Up to the terrible statutes of Thomas Cromwell the clergy in convocation still asserted boldly their older rights against the Crown.
But it was through its prelates that the Church exercised a directly political influence, and these showed a different temper from the clergy.
Their weakness told directly on the constitutional progress of the realm, for through the diminution in the number of the peers temporal the greater part of the House of Lords was now composed of spiritual peers, of bishops and the greater abbots.

Driven by sheer need, by the attack of the barons on their temporal possessions and of the Lollard on their spiritual authority, into dependence on the Crown, their weight was thrown into the scale of the monarchy.
[Sidenote: Change in the Lower House] And while the ruin of the baronage, and the weakness of the prelacy, broke the power of the House of Lords, the restriction of the suffrage broke the growing strength of the House of Commons.

Even before the outbreak of the civil war the striving of the proprietary classes, landowners and merchants, after special privileges which the Crown alone could bestow, had produced important constitutional results.

The character of the House of Commons had been changed by the restriction of both the borough and the county franchise.

Up to this time all freemen settling in a borough, and paying their dues to it became by the mere fact of settlement its burgesses.
[Sidenote: Restriction of Borough Freedom] But during the reign of Henry the Sixth and still more under Edward the Fourth this largeness of borough life was roughly curtailed.