inally, which enabled Elizabeth to choose her own line
in domestic and foreign policy, to defer for thirty years the war with
Spain, and to resist, almost single-handed, the pressure for further
ecclesiastical change. The Tudor monarchy was essentially a national
monarchy. It was popular with the multitude, and it was actively
supported by the influential classes, the nobility, the gentry, the
lawyers, the merchants, who sat as members of Parliament at
Westminster, mustered the forces of the shire as Lords-Lieutenant, or
bore the burden of local government as borough magistrates and
justices of the peace."[18]

[Footnote 18: G. W. Prothero, Select Statutes and
other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the
Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, (Oxford, 1898),
xvii--xviii.]

*19. The Privy Council.*--The times of the Tudors and of the early
Stuarts have been designated with aptness the period of "government by
council." Parliament continued to exercise a certain control over
legislation and taxation, but it was in and through the Privy Council,
together with certain subordinate councils, that the absolute
monarchy, in the main, performed its work. The Privy Council--or
simply "the Council"--comprised ordinarily about seventeen or eighteen
persons, although under Henry VIII. its membership at one time
approached forty. The councillors were almost invariably members of
one or the other of the two houses of Parliament, an arrangement by
which was facilitated the control of the proceedings of that body by
the Government, but which did not yet involve any recognized
responsibility of the executive to the legislative branch. After Queen
Mary the councillors were, with few exceptions, laymen. Technically,
the function of the Council was only advisory, but in practice even
those sovereigns, as Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, who were most vigilant
and industrious, were obliged to allow to the councillors large
discretion in the conduct of public business, and under the early
Stuarts the Council very nearly ruled the realm. Representing at all
times the sovereign, who was supposed invariably to be present at its
deliberations, the Council supervised the work of administration,
regulated trade, granted licenses, controlled the press, kept an eye
on the law courts, ferreted out plots, took measures to suppress
rebellion, controlled the movements of the fleet, a