an election
to Parliament. He is aware that the House of Commons did,
upon one remarkable occasion, deny the capacity of a female
to be heard even as a witness at their bar; and that this
extraordinary vote was obtained through the influence of Sir
Edward Coke, the only text-writer who can be vouched for the
position, that a woman's vote ought not to be received at a
parliamentary election.

Further on, pages 94 and 95;

On the other hand, there are extant many parliamentary
returns for counties and boroughs from the earliest times,
which were made by female electors, and yet were received.
Some of them are enumerated in Prynne's Collections of
Parliamentary Writs. Some of later dates are mentioned in
the Commons' Journals themselves. Others are to be found in
the repositories of the learned or the curious.

Three of the returns in question which related to one and
the same borough, were, at a period long subsequent,
produced before a "Committee of Privilege and Election,"
presided over by the great parliamentary lawyer, Mr.
Hakewell, as evidence for and against the respective parties
in an election trial then pending. The question was whether
the borough was close or open; that is to say, whether
amongst the former returns so produced, those by "Mrs.
Copley, as sole inhabitant," showed the suffrage to be
limited to the Lord or Lady of Gatton for the time being, or
whether those by "Mrs. Copley, _et omnes inhabitantes_,"
showed the suffrage to be of a more popular character. No
question of sex was raised on either side, and neither the
report of the committee which found for the popular right,
nor the resolution of the house for giving effect thereto,
and for taking the Lord of the Manor's return off the file,
contain any allusion to the question of sex.

At that time the House of Commons was not prepared to enter
into conflict with the courts of law, and "privilege" had
not attained to the height which, amid the excitement of the
era of 1688, it was doomed to reach. It was impossible for
the Committee of Privileges, in the Gatton case, to deny the