Star Chamber

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Star Chamber sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, and for nearly two centuries it was one of the most powerful courts in England. Its name came from the ceiling above the judges' heads: a canopy of gilded stars on a blue background, still visible today at Leasowe Castle on the Wirral Peninsula. That ceiling is one of the few physical remnants of a court that shaped English law, broke the power of the landed gentry, and eventually became a byword for tyranny.

  What made the Star Chamber different from an ordinary court? It was staffed by privy counsellors and common-law judges, and it could punish conduct that was morally reprehensible even when technically legal. It could not sentence anyone to death, but it could order the pillory, whipping, or the cutting off of ears. And it used a device called the ex officio oath to trap defendants in what Edgar Lee Masters later called a "cruel trilemma": confess, lie and face perjury, or stay silent and be held in contempt.

  From its origins as a check on the powerful, the court became an instrument of royal oppression under Charles I. Its abolition in 1641 left echoes in the Bill of Rights of 1689 and in the Fifth and Eighth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The story of how a court designed to protect ordinary people ended up banning newsbooks and branding a man on both cheeks is the story the rest of this documentary will tell.

• 2. A Name With Many Theories

  ›

  John Stow, writing in his Survey of London in 1598, offered the most widely repeated explanation for the court's unusual name. He noted that the chamber's roof had once been "decked with images of starres gilted." Gold stars on a blue background were a common medieval ceiling decoration, and examples survive beyond Leasowe Castle: the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua carries similar work.

  The first written record of the name comes from 1398, spelled as "Sterred chambre." The more familiar form appears in 1422 as "le Sterne-chamere," and both spellings recur through the fifteenth century. The last known instance of the older spelling appears in the Supremacy of the Crown Act 1534, the legislation that established the English monarch as head of the Church.

  The jurist William Blackstone, writing in 1769, proposed a very different origin. He suggested the name derived from "starr," a legal term for contracts or obligations involving Jewish merchants, itself drawn from the Hebrew word shtar, meaning "document." Jews were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290, and Blackstone thought the chamber might originally have stored such contracts. The Oxford English Dictionary dismissed this theory, giving it "no claim to consideration."

  Blackstone also floated other possibilities: a derivation from the Old English word steoran, meaning to govern; a connection to the Latin crimen stellionatus, a form of fraud punishable in Roman law; or simply that the room was full of windows. The physical building itself was three stories high with at least three rooms and a kitchen, and it was sometimes used for council meetings and committee gatherings unrelated to the court, which has caused additional confusion about what the Star Chamber actually was.

• 3. Enforcing Law Against the Powerful

  ›

  Henry VII turned to the Star Chamber to solve a problem that had plagued the English monarchy for generations. The Wars of the Roses had demonstrated what happened when the landed gentry became too powerful to be restrained by ordinary courts. A tribunal staffed by the King's own councillors and senior judges was a way to reach those whom local courts were afraid to convict.

  Sir Edward Coke, one of the great legal minds of the Tudor and Stuart period, described the Star Chamber as "The most honourable court (Our Parliament excepted) that is in the Christian world." His praise rested on its procedures: unlike popular myth, the court allowed defendants the right to counsel and the right to call witnesses. Defendants' answers to indictments had to be signed by counsel, and if counsel refused to sign, the defendant was deemed to have confessed.

  The court supplemented rather than replaced the common-law and equity courts. It could hear cases on direct appeal or accept cases referred from lower courts when those courts were clogged or mismanaged. It also developed legal categories that became permanent fixtures of English and American law: attempt, conspiracy, criminal libel, and perjury were all shaped by Star Chamber proceedings. Capital felonies and capital treason lay outside its jurisdiction, and it was not authorised to use torture.

  In the reign of Henry VIII, the court passed through the successive control of Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, and later Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. Under their direction, the original purpose shifted. Plaintiffs were encouraged to bypass the lower courts entirely and bring cases straight to the Star Chamber, turning a supervisory body into a primary forum for political grievances.

• 4. The Ex Officio Oath

  ›

  Among the tools the Star Chamber used against its targets, the ex officio oath was among the most feared. Individuals were compelled to swear, by virtue of their position alone, to answer truthfully any question put to them. There was no right to remain silent.

  The trap that followed was described by Edgar Lee Masters in the early 1900s as a "cruel trilemma." A defendant who answered honestly risked self-incrimination. One who gave unsatisfactory answers faced charges of perjury. One who refused to answer at all was held in contempt of court. There was no safe path through hostile questioning.

  This practice became one of the central arguments for the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The meaning of "compelled testimony" under the Fifth Amendment, the conditions under which a defendant may invoke the right against self-incrimination, is still interpreted with reference to the inquisitorial methods the Star Chamber employed. The US Supreme Court stated that the court "has, for centuries, symbolised disregard of basic individual rights," though it also noted the procedural protections the court formally maintained, including the requirement for counsel.

  The Court also extended its reach in ways that troubled observers across the political spectrum. It summoned juries before it when their verdicts displeased the government, then fined and imprisoned them. Masters noted that with each further exercise of power, the court "became emboldened to undertake further usurpation," until it served mainly as the chief instrument of Charles I against those who challenged royal authority.

• 5. Suppression and Spectacle

  ›

  On the 17th of October 1632, the Court of Star Chamber banned all "news books" from England. The trigger was diplomatic: Spanish and Austrian ambassadors had complained that English coverage of the Thirty Years' War was unfair to their nations. The ban pushed newsbooks underground. Printers relocated to Amsterdam and smuggled their publications back into England, a practice that continued until the ideological pressures of 1640-41 made control of the press impossible to sustain.

  The Star Chamber's most notorious single act of punishment came in 1637, when Archbishop Laud used the court to have William Prynne branded on both cheeks for seditious libel. Prynne was not the only target. John Lilburne, Alexander Leighton, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton all suffered severe treatment at the court's hands during the years when Charles I ruled without Parliament.

  Charles I had made the Star Chamber a Parliamentary substitute during the eleven years of what became known as Personal Rule, the period when he governed without calling Parliament at all. The court became the primary mechanism for prosecuting dissenters, including the Puritans who subsequently fled to New England. This use of judicial power as a political instrument was widely cited as one of the causes of the English Civil War.

  In Ireland, Elizabeth I had established a parallel body in 1571, the Court of Castle Chamber, designed to handle riots and offences against public order. It was initially popular with private litigants, but under the Stuarts it acquired the same reputation for harsh and arbitrary proceedings as the Star Chamber itself, before dissolving in the political disorder of the 1640s.

• 6. Abolition and Its Echoes

  ›

  The Long Parliament abolished the Star Chamber in 1641, acting through the Habeas Corpus Act 1640. The leading force behind the abolition was John Pym, but the driving outrage came from the treatment of John Lilburne and of religious dissenters including William Prynne, Alexander Leighton, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton.

  The punishments the Star Chamber had imposed were not quickly forgotten. When James II revived the same brutal methods, Parliament responded with an article in the Bill of Rights of 1688 stating that "excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted." That language was reproduced almost word for word in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

  The physical chamber itself survived the abolition by nearly two centuries. It was demolished in 1806, or possibly as late as 1834 or early 1836; contemporary records give conflicting dates. When it came down, its materials were salvaged. The door was reused at nearby Westminster School until the Blitz destroyed it. The star-studded ceiling, along with four tapestries depicting the four seasons, was transported to Leasowe Castle on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire.

  In the late twentieth century, the term returned to political usage in Britain. Under Margaret Thatcher's premiership, which ran from 1979 to 1990, the press and civil servants revived "star chamber" to describe private ministerial meetings at which the Treasury resolved budget disputes with high-spending departments. Neil Kinnock referenced this practice at his first appearance at Prime Minister's Questions in 1983. In 2010, the Cameron ministry employed a similar committee to plan public spending cuts. The European Research Group formed its own "Star Chamber" in March 2019 to evaluate Theresa May's proposed Brexit deal, and on the 29th of December 2020, a second ERG Star Chamber assessed Boris Johnson's EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, ultimately recommending that members vote for it on the grounds that it was "consistent with the restoration of UK sovereignty."