150

history of England.

cttap.

XIV.

Electionof mem-bers ofConvoca-tion.

the seventeenth century no such danger was apprehended. Solittle indeed was the Convocation of York then considered, thatthe two Houses of Parliament had, in their address to William,spoken only of one Convocation, which they called the Convo-cation of the Clergy of the Kingdom.

The body which they thus not very accurately designated isdivided into two Houses. The Upper House is composed of theBishops of the Province of Canterbury. The Lower House con-sisted, in 1G89, of a hundred and forty four members. Twenty twoDeans and fifty four Archdeacons sate there in virtue of theiroffices. Twenty four divines sate as proctors for twenty fourchapters. Only forty four proctors were elected by the eightthousand parish priests of the twenty two dioceses. These fortyfour proctors, however, were almost all of one mind. Theelections had in former times been conducted in the most quietand decorous manner. But on this occasion the canvassing waseager: the contests were sharp: Rochester, the leader of theparty which in the House of Lords had opposed the Comprehen-sion Bill, and his brother Clarendon, who had refused to takethe oaths, had gone to Oxford, the head quarters of that party,for the purpose of animating and organizing the opposition.*The representatives of the parochial clergy must have been menwhose chief distinction w r as their zeal: for in the whole list canbe found not a single illustrious name, and very few nameswhich are now known even to curious students.** The official

Canterbury has been contemptuously pronounced chimerical. But it isnot easy to understand why two independent Convocations should boless likely to differ than two Houses of the same Convocation; and itis matter of notoriety that, in the reigns of William the Third and Anne,the two Houses of the Convocation of Canterbury scarcely ever agreed.

* Birch’s Life of Tillotson; Life of Pridcaux. From Clarendon’sDiary, it appears that he and Rochester were at Oxford on the 23rd ofSeptember.

** See the Roll in the Historical Account of the present Convocation,appended to the second edition of Vox Clcri, 1690. The most considerable