A Second Letter to the Bishop of Exeter

Transcribed from the 1851 Joseph Masters edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY A LAYMAN
FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY.
LONDON: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR BY JOSEPH MASTERS, ALDERSGATE STREET. MDCCCLI.
My Dear Lord,
I TRUST I can now satisfy you that we have both been labouring under a great mistake for some time, and that after all no ecclesiastical rule can properly be said to have been violated by the judgment of the Privy Council in the Gorham Case, but that it is quite right that the Crown should have the jurisdiction in such a case which they have actually exercised.
Now the suit, and of course the Appeal to the Privy Council, is, properly speaking, confined to the first branch alone. If the Archbishop decides against the Bishop, the latter then appeals to the Crown to prevent the Archbishop from improperly infringing on his Diocesan rights, and if the Crown, upon argument before the Delegates or Privy Council, think the Bishop right they will by their judgment overrule the Archbishop and prohibit him thereby from proceeding. On the contrary, if they think the Bishop wrong, they will leave the Archbishop to proceed to the second branch, the consequence of his decision, and will direct him to act at his discretion in instituting the Clerk, if on examination he finds him fit.
Or suppose the Archbishop, agreeing with the Bishop, has dismissed the Clerk’s suit in his Court. The Clerk then appeals to the Crown, and the Privy Council hear it. If they think the Bishop originally wrong in his refusal, and therefore that the Archbishop ought to have acted on his jurisdiction, they order him to proceed so to do, and he then proceeds, as in duty bound, to act as he would have done if the living were in the Diocese of Canterbury.
The Privy Council do not order the Archbishop to institute as a mere ministerial act; they have no jurisdiction to do that, but they have a jurisdiction to compel him to exercise his Archiepiscopal discretion in that case.