Never, perhaps, did Convocation pass through a more tumultuous day than Thursday, the 12th of February, ushered in though it was by a circumstance adapted to calm the spirit of ever so excited an assembly. Between 9 and 10 o’clock, as the members of the Lower House were pacing up and down the nave of Westminster Abbey--not then crowded with monuments as it is now--waiting for the commencement of business, and eager to know what turn discussions were about to take, news came that Woodward, the Prolocutor, had been taken ill--very ill, and could not possibly attend to his duties. He must send a deputy, said his friends, and the deputy sent, turned out to be Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, a man of like spirit with the Prolocutor himself. Upon proceeding to read prayers in the Lower House, this deputy was interrupted by a question, whether he ought to take the chair, without receiving the sanction of the Archbishop to his appointment. Kennet and Birch hastily departed to inform his Grace of what had been done; but on their way through the cloisters[358] to the yard, into which opened the principal door to the Jerusalem Chamber, they were stopped by another member, who proposed that they should return and wait until after prayers. They did so. As Aldrich, encouraged by Atterbury, ventured to take the chair, “a tumultuous noise” arose. Opposing members “persisted with vehemence in their demand, that the Dean of Christ Church should relinquish the chair.” They were “peremptory in their manner”--they came “prepared for a rupture,” says a nettled member on the other side.[359] In the midst of the disturbance, Wickart, Dean of Winchester, and Archdeacon Beveridge, removed the instrument of substitution from the table, and carried it to the Upper House, where they met with a gracious reception. After the two had ventured so far to take the matter into their own hands, the Lower House came to a resolution formally to depute certain others to go and wait upon their Lordships; but these messengers, unlike their predecessors, were not admitted. Instead, an order was despatched for the whole House to attend. Accordingly they left Henry the VII.’s Chapel, the Dean of Christ Church at their head “in his square cap and a verger before him,”[360] and crowded up the steps to the Jerusalem Chamber, where, face to face with those whom they regarded as their enemies, they heard from the lips of the Archbishop a simple acknowledgment of a paper of consequence having been received, in allusion to their choice of a deputy, as “an incident of great moment;” and, besides, a formal announcement of prorogation until February the 14th. This Atterbury and his friends confessed to be “every way a surprise to them;” yet, nothing daunted, the Corypheus of the party--as the members were struggling through the small room, and the narrow passage which formed the only outlet from what was the Prelates’ audience-room--pushed them on, crying, “Away to the