Contrary to the ryght and to the order of the lawe

Furst ye must haue the roote of Iustice withowt the which the tree of comon welth can not contynew'. 1 Thus wrote Edmund Dudley, not without some irony perhaps, from the Tower of London as he awaited execution in 1509. Dudley and Richard Empson were the primary agents of, and were made the scapegoats for, Henry VII's fiscal exactions from his subjects, which many contemporaries perceived as unjust: Dudley 'excecutyd his power to the grete hurt and hindrance of some Noble men bothe spyrytuell & temporall and to othir wythowth mercy or pyte'. 2 Historians have been less sure. Dudley had been one of Henry VII's principal agents from 1504, and from 1506 the president of the King's Council, until Henry's death in 1509 brought his abrupt fall from power, arrest and eventual execution in 1510. It has been argued, however, that Dudley and Empson were simply 'the king's long arms with which he took what was his', or that in D.M. Brodie's words 'it may be wise to accept Dudley's description of himself as one who bore "a hartie good will and love towards the prosperous estate of my naturall countrie"'. 3 There was a lively debate in the early 1960s between Geoffrey Elton, who viewed Empson and Dudley as efficient agents 'of a legal, if oppressive, policy', and J.P. Cooper, who argued that 'the last years of Henry VII not only provide evidence of increasing exactions, but also of some definite perversions of justice'. 4 However, the publication in 1972 in this journal of Edmund Dudley's petition of 1509, detailing the sheer scope of his activities and the number of men he felt he had wronged, has created something of a consensus among modern historians. 5 Sean Cunningham has argued that these men, along with the king, *Quotation from the newly discovered petition in the National Archives, now held under the reference E 28/93, no. 99 and printed below pp. 20-22. I am

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