The chief interest in Welsh affairs after 1534 centres in the Council. It was not so prominent after the death of Rowland Lee, when the country had become peaceful and law-abiding; but its general supervision over all Welsh affairs, both legal and administrative, was constant and unflagging. At first the Council had no fixed abode, and we hear of its sitting at Shrewsbury, Hereford, Worcester, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Hartlebury, Oswestry, Wrexham, and Bewdley; but at last it came to be fixed at Ludlow. Here, during the next hundred years, assembled much that was intellectual, fashionable, and splendid in Tudor and Stuart society. It was, as we have seen, the home of Prince Arthur, the eldest child of Henry VII, and of Mary, the eldest child of Henry VIII. Here, for twenty-seven years, lived Sir Henry Sidney, soldier, scholar, and statesman. Here his even more {138} famous son, Philip Sidney, and his daughter Mary, spent the early part of their lives. It had among its guests for shorter periods the poet Churchyard, the Puritan Richard Baxter, and the Royalist Samuel Butler. But the thing which has cast an undying glamour over the place is the fact that, in 1634, John Milton witnessed in the old castle the first performance of his masque _Comus_. The Presidents of the Council were, at first, all ecclesiastics; but in the reign of Edward VI a layman, Robert Dudley, was appointed; and except for an interlude during the reign of Mary that remained the practice. The chief function of the Council was to supervise the work of all Welsh officials, and to hear all manner of "extortions, maintenance, imbraceries, oppressions, conspiracies, escapes, corruptions, falsehoods, and all other evil doings, defaults, and misdemeanours of all sheriffs, justices of the peace, mayors, bailiffs, stewards, lieutenants, escheators, coroners, gaolers, clerks, and other officers and ministers of justice." It had power to issue proclamations, and to assess fines. Unhappily it had too, in company with the other prerogative courts of the Tudors, the power to use torture in order to elicit confessions. The Lord President was, {139} almost invariably, Lord-Lieutenant of the twelve Welsh shires. In legal matters strictly so called the Council exercised a concurrent jurisdiction with the Court of Great Sessions, and an appellate jurisdiction in personal actions. It is not true to say that the Court of Great Sessions exercised no equity jurisdiction; but it is a fact that by far the greater number of Welsh equity cases were heard at Ludlow.