At the assembling of every new Parliament the Members for the City of London, in accordance with an ancient custom, have the privilege of sitting on the Treasury Bench with the Ministers, though for the opening day only. I have frequently read in the newspapers that this privilege was given to the City of London by way of commemorating the protection afforded to the Five Members on that historic day, January 4, 1642, when Charles I came down to the House of Commons to arrest them for their opposition to his will, and found to his discomfiture that “the birds had flown,” to use his own words. The statement is not well established. It is a singular thing that no written record of the origin or existence of the custom is to be found at the Guildhall any more than at the House of Commons. But there is authority for saying that the right was exercised in the time of Elizabeth, and over seventy years before the conflict between Charles I and the Parliament. The earliest reference to it is contained in a Report on the Procedure of the English Parliament prepared in 1568 at the request of the then Speaker of the Irish Parliament by Hooker, a well-known antiquarian of the time, who was a Member both of the English and Irish Parliaments. This report was printed and presented to the Irish Parliament, and was reprinted in London about 1575 under the title of “The Order and Usuage of the Keeping of a Parliament in England.” It is set out fully in Lord Mountmorres’s _History of the Principal Transactions in the Irish Parliament from 1634 to 1666_, published in 1792. Hooker, describing the seating of Members in the House of Commons, says: Upon the lower row on both sides the Speaker, sit such personages as be of the King’s Privy Counsel, or of his Chief Officers; but as for any other, none claimeth, or can claim, any place, but sitteth as he cometh, saving that on the right hand of the Speaker next beneath the said Counsels, the Londoners and the citizens of York do sit, and so in order should sit all the citizens accordingly.