Another common myth is that Star Chamber resorted to torture. It did not. Torture was reserved for capital cases and was part of the royal prerogative, deriving from sovereign immunity from legal action. The king, or far more often his privy council, could warrant torture, and those so warranted could conduct torture, without fear of prosecution. The exercise of this power became one of the important issues in the struggle between the Crown and the parliamentary common law lawyers, since to the latter torture was totally repugnant to the fundamental principles of English law as well as to reason, justice and humanity. Torture, it was said, had long been repudiated by the common law courts, which haughtily rejected it as cruel, as productive of unreliable evidence, and as degrading to all who had anything to do with it, including the courts. This stout rejection was hailed as a distinguishing feature of the common law, and was subject to proud claims by a long series of the greatest English jurists, from Fortescue in the fifteenth century to James Fitzjames Stephen in the nineteenth.

Nonetheless, some eminent practitioners of the common law participated in torture. Edward Coke himself was, under Elizabeth, a commissioner for torture in at least nine cases. Once again it seems to have been the Stuarts' use of it – though they resorted to torture far less often and with more discrimination than their Tudor predecessors – that converted the common law advocates to wholesale opposition, and induced them to trumpet the greater virtues of the torture-free common law.