A Secret Court With No Jury

The Full Story

The Star Chamber started as a good idea. In the fifteenth century, powerful nobles could intimidate local courts. The king's council, meeting in a room with stars on the ceiling, would hear cases that regular courts couldn't handle fairly. The court was not founded in a single moment: it evolved out of the king's council, though tradition links it to an act of 1487 under Henry VII.

Then it became something else.

By the seventeenth century, the Star Chamber had become an instrument of tyranny. It had no jury. Its proceedings were closed. It could impose punishments at its discretion, short of death: branding, ear-cropping, ruinous fines, imprisonment. There was no appeal. Whether it used torture is disputed: torture warrants in this period were issued under the royal prerogative through the Privy Council, not as ordinary Star Chamber procedure.

Charles I used the Star Chamber to crush dissent. Critics of the king were hauled before it, convicted without jury, and brutally punished. William Prynne had his ears cut off for criticizing the queen. John Lilburne was whipped through the streets.

When the Long Parliament met in 1640, abolishing the Star Chamber was among its first acts. The statute of 1641 abolished the court, along with the Court of High Commission, and ended its secret, jury-free justice.

The Star Chamber became a symbol of everything English law should not be: arbitrary, secret, cruel. Its abolition confirmed that English justice must be public, must involve juries, and must have limits.