Overview

If the importance of a convocation were to be judged by the volume of surviving material concerning it, those held in the province of Canterbury during the reign of Queen Anne would stand head and shoulders above all the others which took place before the mid-nineteenth-century revival. In her reign, for the first time, we have a complete picture of what transpired in both the upper and the lower house, including daily attendance lists which enable us to measure the relative importance of the different political factions at any given time. We also possess extensive drafts of many convocation acts and supplementary material to give us a flavour of the proceedings which is sometimes hard to detect in the official record.

Yet for all its volume, the convocation material for this reign is unexpectedly disappointing. The main reason for this is that much of the time was spent in fruitless disputes over minor points of procedure which had surfaced in 1701. The increasingly bitter divisions provoked by party strife made serious business virtually impossible for most of the reign. The queen herself was a devout member of the Church of England, and wanted the convocations to succeed in their role as a church parliament. She maintained an independent ecclesiastical policy and often appointed bishops and other dignitaries without taking the advice of her ministers, though this tendency declined as the reign went on. She was also concerned about the growth of scepticism and unbelief, and in this respect was particularly close to the majority of the convocation in both houses. She was not one of Francis Atterbury's allies, but in many ways their policies coincided, and it was during these years that his plans for the convocation came closest to being realized.

The reign began with a remarkable concession to the clergy. The first-fruits and tenths which had been annexed to the crown at the time of the reformation were handed over to the church, to become the basis for a reorganization of its finances which is still in place today. Anne disapproved of the factional strife which had erupted in the convocation, and tried to end it by encouraging convocation to adopt a specific agenda for business which it was expected to get through in the normal parliamentary time.