CHAPTER TEN William Hudson

The opening lines of Shakespeare’s rollicking Merry Wives of Windsor are the braving words of country-justice Shallow: “Persuade me not; I will make a Star-Chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire.” This was sure to raise a laugh in the Globe—not only because the idea of twenty weighty Falstaffs was a sight too risible to contemplate seriously, but because in Shakespeare’s day hun­dreds of his countrymen every year made some contretemps into a “Star­Chamber matter.”

Clearly, Star Chamber was popular in its day.

judicature. He took cold comfort in the fact at least that the students were passingly aware of his research interests.

Star Chamber did not meet in secret. All trials in the court were public, in a chamber of Westminster Palace, the Camera Stellata, decorated on the ceiling with plaster-relief six-pointed stars (hence its name). In fact, perhaps even more than Shakespeare's Globe, Star Chamber trials provided one of the most engrossing spectacles in the capital. A notable case between great persons would draw in scores of spectators, so many that they crowded in almost to the bar of the court. Every day saw a number of young men, students at the Inns of Court, sitting on the benches at the rear of the court, doing what students always do (taking copious notes) seeking for them­selves a practical education in the law. The judges of the court were the most august men of the realm: the Lord Chancellor presided over other great of­ficers of state—the Lord Treasurer, the Lord Privy Seal, the Lord President of the Council—the Lord Steward, the Lord Chamberlain, the Secretaries of State, other Privy Councillors, at least one archbishop or bishop, and the Chief Justice of King's Bench and Chief Justice of Common Pleas (or, in their absence, other justices of the great common-law courts). The nation's most eminent lawyers appeared there as advocates: the Attorney-General was present on every sitting day (usually Monday and Wednesday in every week of the law term), and the King's Serjeants and other serjeants at law led for important and wealthy clients. Star Chamber proceedings were open and prominent. The only time that the judges of the court sat privately, in camera (in the Inner Star Chamber where the Privy Council transacted its business of state), was on the last day of term when, after hearing counsel plead for mitigation of sentence imposed on their clients at trial previously, the court retired to decide whether mercy was warranted.

What did happen outside the court—and that was before trial—was the entry of pleadings and the taking of evidence. With the exception of the extraordinary and rare procedure called ore tenus (by which the Attorney­General prosecuted orally before the court a defendant who had previously upon examination confessed the facts), Star Chamber proceeded by writ­ten bill of complaint (or information in cases brought by the Attorney­General). To this the defendant was required to put in a written answer to the facts alleged or a special plea in law. This was done in the office of the clerk of the court, located in Gray's Inn, although the defendant's answer might be taken in the country by ad hoc commissioners if he were unable to travel to London. The defendant was also examined upon oath to inter­rogatories drawn by the plaintiff's counsel, and his examination constituted evidence that could be used against him at trial. Witnesses on both sides were examined and cross-examined on oath upon interrogatories drawn by counsel, either in the office or in the country by commission. This was done in total secrecy in order to prevent evidence that might affect the testimony of other witnesses from being known to them. Only after all the testimony had been taken down in writing was it “published,” that is, made available to the parties and their counsel on both sides, and a day set for trial.

The only objection that could be taken to such “secrecy” was a purely functional one from the advocates' point of view: it made cross-examina­tion very difficult in the absence of the witnesses' evidence in chief. Not only was the procedure not inherently unjust, it served the interests of both parties, since it provided the testimony of witnesses in extenso in a writ­ten form that encouraged careful weighing of the evidence. What was lost at trial was the opportunity to observe the demeanor of witnesses. By the same token, so carefully was the testimony reported that it was possible to assess minute discrepancies in the evidence of a witness—indeed, from the Star Chamber records, even four centuries later the historian can often detect perjury.

Another charge in the indictment commonly (and mistakenly) leveled at Star Chamber was that its proceedings were “summary.” Obviously, with forms as elaborate as the bill procedure and the taking of written evidence, there was nothing summary about a Star Chamber matter. By the time of Star Chamber's abolition, an average case took upwards of three years from the subpoena intended to bring the defendant in to answer to the trial of it. This was without undue dilatoriness on the part of either party—and Star Chamber through special pleading (demurrer, pleas in bar, exceptions) gave plenty of scope for dilatoriness.

What was genuinely summary in English criminal procedure of the day was trial by jury at common law upon indictment for felony. It was com­mon for a number of indicted defendants to be tried at the same time by the same jury though each prisoner had been charged with entirely separate offenses.² An indicted felon had no right to counsel, no right to have his witnesses deposed on oath, and no right to give evidence on oath on his own behalf. Trial for felony did not take very long. And if convicted of felony—for as little as the theft of goods worth a shilling or more—the defendant would swing (unless reprieved to await pardon or transportation to Ireland or, after 1607, the colonies).

To have the gibbet before one's eyes is to put the “cruel punishments” of Star Chamber in proper perspective. Because the trial of felony was so deep­ly rooted in the common law's jurisdiction, Star Chamber was prevented from trying those crimes which carried the penalty of death. Star Chamber could not touch life or limb. Its punishments were severe enough: a fine to the King, usually in a sum onerous enough to be in terrorem, and imprison­ment until the fine was paid; “exemplary infamous” punishment, such as riding to the pillory facing rearward on the horse with a poster on the head indicating the nature of the offense, begging forgiveness of a party offend­ed, loss of office, etc.; corporal punishment, including whipping, standing in the pillory, the loss of an ear, the slitting of nostrils, branding on the cheek with letters indicating the offense (e.g., “FA” for false accuser).

Emphatically, Star Chamber did not use torture—another false charge that has been laid at its door. Torture was occasionally used in England, though not as a matter of course, as it was in Continental criminal proce­dure. In England, torture was an extra-judicial procedure inflicted by war­rant of the Privy Council to discover the names of suspected accomplices. The evidence obtained by the rack could not be used against the defendant tortured. And if such a matter came to trial, since the case would be treason or misprision of treason, the evidence against the accomplices would be opened in the common-law court where such serious crimes were tried.

To all of these allegations against Star Chamber was added a final charge of unusual breadth: that it was an “un-English” court, more specifically a “prerogative court” employing a “foreign” and “inquisitorial” procedure, that its substantive law was “Roman law,” and that the lawyers practicing in the court were “civil lawyers.” Such an argument presupposes a norm of Englishness—a norm, of course, that would have to be the common law. But the Englishness of the common law was entirely a product of the passage of time. In its origins in the late twelfth century, its procedure and substance were fundamentally Norman-Angevin, to give due credit to King Henry II and the French-speaking officials who a century after the Con­quest fashioned the writ system and tied it to the institution of the jury. In­deed, this common law was thoroughly “prerogative,” since it sprang from the exercise of the king's will and his duty to do justice. The influence of Roman law on the common law can be detected in the attempt of Glanvill in the late twelfth century to fit the writ system into a thoroughly Roman­ist framework, and Bracton's effort, half a century later, more tenuous and less successful, to adopt for his De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae the arrangement of subjects that Justinian had followed.

Star Chamber didn't have the time to become venerable. It was the product of the late-mediaeval King's Council tying up judicial loose ends and filling lacunae in the implementation of the established common law by entertaining petitions for relief and justice. Therefore, it was the twin of the Chancellor's jurisdiction which would later be called equity. Originally, the Council would act on such petitions, perfunctorily but collectively. Since the business was time-consuming, and the councillors had other impor­tant political and administrative functions to perform, most of the petitions were hived off to the one councillor who had the bureaucratic resources to handle legal paperwork, the Lord Chancellor. Those matters that involved important persons or were politically sensitive were retained by the King's Council, which sat in the Camera Stellata. From the beginning of the fif­teenth century the Chancellor's judicial activities in handling such petitions were clearly and continuously recorded. Because the records of the Coun­cil's entire activities were only fitfully preserved, it was not until almost the end of that century that the Council's judicial work became evident. This was largely due to a statute of 1487 dubbed Pro Camera Stellata which was subsequently curiously misunderstood to have “created” the court of Star Chamber.

Everything procedurally particular to Star Chamber also obtained in Chancery, save that in Chancery the defendant usually was not examined. The procedure used in both these courts—the bill and answer, interroga­tories and depositions method of pleadings and proofs—appear in fact to have originated in English practice, even though they resembled the meth­ods used on the Continent. This offered a model of judicature that was more rational, simpler, and, for busy officers of state, whether the Lord Chancellor solo or the King's councillors collectively, less time-consuming, and it was a common phenomenon in the sophisticated high-Middle Ages. Moreover, whatever relief was sought in Chancery in that epoch could also be obtained from the Council sitting in the Star Chamber, if the Coun­cil thought the matter or the parties important enough. It was not until the early 1500’s, when the tribunal established by the 1487 act Pro Camera Stellata was merged into the Council in the Star Chamber (and that for perfectly practical bureaucratic reasons), that the Star Chamber became ostensibly a court of criminal as well as equitable-civil jurisdiction.³ The 1487 act provided for the Attorney-General to prosecute certain specified offenses by information in the Star Chamber. This grant of jurisdiction was grafted onto the older jurisdiction of the court to hear and grant petitionary relief brought by bill by private parties. Not until the 1560’s did Star Cham­ber stop doing equitable-civil justice. Even afterward, the private litigants who used Star Chamber as a forum to bring prosecutions for criminal ac­tions typically did so in order to support civil suits and actions that they were already contesting in other courts, common law and equity. In the period from 1603 to 1625, for which ample proceedings in Star Chamber exist, four-fifths of all 8228 extant cases (including most of the informa­tions brought by the Attorney-General, which were brought on relation of private litigants) concerned some species of property, real or personal, and over half of the extant cases explicitly indicate that the parties were already at law in Star Chamber or some other court.⁴

Chancery, unlike Star Chamber, did become venerable. It survived the revolution which destroyed its twin, to take its place in the late nineteenth century reform of English judicature as one of three divisions of a “Supreme Court” which preserves still its procedural and substantive distinctiveness. Chancery lasted long enough to have its Englishness assured.

Only utter-barristers, readers and benchers of the Inns of Court, and serjeants-at-law had right of audience in Star Chamber, as in King’s Bench (and for that matter, Chancery) from at least the late Middle Ages. This fact demolishes the charge that the lawyers who practiced in Star Chamber were civil lawyers trained in Roman law, with all of the insinuations of popish sympathies and inquisitorial predilections.

If Star Chamber was not what its detractors have said it was, then what was it? Appropriately enough, the answer is to be found in a detailed writ­ten document, A Treatise of the Court of Star Chamber. The author, William Hudson of Gray’s Inn, Esq., utter-barrister, is untypical of the practicers in the court only by virtue of the size of his practice—the largest in the court's history—and his profound understanding of the court's procedure, substantive law, and even history. Hudson pointed the way to an answer to that question in his treatise, which was written in 1621, when the court was at the apex of its power and importance in England's judicature.

Not published until 1792 (an act of historicist piety by that indefatigable eighteenth-century barrister and antiquarian, Francis Hargrave), Hudson's treatise had circulated widely in manuscript recensions of varying accuracy and thoroughness from the time of its compilation until the abolition of Star Chamber two decades later rendered this extremely practical work use­less to the profession. It was a model treatise of practice for the age, better arranged, more clearly argued, and more stylishly written than all others of that genre. It was learned in every sense of the word, and it carried the authoritativeness of its author's pre-eminent reputation as both a former official of the court and the greatest practitioner at its bar.

Mr. Hudson had a definite purpose in 1621 in composing his treatise, a purpose that had little or nothing to do with its usefulness for his fellow barristers. The treatise hints at a crisis, or perspicaciously posits a potential crisis, in the reputation of Star Chamber. It demonstrates that Star Cham­ber was already in danger of derogation at the hands of detractors and had reason to fear the erosion of its authority, power, and integrity at the hands of its officers and jurists. The historian who will not accept Hudson's dis­quietude refuses to accept the best evidence available of the origins of the court's internal weaknesses, which contributed to its downfall when radical politics governed events fast becoming revolution.

The modern reader can appreciate Hudson's treatise for something else that it offers: insight into the substantive law implemented in Star Cham­ber. The second part, which comprises about one-third of the treatise, is a concise and accurate summation of the criminal law of the court, complete with case citations and illustrative use of cases. It remains today, as it was in the last years of Star Chamber, the quickest means of surveying and un­derstanding what the court did. Hudson's treatment of the substantive law when tested against the thousand plus reports of cases in Star Chamber from the 1590's to 1641 (some in the early printed reports, notably Coke, Croke, Moore, Noy, and Popham but most still available only in manu­script) stands up as a subtle and rigorously analytical treatment of case­law. And what Hudson's treatise reveals is the lasting contribution of Star Chamber to the common law, English and American.

That contribution is nothing less than the law of sophisticated crime, the offenses which today we characterize as “white collar crime.” Crimes against justice (perjury, maintenance, champerty, embracery, vexatious liti­gation, contempt); crimes by officers (subornation and extortion); crimes of covin and deceit (forgery, fraud, impersonation, extortion); criminal li­bel, and in distinction to it the modern civil tort and sedition; inchoate crime (conspiracy and attempt)-all these were crimes either largely cre­ated and developed by Star Chamber in the exercise of its common-law jurisdiction or else were statutory offenses defined and refined by the court. These crimes stood in sharp contrast to the bulk of the criminal law at the outset of the early-modern era in England, the old felonies of the Norman- Angevin origins of the “King's Peace,” the rough-and-tumble crimes of vio­lence and force which led to the gallows. The later medieval “trespasses” had already been truncated into misdemeanor and tort before Star Cham­ber took up its criminal-law jurisdiction seriously in the sixteenth century. Still, it fell to Star Chamber to evolve case by case a corpus of misdemeanor law over the course of the last half-century of its existence.⁵

A corpus it was. The fourth edition of Ferdinando Pulton's popular and inimitable treatise on the criminal law, published about the time Hudson wrote his treatise, devoted two and one-half times more space to misde­meanor than to treason and felony, reflecting the age's preoccupation with covert crime. Pulton wrote:

I shall not farre digresse from my theame [the King's peace] by treating of Forgerie, Periurie, Maintenance, Deceit, Extortion, and Oppression, wherein though a man be not assaulted by the Rapier and Dagger, Pikestaffe, or Bilbow- blade, as he is in a fray, forcible entry, or riot, yet a forged deede that conueyeth his land from him, a false oath which depriueth him of his lease, or unlawfull maintenance that wresteth his credit or goods from him, do longer disturb the peace of his mind, sticke in his stomach, and infireth a deeper and more durable impression of sorrow in his heart, than a bore on the ear, a duff in the neck, or a blow with a cudgel given on the sodain, will do....⁶

That preoccupation was clearly shared by the Privy Councillors and com­mon-law judges who sat in Star Chamber. Moreover, because the 1487 act Pro Camera Stellata instituted for the first time in England's history routine criminal prosecution by a procurator regularly attendant in the Star Cham­ber (in the person of the Attorney-General), the repression of crime became a practical rather than largely a theoretical responsibility of the crown and its great officers. The same act dictated the routine presence and involve­ment of the two Chief Justices in the proceedings, and so brought to the task of defining crime by case-law the best talent on the bench. Because the crime prosecuted was misdemeanor and not felony, the accused had right to counsel, and where learned lawyers are employed on both sides of adversary proceedings, sophisticated law is produced. So it was in the Tu­dor-Stuart Star Chamber. To answer the question posed above—what was the Star Chamber?—it is enough to say that it was a particularly aggressive and activist court of the greatest eminence, owing less to its origins in the royal prerogative than to parliamentary statute, and relying upon neither for its motivation, which in a manner that was entirely consonant with the traditional common-law method of creating and evolving law by cases fashioned the modern law of sophisticated crimes.

Repression of crimes against justice was the objective of the 1487 act, and it remained a staple of Star Chamber's jurisdiction to its end. In its later years, such offenses were alleged in one-quarter of the informations and bills filed. Maintenance, actively supporting and furthering litigation in which the accused had no valid legal interest, was the most common. Champerty, a misdemeanor still in English law which on the western side of the Atlantic is the pot-of-gold contingency fee for the plaintiff's lawyer, was less common. Embracery, that is, corrupting a jury, was still frequently charged. Perjury, no less a staple, had statutory origins, but Star Chamber expanded the range of what constituted the offense and brought testimony given in any court, secular or ecclesiastical, within its scope. As for vexatious litigation, the court went a long way towards defining what constituted val­id grounds for litigation and adequate standing to bring suit by the simple expedient of heavily fining private litigants pro falso clamore for groundless actions. It also took the old medieval ordinance outlawing the agreement of parties to bring false prosecution for capital crime and made it into an effec­tive instrument in its own right, as well as expanding its thrust to create the inchoate crime which contemporaries still called “combination” and which we know as conspiracy. It was Star Chamber, as well, rather more than the Lord Chancellor sitting in Chancery, which created the very rigorous Eng­lish rules concerning contempt of court, both on contempts committed in the face of the court and, more significantly, contempts committed beyond its precincts.

Crimes by officers, particularly bribery and extortion, were almost en­tirely the creation of Star Chamber and were expanded by the court to cover virtually all officialdom. The court went further by extending the doctrines under these heads to the legal profession, not only to attornies (who were officers of their respective courts) but also to barristers, defin­ing professional malfeasance beyond the older parameters of ambidextry. Crimes of covin and deceit revealed Star Chamber in its most activist and ambitious role. Forgery and fraud were expanded far beyond their statutory limitations, and became a large part of the court's jurisdiction. Arguably, impersonation for fraudulent purposes was not a crime until Star Cham­ber made it so. Blackmail by private persons was also criminalized by Star Chamber.

Probably nothing else that Star Chamber did contributed more to the development of an important branch of the law, both on the criminal and civil sides, than what it did with libel. The old medieval offense of scanda­lum magnatum, defaming great persons, was democratized, so to speak, by being applied to libel committed by writing (or tokens) of anyone in­jured in his or her reputation. Because this expansion addressed what was avowedly an offense against the king's peace, Star Chamber never drew a real distinction between libel and sedition, and thereby set the two essen­tial ingredients of criminal libel which obtain in England to this day, that publication is not requisite and the offense does not die with the person defamed. In this, libel as Star Chamber developed it differed from the tort of slander that was a product of the ecclesiastical courts and action upon the case for words in the common-law courts. But written defamation, as distinct from spoken defamation, libel as distinct from slander, even in the civil jurisdiction owed its origins to Star Chamber's protection of the reputations of a myriad of parsons parodied by itinerant players, barristers accused in broadsides of every imaginable corrupt practice, and cuckolded husbands held up to ridicule by horns nailed over their doors.

Sedition, which Star Chamber treated as defamation of the greatest magnate, the King, and the state, has a noxious reputation in our liberal times (made even more pronounced in the United States by virtue of its condemnation by partisan political opinion in the 1790's and the subse­quent interpretation of the First Amendment to provide protection for political argument. In the seventeenth century, however, the development of sedition as an offense distinct from treason signaled a considerable ad­vance in the criminal law. Star Chamber's creation of the offense slowed the tendency of Tudor and Stuart governments to expand the law of treason— with its gruesome penalties of annihilation of person and inheritance—to include words and even thoughts—and to apply to treasonous acts, words and thoughts. The law against sedition sufficiently served to protect the modern state, polity, and society at a particularly vulnerable stage in their development, before the formation of adequate instruments to maintain public order, the genesis of political means and forae to domesticate dissent, and the conceptualization of democratic ideals of participation in the politi­cal process for the preservation of the state.

Inchoate crime, conspiracy and attempt, have their origins in Star Chamber. The birth of modern conspiracy is The Poulterers’ Case, sentenced in the court in 1611. The dictum of Sir Edward Coke, “that a false conspiracy betwixt divers persons shall be punished, although nothing be put in ex­ecution,” is marred by his wonted hyperbole, but it is substantially true as a report of what Star Chamber held.⁷ The first clear conviction for a mere attempt to be found in the reports of any jurisdiction in England is Ryman v. Bickley (1617), in which Star Chamber overruled an exception that the in­tended crime was a “thing not effected” and fined the defendant.⁸ Modern criminal law is inconceivable without the crimes of conspiracy and attempt. Thanks to Star Chamber they began to develop at a very early stage in our modern law.

How was it that a court dashed as an instrument of despotism created so much public law for the repression of crime that has been accepted into the common-law system and survived? The 1641 statute abolishing Star Chamber explicitly transferred its jurisdiction to the common-law courts, particularly King's Bench and the assizes. However, what is clear from a careful sifting of indictments in the common-law courts before 1641 is that at least as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the assizes, as the principal venue in which criminal offenses were tried, were already receiving and accepting from Star Chamber the new misdemeanors. This should not be surprising: the Chief Justices and the other common-law judges who rode the assize circuit also sat in Star Chamber. In Star Cham­ber the justices became increasingly prominent in the court's deliberations during the last half-century of its existence. Sir Edward Coke is the best example: he had practiced in the Star Chamber as Attorney-General from 1594 to 1607 and participated in Star Chamber's lawmaking as Chief Justice of Common Pleas and King's Bench from 1606 to 1616. After his removal from the bench, Coke returned to Star Chamber as a Privy Councillor in 1617, where he proved an active and sometimes disruptive jurist. Among Coke's most prominent publications, from The Reports to the Third Insti­tutes and the Fourth Institutes, are panegyrics on the High Court of Star Chamber. The common-law judges were apt teachers in Star Chamber; they were also apt learners there, and they went out from Westminster Pal­ace to teach rude country jurors what they had learned there, to propound and to promulgate the law they had created there.

To teach and to learn. That is an appropriate way to describe the roles played by the judges of the common-law courts in Star Chamber. What they taught was the learning of the law, based upon their professional train­ing, professional role, and professional experience. What they learned was the exigencies of policy and the limitations of politics, the requirements of state and the imperatives of duty. Not since the crucial formative decades of the common-law system, in the last half of the twelfth century when the King's Justices sat in the King's Court, the undifferentiated Curia Regis, had the English judiciary been so continuously and so intimately involved in affairs of state as they were in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign and the reigns of James I and Charles I, the last half-century of Star Chamber, by virtue of their routine service in that court. Not for four centuries had the judges been so immersed in a process that united political policy and judicial decision-making. There never would be so close a linkage again. In

1640, at the outset of the revolution that would engulf Star Chamber in

1641, a number of the judges of the common-law courts were impeached in Parliament, primarily for the opinions that they had rendered in cases that had come before them during the 1630's — decisions that had been essential to supporting the policies of King Charles's “personal rule.” Aggravating such charges, in the eyes of the parliamentarians who brought them, was the judges' participation in those Star Chamber causes celebres that had con­demned to heavy fines and corporal punishment some of the most notable dissenters to regal policy, men now identified with the radical, revolution­ary, leadership in the Long Parliament.

One lasting result of the English Revolution—an intended one—was to take the judiciary out of politics, if not quite to take politics out of the judiciary. That was assured by the supremacy of Parliament, accomplished within two generations after the demise of Star Chamber. Never again would policy affecting law be so evident and so significant in English judi­cature. Much was gained, obviously. Much was lost, including the potential for the English courts to play the role in judicial review which the United States Supreme Court has played since John Marshall's interpretation of Article III of the Constitution of 1789. Another casualty was the ability of the state, in collaboration with the learned sages of the law, to create neces­sary new law, so fast, so freely, and so thoroughly as had Star Chamber.

Two elements have been neglected: “Robert Shallow, Esq.” and, one also supposes, “Sir John Falstaf They were not negligible, and we dare not omit them. Until the last decade of the Star Chamber, the Shallows and the Falstaffs, beyond any other force working on the court, determined its direction, dominated its time, and even dictated its law. Case-law is pro­foundly the creation of the litigants: they set the courts to work, demand, and pay for the ends they seek in litigation, and vote with their feet and their purses if they are dissatisfied with the justice accorded them by a court. If to some extent this is always true, it was especially so in that period because there were many courts with jurisdiction over any matter in lite, litigation was essentially a business practice in furtherance of business negotiation, the ambit of the law was much concentrated on issues of property (and especially real property), the litigants were neither ignorant of the law nor meekly dependent upon the good offices of their counsel to attain their legal objectives, and the courts from clerks to judges relied entirely on the costs of litigation for their incomes. Solemnly and conventionally, histori­ans often declare that Star Chamber was “popular” until the last decades of its existence. Indeed it was; any court that did the roaring business that Star Chamber did was “popular.” A court that was not popular was one starved of the business that it needed to flourish. What was true of Star Chamber was true of the King's Bench. King's Bench flourished in the period be­cause it developed an egregious legal fiction, the latitat action, which al­lowed it to attract for the first time a sizable civil jurisdiction. Star Chamber flourished because it was a forum where parties could expeditiously sue for damages, bring collateral actions to support or embarrass lawsuits pending elsewhere, and because the prestige of the court had had enormous appeal for the private litigant who could win a victory there.⁹

All these features of Star Chamber can be detected in Hudson's treatise. Sometimes they are too subtly stated and not always self-evident, but there is nothing ambiguous about this statement:

For damages to the wronged party this court is the best jury; and when they have justly discerned the wrong, they make the most ample recompence, and requite the wronged person's labour and travel and sometimes with all his in­jury.¹⁰

Perhaps Hudson was too embarrassed to admit that this had not been the case before the first decade of the seventeenth century—only then did Star Chamber began to award damages. The damages that a litigant could re­ceive in Star Chamber had qualities particularly advantageous to a victo­rious plaintiff. A levy against goods to satisfy damages awarded a private party in Star Chamber took precedence over even a fine to the King. Not only was this was a reasonable consequence of Star Chamber's implicitly civil role in litigation; it was also advantageous in maintaining the volume of the court's business.

Star Chamber's tenderness for the private litigant was good business. It also had a perhaps unintended corollary, but a cosmically significant one. The concern of the vigorous monarchy of the Tudor-Stuart period for maintaining public order and sustaining the state was a major consideration in the formulation of much of the legal doctrine that emerged from Star Chamber. The councillors and officials who sat in Star Chamber saw to that. At the same time, however, the demands of the private litigants who brought cases in Star Chamber ensured that Star Chamber would not be reduced to a mere instrument for executing state policy.

Until the 1630’s, private litigants and what they sought held a clear pre­dominance in the workings of Star Chamber. That began to change during the “personal rule” of Charles I, after 1629, when the king resolved never to call another Parliament and to fund his government by every fiscal ex­pediency that had the slightest shadow of legitimacy. To cloak this expe­diency in legitimacy and to overcome resistance to his policies, the king turned to his courts. All were called upon to do their duty to their sover­eign. All did, including Star Chamber, which saw some of the hardest and most effective service. Beginning in 1631 and continuing until the abolition of the court ten years later—the proceedings were heaviest from 1632 to 1636—the Attorney-General brought more than 175 actions for essentially fiscal ends, pro Rege (for the King) rather than on relation of a private party. Of these, about 40 cases came to trial and determination. Convictions in these actions persuaded scores of subjects who feared prosecution on simi­lar grounds to compound with the Exchequer for their offenses. The more complex of these cases took many days of hearing; one action, against the City of London and its livery companies for fraudulently procuring a grant of the Londonderry lands in Ulster, consumed the whole of Hilary Term 1635 and ten more sitting days in the vacation following. The Attorney­General also increasingly (and notoriously) prosecuted political dissidents against Church and state.

The Attorney-General had the privilege of pre-emption of hearing in the court. If he rose to proceed ore tenus, then other cases set down for hearing that day were stood over. During the personal rule, the Attorney­General claimed the same privilege in cases brought by information, re­sulting in increasingly long delays in private-party actions as the cause-lists grew longer and longer. Patently, Star Chamber had ceased to be a court that catered to private litigants; it had become in fact as well as in name the High Court for the trial of the king’s actions. This made more severe a considerable procedural deceleration which had set in over a decade ear­lier with a marked increase in the incidence of special pleading (which if it was not dilatory in intent certainly occasioned delay in effect). Private-party suits fell off steadily over the 1630’s.¹¹ By the time the court was demolished as an instrument of tyranny it had already lost the bulk of its clientele. The Shallows and the Falstaffs had deserted it. The famous act of 1641 abolish­ing Star Chamber was essentially a coup de grace. William Hudson did not live to see that unhappy moment, for he died in 1635. The execution would not have surprised him.

Star Chamber has its monuments, not the least of which was the order it helped impose in a society coming out of the chaos of the last century of feudal rivalry, in an age of profound religious and ideological disorders ush­ered in by the Reformation, in the first centuries of the perils of new nation­state rivalries. The law it created and bequeathed to its heirs, successors, and assigns, a not unmixed blessing but a substantial benefaction, deserves a substantial cenotaph. Mr. Hudson's treatise is perhaps less monument than epitaph. He ends with a quotation from Bracton that is as good a renvoi or nunc dimittis for Star Chamber as it was for Hudson's own careful and painful labor:

I ask the reader, if he finds in this work anything superfluous or erroneous to correct and amend it, or pass it over with eyes half closed, for to keep all in mind and err in nothing is divine rather than human.¹²

Star Chamber erred; much of what it did was superfluous. A high court it was, but it was not divine, and its judges were all too human. Too long have historians looked at its shortcomings with eyes entirely closed. Eyes even half open can appreciate that without Star Chamber the common law of the English-speaking world would have been vastly different.