The clearest and most distinct way of demonstrating this proposition, that the Convocation is a part of Parliament, will be, after noting that in our early historians _Convocatio_ and _Parliamentum_ are synonymous, first, to bring forward evidences that it was often regarded as being so somewhat late in our history, that is, just before its sessions were suppressed; and, in the next place, to produce facts, documents, and extracts which display this parliamentary character in the earlier stages of its existence. To begin, then, with Burnet, whose statements must be taken with allowance, as those of a hot anti-convocational partisan, as he had indeed good reasons for being:-- "When the Bill (Act of Comprehension) was sent down to the House of Commons, it was let lie on the table; and, instead of proceeding in it, they made an address to the King for summoning a Convocation of the Clergy, _to attend, according to custom, on the session of Parliament_. The party against the Government ... were much offended with the Bill of Comprehension, as containing matters relating to the Church, _in which the representative body of the clergy had not been so much as advised with_."--Burnet's _History of his own Times_, book v. In his account of the Convocation of 1701, the facts which he details are important. After saying that "the clergy fancied they had _a right to be a part of the Parliament_," he continues:-- "The things the Convocation pretended to were, first, that they had a right to sit whenever the Parliament sate; so that they could not be prorogued, but when the two Houses were prorogued. Next they advanced that they had no need of a licence to enter upon debates and to prepare matters, though it was confessed that the practice for a hundred years was against them; but they thought the Convocation lay under no further restraint than that the Parliament was under; and as they could pass no Act without the Royal assent, so they confessed that they could not enact or publish a Canon without the King's licence. _Antiently the Clergy granted their own subsidies apart_, but, ever since the Reformation, the grant of the Convocation was not thought good till it was ratified in Parliament.... _In the writ that the bishops had, summoning them to Parliament, the clause, known by the first word of it,_ 'Præmunientes,' _was still continued. At first, by virtue of it, the inferior clergy were required to come to Parliament, and to consent to the aids there given_: but after the archbishops had the provincial writ for a Convocation of the province, the other was no more executed, _though it was still kept in the writ_, and there did not appear the least shadow of any use that had been made of it, for some hundreds of years; _yet now some bishops were prevailed on to execute this writ, and to summon the clergy by virtue of it_."--Book vi.