Henry Tudor was hellbent on repairing the damage done by so many years of war, and that meant increasing financial security. It also meant recentralising power in London with the crown alone and away from interrelated nobles who had been squabbling over scraps of power since the reign of Richard II, evidenced by the crown beginning to be fought over by different branches of the descendants of Edward III at that time. This move was particularly unpopular and ensured that the king, above all others, was the most powerful and wealthy noble in England rather than well landed lords, and thus the example to follow. Henry VII was not above giving out bills of attainder to disobedient or faithless nobles who refused to bend the knee to him as king, which incidentally also often meant their lands or titles would revert to the crown. During the reign of Henry VII, he made some savvy business investments in the alum trade and made vast improvements to the waterborne infrastructure of the country: the site of his dry dock in Portsmouth still is used today, and equally because of Henry's investments in alum (a mordant used for dying wool, a major export of England at the time) records also show a striking increase in the volume of ships and thus trade coming in and out of England. Portsmouth was an early pet project of Henry VII, one he paid approximately £193 for the entire construction, a sum that for its time was enormous.