Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/346

338 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS July the other. The first is so deeply ingrained in historical parlance that professed historians commonly speak and write as though the council and the privy council were identical terms, and archivists themselves have not been exempt from the ambiguity. Even Sir Harris Nicolas, to whom students of constitutional history owe a deep debt of gratitude, did much to propagate the confusion by interpolating the word ' privy ' in the title * of his collection of Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council ; and in the index to the first volume of the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, all references to the council and its clerks are summarily referred to the privy council. The second confusion is partly due to the same lack of discrimination. Even Leadam, who knew well enough the distinction between council, privy council, and star chamber, was once at least betrayed into glossing ' the starred chamber ' as 'i.e. the Privy Council '. 2 It also owes a good deal of its vogue to antedating the truth in S. R. Gardiner's statement 3 that ' The constitution of the star chamber had been admirably adapted for the purposes for which it had been used in the days of the Tudor sovereigns. Composed of the two chief Justices and the whole of the Privy Council, it brought,' &c. 3 This was approximately true for 1629, the year with which Gardiner was dealing, but emphatically it is not true that at any time in the sixteenth century the personnel of the star chamber was limited to the privy council and the two chief justices ; and the antedating of the practical identity of the judicial star chamber with the executive privy council obscures one of the effective reasons why Stuart govern- ment provoked so much more ill feeling than that of the Tudor s. The study of the council's history during the Tudor period is, however, beset with difficulties which may account for its failure to attract attention. One of the first is a matter of spelling. It is as impossible to deduce any conclusions from the 1 Editors of manuscripts have generally been given to inventive titles. Acts of parliament, for instance, had no titles before the sixteenth century, and they have been invented for medieval legislation by subsequent editors. Similarly the editor of the .Journals of the House of Lords headed the first volume with a title which was not, and could not have been, in his manuscript, and Sir T. D. Hardy did the like for his Registrum Palatinum Dunelmcnse in the Rolls Series. Library rules generally prevent the correction of such interpolations, which therefore continue to mislead students. Hundreds of statements in the Diet, of Nat. Biog. need correction by the deletion of ' privy ' in the lives of late medieval and early sixteenth-century councillors. 2 Select Cases from the Court of Requests (Selden Soc.), p. xi. 3 History of England, ed. 1884, vii. 84. A good number of instances can, however, be collected from Baildon's edition of Hawarde, in which councillors sat in the star chamber in James I's reign who were neither chief justices nor privy councillors ; and even in Charles I's reign Rushworth (ii. 675) says that from 24 to 26 sat in the star chamber ' in cases of Mr. Chambers [Gardiner, vii. 84-5 ; Rushworth, i. 671-2], Sir James Bagg [Gardiner, viii. 89-91 ; Rushworth, ii. 303], the Bishop of Lincoln (Gardiner, viii. 251-5, 390 ; Rushworth, ii. 416], and others '.