The origins of ministerial government in the western world lay in the transformation of royal private secretaries from the personal aides of a prince into major political players in their own right running fully fledged, if small, departments of state. In the course of the sixteenth century secretaries of state emerged at the courts of both France and Spain, but by the 1600s these two great powers had diverged in their models of government. In Spain during the later years of Philip II's reign secretarial authority stalled and multiple layers of conciliar government came to prevail, while in England the Privy Council retained a collective importance over and above the relationship between the secretaries and the monarch. In France, however, the secretaries of state, alongside the financial officials, emerged under Henri III and Henri IV as the vital agents of royal executive power, recruited principally from among lawyers and junior councillors. Not least they provided the king with some insulation from the competing influences of the grands, who found themselves increasingly excluded from institutional roles at the heart of government to the benefit of the secretaries. This system, with modifications, was imitated in Savoy from the 1660s and in Spain after 1700.

Initially the responsibilities of French secretaries of state were allocated on a geographical basis, with each one of these four or five officials entrusted with nearly all business related to a particular region of the kingdom.