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Presidential Address: Tudor Government: the Points of Contact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. R. Elton
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Extract

The Tudor Parliament, I suggested to you a year ago, quite properly fulfilled a function of giving legitimate political ambition a chance to achieve its ends, more particularly because from the 1530s onwards, at any rate, experience in the Commons could put a man in the way of entering the royal Council. Of course, this would never be true of more than a few such knights and burgesses, nor was it either a sufficient or a necessary cause of their becoming councillors. Still, the link was there. I now want to turn to the Council itself and ask whether its history and membership similarly reflected a useful function in enabling ambition to be satisfied. Here we enter upon territory far less well known than the Houses of Parliament. The Tudor Council is not now quite so free from the attention of historians as it was even ten years ago; but while we may be really well informed about it here and there, and while indeed we all think that we have a fair idea of its place in constitution and society, it remains true that every time one asks oneself a question touching it one comes up against so far unillumined obscurities. The work of any governing body is always difficult to understand because only those there present actually know what goes on and because so much of what does go on never reaches the record; and the Tudor Privy Council made emphatically certain of preserving itself from scholarly prying by keeping no minutes of discussion at all.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 25 , December 1975 , pp. 195 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1975

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References

1 In 1964 I enquired ‘Why the History of the Early-Tudor Council remains Unwritten’ (Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge, 1974), i, pp. 308 ff)Google Scholar. Since then we have had two valuable and so far unpublished Cambridge dissertations (whose use I here acknowledge with gratitude), by Hoak, D. E. on ‘The King's Council in the Reign of Edward VI’ (1970)Google Scholar, and by Lemasters, G. E. on “The Privy Council in the Reign of Queen Mary I’ (1971)Google Scholar; MrPulman, M. B. has discussed The Elizabethan Privy Council in the 1570s (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1971)Google Scholar; Mr D. B. McDonald is at work on the Council in the latter part of the century; and Dr J. A. Guy is pursuing further researches which have already sorted out the Court of Star Chamber in Wolsey's day. Miss Margaret Condon is writing the history of Henry VII's Council.

2 31 Henry VIII, c. 8, sect. 1.

3 Cited Pulman, , Elizabethan Privy Council, p. 52Google Scholar.

4 The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, ed. Merriman, R. B. (Oxford, 1903), ii, pp. 112–13Google Scholar.

5 Dr D. R. Starkey, whose completed dissertation (Cambridge, 1974) has investigated the institutional history of the Privy Chamber under the two Henries, is at work on the part it played in administration and politics.

6 Pulman, , Elizabethan Privy Council, pp. 53–55Google Scholar.

7 Elton, G. R., Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972), p. 200Google Scholar.

8 L[etters and] P[apers of Henry VIII], xi, no. 1244 (spelling modernized).

9 LP, xii, pt. i, no. 1013.

10 British Library, Lansdowne MS 160, fos 311v–12v. The list has a few errors in it: Lords Hussey and Windsor, ennobled in 1529, appear here as lords, while Windsor is listed a second time among the knights. Probably the original was carelessly amended in 1529. I have restored the position of 1526.

11 LP, i, no. 2684(88); iii, no. 1036(23).

12 E.g. Stokesley, John (LP, iii, no. 2954)Google Scholar. Englefield, Thomas, called by the title in 1524 (LP, iv, no. 1298[8])Google Scholar, had certainly held it by July 1513 (Public Record Office, E 159/292: Brevia, Trinity Term 5 Henry VIII, rot. 7d).

13 Sir John Alen, lord mayor in 1525, retained the councillor's title, then acquired, for the rest of his life, though he took no active part thereafter: LP, v, no. 1209; vii, no. 1060; Public Record Office, Sta. Cha. 2/34/19 (1532, 1534, 1540). The last time that I can find a current lord mayor called king's councillor is in March 1536 (LP, Add., no. 1053); it would appear, therefore, that the Cromwellian reconstruction, which prevented later lord mayors from getting the appointment, took place about the middle of that year. In 1532, Sir Thomas Denys (of Devon) is described in an indictment taken before him as ‘vnus de Concilio domini Regis ac vnus Iusticiorum dicti domini Regis ad pacem’ (Public Record Office, KB 9/517/30).

14 LP, vii, no. 420. Cromwell's idea recurs in (was suggested by?) a general plan for revising the police system (Public Record Office, SP 1/144, fo 211) which LP, xiv, pt. i, no. 643 places in 1539, but which probably also belongs to 1534: three to six of the ‘head commissioners’ there suggested might be admitted ‘as of his grace's Council, if it so shall stand with his grace's pleasure’.

15 On the grounds that most lord mayors before that date, and none thereafter, can be found described as king's councillors (above, n. 13).

16 Elton, G. R., The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge, 1960), p. 95Google Scholar.

17 31 Henry VIII, c. 10.

18 Cf. n. 1, above.

19 A[cts of the] P[rivy] C[ouncil], ed. Dasent, J. R., i, p. 371Google Scholar.

20 Hoak, , ‘Council of Edward VI’, pp. 51–55Google Scholar.

21 Hoak, , ‘Council of Edward VI’, pp. 66, 70, 72–73Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 89. Things were virtually unchanged a year later: Elton, , Tudor Constitution, p. 96Google Scholar.

23 LP, xi, no. 957. Shrewsbury sat on the reformed Council as lord steward, the office held in 1540 by the duke of Suffolk.

24 ‘Privy Council under Mary I,’ ch. 2.

25 Cited Cheyney, E. P., History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth (London, 1926), i, p. 80Google Scholar.

26 Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, ed. Walzer, Michael (Cambridge, 1974), p. 28Google Scholar.

27 From the list of attendances in APC, xi.

28 Elton, , Tudor Constitution pp. 100–1Google Scholar.

29 APC, xxxii, pp. 495, 496, 498.