abstract:A Privy chamber was the private apartment of a royal residence in England. The gentlemen of the Privy chamber were servants to the Crown who would wait and attend on the King and Queen at court during their various activities, functions and entertainments.
It was the charismatic, even sacral powers of the king, and not bureaucracy, that underpinned regality in the reign of Henry VIII, and such powers were concentrated in the PrivyChamber, the innermost sanctum of the court, and not in institutions such as the exchequer, the courts of law, or even Parliament.