man in England who
had deserved well of Henry it was Oxford, but Oxford had to pay
15,000_l._, a sum worth perhaps 180,000_l._ at the present day, to
atone for his offence. No services rendered to Henry were to excuse
from obedience to the law.

22. =Empson and Dudley.=--As Henry grew older the gathering of money
became a passion. His chief instruments were Empson and Dudley, who
under pretence of enforcing the law established the worst of
tyrannies. Even false charges were brought for the sake of extracting
money. At the end of his reign Henry had accumulated a hoard of
1,800,000_l._, mainly gathered by injustice and oppression. The
despotism of one man was no doubt better than the despotism of many,
but the price paid for the change was a heavy one.

23. =Henry and his Daughter-in-law. 1502--1505.=--On the death of
Prince Arthur in =1502=, Ferdinand and Isabella proposed that their
daughter Catharine should marry her brother-in-law, Henry, the only
surviving son of the king of England, though the boy was six years
younger than herself. They had already paid half their daughter's
marriage portion, and they believed, probably with truth, that they
had little chance of recovering it from Henry VII., and that it would
therefore be more economical to re-marry their daughter where they
would get off with no more expense than the payment of the other half.
Henry on the other hand feared lest the repayment of the first half
might be demanded of him, and consequently welcomed the proposal. In
=1503= a dispensation for the marriage was obtained from Pope Julius
II., but in =1505=, when the time for the betrothal arrived, the young
Henry protested, no doubt at his father's instigation, that he would
proceed no farther.

24. =The Last Years of Henry VII. 1505--1509.=--Circumstances were
changed by the death of Isabella in =1504=, when her son-in-law, the
Archduke Philip, claimed to be sovereign of Castile in right of his
wife Juana. Philip, sailing from the Netherlands to Spain in =1506=,
was driven into Weymouth by a storm, and Henry seized the opportunity
of wringing from him commercial concessions as well as the surrender
of Edmund de la Pole, a brother of the Earl of Lincoln who perished at
Stoke, and a nephew of Edward IV. Henry was himself now a widower on
the look-out for a rich wife, and Philip promised him the hand of his
sister, Margaret, who had formerly been betrothed to Charles VIII.
(see p. 337). Once more, how