"For the persons offended, they were these:—the King ... 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 uniformly, while endeavouring to substantiate its synodical authority and purely ecclesiastical influence, 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 demonstrating 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 produce 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 anti-convocational partisan, as he had indeed good reasons for being:—
"When the Bill (Act 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, in which 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 saying 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 Parliament sate; so that they could not be prorogued, but when the two Houses were prorogued. Next they advanced 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 Parliament, the clause, known by the first word of it, 'Præmunientes,' 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 following 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 invasion 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 evident from the words 'hujus modi periculis et excogitatis malitiis obviandum.' The clause was, however, continued 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 Parliament. The clause, with a slight variation, is still retained in the writ by which the bishops are summoned to Parliament."—Lathbury's History of the Convocation of the Church of England, p. 121.
It will be obvious, then, and plain to the reader of the above passage, that when the clergy were summoned by this clause Præmunientes, in the writ directed to the archbishops, they were summoned to be a part of Parliament; but the King's writ was that which made Convocation what it was—which made it a legal, constitutional, parliamentary assembly, with definite power and authority—instead of a simple synodical meeting of the clergy, whose influence would be solely moral or ecclesiastical. Convocation, from the time of Edward I., that is, from its first beginning, has been a part of parliament, being "an assembly of ecclesiastics for civil purposes, called to parliament by the King's writ" to the archbishops; and before the time of Henry VIII. it voted subsidies to the King independently of the Houses of Lords and Commons. Of this clause Præmunientes, Canon. Ebor. has taken no notice whatever, although in the extract from Collier it was expressly stated that the proctors of the clergy were "summoned to parliament" and "sent up to parliament" by it, and, when assembled in the Lower House of Convocation, they were esteemed the Spiritual Commons of the realm, and a constituent part of "the great Council of the nation assembled in parliament." But as mere assertions, or even uncorroborated deductions, are but of little value without facts, I must establish this much by producing authorities.