Court of Castle Chamber
The Court of Castle Chamber was an Irish court of special jurisdiction which operated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It was established by Elizabeth I of England in 1571 to deal with cases of riot and public order crime generally, and all crimes which threatened the security of the Crown. It was explicitly modelled on the English Court of Star Chamber, and it was often referred to as Star Chamber. It took its name from the chamber which was specially built for it in Dublin Castle, situated over the main gate.
The Court of Castle Chamber in its early decades was, like Star Chamber, popular with members of the public who, under the guise of complaining about cases of riot or public disorder, brought their private lawsuits to Castle Chamber, which was often swamped with private business as a result. Nonetheless, its jurisdiction to hear private cases was often questioned and was not confirmed until 1634, a few years before it ceased to operate. Its popularity was seemingly unaffected by the fact that it was notoriously ineffective in enforcing its decrees.
In the seventeenth century, Castle Chamber, like its English counterpart, was seen by the Stuart dynasty as a suitable instrument for enforcing government policy and it became highly unpopular as a result. Its use by Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, who as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was virtually all-powerful in that Kingdom, as the principal instrument for subduing the king's political opponents, was one of the principal reasons for his downfall and execution in 1641. During the political upheaval caused by the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the court simply ceased to operate, although there is no record that it was ever formally abolished. It was not revived after the Restoration of 1660.
Origins, structure and procedure
While Star Chamber developed gradually over time, Castle Chamber was established by a special commission under the privy seal of Queen Elizabeth I in June 1571. Due to the ineffectiveness of the regular Irish courts in dealing with serious crime, the establishment of a separate Star Chamber jurisdiction in Ireland was a reform which had been proposed by successive Lord Deputies, notably Sir Henry Sidney, who in the months before his recall to England at the end of his first term as Lord Deputy in 1567, helped to draw up the plans for the new court. In time this project gained the support of the leading minister William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, and of the Queen herself. In the Queen's own words:Remit of the court
The remit of the new court was very wide: it had the power to deal with cases of riot, kidnapping, perjury, forgery, recusancy, judicial corruption, the correction of recalcitrant sheriffs and juries, libel and malicious attacks on the reputation of public figures. It did not deal with cases of treason or cases concerning the Plantation of Ulster.Not all the cases it heard fit neatly into any of these categories: in its early years the court heard a petition against the levying of cess, the military tax for the upkeep of the garrisons of the Pale, possibly because it raised questions about the royal prerogative. A celebrated probate case, Lady Digby v Dowager Countess of Kildare, was referred to the Chamber because of an allegation of forgery; the Chamber agreed to hear the case but later complained of the amount of time it had wasted on what was essentially a private inheritance dispute. Likewise, it is unclear what power the Chamber had to hear the charge of domestic cruelty brought against Lord Howth for ill-treating his wife and daughter: the pretext for the hearing was an accusation of perjury against one of his servants.
In Castle Chamber's last years, it was much concerned with cases of misappropriation of Church lands. Again it is unclear how such cases fell within its remit, and this activity should perhaps be seen as part of the Earl of Strafford's wider campaign to curb abuses of power by the "New Irish" nobility, especially the Earl of Cork, whom Strafford regarded as a notorious offender in illegally seizing Church lands.
Discipline of judges and juries
Castle Chamber dealt with a number of cases of judicial corruption: William Saxey, Chief Justice of Munster, was severely reprimanded for corrupt practices in 1597, and Patrick Segrave, Baron of the Court of Exchequer, was removed from office for corruption in 1602.The control of juries was another major concern of Castle Chamber, at a time when the Crown, in cases of treason and other serious crimes, still insisted that the jury must deliver the "right" verdict, and also expected juries to give the "right" verdict in important civil cases, especially those involving the Crown's title to land.
In 1586 a County Kildare jury was convicted of perjury, on the ground that having taken an oath to deliver a true verdict they had in breach of their oath and in flagrant disregard of the evidence acquitted two men who, according to the Castle Chamber, were obviously guilty of murder. For their "dangerous example" to other juries, the jurors were convicted and fined, although "in consideration of their poverty" the fines imposed on them were small.
More severe penalties were imposed on the Youghal jury which in 1603 acquitted William Meade, the former Recorder of Cork, of treason. Meade, one of the few openly Roman Catholic judges on the Irish Bench, was charged with a number of grave offences, including refusing to acknowledge King James I as the rightful monarch, inciting the citizens of Cork to demolish the fort at Haulbowline, killing or inciting the killing of three Englishmen, and shutting the city gates in the face of troops sent by Sir George Carew, the Lord President of Munster. An exceptionally strong Bench of senior officials, headed by Lord President Carew himself, put great pressure on the jury to convict Meade of his "heinous treasons", but the jury refused, maintaining that Meade, who was extremely popular in County Cork, "had not intended in his heart to commit treason". For this conduct, which in the Crown's eyes was only a little less serious than Meade's alleged treason itself, the foreman of the jury was fined £1000 marks and the other jurors were each fined £500, and they were ordered to appear before the next assize court wearing placards proclaiming their offence.
This severe treatment reflects the Crown's consistent attitude to such trials. In England at this time, and for many years afterwards, the jury in a treason trial was expected to convict as a matter of course: as J.P. Kenyon remarks, treason was regarded as a crime so heinous that no person charged with it could be permitted to escape punishment. Irish juries, however, were less easily coerced: Fynes Moryson, secretary to the Lord Deputy, remarked sourly and with the wisdom of hindsight of the Meade case that: "no man that knows Ireland did imagine that an Irish jury would condemn him".
In civil cases also Castle Chamber would on occasion penalize a jury for giving the "wrong" verdict if the case was one in which the Crown had an interest. In 1635 a Galway jury was fined by Castle Chamber after it infuriated the Earl of Strafford, the Lord Lieutenant, by giving a verdict that certain lands belonged not to the Crown but to Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde, thus threatening Strafford's wider policy of reclaiming much of the province of Connacht as Crown land.
Of several accusations of corruption made against the Lord Chancellor, Adam Loftus, in the late 1630s, at least one, the petition of John Fitzgerald, was heard in Castle Chamber, apparently because Strafford, the Lord Deputy, wished to assert his power to override the ordinary judicial process.
Business of the court
As already noted, much of the business of Castle Chamber consisted of private litigation, despite lingering doubts about its jurisdiction in such cases; in 1608 the Court complained that a single private case, Digby v Kildare, had taken up two entire law terms. As a court of equity it was open to women, and quite a large number of cases brought before it involved women as plaintiffs, defendants or both: Jenet Sarsfield sued Margaret Howth for abduction and other offences, and in the long-running case of Digby v Kildare Lettice Digby sued her grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Kildare, for forgery.Castle Chamber became a popular forum for the aristocracy to air their complaints against one another, but could also be used to discipline nobles like Christopher St Lawrence, 8th Baron Howth, who were suspected of disloyalty to the English Crown or of recusancy. It was also used to enforce the Penal Laws with great severity in the period 1605–22, a policy which aroused much public anger and political opposition.
Structure of the court
Castle Chamber was set up partly to curb the number of petitions to the Privy Council of England on Irish affairs, and partly because the equivalent Irish Council, unlike its English counterpart, had not until then had a separate judicial identity.Castle Chamber was intended to be the judicial wing of the Irish Privy Council, but the two bodies were never fully distinct, especially under the personal rule of the Earl of Strafford, who tended to deal with judicial business informally. Its membership was identical to that of the council, but the judges had the predominant influence in the Chamber; later orders specified that the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, the Chief Justices of the courts of common law and the Master of the Rolls in Ireland should always attend. It was presided over by the Lord Deputy of Ireland but could act in his absence or when the office was vacant. The personality of the Lord Deputy and his degree of engagement with the court inevitably affected its operation: under Lord Mountjoy the court effectively ceased to operate.
Legal procedure
Our knowledge of the procedures followed in Castle Chamber is hampered by the court's notoriously poor record-keeping: during the last twenty years of its operation, no proper entry book of the cases it heard was kept. It seems to have followed the Star Chamber procedure: the plaintiff filed a bill of complaint, which was followed by an answer from the defendant, and replication by the plaintiff. The court soon became notorious for slow procedures, heavy fees, and ineffective remedies, although these weaknesses did not deter litigants from bringing lawsuits. The court's procedure seems to have been rather informal: this was a feature of Irish courts generally at the time, and in 1607, in an important recusancy case, the Attorney General urged that the court should show more solemnity than usual.In case of serious offences, such as riot and unlawful assembly, the Chamber gave a ruling in the case of Richard Talbot v Nicholas Nugent that two eyewitnesses to the offence were required; since both parties to that action were High Court judges, the court's reluctance to convict the defendant is understandable.