wethers, presuming to have more excellent wit than those in England,' caused the rejection of the 'Act for
ginning of this session, hath been such that we can do no less than advertise your lordship thereof. After the assembly of the Parliament at this session, some bills were past the Common House, and by the speaker delivered to the High House to be debated there. The spiritual lords thereupon made a general answer that they would not commune nor debate upon any bill till they knew whether the proctors in the Convocation had a voice or not.… My lord, it were well done that some mean may be devised whereby they may be brought to remember their duties better. Except the mean may be found that these proctors may be put from voice in the Parliament, there shall but few things pass for the King's profit, for hitherto have they showed themselves in nothing conformable. We think that no reasonable man would judge them to have such a pre-eminence in a Parliament, that though the King, the Lords, and Commons assent to an Act, the proctors in the Convocation House (though they were but seven or eight in number, as sometimes they be here no more) shall stay the same at their pleasure, be the matter never so good, honest, and reasonable. It doth well appear that it is a crafty cast devised betwixt their masters the bishops and them. It is good that we have against the next session a declaration from them under the King's great seal of England of this question whether the proctors have a voice in the Parliament or not? and that every Act passed without their assents is nevertheless good and effectual.'—State Papers, vol. ii. pp 438–9.
The reply of the Crown, as embodied in an Act of Parliament (Irish Statutes, 28 Henry VIII. cap. 12), is a good authority as to the constitutional, as distinct from the ecclesiastical, theory of the functions of Convocation. The Irish and English practice, however, before the Reformation, seems to have been curiously different. In England custom allowed the clergy to constitute themselves an independent legislative body. In Ireland the proctors seem to have regarded themselves as returned to the Parliament, like the bishops and abbots. 'Forasmuch,' says the Act, 'as at every Parliament begun and holden within this land, two proctors of every diocese within the same land have been used and accustomed to be summoned and warned to be at the same Parliament, which were never by the order of law, usage, custom, or otherwise, any member or parcel of the whole body of the Parliament, nor have had any voice or suffrage in the same, but only to be there as councillors and assistants to the same, and upon such things of learning as should happen in controversy,
