Month: October 2018

The most interesting feature of the concluding chapter goes beyond Schofield’s actual research, and thus beyond the reign of Henry VIII. He contends that, in the reign of Elizabeth I, the value of the assessments declined in both nominal and thus significantly in real terms, with the increased inflation of the later Price Revolution era. Furthermore, tax collections under Elizabeth ranged from just 25% to 51% of independent assessment valuations, compared to an average of 68% under Henry VIII. The chief cause of this discrepancy was a grossly unfair under-assessment of the peerage and upper classes, from “a combination of personal self-interest and the exigencies of patronage politics” that “conspired to undermine the directly assessed subsidy as a viable form of taxation under the later Tudors” (p. 217). If most historians consider Elizabeth to have been the much more enlightened monarch, Schofield contends that, in terms at least of parliamentary taxation, Henry VIII’s reign was the most remarkable of all the Tudors — and Stuarts — “for its sophistication and attention to the principle of distributive justice” — in essence, for its fairness; and that indeed his system of direct subsidies “was several centuries ahead of its time,” with this very short-lived partnership between a more enlightened upper class and the crown. Subsequently, Schofield observes (p. 201), “direct assessment was to be abandoned again in the mid seventeenth century, after decades of complaints over evasion and under-assessments [of upper-class incomes], and would not be revived until the very end of the eighteenth century,” during the Napoleonic Wars, and then only very briefly. The modern income tax was reintroduced, now on a permanent basis, only in 1842, with the Tory regime of Robert Peel: at the modest and flat rate of 7d per pound sterling, or 2.92%. A progressive income tax, on Henry VIII’s 1513 model, would not be achieved in Britain until the early twentieth century.