urge his beth of any higher title to the crown than that under which that house had originally come into possession of it, namely a parliamentary title. Not until Henry had thus received alone the highest sanction that the nation could give, was he willing to hearken to the request of the commons to "take to wife and commons consort the princess Elizabeth," 1 who was not mentioned in marriage the act of settlement, and whose coronation he delayed for with Elizanearly two years. But neither the solemn sanction of parlia- York; ment nor his marriage with the heiress of the house of York gave to the new king peaceful possession of the royal authority. During a period of nearly thirteen years Henry was harassed in turn by two pretenders, the histories of whose exploits constitute a striking illustration of the folly and credulity of mankind. Not until the executions in the fall of 1499 of Perkin Warbeck and of Edward Plantagenet, earl of Warwick, were the last dangers removed which could menace the peace of the realm and the title of the house of Tudor. During the latter part of this period of revolt, rebellion, and uncertainty a natural sense of apprehension brought about the enactment of a statute which is generally regarded as one of the most important of the reign. The act of 11 Henry Act (11 VII. c. I provides that "no person attending upon the king c. 1) for the and sovereign lord of this land for the time being, and doing security of him true and faithful service, shall be convicted of high trea- under a son by act of parliament or other process of law, nor suffer facto any forfeiture or punishment; but that every act made contrary to this statute shall be void and of no effect." It is strange that an act so wisely designed to strengthen Henry's hold upon the crown should have been characterized by Bacon as "rather just than legal; and more magnanimous than provident." "2 Hen. VII. the subject king de of star 3. The last mentioned act for the security of the subject The court under a king de facto is surpassed in importance only by the chamber: famous statute, enacted at a much earlier day, to which is usually traced that abnormal development of the criminal 1 Rot. Parl., vi. p. 278. The separate Statute Rolls, which end with 9 Hen. VII., are merged, after 12 Hen. VII., in the Rotuli Parliamentorum. After 4 Hen. VII. the records of statutes are exclusively in the English language. As to the inability of this act to bind future parliaments, Bacon says: risdiction of council; the days of ... jurisdiction of the council generally known as the court of star chamber. The fact has been heretofore emphasized that the undefined judicial powers of the king in council were not exhausted by the growth out of that body of the great courts original ju- of law and equity.1 "The judicial supremacy of the king is the king in not limited or fettered by the new rule, . . . the old nucleus of light remains unimpaired." 2 After the organization of the four great courts at Westminster the council still retained a residuary jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, original and the council appellate. "It seems," says Sir Francis Palgrave, "that in as a court in the reign of Henry III. the Council was considered as a court Henry III.; of peers within the terms of Magna Carta; and before which, as a court of original jurisdiction, the rights of tenants holding in capite, or by barony, were to be discussed or decided; and it unquestionably exercised a direct jurisdiction over all other of the king's subjects." The tendency of this unlimited and undefined jurisdiction of the council, which Bacon says "subsisted by the ancient common laws of the realm," 4 was to encroach upon the inferior tribunals, and such encroachment jurisdiction led to the enactment of a series of restraining statutes, which extend from the reign of Edward I. to that of Henry IV. With rowed, then the reign of Henry VI. a new legislative policy begins, whose statute; aim was not to narrow the criminal jurisdiction of the council, but to give to it wider expansion. When, in the latter part of that reign, the ordinary administration of law gave way under the strain which the turbulence of the times put upon it, parliament authorized the council to draw before it all persons and all causes that could not be dealt with in the ordinary tribunals. When the turbulence, the lawlessness, the uncertainty, which existed at the beginning of Henry VII.'s reign are taken into account; when the fact is remembered that the evils of livery and maintenance were still in full vigor to hinder the local administration of existing laws, it is not hard to understand why the extraordinary criminal jurisdiction of the council, which Edward IV. had abused, should have been again invoked, as in the days of Henry VI., in the interest of order against anarchy. That such was the motive of the of the council first nar widened by 1 See vol. i. pp. 249-252. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 603. 4"Hist. of Henry VII.," Bacon's. Works, vol. i. p. 332. 5 See vol. i. p. 580, and p. 516, note 2. Hen. VII. C. I, reviv the council; famous act of 3 Henry VII. c. I, is clearly revealed by its Act of 3 terms: "The king our said sovereign lord remembering how by unlawful maintenance, giving of liveries, signs, and tokens, ing and defining and retainders by indentures, promises, oaths, writings, or the criminal jurisotherwise embraceries of his subjects, untrue demeanings of diction of sheriffs in making of panels and other untrue returns, by taking of money by juries, by great riots and unlawful assemblies, the policy and good rule of this realm is almost subdued, and for the not punishing of these inconveniences, and by reason of the premises, little or nothing can be found by inquiry [i. e., by jury trial]. . . . Therefore it is ordained for reformation of the premises by authority of said parliament, that the chancellor and treasurer of England for the time being, and keeper of the king's privy seal, or two of them, calling to them a bishop and a temporal lord of the king's most honorable council, and the two chief justices of the king's bench and common pleas for the time being, . . . have authority to call before them by writ or by privy seal the said misdoers, and them and other by their discretion, by whom the truth may be known, to examine, and such as they find therein defective to punish them after their demerits." In the midst of all the doubt and difficulty which learned refinement has thrown around the meaning and purport of this act, it is safest to assume that it was not intended to create a new tribunal, or even to vest in the council a fresh jurisdiction.1 The soundest of the modern critics agree in the conclusion that it was only intended to invigorate and emphasize by parliamentary sanction the ancient prerogative criminal jurisdiction of the crown, which, as early as the reign of Edward III., we hear of the "chancellor, treasurer, justices, and others" exercising in the "chambre des estoiles" at Westminster. The intention of Henry's statute must have been simply to revivify and define this ancient jurisdiction, and at the same time to commit its exer- vested in a cise as a special duty to a committee of the council composed mittee; on the subject, see Reeves' Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iv. pp. 205-212; Palgrave's 1 For the older literature touching the history of the star chamber, see Hudson's "Treatise on the Star Chamber," in Collectanea Juridica, vol. ii.; Sir Thomas Smith, Commonwealth of Eng., bk. iii. cap. 1; "Hist. of Henry VII.," Bacon's Works, vol. i. p. 334; Hale's Jurisdiction of the House of Lords, c. v. For the modern literature 66 Essay on the Original Authority of the King's Council," Hallam's Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 48-56; Sir J. F. Stephen, Hist. of the Crim. Law of Eng., vol. i. pp. 166-184; Dicey, The Privy Council, pp. 94-115; Gneist, Hist. of the Eng. Const., pp. 504-513. such jurisdiction special com Lord Bacon's views as to the same; of those specially named in the act.1 Of the special tribunal thus organized Lord Bacon writes: "And as the chancery had the pretorian power for equity, so the star chamber had the censorian power for offences under the degree of capital. This court of star chamber is composed of good elements, for it consisteth of four kinds of persons, councillors, peers, prelates, and chief judges. It discerneth also principally by four kinds of causes, forces, frauds, crimes various of stellionate, and the inchoation, or middle acts towards crimes capital or heinous, not actually committed or perpetrated."2 As the elastic jurisdiction of the chancellor grew and widened in civil matters so as to meet the ever expanding wants of litigants, so the extraordinary jurisdiction of the council in criminal matters so widened as to meet the endless demands of despotic authority. This tendency to expansion finally brought about two important departures from the condition. in which we find the criminal jurisdiction of the council after its invigoration by the act to which special reference has been made. The powers of the special committee or court which was organized under the act of 3 Henry VII. c. 1, and fall back to which maintained a separate existence for about fifty years, the general body of the fell back towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII. to the general body of the council. The act of 31 Henry VIII., which gave to the royal proclamations the force of law, provided that offenders against them might be punished by the ordinary members of the council, together with certain bishops and judges, "in the star chamber or elsewhere." While the "censorian" powers of the special committee were thus falling back to the main body of the council itself, those powers were themselves expanding far beyond the statutory limits which such pow had been originally assigned them. When it became conveners expand ient for the Tudor despotism to extend the criminal jurisdicthe limits tion of the council over offences not named in the act of 3 Hen. VII. 3 Henry VII. c. 1, cognizance of them was simply assumed, and those who presumed to contend that the jurisdiction was powers of the special committee council; far beyond of the act of C. I; 1 "This was held to be not so much a novelty as a parliamentary recognition of an ancient authority inherent in the privy council."-Moberly, The Early Tudors, p. 71. 2 "Hist. of Henry VII.," Bacon's Works, vol. i. p. 333. 8 "The king only announces that, owing to the necessities of the times, he intends to exercise his criminal jurisdiction, and delegates for this purpose a small number of privy councillors, with the assistance of two judges." -Gneist, Eng. Const., p. 505. its final form the cil sitting its pro limited by the act were not only ignored, but sharply reprimanded.1 Thus it appears that the court of star chamber as the court in finally organized was nothing more nor less than the whole council sitting judicially; and its jurisdiction as then exercised whole counwas practically unlimited. "It is now no question of what judicially; it had a right to do, but of what it did."2 In its procedure outline of it disregarded the common law, it dispensed with trial by cedure. jury, it accepted report in lieu of the testimony of witnesses, it employed torture, and it could pronounce any judgment short of that of death. Such an institution, although it may have been well employed in the early Tudor days for the suppression of anarchy and the maintenance of order, finally proved itself to be equally efficient as an engine of tyranny, which forced alike the peasant and the noble, the law courts and the parliament, to crouch at the feet of its supreme and irresistible authority.* 4. While under the York and early Tudor monarchy the Henry VII. and parliacouncil was being abnormally developed into the vital organ ment: of the state, its natural antagonist, the parliament, whose place it had to a great extent usurped, was languishing under causes of disintegration and decay to which its constitution had yielded in the last days of the Lancastrian kings. As causes heretofore explained, the restriction of the suffrage had checked which led to the growing strength of the house of commons, while the prior to his decay of the feudal organization of the baronage and the weakness of the prelacy broke that of the house of lords. To 1 "Lord Chancellor Egerton would often tell that in his time, when he was a student, Mr. Serjeant Lovelace put his hand to a demurrer in this court for that the matter of the bill contained other matters than were mentioned in the statute 3 Hen. 7, and Mr. Plowden, that great lawyer, put his hand thereto first, whereupon Mr. Lovelace easily followed. But the cause being moved in court, Mr. Lovelace being a young man, was called to answer the error of his ancient Mr. Plowden, who very discreetly made his excuse at the bar that Mr. Plowden's hand was first unto it, and that he supposed he might in anything follow St. Augustine. And although it were then overruled, yet Mr. Serjeant Richardson, thirty years after, fell again upon the same rock, and was sharply rebuked for the same." Hudson, Collectanea Juridica, vol. ii. 2 Dicey, The Privy Council, p. 105. "The Council stands forth, as at 5 See vol. i. pp. 562-576. its decline accession; |