Secondly, there was the proclamation. This was in theory the formal announcement either of an executive act, or of the royal intention as to the enforcement or interpretation of a statute. In practice it tended more and more, during the Tudor period, itself to take the place of a statutory enactment. Proclamations were made by direction of the sovereign in council, and were enrolled, like the patents, in Chancery. Both proclamations and, at a comparatively late stage, patents were made use of in the process of regulating players. But they were largely supplemented by the third method through which the royal prerogative expressed itself, namely that day-by-day activity of the Privy Council in the general co-ordination and supervision of affairs, which has already been described.[1] The Council Register itself and the local archives, especially those of London, are full of letters from head-quarters to justices and corporations, directing them as to the allowance or inhibition of plays in general, or calling for special action in cases in which a company of players had provoked a breach of the peace or had brought themselves under suspicion of heresy or sedition. No doubt the corporations, in particular, would often have preferred to act upon their own discretion. Sometimes they argued or protested or deferred compliance. But the Council had the powers of the Star Chamber behind them; and if in the end they resorted to more direct ways of control, this was probably rather for the sake of avoiding administrative friction than because they found any ultimate difficulty in imposing their will by means of correspondence upon reluctant magistrates.
It was, of course, until plague and Puritanism became serious preoccupations, with the subject-matter of plays, rather than the details of times and places, that the central government mainly concerned itself; and it was apparently the disturbed ecclesiastical position of the later years of Henry VIII that directed attention to the drama as a subject of state instead of merely local concern. I have dealt elsewhere with the encouragement given to controversial interludes by Cromwell and Cranmer, with the swing of the pendulum when the controversialists began to apply themselves, not merely to points of church government which Henry desired to alter, but with heresies which he was not prepared
- ↑ Cf. ch. ii.
was addressed to the Lord Chancellor, and became in its turn the authority for the issue of (f) the actual Letters Patent under the Great Seal. These were handed to the recipient, while the Writ of Privy Seal passed on to the Six Clerks in Chancery, for (g) an Enrolment of its contents upon the Patent Roll.
