Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/350

 342 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS July activities of the council before it had developed the various Tudor offshoots, of which the privy council was but one. This older council was a single body which usually met, when the king was at Westminster, in the star chamber, and there trans- acted its multifarious business. Commonly its clerk refers to it as a consilium, but sometimes as a curia. 1 When its business was judicial, the judges, attorney, and serjeants-at-law generally participated, though it is difficult to draw any clear line between the occasions on which their presence was required and those on which it was not. 2 In any case it was only their advice that was considered necessary ; they were judges in their proper courts, but not in the council any more than in parliament, 3 and when any distinction between them and other counsellors was drawn it was to the derogation of the judicial members. The peers are the judges in parliament, 4 and councillors are the judges in council. By their own interpretation the chief justices and their brethren decided that they were only assistants to the chancellor, treasurer, and lord privy seal under the terms of the so-called Star Chamber Act of 1487. 5 The medieval council had, however, foundered in the Wars of the Roses, owing to the incapacity of Henry VI, and it was Lancastrian partisans who wrecked the ship. Suffolk used his influence over the weak mind of the king to impair the authority of the council much in the same way as Northumberland did a century later, when in 1550, Edward VI being twelve years old, ' it was decreed that these words by the advice of the council should be left out of all warrants, bills to be signed, and all such writings as shall pass in the king's majesty's name ', and a year later order was ' taken for the king's majesty's signing of his things himself alone '. 6 This ill-disguised autocracy, first of Suffolk and then of Somerset, destroyed the unity of the council and prepared the way for civil war. It is by no accident that records of the council rapidly dwindle after 1440. In all probability Edward IV did something, 7 and Richard III did more, to restore an organized council ; but Henry VII had naturally little use for the counsellors who had proscribed him, his family, and his friends. The council-board was for him a tabula rasa, and there was nothing in the law of the constitution to restrain his liberty of choice. He arrived from France in 1485 with a body of adherents who had been exiled, if not for his sake, at least for disaffection to his rivals ; but a contem- 1 E. g. Nicolas, ii. 304. 2 Ibid. v. 3-4, 17-18, 27, 35, 38, 46, 57-9. 72-9. 8 Cf. Prothero, Select Documents, 1898, p. 130. * Rot. Part. ii. 536. 5 Year Book, Tottel's ed. 1580, 8 Henry VII, Pasch., fo. xiii ; Lcadam, Star Chamber (Selden Soc.), I. xxxv-xlv ; my Henry VII, ii. 57. Acts of the Priv. Coun. 1550-2, pp. 110, 416. 7 Possibly at Fortescue's instigation.