with the difficulty which had arisen. A conference was
held in the Painted Chamber; and there Hartington, who appeared for the
Commons, declared that he was authorized, by those who had sent him, to
assure the Lords that Duncombe had, in his place in Parliament, owned
the misdeeds which he now challenged his accusers to bring home to him.
The Lords, however, rightly thought that it would be a strange and a
dangerous thing to receive a declaration of the House of Commons in its
collective character as conclusive evidence of the fact that a man
had committed a crime. The House of Commons was under none of those
restraints which were thought necessary in ordinary cases to protect
innocent defendants against false witnesses. The House of Commons
could not be sworn, could not be cross-examined, could not be indicted,
imprisoned, pilloried, mutilated, for perjury. Indeed the testimony of
the House of Commons in its collective character was of less value than
the uncontradicted testimony of a single member. For it was only
the testimony of the majority of the House. There might be a large
respectable minority whose recollections might materially differ from
the recollections of the majority. This indeed was actually the case.
For there had been a dispute among those who had heard Duncombe's
confession as to the precise extent of what he had confessed; and
there had been a division; and the statement which the Upper House was
expected to receive as decisive on the point of fact had been at last
carried only by ninety votes to sixty-eight. It should seem therefore
that, whatever moral conviction the Lords might feel of Duncombe's
guilt, they were bound, as righteous judges, to absolve him.

After much animated debate, they divided; and the bill was lost by
forty-eight votes to forty-seven. It was proposed by some of the
minority that proxies should be called; but this scandalous proposition
was strenuously resisted; and the House, to its great honour, resolved
that on questions which were substantially judicial, though they might
be in form legislative, no peer who was absent should be allowed to have
a voice.

Many of the Whig Lords protested. Among them were Orford and Wharton.
It is to be lamented that Burnet, and the excellent Hough, who was now
Bishop of Oxford, should have been impelled by party spirit to record
their dissent from a decision which all sensible and candid men will now
pronounce to have been just and salut