The habeas corpus was several times suspended in this reign, as it had been in that of William. Though the perpetual conspiracies of the jacobites afforded a sufficient apology for this measure, it was invidiously held up as inconsistent with a government which professed to stand on the principles of liberty. Parl. Hist. v. 153, 267, 604; vii. 276; viii. 38. But some of these suspensions were too long, especially the last, from October 1722 to October 1723. Sir Joseph Jekyll, with his usual zeal for liberty, moved to reduce the time to six months.
[348] "It was first settled by a verbal agreement between Archbishop Sheldon and the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, and tacitly given into by the clergy in general as a great ease to them in taxations. The first public act of any kind relating to it was an act of parliament in 1665, by which the clergy were, in common with the laity, charged with the tax given in that act, and were discharged from the payment of the subsidies they had granted before in convocation; but in this act of parliament of 1665 there is an express saving of the right of the clergy to tax themselves in convocation, if they think fit; but that has been never done since, nor attempted, as I know of, and the clergy have been constantly from that time charged with laity in all public aids to the Crown by the House of Commons. In consequence of this (but from what period I cannot say), without the intervention of any particular law for it, except what I shall mention presently, the clergy (who are not lords of parliament) have assumed, and without any objection enjoyed, the privilege of voting in the election of members of the House of Commons, in virtue of their ecclesiastical freeholds. This has constantly been practised from the time it first began; there are two acts of parliament which suppose it to be now a right. The acts are 10 Anne, c. 23; 18 Geo. II. c. 18. Gibson, Bishop of London, said to me, that this (the taxation of the clergy out of convocation) was the greatest alteration in the constitution ever made without an express law." Speaker Onslow's note on Burnet (Oxf. edit. iv. 508).
[349] The first authority I have observed for this pretension is an address of the House of Lords (19 Nov. 1675) to the throne, for the frequent meeting of the convocation, and that they do make to the king such representations as may be for the safety of the religion established. Lords' Journals. This address was renewed February 22, 1677. But what took place in consequence I am not apprised. It shows, however, some degree of dissatisfaction on the part of the bishops, who must be presumed to have set forward these addresses, at the virtual annihilation of their synod which naturally followed from its relinquishment of self-taxation.
[350] Kennet, 799, 842; Burnet, 280. This assembly had been suffered to sit, probably, in consequence of the tory maxims which the ministry of that year professed.
[351] Wilkins's Concilia, iv.; Burnet, passim; Boyer's Life of Queen Anne, 225; Somerville, 82, 124.
[352] The lower house of convocation, in the late reign, among their other vagaries, had requested "that some synodical notice might be taken of the dishonour done to the church by a sermon preached by Mr. Benjamin Hoadley at St. Lawrence Jewry, Sept. 29, 1705, containing positions contrary to the doctrine of the church, expressed in the first and second parts of the homily against disobedience and wilful rebellion." Wilkins, iv. 634.
[353] These qualities are so apparent, that after turning over some forty or fifty tracts, and consuming a good many hours on the Bangorian controversy, I should find some difficulty in stating with precision the propositions in dispute. It is, however, evident that a dislike, not perhaps exactly to the house of Brunswick, but to the tenor of George I.'s administration, and to Hoadley himself as an eminent advocate for it, who had been rewarded accordingly, was at the bottom a leading motive with most of the church party; some of whom, such as Hare, though originally of a whig connection, might have had disappointments to exasperate them.
There was nothing whatever in Hoadley's sermon injurious to the established endowments and privileges, nor to the discipline and government, of the English church, even in theory. If this had been the case, he might be reproached with some inconsistency in becoming so large a partaker of her honours and emoluments. He even admitted the usefulness of censures for open immoralities, though denying all church authority to oblige any one to external communion, or to pass any sentence which should determine the condition of men with respect to the favour or displeasure of God. Hoadley's Works, ii. 465, 493. Another great question in this controversy was that of religious liberty, as a civil right, which the convocation explicitly denied. And another related to the much debated exercise of private judgment in religion, which, as one party meant virtually to take away, so the other perhaps unreasonably exaggerated. Some other disputes arose in the course of the combat, particularly the delicate problem of the value of sincerity as a plea for material errors.
[354] Tindal, 539.
[355] Parl. Hist. vi. 362.