government was the court of high commission, which had the double advantage of being authorized by statute, and yet left at liberty to derive its weapons from the inexhaustible armoury of the king's prerogative. It was the policy of queen Elizabeth to employ the authority of this court for all the purposes of the church, whether executive or legislative, considering the prelates whom she placed in it, with the primate at their head, as a delegation from the house of bishops, and acquiring the further advantage of controling their opinions by means of the other commissioners appointed from among her own ministers. Doubtless this court, from the unbounded extent of its jurisdiction and the extreme cogency of its measures, was an instrument admirably adapted for the hands of an absolute ruler; but Elizabeth seems also to have considered it as capable of sustaining any weight of odium or resistance that might be occasioned by her rigorous views of church discipline. The Advertisements that were issued in the year 1564 by the bishops in commission, consisting of orders for the government of the church, which were founded upon no past sanctions, either legislative or synodical, and were not permitted to receive her own formal ratification, shew, by a memorable instance, that the queen placed no limit upon the authority of that court, and had no fears as to any amount of opposition it might meet with.

And beyond and above all these methods of coercion and direction was the supremacy of the crown, which at the time of the Reformation may be said to have combined the rights of an absolute monarch with the spiritual domination of the pope, and to have been restrained in the personal exercise of the latter functions only by its own act of self-denial admitted and confirmed by the legislature. The oath of supremacy, provided in the statute, (1 Eliz. c. 1,) declared the queen to be the "only supreme governor of the realm, as well in all spiritual and ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal ;" and there was nothing to exclude her from "challenging authority and power of ministry of divine service in the church," until she expressly renounced it in her Injunctions of the year 1559, and allowed her renunciation to be confirmed by an act of parliament in the year 1571, when the XXXIX Articles of religion became the law of the land.

But although these high and rival authorities were sufficient

to cripple the power of convocations, and to relieve them from the discharge of their most important duties, there still remained to them the office of providing subsidies from the great and wealthy body whom they represented. This office they fulfilled during the most trying periods of the monarchy with constant and unabated loyalty, advancing large sums by way of loan, taxing themselves to a great amount for terms of years, and granting in several instances lavishly, and in one instance fatally, a free benevolence. It is a fact worth observing, and only to be explained by the acknowledged connection in interest and in existence between the church and the throne, that these imposts, though frequently attended with great hardship, were freely voted, and for the most part were readily paid. But a benevolence was a method of raising supplies which came recommended to the sovereign by two most important advantages. It was paid to him directly, and without the liability of his rendering any account of it, and—what became at last its most pernicious attribute-it did not require, as all common subsidies did, to be confirmed and levied by authority of parliament. It was enforced by means of the weapons of the church; and as excommunication was full of terrors, both spiritual and temporal, to all those from whom the benevolence was to be collected, it needed no assistance from the common penalties of the law. This was the measure to which recourse was had by Charles I. in the year 1640; and archbishop Laud, who was painfully alive to all the consequences of the approaching conflict, but had not duly estimated the relative strength and influence of the combatants, recommended that the benevolence should be raised, and took his precedent from a similar proceeding of archbishop Whitgift in 1585, when the jealousy of the commons could not be of fended, and the prerogative of the crown was undisputed. To this act of archbishop Laud, above the other conspiring causes of that eventful period, may be ascribed the complete and disastrous alienation that followed between the church and the parliament.

The recollection of this important measure, and of the great constitutional interests involved in it, survived the long interval of disorder, and led at the period of the restoration to a new era in the history of convocations. All persons, whether

promoting the welfare of the church or of the state, appeared to acquiesce in the necessity for some change, to prevent the occurrence of any future contests between the clergy and the commons. The one party naturally suggested that an uniform system of taxation, enforced by the same authority, should prevail throughout the kingdom; and the other readily acquiesced in a proposal, which not only dispensed equal justice to all parties, but in doing so relieved their own adherents from great oppression. The experiment moreover had been tried during the protectorate, and having been considered successful had created a kind of necessity in its favour. The clergy were aware that by surrendering this right of selftaxation, they were abandoning many disputable pretensions of their predecessors in order to accomplish an arrangement of real usefulness; but they probably did not foresee the ultimate consequences of their measure, consequences, which though remote were unavoidable, commencing in the immediate disparagement of all church synods, and terminating in their virtual annihilation. This arrangement, adopted by all' parties tacitly at the time, and never confirmed by any sufficient authority, legislative or synodical, has since, like wild plants in an intricate forest, become intermingled with provisions of acts of parliament, and taken firm root among them; being, as bishop Gibson has observed, the greatest alteration ever made in the constitution without an express law.

It was soon found that convocations were an empty pageant. They were of no value to the government; they were regarded with some degree of jealousy by the bishops; attendance on them was irksome and harassing to the lower clergy; and it was only the sense of their constitutional importance, and the fear that the church would lose its proper influence in the counsels of the nation, which made any party desire that convocations should still maintain a decent and determinate existence. A time of great trouble followed, when all the energies of the church were needed, and its individual members entering boldly into the conflict were the means of saving both the church and the state from impending destruction; and yet convocations continued silent. The revolution was effected, and one of its immediate consequences was to bring the great body of the clergy into collision with the civil go

vernment, and to invest them with an unusual degree of influence and authority. And this was precisely the period, when a man of active and resolute spirit, devoted to the cause of church privilege, and inflamed with temporal ambition, would find an ample field for his exertions, and a large body of followers ripe for extreme measures. The discussion had already been opened by other writers; but the book published by Atterbury in the year 1700, entitled "The rights, powers and privileges of an English convocation stated and vindicated,” and the eloquence and intrepidity with which he followed up his defence of the lower house, soon placed him at the head of the high-church party, and in open opposition to the measures of the court. In the political changes which took place in the earlier portion of the 18th century, he filled high stations and exercised a commanding influence, although he was finally driven into banishment. During the same interval there were also times when under the advantage of the royal favour the convocation was called upon to transact important business in connection with church discipline. But the feud between the two houses, which Atterbury had studiously carried to extremities, had sunk deep into the memory of the nation, and tainted in public opinion the very nature of a synod.

And yet it appears that in this protracted contest the blame belonged exclusively to the lower clergy, who sought in opposition to all past practice to obtain an acknowledgment that their house was coordinate in every respect with the house of bishops, making a large use of their alleged analogy with the commons in the constitution of a parliament. The points on which they practically insisted were the right of declaring their own adjournments, of holding intermediate sessions independently of the prorogations issuing from the president, and of demanding a free conference between the two houses. But the questions that were most earnestly debated, and the right judgment to be formed respecting them, may be seen from the following resolutions adopted in the course of the contest by the bishops, resolutions, which were intended at once to protect the upper house from the assaults of the lower clergy, and the convocation at large from the more formidable encroachments of the civil power.

"The upper house having observed that the most part of those unhappy differences which have arisen between the bishops and clergy concerning the methods of proceeding in convocation, have been occasioned by a wrong notion of the convocation's being a parliamentary assembly; and that the forms of sitting and doing business ought to be regulated by those of the parliament; have thought it necessary to cause the records of our provincial synods and convocations to be exactly searched, and an extract to be drawn from thence of the customary methods of their meeting, acting, proroguing, and dissolving, as well before the Act of Submission, 25 Hen. VIII. c. 19, as since; with proper proofs to support the truth of every article; and having duly examined and considered the same, have thereupon come to the following resolutions:

"1. It is the opinion of this house that the constitution of our provincial synods and convocations is in many particulars very different from that of the parliament.

"2. That it does not appear to this house upon the strictest inquiry they can make, that the convocation or synod provincial is any where in our records called by the name of a parliament spiritual; nor can we find in those records any ground for any such title.

"3. That both the word of adjournment and the thing meant by that word, as distinguished from prorogation, are utterly unknown to our records: nor can we find it was ever made use of in any royal writs sent to the convocation, but only in the 19th of king James I. (and then, as we conceive, by the ignorance or inadvertency of the clerk who drew the writ). And in the execution of it made in the other province, whose acts alone of that year remain to us, the convocation pursued its own method, and was prorogued by the commissary of the archbishop, as usual, thereupon.

"4. That all the continuations of our convocations or synods provincial, as they are in our records called prorogations, so are they properly such: and the continuance of the business before them from one session to another, depends not upon any imaginary distinction between adjournments and prorogations, (which we take to be newly coined to serve a present

e Wake, MSS. Misc. 42. p. 665.