Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/538

 530 STAR CHAMBER UNDER THE TUDORS October Even the fragmentary transcripts of the Liber which alone survive enable us, in spite of their misuse by their transcribers, to see that in Henry VII's reign council and star chamber were one body, or rather that the council was the body and the chamber its habitation. 1 Nevertheless, a council attendant was emerging out of the general council in the star chamber ; and if we had to identify the committee of 1487 with either, it would be with the council attendant rather than with the council in the star chamber. The act of 1504 does in fact give the two councils (if they can be called two councils instead of two bodies of counsel) concurrent powers of dealing with liveries and retaining without suit or information, while it does not mention the committee of 1487 at all. Neither identification is, however, probable ; and if logic compels us to identify the committee of 1487 either with counsel attendant or with counsel in the star chamber because it exercised jurisdiction in cases of riot, we shall have to deny the distinction between counsel attendant and counsel in the star chamber. The truth is that the distinction, though real, was only inchoate ; it took the greater part of the sixteenth century to draw a firm line between the jurisdictions of the two, 2 and even that discrimination was frustrated by the Stuarts when they practically eliminated the distinction of personnel between the privy council and the star chamber. In Elizabeth's reign, for instance, recognizances to appear before the star chamber were taken in the privy council ; but in 1500 we have a recognizance to appear ' coram domino rege in consilio suo ubicunque f uerit ' taken ' coram domino cancellario in camera stellata ', as well as another recognizance in which the order is reversed ; and in the latter case also the council attendant refers it, so far as title to lands was concerned, to the star chamber, but reserves it, so far as riot was involved, for its own consideration. 3 According to later theory, the riot should have gone to the star chamber, 4 and similarly fails to distinguish the judicial and administrative proceedings of the council in the star chamber ; and even in Leadam's Select Cases (ii. 289-306) we have printed in an appendix such non- judicial documents as proclamations against forestallers and regraters, and certificates of the shipment and discharge of victuals. 1 Nor was the star chamber the council's only habitation, even when it was trans- acting what we should call star chamber business ; for 33 Henry VIII, c. 1, gives J.P.'s and others power to bind over offenders against that act to appear before the king and council ' in the sterred chamber at Westmynster or other place of their comen assemble in the terme next ensuying '. 2 See an unpublished thesis by Miss Edna White, ' The Jurisdiction of the Privy Council', in the University of London Library ; part of it was read, as the Alexander Prize Essay, before the Royal Historical Society in June 1920. 3 Sir Julius Caesar, Court of Requests, 1597, pp. 2, 26 (cf. Leadam, Bequests, pp. xxii- iv) ; Scofield, p. 28. 4 This was done, according to Caesar, two years later, in another case cited by him (ibid. p. 62).