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Finally, there are Ministers of State—who are deputy ministers in departments where there is a heavy load of work or where, as in the case of the Foreign Office, the duties involve frequent overseas travel—and junior Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries, or Parliamentary Under Secretaries of State.

The cabinet system, like so much else in British government, was not the result of Olympian planning. It "just growed." The Tudors began to appoint ad hoc committees of the Privy Council. By the time of Charles II the Privy Council numbered forty-seven. There then developed an occasional arrangement in which a council of people in high office was constituted to debate questions of domestic and foreign affairs.

Such committees or cabinets persisted until the reign of Queen Anne. Usually, but not always, they met in the presence of the sovereign. In 1717, George I, the first Hanoverian King, ceased to attend cabinet meetings. Until recently the accepted historical reason for this was the King's ignorance of English—a circumstance that might, one would think, enable him to bear long debates with fortitude. However, J.H. Plumb in his recent life of Sir Robert Walpole has suggested that the King's absence from the cabinet was due to a quarrel between the monarch and the Prince of Wales.