Henry established a special tribunal for dealing with the offences of men, whose power and influence might foil and divert the ordinary course of justice. This was the new and unconstitutional "Court of Star Chamber," a committee of trusted members of the Privy Council, which met in a room at Westminster whose roof was decorated with a pattern of stars. The court was useful at the time, but grew to be a serious grievance in later days, because it stood over and above the ordinary law of the land, and was used to carry out any illegal punishment that the king might devise. [Sidenote: =Reduction of the surviving barons.=] By these arbitrary means, Henry Tudor succeeded in taming the survivors of the baronage, and in reducing them to such a state of subjection to the crown as England had never before seen. Their spirit had already been broken by the endless slaughters and confiscations of the Wars of the Roses, and the majority of them were well content to surrender the anarchical independence which they had enjoyed of late, in return for a quiet and undisturbed security for life and land. It is to be noticed that many of the oldest and most powerful houses had now disappeared. By the year 1500 there only survived of the older and greater peerages those of Northumberland, Westmoreland, Arundel, Buckingham, Devon, and Oxford, to which may be added the duchy of Norfolk, afterwards restored to the Howards by Henry VIII. If we find other ancient titles borne by men of the Tudor time, we must remember that the holders were not the heirs of the lines whose names they bore, and did not possess the vast estates that had made those titles all-important. The Warwicks or Somersets, the Suffolks or Herefords of the sixteenth century are the mere creatures of Tudor caprice. [Sidenote: =Foreign policy of Henry.=]