The Privy Council of England became, by the reign of Elizabeth I, the most powerful force in English politics, dictating policy in both government and English society.
The rise of the Privy Council to great power in the 16th century could not have been anticipated earlier. Although a private council was a feature of English government as far back as the reign of William I, whose curia regis was the conqueror’s private set of councillors, the curia had little actual authority other than the management of certain kinds of legislation. However, by the late Middle Ages Parliament had emerged, and the council settled into the work of administering a government that was in the process of becoming larger and more complex. By the time of Henry VIII, the council had established offices, accumulated records, and become a significant bureaucracy within Westminster Palace. Councillors’ importance waxed during the short reign of Edward VI, partly due to the king’s youth, but Elizabeth relied on their advice during the important years when the English secured secular rule, achieved a religious settlement in a post-HEFORMATlON world, and started the colonization of the Western Hemisphere.
In Elizabeth’s time the council was often labeled “the government.” The council had vast powers: It appointed men to government offices and had the power to expel them, it oversaw the military affairs of England, it regulated domestic and international trade, it negotiated with foreign nations, and it possessed judicial authority. At Elizabeth’s death the Privy Council even smoothed the transition of power from one dynastic family to another.
Further reading: G. H. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd ed. (London: Houtledge, 1991); D. E. Hoak, The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Michael B. Pulman, The Elizabethan Privy Council in the Fifteen-Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Alan G. H. Smith, The Government of Elizabethan England (New York: Norton, 1967).
—David P Dewar
World History
