lapsed
during which the convocation was prorogued from time to time without any
meeting of its members for business being allowed. The next convocation
which was permitted to meet for business, in 1700, was marked by great
turbulence and insubordination on the part of the members of the Lower
House, who refused to recognize the authority of the archbishop to
prorogue their sessions. This controversy was kept up until the
discharge of the convocation took place concurrently with the
dissolution of the parliament in the autumn of that year. The
proceedings of the Lower House in this convocation were disfigured by
excesses which were clearly violations of the constitutional order of
the convocation. The Lower House refused to take notice of the
archbishop's schedule of prorogation, and adjourned itself by its own
authority, and upon the demise of the crown it disputed the fact of its
sessions having expired, and as parliament was to continue for a short
time, prayed that its sessions might be continued as a part of the
parliament under the "praemunientes" clause. The next convocation was
summoned in the first year of Queen Anne, when the Lower House, under
the leadership of Dean Aldrich, its prolocutor, challenged the right of
the archbishop to prorogue it, and presented a petition to the queen,
praying her majesty to call the question into her own presence. The
question was thereupon examined by the queen's council, when the right
of the president to prorogue both houses of convocation by a schedule of
prorogation was held to be proved, and further, that it could not be
altered except by an act of parliament. During the remaining years of
the reign of Queen Anne the two Houses of convocation were engaged
either in internecine strife, or in censuring sermons or books, as
teaching latitudinarian or heretical doctrines; and, when it had been
assembled concurrently with parliament on the accession of King George
I., a great breach was before long created between the two houses by the
Bangorian controversy. Dr Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, having preached a
sermon before the king, in the Royal Chapel at St James's Palace in
1717, against the principles and practice of the nonjurors, which had
been printed by the king's command, the Lower House, which was offended
by the sermon and had also been offended by a treatise on the same
subject published by Dr Hoadly in the previous year, lost no time in
representing the sermon to the Uppe