XII.] HOUSE OF LORDS. 3°9 house or refectory of the Abbey until the end of the reign ; Edward VI, in his first parliament, took the Commons to S. Stephen's Chapel. The parliament chamber, or the chamber of the Holy Cross, the situation of which is unknown to me unless it was the ' Painted Chamber under a new name, was the place of opening the session under Henry VII and Henry VIII. Our first question, however, is concerned with the personal composition of the assembly. The House of Lords is the chamber that undergoes the greatest modifications during the period. We take the lords spiritual first; the parliaments of Henry VII had contained two archbishops, nineteen bishops, and twenty-eight abbots; Henry VIII added three abbots, the abbot of Tewkesbury in 1512, the abbot of Tavistock in 1514, and the abbot of Burton in 1534; and after the foundation of the new bishoprics, he added the six new bishops of Oxford, Peterborough, Gloucester, Bristol, Chester, and Westminster : but before/ that was done the abbots had disappeared from parliament I so at the beginning of the reign the number of spiritual1 peers was 49; at the maximum in 1534 it was 52, and, after the dissolution of the monasteries, it fell to 26. The number of lay peers varied little, for there were few new creations except where an old peerage had been extinguished. The minimum number was called in 1523, being only 28, several of the peers being that year employed in military affairs abroad; the maximum was in 1536, in the parliament called to approve of the destruction of Anne Boleyn, and the number was 51. In the other parliaments it varied between 36 and 46. It will be thus observed that, until the dissolution of the monasteries, the spiritual lords were ' always in a numerical majority, but that the tendency was decided towards an equalisation'; a tendency which is ocularly perceptible in the journals where, in the list of