Conflict coalesced in the Court of Star Chamber. The very name is now a byword for tyranny but this is a misnomer. In its inception, and throughout most of its history, it represented precisely the opposite. Its demise was tragic in the true sense that it was as a result of the corruption of the best. Star Chamber – camera stell at a – consisted of two interconnected rooms in the Palace of Westminster. From the fourteenth century on the king's council met there, around a large table covered by a green carpet, to exercise its delegated powers, including judicial ones. It derived its authority directly from the king; it derived its name from the star-studded ceiling. 1 But fantasy also gilded it. ‘Like as the stars do adorn the firmament and in the dark night do give their light unto the earth, so the lords of the nobility according to their calling do in this court shine forth by their virtues of piety, wisdom and good justice’, gushed Richard Robinson in Elizabeth's reign. Its first historian, William Hudson, writing under James I, went further in sycophancy, asserting that its starry decor demonstrated that the councillors sitting there in judgment were but a mere reflection of the grandeur of the monarch from whom all their powers flowed. Long before Louis XIV, James I was the Sun King: