A firm hand and a resolute will were thus the primary necessities; but tired as the nation was, it was still ready to resent a flagrant tyranny. The Yorkist Kings had seen that absolutism was the condition of stability; Henry perceived that, applied as they had applied it, the stability would still be wanting. He had to find a mean between the wantonly arbitrary absolutism which had been attempted a century before by Richard II. and recently by Edward IV. and Richard III. on the one hand, and on the other hand the premature application of constitutional ideas under the House of Lancaster. The actual method evolved was the concentration of all control in the hands of the King, accompanied by an ostentatious deference to the forms of procedure which were liable to be put forward as popular rights, and a very keen attention to the limits of popular endurance.
Thus Henry's first step was to summon Parliament and follow the Lancastrian precedent of obtaining its ratification of his own title to the throne. The next step, necessitated by his position, was to cut the claws of the Yorkists as a faction by striking at Richard's principal supporters. This could only be done effectively by treating them as traitors--a proceeding which could not but savour of tyranny, since they had at any rate been supporting the _de facto_ King: so again Henry took the only means of minimising the arbitrary character of his action, by obtaining parliamentary sanction. Some ten years later, at the time of Perkin Warbeck's attempted landing at Deal, he procured the remarkable enactment that support of a _de facto_ King should not in the future be accounted as treason to the successor who dethroned him--a measure characterised by Bacon, writing a hundred years later, as too magnanimous to be politic. In 1485 it would have been so; but at the actual time Henry was himself the _de facto_ monarch; he had no wish to punish his predecessor's supporters further; and he was really providing an inducement to his subjects to be loyal to the ruling dynasty. At the same time he could pose as advocating abstract justice in preference to the prevailing practice by which he had himself profited; strengthening his own hands in fact, while in theory he was introducing into politics the recognition of an ethical principle which--as it happened--no longer conflicted with his own advantage.