commissioners appointed by the king, under the great seal, to hear and determine appeals from the ecclesiastical court.

Court of DELEGATES, the great court of appeal in all ecclesiastical causes. These delegates are appointed by the king's commission under his great seal, and issuing out of chancery, to represent his royal person, and hear all appeals to him made by virtue of the statute 25 Henry VIII. c. 19. This commission is usually filled with lords spiritual and temporal, judges of the courts at Westminster, and doctors of the civil law. Appeals to Rome were always looked upon by the English nation, even in the times of Popery, with an evil eye, as being contrary to the liberty of the subject, the honour of the crown, and the independence of the whole realm; and were first introduced in very turbulent times, in the 16th year of king Stephen (A.D. 1151), at the same period (Sir Henry Spelman observes) that the civil and canon laws were first imported into England. But in a few years after, to obviate this growing practice, the constitutions made at Clarendon, 11 Hen. II. on account of the disturbances raised by archbishop Becket and other zealots of the holy see, expressly declare, that appeals in causes ecclesiastical ought to lie from the archdeacon to the diocesan; from the diocesan to the archbishop of the province; and from the archbishop to the king; and are not to proceed any farther without special license from the crown. But the unhappy advantage that was given in the reign of king John, and his son Hen. III., to the encroaching power of the Pope, who was ever vigilant to improve all opportunities of extending his jurisdiction to Britain, at length rivetted the custom of appealing to Rome in causes ecclesiastical so strongly, that it never could be thoroughly broken off, till the grand rupture happened in the reign of Hen. VIII.; when all the jurisdiction usurped by the Pope in matters ecclesiastical was restored to the crown, to which it originally belonged; so that the statute 25 Hen. VIII. was but declaratory of the ancient law of the realm. But in case the king himself be party in any of these suits, the appeal does not then lie to him in chancery, which would be absurd; but, by the 24 Henry VIII. c. 12. to all the bishops of the realm, assembled in the upper house of convocation.