Alike, then, by his disuse and his use of parliaments, Henry strengthened the royal power, the initiative of all legislation remaining in his hands. To the same end he continued to depress the great nobles and to create a new nobility dependent on royal favour. All who threatened to display a dangerous ambition, from Buckingham on, were struck down; the House of Norfolk survived till the end of the reign, when the Duke was attainted and his son was sent to the block. No ancient House was represented in the Council of Regency nominated under Henry's will. The men who served the King were those whom he had himself raised, and could himself cast down with a word. The edifice of his absolutism was complete, though it was modified by the conditions under which his son and his two daughters succeeded to the throne. [Sidenote: Parliament and the purse] The theory of absolutism from Richard II. to Wolsey had been that the King should make it his aim to rule without parliaments; whereas we are confronted with the apparent paradox that Henry was never more absolute than when his parliaments were in almost continual session. The explanation lies in this, that he did not usually call them to ask them for money out of their own pockets; for the most part he invited them to approve of his taxing some one else, by confiscations or the conversion of loans received into free gifts--a much more congenial task. The King had found other methods of raising revenues than by appealing to the generosity of his faithful Commons--methods which in effect relieved them of demands which they would otherwise have been obliged to face. The vast sums wrung from Convocation or from the Monasteries went to relieve the Commons from taxes. The parliament of 1523, summoned to grant subsidies, faced Wolsey with an independence which fully justified the minister in avoiding the risk of similar rebuffs: the Reformation parliament itself offered a stubborn resistance to the Bill of Wards, which touched its own pocket. Independence and resistance vanished when the incentive was withdrawn, and the diversion of the stream of ecclesiastical wealth into the abysses of the royal treasury was acquiesced in with a certain enthusiasm. The King got the credit of the ends secured, his minister the odium for the methods of obtaining them: and so year by year the crown became more potent. [Sidenote: The Land]