#that's not to say neither of them had a genuine reformist zeal

[richmond-rex]

It's always worth pointing out that monarchs didn't reform laws in a vacuum, or else we risk assigning anachronistically progressive roles to them. As A. J. Pollard said in his bio of Richard III, 'The normal course of legislation was for it to be introduced in bills presented individually by members or collectively by the house. A meeting of parliament, whoever the king, whatever the political circumstance, was always an opportunity for routine amendment of the law. The king assented (and could veto), but he rarely initiated such legislation'. In the same way that it's incredibly crass to call Richard III a 'social justice king' (as Matt Lewis so often does) because he passed some laws regulating the administration of justice — when 'there was nothing necessarily exceptional about the public acts of 1484' — it would be equally wrong to assign to Henry VII's legislation on rape/abduction any 'feminist' leanings by ignoring the crown's medieval model of patriarchal responsibility to women.