Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/364

 356 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS July any outstanding personality, by such a man as Wolsey, More, Cromwell, or Burghley, nor even by Morton, Paget, or Gardiner. But simply by its creation it affords proof of the growing discrimination between the council attendant upon the king and the councils in the star chamber and in the white hall. The council attendant, however, was not a new phrase even in Henry VII's reign, and it stood for something almost as old as the council itself. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, if not earlier, it is possible to distinguish counsellors as well as judges who followed the king about in England and to France from others who remained in London. 1 But these did not make two different councils any more than the absence of three or four ministers at Genoa in our own time constituted a second cabinet. They merely resemble those divisions of the council which were made when Henry VIII went campaigning in France in 1513 and 1544 or parleying at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520 and at Boulogne in 1532, or on his northern progress of 1541 ; and they have only a slight constitutional importance which may be examined later. The statute of 1504, 2 however, which provides in the cases of livery and retainers an alternative prosecution ' before the chancellor of England or the keeper of the Kynges gret seale in the Sterre Chamber, or before the Kyng in his Benche, or before the Kyng and his Counseill attend- yng upon his most roiall person whersoever he be ', clearly implies a more permanent distinction which takes legal form in the difference between writs to appear coram rege et consilio suo apud W estmonasterium and coram rege et consilio suo ubicunque fuerit. The incipient differentiation between the council attendant and the council in the star chamber is apparent, and the dis- tinction is clearly drawn in two cases of 1494 and 1500, both of which were heard partly in the star chamber and partly coram consilio ubicunque ; 3 but it will not do to call the council attendant the privy council for at least another generation. Henry VII, however, was experimenting. We have already seen that he had a large body of persons called consiliarii and numbering about a hundred, far too many to constitute a con- tinual or a privy council. Most of them probably never sat at .a council table at all, and were simply retained to give Henry legal or ghostly counsel when he required it. But a council -book called a Liber Intracionum was kept, and though the original has disappeared, some fragmentary transcripts of it, made a century later by scribes, who thought that because it dealt with proceedings of council in the star chamber, it was a register of what they called the ' court ' of star chamber, 4 enable us to see 1 Baldwin, p. 397. 2 19 Henry VII, c. 14. 3 ScoBeld, p. 28. 4 These transcripts must be discussed in a subsequent article on the star chamber.