Henry VII. died at Richmond on the 22nd April 1509, making a better and more generous end than could have been expected from his life. He, like his rival Ferdinand, had been avaricious by deliberate policy; and his avarice was largely instrumental in founding England's coming greatness, for the overflowing coffers he left to his son lent force to the new position assumed by England as the balancing power, courted by both the great continental rivals. Ferdinand's ambition had o'erleaped itself, and the possession of Flanders by the King of Castile had made England's friendship more than ever necessary thenceforward, for France was opposed to Spain now, not in Italy alone, but on long conterminous frontiers in the north, south, and east as well. Henry VIII. at the age of eighteen was well fitting to succeed his father. All contemporary observers agree that his grace and personal beauty as a youth were as remarkable as his quickness of intellect and his true Tudor desire to stand well in the eyes of his people. Fully aware of the power his father's wealth gave him politically, he was determined to share no part of the onus for the oppression with which the wealth had been collected; and on the day following his father's death, before himself retiring to mourning reclusion in the Tower of London, the unpopular financial instruments of Henry VII., Empson and Dudley and others, were laid by the heels to sate the vengeance of the people. The Spanish match for the young king was by far more popular in England than any other; and the alacrity of Henry himself and his ministers to carry it into effect without further delay, now that his father with his personal ambitions and enmities was dead, was also indicative of his desire to begin his reign by pleasing his subjects.