354 THE COUNCIL UNDER THE TUDORS July the king when Norfolk and Sir Thomas More were absent. 1 Before the end of the year, however, Norfolk is for once styled president of the council, 2 and then the presidency seems to relapse into the obscurity from which it had so suddenly emerged. The act of 1529 looks like a measure merely designed to give high official rank to Suffolk, the king's brother-in-law, who was a competent soldier but had no aptitude for politics, little weight in counsel, and more taste for the country than the court. He surrendered the earl-marshalship, which he had held since 1524, to Norfolk in April 1533, 3 and continued to hold the office of lord president until his death. But he was generally absent from court, and apparently had no functions to perform. In April 1538, when Shrewsbury, the lord steward, was nearing his end, it was reported that the royal household was to be arranged ' as it is in France, and a gran mastre de hostell made ' ; 4 and Suffolk was soon afterwards appointed lord great master, 5 or lord steward, as the office is alternatively described in the act of 1539. 6 Besides being lord president, he was lord great master until his death in 1545. The future duke of Northumberland applied for the latter office on hearing of Suffolk's illness, 7 but it was granted to Sir William Paulet, Lord St. John and afterwards earl of Wiltshire and marquis of Winchester, who, however, was not made lord president until Edward VI's reign, on 21 March 1547. After Somerset's fall in October 1549, St. John became lord treasurer, while Warwick succeeded him first as lord great master and then as lord president, and in 1552 he is styled in the Lords' Journals Praesidens Privati Consilii Domini Regis. 8 It was he who, wisely avoiding the title of lord protector, made the office of lord president something very much like it. On Mary's accession, Arundel became lord president, while the act of 1539 was repealed 9 and the lord great master reduced to the old style of lord steward, an office which Arundel also held. He continued to be called lord president till the end of the 1555 session, but from that time onward no lord president or steward appears in 1 Letters and Papers, iv. 6199. The list in App. D to the new edition of G. E. C.'s Complete Peerage (ii. 622) only gives three presidents in the sixteenth century.
- Letter? and Papers, iv. 6763 ; Du Bellay had written of Norfolk being made
chief of the council in October 1529 (ibid. 6018). 8 Ibid. vi. 415.
- Ibid. xm. i. 510 ; the phrase ' Lord Master ' occurs in the instructions for Mary's
council in Wales in 1525, and precedes her ' president of council ' (ibid. iv. 2331). 5 Sussex actually succeeded Shrewsbury as lord steward, but in 1540 he was made lord great chamberlain vice Cromwell, who had been appointed on the earl of Oxford's death (ibid. xv. 541, 611 [37], 1027 [12]. Suffolk begins to be styled lord great master in 1539-40 in the Letters and Papers.
- 31 Henry VIII, c. 10. ' Letters and Papers, xx. ii. 427.
8 Lords' Journals, i. 394-5. 1 Mary, Session 3, c. 4.
