For multitudinous examples of the Convocation Clergy, "Prælati et clerus," being spoken of as not only of the parliament, but present in it, I must refer Canon. Ebor. to Atterbury's work, pp. 61, 62, 63.

And it is certain that, before the Commons can be proved to have been summoned to parliament at all, the inferior clergy sat there. In the parliament of Henry III. held at Westminster, 1228, there sat "the Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, Priors, Templars, Hospitallers, Earls, Barons,

Rectors of churches, and they that held of the King in chief" (Mat. Paris, p. 361.), in which the order of precedence is worth observing.

One more argument of Canon. Ebor.'s has to be met. He says (Vol. iv., p. 197.), "The Convocation of the Clergy never met either the sovereign or the parliament." The following quotations will destroy this position:—

"Though sometimes the King himself has vouchsafed to appear and sit in Convocation, when it was called for some extraordinary cause; as in Arundel's Register Henry IV. is remembered to have done (in Conv. habitâ 23 Jul. 1408, causâ Uniones)."—Atterbury, p. 20.

Also:

"'Until the reign of Henry VII., there is a doubt whether the Convocation of the Clergy, then in separate existence from the Parliament since Edward I., had transacted purely ecclesiastical business not connected with the Government, or where the King was not present in person. (Henry IV., Wilkins, p. 310.) In the reign of Henry VIII., who also sat in Convocation, no Church Provincial Synod was held, and the House of Lords met and adjourned on the days on which Convocation transacted business in consideration to the bishops, who were barons of Parliament, and also members of the Upper House of Convocation. (Wake.)'"—Diocesan Synods, by Rev. W. Pound, M.A.

3. The Clergy were not, and are not, represented in parliament by the Spiritual Lords. The bishops are called to the House of Lords as barons; just in the same manner as the abbots and priors were formerly summoned, not as representing any body of men, but as holding in capite of the King. The prelates have sat in the House of Lords since William I., not as peers or nobles by blood, nor as representatives, but by virtue of this tenure. They certainly were not considered as representatives before the Reformation; and that the same opinions respecting them prevailed still later, will appear from the decision of the House of Commons in 1 Mary, that a clerk could not be chosen into that House, "because he was represented already in another House;" and again, from a speech in the Commons by Mr. Solicitor St. John on the "Act to take away Bishops' Votes in Parliament:"

"1. Because they have no such inherent right and liberty of being there as the Lords Temporal and Peers of the Realm have; for they are not there representative of any body else; no, not of the clergy; for if so, then the clergy were twice represented by them, viz. the Lords' House and in the Convocation; for their writ of election is to send two clerks ad consentiendum, &c. Besides, none are there representative of others, but those that have their suffrages from others; and therefore only the clerks in Convocation do represent them.

"3. If they were representative of the clergy, as a third estate and degree, no act of parliament could be good if they did wholly disassent; and yet they have disassented, and the law good and in force, as in the Act for establishing the Book of Common Prayer in Queen Elizabeth's time. They did disassent from the confirming of that law, which could not have been good if they had been a third estate, and disassented."—Rapin's History of England, book xx.

And in the same parliament Lord Falkland—