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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2023
Overview
The accession of a new king might have heralded a new beginning for the convocation, but instead it went into an even deeper recess than before. There are no further act or minute books from the lower house, which continued to exist but did nothing other than ratify the loyal address to the king which the bishops prepared at the start of each new synod. No licence for business was forthcoming during this reign, but hope revived in 1744 and for a while it appeared as if something might be done to get the institution up and running again. But the bishops could not work out what the convocation had to do that could not be done equally well elsewhere by someone else, and after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-6 there was no chance that a body which might contain many Jacobite sympathizers would be allowed to meet under parliament's nose. The moment when revival was a possibility thus passed, and the convocation went back to its by then customary pattern of occasional prorogations.
The convocation of 1727-34
This convocation met for the first time on 28 January 1728, after a number of false starts in the previous year, and a loyal address was sent to the king on 13 February. It was full of undeserved flattery for the king's pious zeal for the cause of Christianity and the church, but the bishops were careful to avoid saying anything too directly about the possibility of allowing the convocation to transact business. On 10 April 1728 the bishops were finally able to rein in the lower house by declaring its method of continuing sessions from one day to the next to be irregular, and that henceforth only the archbishop would prorogue them and designate when and where they would reconvene. The quarrel begun in 1701 was at last resolved in the archbishop's favour, but of course it scarcely mattered now.
On 17 May 1728 the archbishop received a petition from the dean and chapter of Chichester, where there had been an irregular election for the chapter proctor. The issue at stake was whether non-residentiary canons had a right to vote, which apparently they had never previously done.
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