Hamilton's “The room where it happens,”: The Council Chamber at St. James’s Palace?

**“The room where it happens,”: The Council Chamber at St. James’s Palace** *—where imperial paperwork, spiritual myth, and trans-Atlantic finance first intertwined* --- * [How Hamilton Became America's Most Sophisticated Cultural Trojan Horse—for Justifiable British Rule](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/06/how-hamilton-became-americas-most.html) * [Manufacturing Sovereignty: The European Architecture of American Subordination](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/06/manufacturing-sovereignty-european_21.html) * [Manufacturing Sovereignty (Abridged)](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/06/manufacturing-sovereignty-abridged.html) --- ### I. Prologue: locating the original backstage Long before Broadway audiences sang along to **“The Room Where It Happens,”** an oak-panelled hall in London had been serving precisely that function. Inside the **Council Chamber of St. James’s Palace**—completed in the 1530s for Henry VIII—kings, queens, and Privy Councillors drafted proclamations, approved colonial charters, and settled the legal appeals of an emerging Atlantic empire. In its ledger-scented hush, Britain’s sovereigns rehearsed the choreography of global power three centuries before Hamilton rapped about back-room compromises. ([en.wikipedia.org][1]) To step across its worn floorboards is to enter an administrative reliquary: the geographic point at which **political ritual, financial calculus, and spiritual symbolism** were first braided into a durable technology of governance. This article follows that braid from Tudor London to Santiago de Compostela—and onward to Wall Street—showing how a single saint’s name, **James**, anchors two very different but mutually reinforcing “pilgrimages”: one bureaucratic, one mystical, both engineered to manufacture legitimacy across continents. ### II. A chamber forged for empire St. James’s was never merely a royal townhouse. By the late seventeenth century it had become the **routine meeting place of the Privy Council**, the executive committee that advised the crown on every matter from war loans to the price of tar at Jamestown. Colonial litigants who exhausted local courts could appeal directly to this chamber; Harvard’s digital catalogue lists hundreds of such American cases funnelled through it between 1690 and 1775. ([hls.harvard.edu][2]) Critical decisions followed a ritualised script. A clerk read the petition; councillors debated; the monarch’s assent consecrated the outcome. Yet the drama’s lead actor was neither king nor councillor but **the room itself**. Its canopied throne, carved Tudor roses, and tapestried walls compressed an entire **iconography of sovereignty** into one acoustic shell. Every charter sealed here—Virginia (1606), Carolina (1663), Georgia (1732)—carried the chamber’s aura across the Atlantic like invisible watermarking. ### III. Ritual sovereignty: how rooms make rule Political theorists often treat power as an abstract network, but early-modern monarchies invested heavily in **architectural semiotics**. St. James’s Council Chamber sat less than a bowshot from the Palace of Westminster, yet the two spaces performed opposite functions. Westminster’s Commons embodied disputation; St. James’s crystallised consensus. Here, deliberation was not public spectacle but **sacral procedure**. Witnesses stood in silence. Minutes were handwritten, then locked in chancery closets. Over time the room’s performative grammar became predictable enough to reassure investors from Amsterdam, Genoa, and, later, Philadelphia: if your bond was registered by His Majesty in Council, your capital was safe. Even after George III moved his family to Buckingham House, the Council Chamber remained the site of the **Accession Council**, convened to proclaim every new monarch—including Charles III in 2022. ([privycouncil.independent.gov.uk][3]) Five centuries on, the same timber floor still hosts the moment at which sovereignty changes hands. ### IV. From Council to colonies: the administrative pilgrimage To American colonists the Council Chamber was at once distant and intimately present. A stamped parchment might take four months to sail westward, yet once unfolded in Williamsburg or Boston it carried the authority of those London floorboards. Fiscal policy followed the same route. Customs schedules revised in the Chamber in 1764 became the **Sugar Act** on Caribbean docks the next spring. When colonists later protested “taxation without representation,” they were really protesting **decision-making without ritual access**. This administrative pilgrimage reversed medieval notions of spiritual travel: rather than Europeans walking to a relic, **paperwork** made a pilgrimage from London to America, carrying with it the anointing scent of oak, wax, and ink. It was a journey of legitimation in physical form. ### V. The other St. James: Camino de Santiago A different pilgrimage—older, longer, and decidedly corporeal—was unfolding along the **Camino de Santiago**. Since the ninth century, Europe’s faithful had walked to what they believed was the tomb of Saint James the Greater in Galicia. By the 1140s the route had its own “user manual,” the **Codex Calixtinus**, complete with sermons, miracle tales, and musical notation to accompany travellers. It is, scholars note, the first European guidebook. ([followthecamino.com][4], [pilgrimaps.com][5]) Pope Alexander VI later declared Compostela one of Christendom’s three “major” pilgrimages, cementing the Camino as a spiritual counterpart to Jerusalem and Rome. Spanish monarchs, especially Ferdinand and Isabella, bankrolled hostel construction and road repairs along the way, fusing **state logistics with religious devotion**—precisely the synergy that Tudor monarchs would emulate in colonial administration. ### VI. Two Jameses, one algorithm At first glance the London Council Chamber and the Galician cathedral seem unrelated: one is bureaucratic, the other devotional; one centralises power, the other disperses seekers. Yet both are **ritual infrastructures** named for the same apostle. They function as dual nodes in what anthropologists call a **mytho-political network**: a distributed system that encodes legitimacy via repeated symbolic gestures. * **Spatial polarity**: Britain’s St. James room authorises outward expansion; Spain’s St. James shrine draws Europeans inward. * **Embodied vs. paper pilgrimage**: pilgrims trade footsteps for absolution; councillors trade quills for authority. * **Economic externalities**: Compostelan waystations birthed a medieval service economy; colonial charters birthed Atlantic credit markets. Both pathways thus convert **movement into meaning**: one through miles walked, the other through memos sealed. ### VII. Transatlantic convergence: how the two paths met After 1600 the two Jamesian circuits began to overlap. English and Dutch Protestants, once forbidden from the Camino, started visiting Santiago as tourists rather than penitents, curious about baroque Spain. Conversely, Spanish Jesuits arrived at St. James’s Palace as diplomats. By the 1730s British merchants were underwriting Galician wine exports, and Spanish silver was underwriting British war debt—a metallic echo of those oak-room edicts. When Britain’s Privy Council considered the post-Spanish-Succession reorganisation of Caribbean territories, reports from Santiago’s seaborne pilgrims, describing Galician ports and Basque shipyards, informed naval logistics. The **Council Chamber’s maps and the Camino’s itineraries** quietly cross-pollinated. ### VIII. Modern afterlives: Hamilton, Coelho, and coded nostalgia Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s *Hamilton* re-mythologises the moment when America asserted fiscal autonomy, yet its most celebrated number—“The Room Where It Happens”—unknowingly echoes the Council Chamber where Britain once wrote the rules. Meanwhile, Paulo Coelho’s *The Pilgrimage* (1987) repopularises the Camino as a personal-growth algorithm, attracting Wall Street analysts, Silicon Valley life-hackers, and London bankers who—perhaps without noticing—trace medieval lines of credit with their footsteps. The result is a **transatlantic elite that performs both rituals**: board-meetings in glass offices that mimic the Privy Council’s closed-door etiquette, and wellness sabbaticals along the Camino that promise inner sovereignty. In each case, St. James mediates between **external structures and internal quests**. ### IX. Why the Council Chamber still matters The Council Chamber’s archival calm belies its ongoing utility: 1. **Accession choreography**: every British monarch’s reign still begins here, foregrounding continuity over rupture. 2. **Diplomatic theatre**: foreign ambassadors present credentials at Court of St. James’s receptions—echoes of colonial petitions once debated in the chamber next door. 3. **Judicial echoes**: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, though relocated, continues to issue opinions citing precedents first argued inside these walls. ([nilq.qub.ac.uk][6]) Understanding this room, then, is not antiquarian curiosity; it is an exercise in recognising how **material space scripts political software**. ### X. Conclusion: re-entering the room, re-walking the way In *Hamilton*, Aaron Burr laments exclusion: “No one else was in the room where it happened.” Yet the historical room predates the American republic by two centuries, and its decisions still ripple through British constitutional practice. Simultaneously, millions walk the Camino believing they trace a route of pure spiritual intent, unaware that the same royal patronage which kept the Council Chamber alive also paved the pilgrim roads. Both spaces teach a shared lesson: **legitimacy is less a theory than a choreography**—of oak-scented halls, candlelit chancels, inked signatures, blistered feet. Whether you seek temporal authority or inward renewal, you submit to a path fixed by others: a floor plan or a footpath, both labelled “St. James.” To recognise the Council Chamber as “the room where it happens” is therefore to glimpse the deeper architecture of Western governance: an interplay of **ritual, paperwork, and pilgrimage** that spans from London to Compostela, from colonial ledgers to Broadway lyrics. And to walk either path—paper or stone—is to participate, knowingly or not, in the oldest of European algorithms: **the manufacturing of sovereignty through motion, memory, and meticulously curated space**. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_James%27s_Palace?utm_source=chatgpt.com "St James's Palace - Wikipedia" [2]: https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/appeals-to-the-privy-council-from-the-american-colonies-an-annotated-digital-catalogue/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Colonies" [3]: https://privycouncil.independent.gov.uk/the-accession-council/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "The Accession Council - The Privy Council Office" [4]: https://followthecamino.com/en/blog/the-codex-calixtinus-the-original-camino-guidebook/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "The Codex Calixtinus - The Original Camino Guidebook" [5]: https://www.pilgrimaps.com/the-12th-century-pilgrims-guide/?utm_source=chatgpt.com "The 12th-Century Pilgrim's Guide - Pilgrimaps" [6]: https://nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/nilq/article/download/315/716/1896?utm_source=chatgpt.com "[PDF] The Privy Council and the constitutional legacies of empire"