his property should not be exempted from the general
confiscation.

The bill went up to the Peers, but the Peers were not inclined to pass
it without considerable amendments; and such amendments there was
not time to make. Numerous heirs at law, reversioners, and creditors
implored the Upper House to introduce such provisoes as might secure the
innocent against all danger of being involved in the punishment of the
guilty. Some petitioners asked to be heard by counsel. The King had made
all his arrangements for a voyage to the Hague; and the day beyond which
he could not postpone his departure drew near. The bill was therefore,
happily for the honour of English legislation, consigned to that dark
repository in which the abortive statutes of many generations sleep a
sleep rarely disturbed by the historian or the antiquary, [800]

Another question, which slightly and but slightly discomposed the
tranquillity of this short session, arose out of the disastrous and
disgraceful battle of Beachy Head. Torrington had, immediately after
that battle, been sent to the Tower, and had ever since remained there.
A technical difficulty had arisen about the mode of bringing him to
trial. There was no Lord High Admiral; and whether the Commissioners of
the Admiralty were competent to execute martial law was a point which
to some jurists appeared not perfectly clear. The majority of the judges
held that the Commissioners were competent; but, for the purpose of
removing all doubt, a bill was brought into the Upper House; and to this
bill several Lords offered an opposition which seems to have been most
unreasonable. The proposed law, they said, was a retrospective penal
law, and therefore objectionable. If they used this argument in good
faith, they were ignorant of the very rudiments of the science of
legislation. To make a law for punishing that which, at the time when it
was done, was not punishable, is contrary to all sound principle. But
a law which merely alters the criminal procedure may with perfect
propriety be made applicable to past as well as to future offences. It
would have been the grossest injustice to give a retrospective operation
to the law which made slavetrading felony. But there was not the
smallest injustice in enacting that the Central Criminal Court
should try felonies committed long before that Court was in being. In
Torrington's case the substantive law continued to be what it had always
been. The definition of