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 hað 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 council; 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 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 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 form the 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 dure. 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.* and parlia 4. While under the York and early Tudor monarchy the Henry VII. council 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." p. 80. 2 Dicey, The Privy Council, p. 105. 4 "The Council stands forth, as at 5 See vol. its decline accession; the great baronial houses became extinct in the civil war; the history of the combined action of these causes, which made possible the emancipation of the monarchy at the accession of Edward IV., we must look for a full explanation of the almost entire suspension of parliamentary life which characterizes the politics of the sixteenth century, rather than to the incomplete and inaccurate statement which attributes such suspension to the assumptions that the older nobility had been to a great extent cut off in the Wars of the Roses, and that the commons had not yet grown sufficiently strong and selfreliant to act alone. The truth is that the decline of the baronage, which began in the days of the Edwards, progressed so rapidly under the Lancasters that, after the battle of Agincourt, the number of temporal peers touched its lowest point, from that time to the accession of the Tudors they numonly two of bered but fifty-two. Only two of the great baronial housesBeaufort and Tiptoft — became extinct for the want of heirs during the civil war, and the reason why only twenty-seven lay peers met Henry VII. in his first parliament is explained by the fact that he failed to summon twenty-five more upon whose fidelity he could not rely.1 The decay of the baronage, which had been gradually brought about by the wreck of feucheck the dalism, the extinction of the greater families, and the breaking up of great estates, Henry showed no disposition to check or repair. His coronation was attended with only three creations, and the new nobility which grew up under him and his succesdependent sors was composed of new men, creatures of royal favor, who character of assumed the rôle rather of courtiers than of parliamentary Henry made no effort to decline of the baronage; the new nobility; barons. Such of the older nobles as the Percies, the Nevilles, and the Howards were held in check by the advancement of men like Morton, Fox, Wolsey, Cromwell, Cecil, Bacon, and Walsingham. As Bacon himself has told us: "Henry VII. kept a strait hand on his nobility, and chose rather to advance clergymen and lawyers, which were more obsequious to him, but had less interest in the people," — a policy which was 1 See Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. ii. pp. 13-15; Moberly, The Early Tudors, p. 27. 24 The aggregate number of the newly created peerages, as well as of those advanced in rank, is given as follows: under Henry VII., twenty; under Henry VIII., sixty-six; under Edward VI., twenty-two; under Mary, nine; and under Elizabeth, twenty 3. parliamen of that of IV.; lences; pursued both by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. The policy of Henry VII. towards the parliament as a whole was simply a Henry's repetition of that of Edward IV. Like Edward, Henry was tary policy willing to summon parliament only on rare and critical occa- a repetition sions, when it was necessary to draw strength from its authority Edward or revenue from its bounty. Like Edward, Henry looked to parliament for a recognition of his title, for a grant of tonnage and poundage for life, and for bills of attainder from which he could enrich himself from the spoils of his enemies. Strength- his financial ened by such a beginning, it seemed to be the prime object of policy; his policy to render himself independent of parliament, by reducing to the smallest possible limit his expenditures, on the one hand, and by increasing his revenues, on the other, by the enforcement of all kinds of obsolete feudal forfeitures and amercements, and by a revival of that odious form of royal taxation known as benevolences. The exchequer was greatly benevo enriched at one time from the source last named through the enforcement of an argument called "Morton's fork," invented Morton's by the archbishop of that name, who maintained that those who lived handsomely should give liberally because their wealth was manifest, and that those who lived plainly should be even more liberal because it was certain that economy had made them opulent. More odious even than these forced revival of contributions were the fines and other obsolete feudal exac- feudal extions which the king, in imitation of Edward IV., mercilessly actions, enforced through two infamous agents, Empson and Dudley, and who practiced all kinds of oppressions and illegalities, and who robbed every class in order to enrich the king, and who robbed the king in order to enrich themselves. Such a financial policy, although it deeply stained Henry's memory, brought to parliament him the independence of parliament which he designed to se- only seven cure. During the twenty-four years of his rule he summoned times during the parliament only seven times, and nearly all of these meetings reign; 1 In 1490 and in 1497, when general subsidies (one of a novel character) were levied upon the nation, serious insurrections occurred; the first in the north, and the last in Cornwall, which was suppressed only after great bloodshed. See Lingard, vol. iii. pp. 314, 324. In order to remove the irritation thus produced by the pressure of general taxation, Henry seems to have resorted, with the aid of “Morton's fork," to the fork; obsolete Empson Dudley; summoned were called in the first half of the reign. During his last thirteen years, parliament was summoned only once.1 At his the king's death the king's hoarded treasure is said to have amounted to nearly two millions of pounds. hoard. Henry's purpose to mediate remedies evils; his two great stat one to - secure the subject under a king de 5. A careful review of the legislation of Henry VII. will legislation; hardly sustain the eulogy of Lord Bacon, who has pronounced him to be "the best lawgiver to this nation since Edward I.” Henry's laws seemed to have been designed, not so much as Bacon says, "out of providence for the future, to make the estate of his people still more and more happy, after the manits leading ner of the legislators in ancient and heroical times," as from provide im- a desire to provide immediate remedies for the lawlessness and disorder which remained as the natural legacy of the civil for pressing war. To restore peace, order, and confidence to the realm, by strengthening the royal authority, and by providing new expedients for the enforcement of existing laws, seems to have been the leading motive of Henry's legislation. To quiet the utes, the minds of such as might doubt the stability of his title, he enacted the statute for the protection of the subject who served a king de facto; to crush the expiring system of livery and maintenance, as well as the riots and disorders which disturbed facto; the the local administration of justice, he enacted the statute which strengthen so greatly invigorated the criminal jurisdiction of the council as exercised in the star chamber. With the same general design were passed the acts which provided for the punishment of vagrants, and of those who attempted to enrich themselves by the stealing of women of fortune.2 In this connecthe act in- tion may be noted the act (3 Hen. VII. c. 3) which gave authority of authority to justices of the peace to take bail of felons under justices of conditions which finally led to their being charged with the duty of making preliminary investigations in all criminal cases.3 The most notable act of the reign touching private right is Statute of the act of 4 Hen. VII. c. 24, known as the Statute of Fines, which Henry was at one time supposed to have enacted with the subtle design of completing the ruin of the aristocracy by enlarging their power to alienate their entailed estates. This misconception of motive, which seems to have been borrowed other to the criminal jurisdic tion of the council; creasing the the peace; Fines; 1 The last parliament called was that of 1504. 2 See Reeves' Hist. Eng. Law, vol. iv. pp. 181, 202. 8 See Gneist, Hist. of the Eng. Const., p. 466; Stephen, Hist. of the Crim. Law of Eng., vol. i. pp. 236, 237. |