368 WRITS OF ASSISTANCE, 1558-1700 July might want to know, without the necessity for calling upon his colleague to be present. But it was very doubtful if the secretaries sat in the upper house as of right in consequence of the act of 1539, for this merely settled their position if they should happen to be there, and did not make it imperative for them to be summoned. That this was the view taken by the lawyers in 1640 is shown by the report of a reading given by a certain Mr. Jones at Lincoln's Inn in that year in which it was questioned what honor was due to the Secretaries of State by Kighte or favour as also whether they have any place de hire in the Upper House of Parlement ; and that our Mr. Babor and Mr. Tailer undertook it, who concluded that they had no place in the Upper House unless made Barrons or cawled by writt. 1 The secretaries were summoned to the upper house, as Sir Thomas Smith says, ' to aunswere of such letters or thinges passed in counsell whereof they have the custodie and knowledge ' ; 2 but this was a function that had to be performed in the house of commons also, and it was probably for this reason that Henry VIII, when he appointed Sadler and Wriothesley secretaries of state in 1540, ordered that they were to retain their seats in the house of commons, sitting one in each house, alternately, by weeks. 3 This system does not seem to have lasted long, for it would be impossible during the greater part of Elizabeth's reign, when there was only one secretary, and in later years the secretaries who were not peers gave far the greater share of their attention to the commons. So far as one can judge from the Journals of the House of Lords, the secretaries who were summoned as attendants must have played the very smallest of parts in the upper house, if they ever attended at all. On one occasion, certainly, the secretary took part in the debate, 4 but this was not repeated. (/) The fact that occasionally during the seventeenth century certain members of the privy council received writs of assistance presents an exceedingly difficult problem for solution, because there seems to be no definite rule which can be laid down as to when a privy councillor was summoned to attend the house of lords and when he was not. Historically, of course, the king could summon, if he pleased, any member of the council to be present in the upper house, because there the king was in his council in parliament ; but in practice the Crown seems rarely to have exercised this right in the last four centuries, though the standing orders of the house of lords still speak of ' the 1 State Papers, Domestic, Charles I, ccccxlvi. 25, 25 February 1640. 2 Sir Thomas Smith, De Eepublica Anglorum, ed. by L. Alston, p. 51. 3 Stowe MSS. 141, fo. 78. * In 1548. See above, p. 360, n. 8.
