Besides the influence derived from the nature and extent of their property, generally let on lease, on easy terms, to the younger sons and dependants of great families, the weight the clergy had in Parliament was very considerable. The number of temporal barons being extremely limited, and the lesser barons and representatives of boroughs looking upon it as a hardship to attend, combined with the mode of choosing the Lords of the Articles. Its proceedings in a great measure were left under their direction and control.
The Lords of the Articles were a Committee whose business it was to prepare and digest all matters that were to be laid before Parliament. Every motion for a new law was made in this committee, and approved or rejected by the members of it; what they approved was formed into a bill, and presented to Parliament; what they rejected could not be introduced into the house. This committee owed the extraordinary powers vested in it to the military genius of the ancient nobles, and in this way not only directed all the proceedings of Parliament, but possessed a negative before debate. It consisted of eight temporal and eight spiritual lords, of eight representatives of boroughs, and of eight great officers of the crown, and when its composition is considered, it will easily be seen how much influence it would add to the already too great power of the clergy.
Their character also was held sacred; neither were they subject to the same laws, nor tried by the same judges as the laity, a remarkable instance of which occurred on the trial of the murderers of Cardinal Beaton, one of whom was a priest. He was claimed by a delegate from the clerical courts, and exempted from the judgement of Parliament on that account.
By their reputation for learning, they almost wholly engrossed the high offices of emolument and trust in the civil government; but even this was not for acting in their capacity of confessors, they made use of all these motives which operate so powerfully on the human mind, to promote the interest of the church, so that few were allowed to leave the world without bestowing on her some marks of their liberality, and where credulity failed to produce this effect, they called in the aid of law. (When a person died intestate, by the 22d Statute of William the Lion, the disposal of his effects was vested in the bishop of the diocese, after paying his funeral charges and debts, and distributing among his kindred the sums to which they were respectively entitled, it being presumed that no Christian could have chosen to leave the world without destining some of his substance to pious purposes.) Their courts had likewise the cognisance of all testamentary deeds and matrimonial contracts, and to these engines of power, and often in their hands of oppression, they super-added the sentence of excommunication, which besides depriving the unhappy victim on whom it fell of all Christian privileges, cut him off from every right as a man or citizen. To these, and other causes of a similar nature, may be ascribed the power of the Popish church; and to these, also, combined with the celibacy to which by the rule of their church they were restricted, may be attributed the dissolute and licentious lives of the clergy, which in the end destroyed that reputation for sanctity, the people had been accustomed to attach to their character.