Star-chamber cautious of determining questions of
inheritance, which they commonly remitted to the judges; and from the
early part of Elizabeth's reign they took a direct cognizance of any
civil suits less frequently than before, partly, I suppose, from the
increased business of the court of chancery and the admiralty court,
which took away much wherein they had been wont to meddle, partly from
their own occupation as a court of criminal judicature, which became
more conspicuous as the other went into disuse. This criminal
jurisdiction is that which rendered the Star-chamber so potent and so
odious an auxiliary of a despotic administration.

The offences principally cognizable in this court were forgery, perjury,
riot, maintenance, fraud, libel, and conspiracy. But, besides these,
every misdemeanor came within the proper scope of its inquiry; those
especially of public importance, and for which the law, as then
understood, had provided no sufficient punishment; for the judges
interpreted the law in early times with too great narrowness and
timidity, defects which, on the one hand, raised up the overruling
authority of the court of chancery as the necessary means of redress to
the civil suitor who found the gates of justice barred against him by
technical pedantry, and on the other, brought this usurpation and
tyranny of the Star-chamber upon the kingdom by an absurd scrupulosity
about punishing manifest offences against the public good.

Thus corruption, breach of trust and malfeasance in public affairs,
attempts to commit felony, seem to have been reckoned not indictable at
common law, and came, in consequence, under the cognizance of the
Star-chamber. In other cases its jurisdiction was merely concurrent; but
the greater certainty of conviction and the greater severity of
punishment rendered it incomparably more formidable than the ordinary
benches of justice. The law of libel grew up in this unwholesome
atmosphere, and was moulded by the plastic hands of successive judges
and attorneys-general. Prosecutions of this kind, according to Hudson,
began to be more frequent from the last years of Elizabeth, when Coke
was attorney-general; and it is easy to conjecture what kind of
interpretation they received. To hear a libel sung or read, says that
writer, and to laugh at it and make merriment with it, have ever been
held a publication in law. The gross error that it is not a libel if it
be true, has long since, he adds,