all who gave their allegiance to the king for the time being – that is, whoever sat upon the throne, whatever their true claim – should be secure in their lives and property. But even while passing this law, Henry felt secure enough to keep possession of Richard III's estates, which he had won by right of conquest, as well as the Lancastrian lands to which he was heir.
In Henry, therefore, England finally had a king with sufficient private revenue to face down the magnates. What's more, he was the first monarch since before the Wars of the Roses who had come to power without owing his position to a rich aristocratic backer. He had no debts to pay and owed no favours. He was able to choose his own advisers and ministers from outside the old nobility. They owed their positions – and their loyalty – to him alone. Henry set in motion the slow shift of power to the centre. The stage was being set for a new kind of monarchy: one that was moving closer to Fortescue's dominium regale.
Semi-divine status
Henry VIII was very unlike his father in many ways, but in his desire for control, he was a chip off the old block. When the pope denied him the annulment from Catherine of Aragon that he sought in his quest for a son and heir, he asserted the spiritual as well as the secular supremacy of the sovereign. In addition to seizing Church land and property through the dissolution of the monasteries, he claimed a semi-divine status more akin to that of a Roman emperor than the customary authority of an English king. Through all this, Henry accomplished a centralisation of power into his own hands that was unprecedented for an English monarch.
The monarchy seemed poised to take on an absolutist character, as was happening in mainland Europe, where the rights and privileges of ancient parliaments were everywhere making way for modern court-based politics, in which all the reins of power were gathered in the hands of the monarch and his or her ministers, and powerful aristocracies were being usurped by powerful bureaucracies. Henry was a true Renaissance prince. Increasingly, power in England came only with proximity to the royal person.
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 Henry VII (1457-1509), a new kind of English king, with sufficient wealth to rule without the support of the nobility.
Society of Antiquaries, London/Bridgeman Art Library
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