370 WRITS OF ASSISTANCE, 1558-1700 July place which he, as a pryvy counsellor, would not bee destytute of l Furthermore, with the possible exception of the cases mentioned above of Grandison and Chichester in 1624-5 and Newburgh in 1640, we have found no record to show that any privy councillor was ever summoned as an assistant to the house of lords because he had no seat in the house of commons. There- fore, the truth of Clarendon's statement as to what the custom was must be denied. Consequently we are driven back upon pure conjecture to account for the occasional presence in the lords of these members of the privy council, and the only thing that seems at all likely is that the cases in 1624-5 are part arid parcel of the early Stuart policy of exalting the household and minor officials at the expense of the greater nobles. Why the Scottish secretaries of state were summoned in 1685 is still less plain, for there seems to have been nothing of particular importance to Scotland transacted in this parliament. No account of the attendants on the peers would be complete, if mention were not made of the masters of the court of chancery. They do not appear on the Parliament Pawns, and therefore, presumably, did not receive writs of assistance, and, though they sat on the woolsack, 2 they appear to have been distinctly sub- ordinate in status to the other officials who attended the upper house. Their duties in this connexion consisted in carrying messages and bills from the lords to the commons, 3 and they never seem to have been consulted, by the lords on matters of law, as were the other legal assistants. Moreover, the lords were prepared to insist upon their right of being constantly attended by some of these masters of chancery : not only did they have to get leave of the house if they desired to go into the country, 4 but on one occasion at least the gentleman usher is required to take into custody one of the masters ' for his Neglect of his attending this House ' ; 5 and on another occasion the commissioners of the Great Seal are requested to take measures that the house may be daily attended by some ot the masters of chancery. 6 They seem in fact to have occupied a position half-way between that of the sixteenth -century attendants as 1 From a note by Sir Roger Twysden about Vane's efforts to get elected to the Short Parliament from Kent, printed in Proceedings in Kent in 1640 (Camden Soc.), p. 6. 2 See the seventeenth-century picture of the house of lords that serves as a frontis- piece to D'Ewes. 3 e.g. Lords' Journals, i. 548, 11 February 1559; i. 692-3, 22 May 1571 ; i. 740, 2 March 1575 ; iii. 130, 24 May 1621 ; iii. 327, 29 April 1624 ; iii. 339, 4 May 1624 ; iv. 387, 31 August 1641. 4 e. g. ibid. v. 212, 15 July 1642; v. 214, 16 July 1642 ; of course the peers and the judges were also supposed to do this (see above). 5 Ibid. v. 289, 15 August 1642. « Ibid. ix. 543, 26 November 1647.
