DAVID STARKEY Court, Council, and Nobility in Tudor England in RONALD G. ASCH AND ADOLF M. BIRKE (eds.), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 175–203 ISBN: 978 0 19 920502 7 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 7 Court, Council, and Nobility in Tudor England DAVID STARKEY 'IT is difficult to realize that the king's Council was part of the king's household, ... and that we have to trace the develop- ment of the Council with the help of household books and ordinances.' This is A. F. Pollard's most striking insight into the history of the council. It is also the one that has least affected the historiography. This chapter aims to redress the balance by treating the development of the Tudor privy council as an aspect of the history of the Tudor court. One reason for Pollard's dictum falling on stony ground was that the evolution of the Tudor household itself was imperfectly understood. 1 But the broad outlines are now clear. The medieval English household, like other European courts, had been divided into two main departments, the household ('below stairs') and the chamber ('above stairs'). In the early Tudor period, however, a new third department, the privy chamber, appeared. This was responsible for the king's personal body service. Three main factors were involved. The first was behavioural: there was a new taste for privacy, whose architectural expression was the creation of an extensive 'privy lodging' for the king. The second was political, as 1 A. F. Pollard, 'Council, Star Chamber, and Privy Council under the Tudors', English Historical Review, 37 ( 1922), 337-60, p. 340. The other reason for the neglect of Pollard's point was that Sir Geoffrey Elton, the most recent authority on the 16th cent., chose to follow Newton's curious theory that the reign of Henry VIII saw the definitive separation between 'government' and 'household' (A. P. Newton, 'Tudor Reforms in the Royal Household', in R. W. Seton-Watson (ed.), Tudor Studies (London, 1924), 231-56, esp. p. 232). Elton's recent attempt to reassert the full purity of his early doctrine of a 'Tudor Revolution in Government' does not convince: G. R. Elton, 'Tudor Government', Historicaljoumal, 31 (1988), pp. 425-34, answered by D. Starkey, 'Tudor Government: The Facts', ibid. 921-31. In view of this exchange it seemed unnecessary to draw attention here to most ofmy points of disagreement with Elton. DAVID STARKEY Henry VIIl's great ministers Wolsey and Cromwell sought to bridle their ever-changeable master by packing this 'privy lodging' with their creatures. And the third and most important was the king's own desire to mould his personal service for his own ends: to preserve his privacy on the one hand and his freedom of action on the other. The course of change was as complex as its causes. The foundations of the privy chamber's organization were laid by Henry VII in about 1495; in 1518-19 a series of ad hoc changes created a hierarchy of new offices and fees; in 1526 the new department was, for the first time, the subject offull and formal regulation in the Eltham ordinances; and in 1539-40 another great set of household ordinances gave the final touches. 2 But what of the council in all this? Pollard's dictum would suggest that major change in one part of the royal entourage-- the privy chamber-would have its counterpart in alteration in another-the council. And so it proves. The time-scale of innovation is similar; the same dates, and even the same documents, appear as milestones. And some of the same causes were at work: the royal itinerary and the planning of the king's palaces on the one hand, and his strategies of power on the other. But the role of the ministers is not prominent. Instead, involvement in conciliar reform appears as the particular field of action of the group most strenuously opposed to ministerial power: the Tudor nobility.3 Or at least it does under Henry VIII. Under Henry VII the story is very different. His council presents a double aspect: on the one hand, it was large and diverse in membership; on the other, it met in a series of smaller councils or courts. There. were several of these, of which the three most important were the council in star chamber, the council attendant, and the council-learned-at-law. There was much overlap in personnel 2 A convenient summary of all this will be found in D. Starkey, 'Intimacy and Innovation', in idem (ed.)., The English Court.from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1g87), pp. 71-118. 3 The role of the ideology of 'aristocratic conciliarism' in the development of the council is more fully considered in D. Starkey, 'The Lords of the Council: Aristocracy, Ideology and the Formation of the Tudor Privy Council', Proceedings of the One Hundred First Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association ( 1986), sess. 31, andJ. Guy, 'The King's Council and Political Participation', in A. Fox andJ. Guy (edd.), Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986), pp. 121-47. Court and Council in Tudor England 177 between these councils, but they also led substantially separate lives. They met in different places and at different times of the year; they had different presiding officers, records, and record keepers; finally, they differed substantially in function. 4 But underlying the apparent tendency of the council to fragment into a series of separate councils was an opposed development which concentrated most important business-of whatever sort and wherever it was transacted- into the hands of a small group of inner councillors. The membership of the 'inner ring' emerges fleetingly from ambassadorial reports and the like while Henry was still alive; it becomes manifest at his death when the eighteen 'inner councillors' were listed as the executors of his will. And, just as it would be under the terms of Henry VIII's own will, the dead king's executors became the councillors of the new king. 5 One of their first acts was to decide on the repudiation of the old king's 'fiscal tyranny': Empson and Dudley, the two leading lights of the council learned and both members of the inner ring were arrested, and the council learned itself dissolved. But the rest of the 'inner councillors' went from strength to strength. Henry was seventeen years and ten months old at his accession. This made him barely of age and indeed the 'inner ring' of his council behaved 'almost after the fashion of councillors during a royal minority'. Councillors countersigned both the cancellation of recognizances and the issuing of grants; letters patent were also made 'by advice of the 4 C. G. Bayne and W. H. Dunham, Select Cases in the Council of Henry Vil (Se;ldcn Society, 75; 1958), pp. xxiv-xxviii, xxxvi-xl, lxxviii-lxxix; M. Condon, 'Ruling Elites in the Reign of Henry VII', in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester, 1979), 109-42, pp. 130-4; cadcm, 'An Anachronism with Intent? Henry VII's Council Ordinance of 1491/2', in R. A. Griffiths et al. (edd.), Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1986), 228--53, p. 246 item 9; J. Stow, A·Survl!JI of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (2 vols.; Oxford, 1908), ii. 119; L. M. Hill' (ed.), The Ancient State Authoritie, and Proceeding~ of the Court of Requests (Cambridge, 1975), PP,· 3g-40; Pollard, 'Council', pp. 344-5. 5 Condon, 'Ruling Elites', pp. 128--30; J. Guy, 'The Privy Council: Revolution or Evolution?', in C. Coleman and D. Starkey (edd.), Revolution Reassessed (Oxford, 1986), 5g-86, p. 62. 6 G. R. Elton, 'Henry VII: Rapacity and Remorse', in idem, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Government and Sociery (3 vols.; Cambridge, 1974-83), i. 45--66, p. 6s; L[etters and] P[apers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII], ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R.H. Brodie (21 vols. and addenda; London, 1862-1932), I. i. 11/10. ii. DAVID STARKEY Council'.7 It was the same with policy. Henry VIII had come to the throne committed to war with France; yet Vergil depicts him having to fight every inch of the way against the preponderant peace party on his council. And when the decision was finally taken to attack 'his ancient enemy the French king', the army was raised 'by advice of the Council'.8 This is more like the behaviour of a fifteenth- than a sixteenth- century council. And there are many other echoes of 'Lancastrian constitutionalism' in these years as well, with both the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum-the arch text of aristo- cratic concilarism-and Magna Carta itself reappearing in political discourse.