p. 622. Thus, too, it is
declared that the treaty of Staples in 1492 was to be confirmed per tres
status regni Angliae rite et debite convocatos, videlicet per prelatos et
clerum, nobiles et communitates ejusdem regni. Rymer, t. xii. p. 508.

I will not, however, suppress one passage, and the only instance that
has occurred in my reading, where the king does appear to have been
reckoned among the three estates. The commons say, in the 2nd of Henry
IV., that the states of the realm may be compared to a trinity, that is,
the king, the lords spiritual and temporal, and the commons. Rot. Parl.
vol. iii. p. 459. In this expression, however, the sense shows that by
estates of the realm they meant members, or necessary parts, of the
parliament.

Whitelocke, on the Parliamentary Writ, vol. ii. p. 43, argues at length,
that the three estates are king, lords, and commons, which seems to have
been a current doctrine among the popular lawyers of the seventeenth
century. His reasoning is chiefly grounded on the baronial tenure of
bishops, the validity of acts passed against their consent, and other
arguments of the same kind; which might go to prove that there are only
at present two estates, but can never turn the king into one.

The source of this error is an inattention to the primary sense of the
word estate (status), which means an order or condition into which men
are classed by the institutions of society. It is only in a secondary,
or rather an elliptical application, that it can be referred to their
representatives in parliament or national councils. The lords temporal,
indeed, of England are identical with the estate of the nobility; but
the house of commons is not, strictly speaking, the estate of
commonalty, to which its members belong, and from which they are
deputed. So the whole body of the clergy are properly speaking one of
the estates, and are described as such in the older authorities, 21 Ric.
II. Rot. Parl. vol. iii. p. 348, though latterly the lords spiritual in
parliament acquired, with less correctness, that appellation. Hody on
Convocations, p. 426. The bishops, indeed, may be said, constructively,
to represent the whole of the clergy, with whose grievances they are
supposed to be best acquainted, and whose rights it is their peculiar
duty to defend. And I do not find that the inferior clergy had any other
representation in the cortes of Castile and Aragon, where the
ecclesiastical order was always counted