of certain payments made on warrants from the Lord Chamberlain. Similar payments thereafter form a regular section of the account from year to year. By a later privy seal of 11 October 1614, still extant, an additional sum of £1,500 a year is put at the disposal of the Treasurer to enable him to meet them.[1] His total assignment was thus increased to about £20,000 or rather more than half as much again as the office had cost under Elizabeth. That of the Privy Purse was now about £6,000.[2] We have seen that there had been possibilities of overlapping between the two accounts, but it is rather odd that amongst the items transferred should be specified allowances for plays, bear-baitings and other sports, since such allowances had regularly been paid by the Treasurer of the Chamber for something more than a century past. It is, however, the case that from 1614-15 onwards, the payments were made on warrants from the Lord Chamberlain instead of the Privy Council.
It is rather surprising that the Privy Council, whose members were carrying out duties roughly analogous to those of a modern Cabinet, should at any time have concerned itself with such trifling matters of domestic routine as the signature of certificates authorizing the payment of rewards at recognized rates to companies of actors and other entertainers. The explanation, however, is that the Privy Council, like the Household and the Departments of State themselves, was a direct representative of the Norman curia regis, and that the curia regis had been the organization through which the King's subjects and servants gave him assistance in all his affairs, small and great, domestic as well as political.[3] For all practical purposes, indeed, the Elizabethan Privy Council consisted of little more than the chief officers of the State departments and Household, sitting together, and acting collectively. The great territorial magnates, who at certain periods of its history had turned it into an instrument for the control rather than the exercise of the royal prerogative,
- ↑ Lord Chamberlain's Records, v. 81-3. The recital runs: 'Whereas we have thought fitt to disburden our privy purse of certaine paymentes used of late to be made out of it, And to assigne the said paymentes to be henceforth made by you our Treasurer of our Chamber . . . for allowances to players, for playes made before vs, for bullbayting, beare-bayting, and anie other sport shewed vnto vs.' The Treasurer is to pay 'vpon billes rated allowed and subscribed by our Chamberlaine'. Warrants for rewards for plays were still signed by the Privy Council during 1608-14, but by the Chamberlain from 1614.
- ↑ Abstract, 7, 12. During 1603-17 the Treasurer of the Chamber had also had £21,362 for 'extraordinary disbursements'.
- ↑ The development has been fully worked out by Professor Baldwin.
