Star-chamber

Star-chamber, a tribunal which met in the old Council-chamber of the palace of Westminster, and is said to have got its name from the roof of that apartment being decorated with gilt stars, or because in it 'starres' or Jewish bonds had been kept. It is supposed to have originated in early times out of the exercise of jurisdiction by the king's council, whose powers in this respect had greatly declined when in 1487 Henry VII., anxious to repress the indolence and illegal exactions of powerful landowners, revived and remodelled them, or, according to some investigators, instituted what was practically an entirely new tribunal. The statute conferred on the Chancellor, the Treasurer, and the Keeper of the Privy Seal, with the assistance of a bishop and a temporal Lord of the Council, and Chief-justices, or two other justices in their absence, a jurisdiction to punish, without a jury, the misdemeanours of sheriffs and justices, as well as riots and unlawful assemblies. Henry VIII. added to the other members of the court the President of the Council, and ultimately all the privy-councillors were members of it. The resulting tribunal was, during the Tudor age, of undoubted utility as a means of bringing to justice great and powerful offenders who would otherwise have had it in their power to set the law at defiance. It was independent of a jury, and at that time juries were too easily terrorised by the nobles. The civil jurisdiction of the Star-chamber comprised controversies between English and foreign merchants, testamentary causes, disputes between the heads and commonalty of corporations, lay and ecclesiastical, and claims to deodands. As a criminal court it could inflict any punishment short of death, and had cognisance of forgery, perjury, riots, maintenance, fraud, libels, conspiracy, misconduct of judges and others connected with the administration of the law, and all offences against the state, in so far as they could be brought under the denomination of contempt of the king's authority. Even treason, murder, and felony could be brought under the jurisdiction of the Star-chamber, where the king chose to remit the capital sentence. The form of proceeding was by written information and interrogatories, except when the accused person confessed, in which case the information and proceedings were oral; and out of this exception grew one of the most flagrant abuses of this tribunal in the later period of its history. Regardless of the existing rule that the confession must be free and unconstrained, pressure of every kind, including torture, was used to procure acknowledgments of guilt; admissions of the most immaterial facts were construed into confessions; and fine, imprisonment, and mutilation inflicted on a mere oral proceeding, without hearing the accused, by a court consisting of the immediate representatives of prerogative. The proceedings of the Star-chamber had always been viewed with distrust by the commons; but during the reign of Charles I. its excesses reached a pitch that made it absolutely odious to the country at large; the punishments inflicted on Alexander Leighton, Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick brought matters to a height, and in 1641 a bill was carried in both Houses (16 Car. I. chap. 10) which decreed the abolition of the Star-chamber and the equally unpopular court of High Commission (q.v.). See CHARLES I., LAUD.