On other questions the clerical party were in the ascendant; They had a decided majority in the House of Commons; in the Upper House there was a compact body of twenty bishops; and Gardiner held the proxies of Lord Rich, Lord Oxford, Lord {p.178} Westmoreland, and Lord Abergavenny. The queen had created four new peers; three of whom, Lord North, Lord Chandos, and Lord Williams, were bigoted Catholics; the fourth, Lord Howard, was absent with the fleet, and was unrepresented. Lord North held the proxy of Lord Worcester; and the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Montague, and Lord Stourton acted generally with the chancellor. Lord Russell was keeping out of the way, being suspected of heresy; Wentworth was at Calais; Grey was at Guisnes; and the proxies of the two last noblemen, which in the late parliament were held by Arundel and Paget, were, for some unknown reason, now held by no one. Thus, in a house of seventy-three members only, reduced to sixty-nine by the absence of Howard, Russell, Wentworth, and Grey, Gardiner had thirty-one votes whom he might count upon as certain; he knew his power, and at once made fatal use of it. For two parliaments the liberal party had prevented him from recovering the power of persecution. He did not attempt to pass the Inquisitorial Act on which he was defeated in the last session. But the act to revive the Lollard Statutes was carried through the House of Commons in the second week in December; on the 15th it was brought up to the Lords; and although those who had before fought the battle of humanity, struggled again bravely in the same cause, this time their numbers were too small; they failed, and the lives of the Protestants were in their enemies' hands.[403] Simultaneously Gardiner obtained for the bishops' courts their long-coveted privilege of arbitrary arrest and discretionary punishment, and the clergy obtained, as they desired, the restoration of their legislative powers. The property question alone disintegrated the phalanx of orthodoxy, and left an opening for the principles of liberty to assert themselves. The faithful and the faithless among the laity were alike participators in church plunder, and were alike nervously sensitive when the current of the reaction ran in the direction of a demand for restitution. [Footnote 403: "La chambre haulte y faict difficulte pour ce que l'auctorite et jurisdiction des evesques est autorizee et renouvellee, et que le peine semble trop griefve. Mais l'on tient qu'ilz s'accorderont par la pluralite."--Renard to the Emperor, December 21: _Granvelle Papers_, vol. iv.] Here, therefore, Paget and his friends chose their ground to maintain the fight.