. On a visit
to the Earl of Oxford, one of the most devoted adherents of the
Lancastrian cause, the king found two long lines of liveried retainers
drawn up to receive him. "I thank you for your good cheer, my Lord," said
Henry as they parted, "but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my
sight. My attorney must speak with you." The Earl was glad to escape with
a fine of L10,000. It was with a special view to the suppression of this
danger that Henry employed the criminal jurisdiction of the royal Council.
The king in his Council had always asserted a right in the last resort to
enforce justice and peace by dealing with offenders too strong to be dealt
with by his ordinary courts. Henry systematized this occasional
jurisdiction by appointing in 1486 a committee of his Council as a regular
court, to which the place where it usually sat gave the name of the Court
of Star Chamber. The king's aim was probably little more than a purpose to
enforce order on the land by bringing the great nobles before his own
judgement-seat; but the establishment of the court as a regular and no
longer an exceptional tribunal, whose traditional powers were confirmed by
Parliamentary statute, and where the absence of a jury cancelled the
prisoner's right to be tried by his peers, furnished his son with an
instrument of tyranny which laid justice at the feet of the monarchy.

[Sidenote: War of Britanny]

In his foreign policy Henry like Edward clung to a system of peace. His
aim was to keep England apart, independent of the two great continental
powers which during the Wars of the Roses had made revolutions at their
will. Peace indeed was what Henry needed, whether for the general welfare
of the land, or for the building up of his own system of rule. Peace
however was hard to win. The old quarrel with France seemed indeed at an
end; for it was Henry's pledge of friendship which had bought the French
aid that enabled him to mount the throne. But in England itself hatred of
the French burned fiercely as ever; and the growth of the French monarchy
in extent and power through the policy of Lewis the Eleventh, his
extinction of the great feudatories, and the administrative centralization
he introduced, made even the coolest English statesman look on it as a
danger to the realm. Only Britanny broke the long stretch of French coast
which fronted England; and the steady refusal of Edward the Fourth to
suffer Lewis to attack the Duchy showed the