In all the twenty-four years of Henry VII’s reign he called Parliament only seven times, and six of the seven Parliaments sat within the first eleven years of his kingship. Each was the occasion of a demand for money. At his first Parliament, that of 1485, he received a grant of tunnage and poundage and a subsidy on wool for life.[268] Three years later, however, the consequences of heavy taxation were disastrous. Need arising for the enlistment of an army with which to aid the Duke of Brittany against the King of France, a tax was devised which not only exacted a tenth of incomes from freeholders, but applied as well to movables, laying imposition upon articles used in trade and even merchants’ stocks. This “new-found subsidy” proved so intolerable to the lower classes that a great insurrection broke out in the north against it.[269] The king with Tudor wisdom, remitted some £48,000 of the £75,000 which the tax was designed to raise, and Parliament gave him in return a fifteenth and tenth. In 1497, a similar rebellion occurred in Cornwall against a tax levied for the Scotch War. With these examples of parliamentary taxation before him, Henry turned away to fields at once more profitable and less dangerous, at least in their immediate consequences. [Morton’s crotch] He turned to the old expedient of the benevolence, despite the statute of Richard III prohibiting its imposition. The methods used in laying a benevolence are illustrated in the famous account by Lord Francis Bacon of the dilemma devised by Bishop Morton, Henry’s Chancellor, “to raise up the benevolence to a higher rate; and some called it his fork and some his crotch. For he had couched an article in the instructions to the commissioners who were to levy the benevolence, that if they met with any that were sparing, they should tell them that they must needs have, because they laid up; and if they were spenders, they must needs have, because it was seen in their port and manner of living; so neither kind came amiss.”[270] Parliament, subservient to the king, actually registered for the moment its approval of the practice of levying benevolences, when in 1492 it passed the “Shoring or Under-propping Act” making debts still owing on gifts promised to the king legally collectable. The benevolence was not the only means by which the ingenious monarch increased his income. Like Edward IV, he revived obsolete statutes and rigorously exacted fines in consequence of every infraction of them; but worse than that was his perversion of every function of the courts of law into a means of extortion. His odious instruments in that work were Richard Empson and Edmund Dudly who later were made to suffer for the evil practices of the father in the reign of the son. Beside these forms of imposition, the king pushed to the extreme the exaction of feudal dues accruing to the crown. [Henry VIII’s early taxation]