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Presents the Privy Council's debate of the draft bill and Legislative Bureau's preparation for the Diet debates. Before the draft could be submitted to the Diet, the Privy Councillors, former prime ministers and other conservative advisers to the emperor, examined and debated it. In eleven sessions between April 22 and June 3, the councillors expressed deep concern about the chapters on the emperor, on the permanent disarmament of Japan and many other provisions of the draft, but came to understand why they could not change them. These sessions helped minister Kanamori Tokujirō and Satō Tatsuo of the Legislation Bureau to prepare the government to face the House of Representatives in the debate of this bill.

Most questions about how Scotland was governed tend sooner or later to lead back to the privy council. Below the crown, the council was the supreme executive authority, with a general political competence that allowed it to intervene in almost any area of government. This was partly because the privy council was more closely connected to the monarchy than any other executive body. The privy council was a corporate body, with its own administrative structure and traditions, able to run the daily central government by itself. This chapter looks at the privy council and its gradual emergence as the central coordinating body of daily government. It worked by consensus with the monarch (something that changed little even after 1603), and coordinated the executive government departments. The privy council's relationship with Scottish nobility is also considered.

This chapter discusses the judicial roles of the House of Lords and Privy Council from 1820-1914. Topics covered include the era of Lord Eldon, the establishment of the Judicature Commission, the Appellate Jurisdiction Act, the creation of the Judicial Committee, and the organization and procedure of the Privy Council.

This chapter examines the question: was there a ‘Stewart revolution in government’? This chapter argues that there was, but looks at certain modifications of the ‘revolution in government’ hypothesis that are necessary in order to apply it to Scotland. The key development, linked to numerous others, was the establishment of an executive privy council as a corporate decision-making body, rather than having a king advised by ‘lords of council’, usually individually. Below the privy council came more active administrative departments, notably the late 16th-century exchequer and then the early 17th-century treasury. Both bureaucracy and centralisation grew, with more of the governing that local elites did being subject to national standards (statute law, and the practice of the court of session) rather than local custom. Taxation, both direct and indirect, also grew. The state now drew its revenues from the propertied classes rather than having its own separate property. There was also a transformed role for parliament.

This chapter discusses the relationship of the Scottish parliament to the crown, which refers not only to the person who was entitled to wear this item of headgear, but also to the vehicle for the issuing of orders in that person's name in such a way that they carried effective legal force. The rise of parliament was paralleled by the rise of a more powerful personal monarchy, in which the crown began to do more things using the royal prerogative, and even to exclude parliament from certain areas. The possibility of sustained conflict between crown and parliament began to arise. The continuing influence and involvement of the crown after 1603 casts doubt on the concept of ‘absentee monarchy’. This chapter discusses the role of personal monarchy in the politics and government of Scotland, as well as that of parliament, royal court, privy council, and nobility.

This chapter examines ‘judicial creativity’ in New Zealand's appellate courts. It argues that judicial creativity is a natural and vital part of how the three branches of government work together to provide a single comprehensive system. The selection of appellate decisions discussed in this chapter displays the range of judicial creativity and restraint in the New Zealand jurisdiction. Both an appreciation of the degree of creativity which the system of government expects of the courts and the ongoing confidence the community maintains in the courts, suggest that the New Zealand appellate courts — notwithstanding the strident concerns of a small group of business and academic commentators — are perceived to be maintaining an appropriate balance between creativity and restraint.

This chapter examines the constitutional foundations of adjudication on ‘devolution issues’ and the role and character of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. It argues that the 1998 devolution Acts caused a lack of clarity and confusion at the apex of the UK's legal systems and that ‘for the sake of constitutional and democratic stability in post-devolution UK’ a better arrangement is needed.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how, when viewed from the New Commonwealth, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords was always considered a powerful, if amorphous, creation, while the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was less so. It argues that despite the criticisms and imperfections, it cannot be disputed that the courts made an invaluable contribution to the common law jurisprudence in the New Commonwealth.

This chapter deals with how the New Zealand legal system has benefited from Lord Bingham's judicial leadership. He has influenced the New Zealand legal system directly through his work in the Privy Council, and by being an inspiration as a judge. The chapter discusses why Lord Bingham's judgements has been of such influence, reasons mentioned are his beautiful writing, the care he takes to ground the rule or principle of law he is applying in its legal context, the pains he takes over constitutional exposition, his willingness to look to foreign cases, to acknowledge the legal policies that underlie judicial choice, and to express the moral values of the law.

The English tradition of substantive formalism, for most of the twentieth century, had a pervasive influence, not only on English legal culture but the legal cultures of Commonwealth and Empire. Staffing of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council embodied, on the one hand, a rigidly formalistic view of the declaratory theory of law yet, on the other, the vague approach to separation of powers and judicial independence encountered elsewhere. If the legal systems of some Commonwealth countries still sometimes seem the prisoners of the earlier decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, it is perhaps appropriate to ask how that latter court was staffed as life ebbed out of it in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Queen Mary returned to her native land in 1561 to take over the government of a kingdom in which a provisional administration had been formed in the previous year by the Protestant insurgents, the ‘Lords of the Congregation’, who had overthrown the regency of her mother, Mary of Guise. An outline of the new administration of Scotland had first taken shape on August 1, 1559, when the Lords of the Congregation made a bond not to communicate with the regent. This chapter discusses how the various components of government — monarchy, parliament, privy council, nobility, and so on — acquired legitimacy in the course of political practice. In investigating this, law and government are considered as a reflection of a set of shared values. ‘Righteous’ government was highly valued, not least because it was recognised that rulers and governmental agencies might do things that would be undesirable or wrong.

Chapter 4 examines Essex’s attitudes to the structure of the Elizabethan polity, in particular in relation to the decline of his career, before and after his fall from grace in October 1599, after the earl’s failed attempt to suppress the rebellion in Ireland of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone. The origins of Essex and his followers’ conceptualization of his political rivals as evil counsellors are assessed, as are their increasing tendency to define Elizabeth’s government as a form of weak tyranny, as the earl became alienated from Privy Council, court, and queen. The chapter also analyses the origins of Essex’s powerful identification of his own virtue and welfare with the health of the Elizabethan polity, and his engagement with renaissance debates about the nature and constitutional role of the nobility. Finally, Essex’s opaque attempts to energize the Elizabethan ‘public sphere’ are reconsidered from the surviving, often ambiguous, textual evidence.

The main instruments of change in the years when the playing companies were first securing a foothold in London were the companies themselves, with their determination to establish a grip on the financial resources that the thousands of London’s paying customers offered them daily. The significant agents of change were the great lords of the Privy Council who gave them patronage. Until the companies acceded to royal patronage in 1603, three or four leading patrons led the fight against the city authorities’ opposition to playing. One figure looms particularly large in the story of how they secured their London foothold: Charles Howard, Lord Effingham, later Lord Admiral and later still the earl of Nottingham. Before looking at his actions in these years, though, it is appropriate to consider the first of the official controllers of companies, a man who was Howard’s kin and whom Howard patronized, Edmund Tilney. This chapter looks at the official controllers’ policies regarding playing companies, the plays performed by the companies, and the playhouses where they performed.

This chapter examines a wider range of seditious talk from the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of the civil war. Between 1625 and 1642, the Privy Council heard repeated reports of subjects who disparaged their monarch, who impugned his character, or who even compassed his death. The national conversation could be crude and irreverent, with scant regard for proprieties of discourse. The discussion shows that the domain of political discourse in early Stuart England to have been wider, and sometimes nastier, than historians have often imagined. It shows the cherished arcana imperii, to have been constantly eroding at the edges. A running motif across his reign was that King Charles was deficient — a boy, a child, not fit to govern. By the time his kingdom plunged into civil war, King Charles had endured a barrage of seditious despite.

There is no tangible evidence about what prompted the queen, or her agent, the Privy Council’s secretary Francis Walsingham, to set up the Queen’s Men, a new and monopolistic playing company with her patronage, on March 10, 1583. One possible reason must have been the weight of the city’s hostility to playing, and the need for the court to give some protection to the leading players, or at least enough to permit them to play in London and so fulfil their duties in the Christmas revels. The negotiations that the new Lord Chamberlain took in hand with the Lord Mayor in 1584 over accommodation for the Queen’s company in London indicate that this last motive was at least as strong as the others. The claim that support for the leading playing companies was necessary in order to ensure the annual supply of plays to the court now became the Privy Council’s standard argument in defence of playing. This chapter looks at the history of the Queen’s Men, their performances from 1583 to 1603, the plays they performed, the playhouses where they performed, their playing sharers, and their travelling records.

This chapter deals with religion, while examining the conflict between the church and the state. At parish level, the people had to be instructed in their religious duties. The direct requirements for this were preaching and catechizing: preaching to expound the word of God, catechizing to inculcate it into the memory of individuals. As well as providing these services to the community, the church was also a disciplinary institution. Discipline could itself create community, as the godly folk of the parish strengthened their identification with the church through the visible contrast that it drew between them and the ungodly. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the terms of the debate between church and state underwent a further shift. Religious radicals still invoked versions of the two-kingdoms theory, but they were never more than small and outspoken minorities. The debate looks at how much religious pluralism the state should tolerate.

Elizabeth’s reign saw Wales being brought much more completely within the orbit of the English monarchy and the full effects of the assimilation become increasingly apparent. Her monarchy was strong, stable, and popular. The problems faced by the Elizabethan administration in Wales were much the same in any part of the realm. One major difficulty about this whole extension of royal authority was that all official proceedings had to be conducted in the English language, of which the majority of the Welsh had little or no command. At the centre of government was the Privy Council, the group of Elizabeth’s most influential advisers handpicked by the Queen. Its daughter body in Wales was the Council in Marches. There were regional institutions, local institutions, and office-holders too that ran the government. Rivalries were rampant among politicians and landowners in Wales.