Conspiracy, Crime, and Conflict in the Court of Star Chamber
Keywords:
papists, Essex, conspiracies, secret histories, arguablyAbstract
To those living through them, the Elizabethan and early Stuart years of England’s history seemed unusually riven by plots and conspiracies. Protestants feared the public effects of the private machinations of the Scottish queen and her supporters, of Jesuits, and of perfidious “papists” more generally. Catholic polemicists countered with narratives of dark deeds done by men who subverted rather than served the Crown: “secret histories” circulated that warned of William and Robert Cecil, the earl of Leicester, and others undermining the public state of the realm.1 Very real conspiracies by men such as the Earl of Essex and Guy Fawkes fostered fears of others. From the hard and hungry 1590s, protests against enclosures and lack of food became so common and concerning that the authorities contrived to brand some such riots as the products of treasonous conspiracies that threatened not just particular landlords or grain merchants but the public at large.2 Over the early seventeenth century, fears of covert machinations by both the poor and the powerful only increased, culminating in the fear that King Charles himself had become a pawn in a Catholic conspiracy that endangered the lives and liberties of his subjects.3 Talk of plots and conspiracies—real and imagined—abounded in an increasingly divided and discordant political culture, seen as threatening a “public” they arguably helped to create.
References
1
For a representative contemporary example, see A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies of Late Time Detected to have (by Barbarous Murders) Taken away the Life of the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty (London, 1594). For scholarship on conspiracies, fears of conspiracies, and the political culture they helped create, see, e.g., Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London: Pimlico, 2006).
2
John Walters, “A “Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past and Present 107.1 (1985): 90–143 at 127–30 and Roger Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 227–9.
3
See especially Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) and Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
4
On the history of the law of conspiracy, see especially Alan Harding, “The Origins of the Crime of Conspiracy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983): 89–108; Víctor Saucedo, Conspiracy: A Conceptual Genealogy (Madrid: Editorial Dykinson, 2017); and Percy Winfield, The History of Conspiracy and Abuse of Legal Procedure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921).
5
A sizable body of work on these disputes exists, but for relatively recent studies that push their origins back into the reign of Queen Elizabeth and broaden our understanding of them as incorporating concerns about the encroachment of ecclesiastical courts into criminal business and its effects on the “liberties of the subject,” see especially J.H. Baker, The Reinvention of Magna Carta, 1216–1616 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); David Chan Smith, Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Adam Forsyth, “England’s Erastus? Or, James Morice and the Law of Excommunication,” Historical Journal, forthcoming.
6
See, e.g., Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1999, 2nd edn.). Steve Hindle, The State and Social Chance in Early Modern England, 1550-1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), makes a case for participation’s role in state formation, drawing on Star Chamber practice as well as common law. On the boom in civil litigation and arguments for its integrative role, see especially work by Christopher W. Brooks, including Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and work by Craig Muldrew, including “The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 39.4 (1996): 915–42.
7
Laura Flannigan, Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), quotes at 16, 257. For other recent works offering a pessimistic view of the effects of popular participation in the law’s operation, see, e.g., Hillary Taylor, Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) and Jonah Miller, Gender and Policing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
8
See works by T.G. Barnes, esp. “The Making of English Criminal Law (2): Star Chamber and the Sophistication of the Criminal Law,” Criminal Law Review (1977): 316–26. On Star Chamber more generally, see the essays in K.J. Kesselring and Natalie Mears, ed., Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and its Records (London: University of London Press, 2021).
9
The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), STAC 5/B8/32, from Richard Brereton’s bill of complaint in Brereton v Radcliffe et al. (1583-4).
10
British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 24,926, “A discourse on the court called the Star Chamber,” ff. 2–3, 7. Dated 1585/6; later published as part of William Lambarde, Archeion, or, A Discourse upon the High Courts of Justice in England (London, 1635), 78–9.
11
On the limits, see esp. William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1931), 1:487.
12
See esp. Harding, “The Origins of the Crime of Conspiracy.”
13
17 Car. 1, c. 10, An Act for the Regulating the Privy Council and for Taking away the Court Commonly Called the Star Chamber.
14
The quoted phrase appears in Jacobean royal proclamations, e.g., Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larking and Paul Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973),1:304 (no. 136). On the emergence of the concept of the “state,” named as such, see, e.g., John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 352 and Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19–20.
15
Kesselring and Mears, “Introduction: Star Chamber Matters,” 9–10.
16
It is difficult to quantify complaints in even the well-indexed Jacobean files (let alone in the Elizabethan records catalogued only by plaintiff’s surname) given the multiple and overlapping allegations in most bills, but for T.G. Barnes’s categorization and counting of Jacobean cases, see “Star Chamber Litigants and their Counsel, 1596–1641,” in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J.H. Baker (London, 1978), 7–28 at 13. (The count of cases alleging offenses that hindered the execution of law would be substantially higher if it included unlawful assemblies and riots, as some contemporaries understood them.) Louis Knafla also comments on the high volume of corruption and related cases in his study: Kent at Law, 1602, vol. 3, Star Chamber (Kew: List and Index Society, special series 47, 2013), xxviii–xxx.
17
The classic study of corruption and its political effects in this period is Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
18
TNA, STAC 5/P4/10, Parker v Roise (1587).
19
K.J. Kesselring, ed., Star Chamber Reports: Harley MS 2143 (Kew: List and Index Society, 2018), nos. 257, 381, 957.
20
See Taylor, Language and Social Relations.
