Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/349

1922 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS 341 the supreme ' court ' of appeal for the British empire is the judicial committee of the privy council, which calls itself ' the board '.* Much of the trouble that awaits the student is due to the fact that before the end of the sixteenth century historical writers and even clerks of the council themselves have begun to antedate a discrimination which by then was becoming clear, and to claim for each of the divided parts a history and traditions which belonged to the undivided whole. A clerk of the privy council, a clerk of the council in the star chamber, and even a clerk of the council in the white hall will each contend that his particular court or council is the king's council and the true inheritor of its prerogatives and prestige. Archivists have perpetuated and developed the confusion, and the history of the king's council under Henry VII and Henry VIII has been obscured because its scanty records have been relegated to a category labelled the star chamber. 2 In order to trace the differentiation we have to go back to the Lancastrian period before the differentiation began. For our present purpose we can rule out those extended sessions of the council called magna concilia, although they continued to be occasionally summoned down to the reign of Henry VIII, 3 and confine our attention to the regular permanent body. Occasionally, in order to distinguish it from those larger sessions or magna concilia, which were specialiter congregata, the council is, even in the fifteenth century, called a concilium priva- tum ; but only about half a dozen instances of the use of this phrase can be collected from as many volumes of Nicolas 's Proceedings* and the phrase privy council is more properly reserved to distinguish the inner ring which in Henry VIII's reign grew up in the council itself and has ever since been known as the privy council. Although entitled Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, Nicolas 's collection of documents is, until we come to his seventh volume, 5 a record of the miscellaneous 1 Cf. Lord Buckmaster's letter in The Times, May 1922. There are no subpoenas or writs of privy seal to appear before anything called a curia ; and even when the star chamber comes to be commonly called a court, its writs are summonses to appear coram rege et consilio suo apud Westmonasterium. 2 It is perhaps natural, but none the less confusing, that orders in council, the breach of which was punishable in the star chamber, should themselves be classified as star chamber documents. Thus among star chamber documents of Henry VIII's reign (vii. 172) is an order of the persons authorized by 25 Henry VIII, c. 1, to regulate the sale of cattle, though those persons were not the council in the star chamber and may not even have made their order there (cf. Scofield, p. 30 n'. ; Leadam.ii, 288-92). 3 Cf. my Henry VII, ii. 76, iii. 315, 320 ; Ellis, Original Letters, I. i. 53 ; Fabyan, Chron. p. 686 ; Hall, Chron. pp. 700, 759 ; Letters and Papers of Hen. VIII, x. 834 ; Acts of the Priv. Coun. 1552-4, p. 398. 4 E. g. iii. 322, iv. 103-5, v. 72; there is also one in Stevenson's Letters and Papers, Rolls Series, ii. 442. 5 This extends from August 1540 to April 1542 ; the sixth volume ends in 1461, and there is a gap of seventy-nine years between the sixth and seventh.