540 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 136. 



to Canon. Ebor. " quite to support his own posi- 

 tions." I must therefore again ask leave to de- 

 fend the view which I advanced in Vol. iv., p. 115., 

 and will endeavour, whether it be a right or wrong 

 one, to express my arguments in support of it so 

 definitely and distinctly as not again to leave room 

 for any misapprehension of them. To adopt Canon. 

 Ebor.'s threefold division : — 



1. The Three Estates of the Realm are the No' 

 lility, the Clergy in Convocation, and the Commons. 

 In this order they are ranked in the collect I 

 quoted, and in which they are described as " as- 

 sembled in parliament;" i.e. en plein parlement. 

 The following extract plainly bears out my view : 



« And that this doctrine (viz. that the Clergy are an 

 extrinsic part of Parliament, or an Estate of the Reahn) 

 was still good, and the language much the same, as low 

 as the Restoration of Charles II., the Office then anew- 

 set out for the 5th of November shews, where mention 

 is made of 'the Nobility, Clergy, and Commons of this 

 realm, then assembled in Parliament :' for to say that 

 by ' the Clergy of this realm,' my Lords the Bishops only 

 are intended, were so absurd a gloss, that even Dr. 

 Wake's pen would, I believe, be ashamed of it. And 

 if they were then rightly said to be ' assembled in Par- 

 liament,' they may as rightly be said to be so assembled 

 still: and if 'assembled in Parliament,' why not 'a 

 member of Parliament?' to those intents and pur- 

 poses, I mean, for which they are assembled in it." — 

 Atterbury's Rights, Powers, and Privileges of Convoca- 

 tion, 2nd edit, p. 30.5. 



The same order is observed in Sir Edward 

 Coke's speech on Garnet's trial : — 



" For the persons offended, they were these : — the 

 Kin" .... the Queen .... the noble Prince; .... 

 then the whole royal issue. The Council, the Nobility, 

 the Clergy ; nay, our whole religion itself," &c. 



And if Canon. Ebor. wishes for a more decisive 

 authority on the matter, he will find it in An Act 

 for granting Royal Aid unto the King's Majesty, 

 passed in 1664. 



2. The Convocations of the Clergy are a part 

 of the Parliament. This fact, and its importance, 

 has been generally overlooked or disregarded by 

 writers on Convocation. They have almost uni- 

 formlj',. while endeavouring to substantiate its 

 synodical .authority and purely ecclesiastical in- 

 fluence, omitted to point out its position as a part 

 of our parliamentary constitution : the result has 

 been a degree of vagueness and uncertainty on 

 the subject. 



The clearest and most distinct way of demon- 

 strating this proposition, that the Convocation is 

 a part of Parliament, will be, after noting that in 

 our early historians Convocatio and Parliamentum 

 are synonymous, first, to bring forward evidences 

 that it was often regarded as being so somewhat 

 late in our history, that is, just before its sessions 

 were suppressed ; and, in the next place, to pro- 

 duce facts, documents, and extracts which display 



this parliamentary character in the earlier stages 

 of its existence. To begin, then, with Burnet, 

 whose statements must be taken with allowance, 

 as those of a hot an ti- con vocational partisan, as he 

 had indeed good reasons for being : — 



" When the Bill CAct of Comprehension) was sent 

 down to the House of Commons, it was let lie on the 

 table ; and, instead of proceeding in it, they made an 

 address to the King for summoning a Convocation of 

 the Clergy, to attend, according to custom, on the session 

 of Parliament. The party against the Government .... 

 were much offended with the Bill of Comprehension, 

 as containing matters .relating to the Church, i7i ivhich 

 the representative body of the clergy had not been so much 

 as advised with." — Burnet's History of his own Times, 

 book v. 



In his account of the Convocation of 1701, the 

 facts which he details are important. After say- 

 ing that " the clergy fancied they had a right to 

 be a part of the Parliament," he continues : — 



" The things the Convocation pretended to were, 

 first, that they had a right to sit whenever the Parlia- 

 ment sate ; so that they could not be prorogued, but 

 when the two Houses were prorogued. Next they ad- 

 vanced that they had no need of a licence to enter upon 

 debates and to prepare matters, though it was confessed 

 that the practice for a hundred years was against them ; 

 but they thought the Convocation lay under no further 

 restraint than that the Parliament was under ; and as 

 they could pass no Act without the Royal assent, so 

 they confessed that they could not enact or publish a 

 Canon without the King's licence. Antiently the Clergy 

 granted their own subsidies apart, but, ever since the 

 Reformation, the grant of the Convocation was not 

 thought good till it was ratified in Parliament .... 

 In the writ that the bishops had, summoning them to Par- 

 liament, the clause, known by the first word of it, ' Pr£B- 

 munientes,' was still continued. At first, by virtue of 

 it, the inferior clergy were required to come to Parliament, 

 and to consent to the aids there given : but after the 

 archbishops had the provincial writ for a Convocation; 

 of the province, the other was no more executed, though 

 it was still kept in the writ, and there did not appear 

 the least shadow of any use that had been made of it, 

 for some hundreds of years; yet now some bishops were 

 prevailed on to execute this writ, and to summon the clergy 

 by virtue of it." — Book vi. 



"With this last extract from Burnet, let the fol- 

 lowing from Lathbury be compared : — 



" This clause, it appears, was inserted in the bishops' 

 writ in the twenty-third year of Edward I. When 

 assembled by this writ, the Clergy constituted a State 

 Convocation, not the Provincial Synod. When the 

 clause was inserted, there was a danger of invasioa 

 from France ; and it is clear that the Clergy were not 

 assembled by this clause as an Ecclesiastical Council, 

 but to assist the King in his necessities. This is evi- 

 dent from the words ' hujus modi periculis et excogitatis 

 malitiis obviandum.' The clause was, however, con- 

 tinued in the writ after the cause for its insertion had 

 ceased to exist ; but whenever they were summoned by 

 virtue of this writ, they constituted a part of the Parlia- 



