Such privileges also as are essential to all free assemblies which deliberate, they may be allowed to assume, whatever precedents may prevail: but though the king's interposition, by an offer or advice, does in some degree overawe or restrain liberty; it may be doubted whether it imposes such evident violence as to entitle the parliament, without any other authority or concession, to claim the privilege of excluding it.

But this was the favorable time for extending privileges; and had none more exorbitant or unreasonable been challenged, few bad consequences had followed.

The establishment of this rule, it is certain, contributes to the order and regularity, as well as freedom, of parliamentary proceedings.
The interposition of peers in the election of commoners was likewise about this time declared a breach of privilege, and continues ever since to be condemned by votes of the commons, and universally practised throughout the nation.
Every measure pursued by the commons, and, still more, every attempt made by their partisans, were full of the most inveterate hatred against the hierarchy, and showed a determined resolution of subverting the whole ecclesiastical establishment.

Besides numberless vexations and persecutions which the clergy underwent from the arbitrary power of the lower house, the peers, while the king was in Scotland, having passed an order for the observance of the laws with regard to public worship, the commons assumed such authority, that, by a vote alone of their house, they suspended those laws, though enacted by the whole legislature: and they particularly forbade bowing at the name of Jesus; a practice which gave them the highest scandal, and which was one of their capital objections against the established religion.[*] They complained of the king's filling five vacant sees, and considered it as an insult upon them, that he should complete and strengthen an order which they intended soon entirely to abolish.[**] They had accused thirteen bishops of high treason, for enacting canons without consent of parliament,[***] though, from the foundation of the monarchy, no other method had ever been practised: and they now insisted that the peers, upon this general accusation, should sequester those bishops from their seats in parliament, and commit them to prison.
* Rush.

vol.v.p.