Let’s talk about England in those messy years before the Civil War broke out and everything got even messier. If you find a few modern resonances tucked into the tale, I didn’t put ‘em there–they’re baked in–but they did draw my attention to the tale. As usual, though, we’ll start a century or so earlier.

The Star Chamber

England’s Court of the Star Chamber grew out of the medieval tradition of a king presiding over a court that was made up of his councilors, and in  1487 Henry VII established it as a judicial body separate from the king’s council. Its judges were his councilors and it acted as the council’s judicial arm. The name came  from the star-patterned ceiling in the Westminster Palace room where it met. 

From 1485 to 1641 it acted as a law court and also supervised common-law courts. The number of cases it heard expanded from 150 a year in the 1530s to more than 700 by 1600, and its powers also grew.

Under the Tudors people seem to have thought well of it. It cut through the web of corruption and influence that entangled the common-law courts in, and it could deal with actions that weren’t illegal but did cause problems. To steal a contemporary phrase, it could get things done. 

I probably don’t need to say this, but that doesn’t usually stop me: there’s a good and a bad side to getting things done. Let’s say you’re the ruler. You are, of course, wise and good, so you only want good things to get done, and you set up a Get-things-done mechanism to do them. It’s efficient, it’s powerful, an lo, Things Get Done. But you don’t live forever. You may not even stay in power for the rest of  your life, so at some point you lose control of the Get-things-done machine, and eventually a person who’s not wise and good gets control of it they get to decide what things need doing. 

Remember how hard you made it for anyone to stop the machine? Yeah, history’s an ironic sumbitch, isn’t it? And we haven’t even talked about the possibility of you not being as wise or as good as you meant to be, or about the machine running out of control. 

But back to the Star Chamber. Its cases included issues of public disorder, riot, forcible entry, assault, fraud, official and judicial corruption, municipal, land enclosure, and trade disputes, and the occasional accusation of witchcraft. One source says that if you dig deeper you’ll find they private disputes about property rights. For our purposes, I’m not sure it matters.

Power

Since it was so closely aligned to the king or queen and since it functioned outside the common law, the Star Chamber Court wasn’t bound by rigid form the way common-law courts were. It didn’t need juries: it could indict or convict on its own say-so. It could act on someone’s complaint or petition but it could also act on information it received, without anyone initiating a complaint. In other words, it was effective and it didn’t have to listen to anyone except itself. Except of course the monarch-of-the-moment. 

Under Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Official You-Name-It-and-More, the court began prosecuting forgery, perjury, riot, slander, and anything else he considered a breach of the peace. And offenses against legislation or the king’s proclamations. 

Since it was operating outside the law, its punishments weren’t set by law. It couldn’t sentence anyone to death, but short of that it had a free hand, and its punishments included imprisonment, fines, the pillory, whipping, branding, and mutilation. 

We’ve now run out of Tudors

Under the Stuarts, the Star Chamber turned its attention to religious dissenters–England was rich in religious dissenters–and under Charles I (one of the Stuarts) it also ran out of popularity. Charles was trying to govern without Parliament, since it hadn’t done what he wanted, and that left him filling the gap with royal proclamations, then using the Star Chamber to enforce them. He could issue a proclamation and the Star Chamber–his own advisors, remember–to enforce it, making it both executive and judiciary.

This united a range of opponents who might otherwise have wanted nothing to do with each other. The common-law courts saw the Star Chamber as a rival to its powers. A substantial faction of parliamentarians saw it as a rival to theirs. Dissenters–its prime target–were guaranteed to oppose it. The surprise component, though, was the gentry. Their influence was already being threatened by government centralization and they were horrified–according to the Britannica–by the use of the pillory and corporal punishment against dissenters.  

Why? Because the dissenters were fellow members of the gentry. Common-law courts would never have treated them that way. I mean, it was one thing to nail some peasant’s ear to a post, but a gentleman’s? It was unthinkable.

Charles wasn’t playing by the established rules.

And then what happened?

Eventually Charles had not choice but to recall Parliament–he needed money–and two women, Sara Burton and Susanna Bastwick, galvanized opposition to the Star Chamber by petitioning Parliament for the release of their husbands, Henry and John. 

By way of–of course–background, both men (and presumably the women) were dissenters and both men (and of course not the women) had published books criticizing the Church of England. Printing was strictly regulated and they’d cheated the system, so the Star Chamber made accusations against them and when they didn’ appear, the judges read that as a confession of guilt. Burton was stripped of his university degree and license to act as a minister. Both were fined impossible amounts of money, and sentenced to be pilloried and have their ears cut off. Then they were to be imprisoned for as long as the king pleased, but outside of England, on Guernsey and the Isles of Scilly, so a writ of habeas corpus wouldn’t apply. Or at least might not apply. 

I did warn you about those contemporary resonances, didn’t I?

The heavy fines had become pretty standard by then. It was a way to pour money into the king’s treasury. 

When they put Bastwick in the pillory and cut off his ears, Susanna climbed on a stool and kissed him, and once his ears were cut off demanded to have them handed to her so she could carry them away in her handkerchief.  

I know, but you have to admit, she made her point.

When they cut off Burton’s ears, they cut so close that they severed an artery. 

So that’s your background. When Parliament reconvened, the two women called for their husbands to be released and their cause was taken up by John Pym, a Member of Parliament, who brought their petition to the Commons, and before long other people were petitioning for the release of men imprisoned by the Star Chamber, and the house ordered a committees to evaluate both individual cases and the “excesses” of the court.

Both women were gutsy as hell and I’d planned to focus this post on them, but other than their petition to Parliament and that thing about the ears, I found next to nothing about them. I couldn’t even find online bios of them. They appear only in bios of their husbands.

Shutting down the machine

Not long after the women’s petition to the Commons, Sir Richard Wiseman petitioned the House of Lords for his freedom. He’d lost a case in the Star Chamber and turned to the king, alleging that he’d lost because his opponent bribed the judges. 

Bad move. It landed him back in front of the Star Chamber, this time charged with insulting the court. He was ordered to pay damages plus a £10,000 fine to the king, and to lose his ears and his knighthood. When he couldn’t pay (it was a huge amount of money at the time), he was dumped in the Fleet prison for years. 

Lord Montagu wrote that Wiseman “moved such compassion in us, especially the poor and beggarly array the man was in, that we fell into speech against the exorbitancy of the court, and chose a special committee to consider the proceedings thereof.” 

I mean, it was one thing to see a beggar looking beggarly, but one of their own? They freed him and voted him £50 for clothes and food–and they set up a committee to consider both Wiseman’s case and the Star Chamber itself.

Before long, Parliament had 47 petitions relating to the Star Chamber and the question became whether to regulate it or abolish it. Commons was the first to propose abolition, but within a few months the Lords fell into line. It had, Parliament wrote, “undertaken to punish where no law doth warrant, and to make decrees for things having no such authority, and to inflict heavier punishments than by any law is warranted.”

The king resisted for a while but he needed money, Parliament held it back, and he gave in.