ABSTRACT
The financial system which Cromwell took over centred upon the general surveyors of crown lands and the treasurer of the chamber. Since he could not make sufficient use of an organisation so directly dependent on the crown, he tried to reduce the importance of the chamber and turn the general surveyors into a proper, but restricted, department of state. He began to deprive the chamber of revenue, much to the sorrow of its treasurer, Sir Brian Tuke, who was himself a civil servant of ability and responsible for much of the increasing bureaucratic organisation of his department. Soon Cromwell had to set up new agencies of finance as the additions he made to the revenue came to complicate the problem. The acquisition of the clerical first fruits and tenths in 1534 could have been handled by the chamber, as was originally intended, but Cromwell instead appointed a personal servant of his own, John Gostwick, as treasurer for this money, using him very much as his personal paymaster in affairs of state. The monastic lands raised much greater administrative difficulties which were solved by the erection of a separate and self-contained institution capable of acting both as a court (since litigation over the lands was bound to arise) and as a revenue department. It was modelled on the duchy of Lancaster whose simple accounting methods it copied. It seems that in about 1535 Cromwell decided on this policy of revenue courts, planning to allot the royal income properly
to various departments whose reserves would be drawn upon indiscriminately by the government (himself) as need arose.1 In 1535, an act of parliament made the general surveyors permanent -they had hitherto existed from one parliament to the next onlyand deprived them of all chance of new revenues. Though it was not until 1542, after Cromwell's fall, that they were incorporated in a fully organised court, it is certain that Cromwell had meant them to develop in that \vay. In 1540 an act drafted by Cromwell but not passed until after his fall added the court of wards;2 and a few weeks later the treasurer of first fruits also becalne treasurer of a proper court, a step which Cromwell had been reluctant to take because of the needs of his personal government.
