‘The closing years of the reign of Henry VII were marked by a series of incidents which, to Londoners at any rate, bore the impress of tyranny.’ So Helen Miller wrote in her 1962 article ‘London and Parliament in the Reign of Henry VIII’. The example Miller used to substantiate her argument was that of the squabble between the crown and the city that followed the award by Henry VII to the Tailors’ Company of a letter patent which, among other things, allowed them to style themselves ‘Merchant Taylors’. This patent was to prove so unpopular with the citizens of London that the royal council feared riot on the pretext of the grant. Miller's compelling argument has since been supplemented by the work of Paul Cavill and Matthew Davies, and although between them they provide comprehensive detail about the chronology of the grant, its implications and consequences, it was outside the remit of their work to examine possible motives for Henry's behaviour in this scenario. This essay is intended to provide a prehistory of the Merchant Taylor grant, to offer an explanation for the king's actions and to find reasons for the favour he bestowed upon the Tailors at the expense of the city.

This paper is divided into three parts. The first will briefly outline the circumstances surrounding the inauguration of the Merchant Taylors and its consequences for both the city and the crown. The second will explore the possibility that Henry’s championing of the Tailors was largely motivated by prejudices formed early in his reign against the mercantile city companies and the civic bureaucracy of London as a whole. Lastly, the third part will seek to draw some conclusions and fit the Merchant Taylors’ grant into a wider hypothesis about Henry’s methodology in dealing with perceived power bases.