Henry III and the Royal Policy to the offices sailing

Abstract

Numerous accusations against King Henry III (1574–1589) included his outstanding greed, for he tried to gain as much as possible from the sale of offices and repeatedly ignored his own promises to reduce significantly the number of royal officials. The king had the right to create new offices as well as to abolish existing ones, but in fact their number could be reduced only by abolishing vacant offices, whose owners had died, otherwise the king had to compensate the owner for the money spent. From the body of Henry III’s legislation, we have selected royal edicts and other acts relating to offices, with particular attention paid to the establishment of new offices and to the abolition of those already existing. The resulting table allows a conclusion that the royal power was interested in creating offices, primarily because of the financial gain. The abolition of offices, on the contrary, was not profitable either for their owners (as it was very difficult to obtain compensation from the treasury) or for the royal power, so it is not surprising that some of the abolition edicts were subsequently repealed.