ABSTRACT
Apart from some small but useful changes in the exchequer of receipt, these were Henry VII's reforms in the financial machinery. He made no innovations in the means and principles employed, for chamber finance and the use of household officers had a long and respectable history. The degree to which he developed the system, however, was something new. No king before him had disposed of so efficient an agency so firmly under his personal control, for the collection of so large a revenue. But the system depended very much on his personal action; Henry VIII's lack of interest doomed it, though Wolsey continued to work a more bureaucratic form of it. In the last analysis, Henry VII, because he used the old household methods, failed to lay the foundations of a really reformed administration.
