Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/526

 518 STAB CHAMBER UNDER THE TUDORS October in which the council met during the fifteenth century to discharge most of its multifarious functions, deliberative and administrative as well as judicial. Just as the chancellor and his colleagues in the virtue of 31 Edward III, c. 12, could hear cases of error from the exchequer in any council chamber, so the council in the star chamber could deal with any kind of council business. There may have been some distinction, which the records do not reveal, between what the council did in the inner and in the outer star chamber ; but I have found no specific reference to the two chambers before 2 Richard III, and long enough after that the star chamber remained simply, as Mr. Leadam has said, a locus in quo. 1 This fact led to confusion before the end of the Tudor period. For example, the circumstance that the coun- sellors told off to hear poor men's causes undoubtedly sat at one time in the star chamber 2 enabled Sir Julius Caesar and other masters of requests to contend that the court or council of requests had been the real king's council ; and the fact that the council of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had sat in the star chamber enabled Mill and other clerks of that ' court ' at the end of the sixteenth to maintain that the council whose records they kept was the only real council of state in England, the privy council being in their eyes merely ' a private board, although the most honourable in the world '. 3 The term star chamber has, however, become so exclusively identified with one particular aspect of the council's activity in 1 Star Chamber Cases, ii, p. xiii. 2 The council had repeatedly been required by parliament and resolved during the fifteenth century to give preference to poor men's suits (Rot. Parl. iv. 201, v. 408 ; Nicolas, iii, pp. xix, 149-52, 214-20 ; iv. 60-3), and we have already noted Harington's appointment as clerk of the council for that purpose. The counsellors detailed for that duty are said to have sat in the white hall in Henry VII's reign, but other cases, even cases of treason and heresy, were also tried there (my Henry VII, i. 209-10 ; Hall, Chron., p. 826) ; and it is not until 1519 that we have the definite record appointing eight counsellors ' to hear the causes of poor men depending in the sterred chamber ' and to ' sit in the white hall in Westminster, where the said suitors shall resort ' (Letters and Papers, iii. 571 ; the document is printed in full in Leadam, Bequests, pp. Ixxxi-ii). Caesar remarks (Leadam, Court of Requests, p. xxxi), ' Some judges of this court have from time to time till 1 Elizabeth sat alternis vicibus as judges in the Starchamber '. It would be clearer to say that these ' judges ' were members of a yet undivided council which transacted its undivided business in its usual council room, the star chamber. The term court was not commonly applied either to the council in the star chamber or to the council in the white hall until the middle of the sixteenth century. There was ' counsel for requests ' attendant upon the king as well as counsel in the white hall. Often this ' counsel ' was a single person. Dr. Wolman is so nominated in the Eltham ordinances, and Sir Julius Caesar speaks of ' my ordinary place of Master of Requests attendant upon her [Elizabeth's] person ' ; he had been appointed extraordinary Master of Requests four years earlier (Leadam, Requests, pp. xii, xxivn.). The form of the word requestae (instead of the requisitiones of Richard Ill's appointment) appears to have been borrowed from France ; Coke, indeed, ascribes the whole ' court ' to imitation of France (Institutes, iv, ch. 9). 3 Hudson, loc. cit., ii. 62.