COUNCIL OF STATE, THE, the executive body of the Commonwealth, one and twenty members chosen by the Senate and renewed by thirds each year, so that no Council is ever wholly new and none is ever more than three years old in its most junior third. It is presided over by the Lord President (q.v.), who is its chairman and the Commonwealth's chief magistrate but possesses within it no vote the other twenty do not equally possess, an equality this contributor's colleagues in constitutional law regard as the Frame's most deliberate single check upon the office: whatever moral authority a Lord President accumulates in his term, he accumulates it by persuading twenty colleagues rather than by outvoting them.
The Council's ordinary business — the conduct of foreign correspondence between sessions of the Senate, the superintendence of the customs and the Navigation System's own schedule, and, since 1691, the standing Committee of the Plantations through which the Western Provinces' affairs are managed between the sittings of a Western Session — occupies the greater part of its calendar and generates, in an ordinary year, considerably more paper than glory. It meets at the Convention House (q.v.), in the chamber built for the purpose in 1697 and enlarged only once since, when the Third Frame's bicoastal sessions required room enough for the Committee of the Plantations to sit alongside the Council proper rather than in the corridor outside it, a crowding the Council's own minute-books complain of, in terms this contributor finds more entertaining than the ordinary run of committee business generally allows itself, for the better part of two decades before the enlargement was finally voted.
Its accounting has been laid before the Senate publicly every year since Sir Henry Vane (q.v.) first made a virtue, in the sixteen- sixties, of a practice no earlier English government had thought to make customary, and this contributor, who has examined a representative decade of those accounts scattered across the last two centuries, can report that the practice has held with a consistency few of the Commonwealth's other institutions can match: the Council of State has never yet gone a twelvemonth without publishing what it spent, though it has occasionally taken rather longer than a twelvemonth to publish what it spent the money on. It remains, by design, an unglamorous body — a chairman with no extra vote, twenty colleagues renewed a third at a time, and an archive that survives fire rather better than it survives the ordinary tedium of provincial correspondence — and this contributor is inclined to think its very unglamour the surest evidence that the framers of 1660 built it to do exactly what it does, and very little more. (E. H. V.)