slation, and in the end the control of
government. But though in all essential points the character of Parliament
has remained the same from that time to this, there were some remarkable
particulars in which the assembly of 1295 differed widely from the present
Parliament at St. Stephen's. Some of these differences, such as those which
sprang from the increased powers and changed relations of the different
orders among themselves, we shall have occasion to consider at a later
time. But a difference of a far more startling kind than these lay in the
presence of the clergy. If there is any part in the parliamentary scheme of
Edward the First which can be regarded as especially his own, it is his
project for the representation of the ecclesiastical order. The King had
twice at least summoned its "proctors" to Great Councils before 1295, but
it was then only that the complete representation of the Church was
definitely organized by the insertion of a clause in the writ which
summoned a bishop to Parliament requiring the personal attendance of all
archdeacons, deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for each
cathedral chapter, and two for the clergy within his diocese. The clause is
repeated in the writs of the present day, but its practical effect was
foiled almost from the first by the resolute opposition of those to whom it
was addressed. What the towns failed in doing the clergy actually did. Even
when forced to comply with the royal summons, as they seem to have been
forced during Edward's reign, they sat jealously by themselves, and their
refusal to vote supplies in any but their own provincial assemblies, or
convocations, of Canterbury and York left the Crown without a motive for
insisting on their continued attendance. Their presence indeed, though
still at times granted on some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality
that by the end of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into desuetude.
In their anxiety to preserve their existence as an isolated and privileged
order the clergy flung away a power which, had they retained it, would have
ruinously hampered the healthy developement of the state. To take a single
instance, it is difficult to see how the great changes of the Reformation
could have been brought about had a good half of the House of Commons
consisted purely of churchmen, whose numbers would have been backed by the
weight of their property as possessors of a third of the landed estates of