Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/281

 I have already mentioned that Henry VIII held nine parliaments in his thirty-eight years, and that of those one was extended over the best part of seven years, that is the great organic parliament, which began in 1539 and ran on to the spring of 1536: a parliament which, both on account of its length and for the importance of its acts, may deserve the title of the Long Parliament of Henry VIII. Of the other eight parliaments, two, that summoned in 151 3 and that summoned in 154a, ran over three years with short sessions; the others are all shorter, of one or two sessions. All these parliaments were held in London, either at Westminster or, in one instance and possibly an occasional sitting, at Blackfriars, and in the old places of assembly; the convocation of Canterbury met at S. Paul's, and so continued to meet, as it still does on the first day of the session. In 1533 Wolsey summoned it to Westminster; and, after the Submission in 1533, it was frequently adjourned from S. Paul's to Westminster for the convenience of the bishops, whose hands were full of business in both chambers. The House of Lords continued to meet in the parliament chamber, and the Commons sat in the chapter-house or refectory of the Abbey until the end of the reign; Edward VI, in his first parliament, took the Commons to S. Stephen's Chapel. The parliament chamber, or the chamber of the Holy Cross, the situation of which is unknown to me unless it was the Painted Chamber under a new name, was the place of opening the session under Henry VII and Henry VIII.

Our first question, however, is concerned with the personal composition of the assembly. The House of Lords is the chamber that undergoes the greatest modifications during the period. We take the lords spiritual first; the parliaments of Henry VII had contained two archbishops, nineteen bishops, and twenty-eight abbots; Henry VIII added three abbots, the abbot of Tewkesbury in 1513, the abbot of Tavistock in 1514, and the abbot of Burton in 1534; and after the foundation of the new bishoprics, he added the six new bishops of Oxford, Peterborough, Gloucester, Bristol, Chester, and Westminster: but before that was done the abbots had disappeared from