aracter of the appellant, about the impudent accusation
which he had brought against Catherine of Braganza, and about the evil
consequences which might follow if so bad a man were capable of being a
witness. "There is only one way," said the Lord President, "in which I
can consent to reverse the fellow's sentence. He has been whipped from
Aldgate to Tyburn. He ought to be whipped from Tyburn back to Aldgate."
The question was put. Twenty-three peers voted for reversing the
judgment; thirty-five for affirming it, [396]

This decision produced a great sensation, and not without reason. A
question was now raised which might justly excite the anxiety of every
man in the kingdom. That question was whether the highest tribunal,
the tribunal on which, in the last resort, depended the most precious
interests of every English subject, was at liberty to decide judicial
questions on other than judicial grounds, and to withhold from a suitor
what was admitted to be his legal right, on account of the depravity of
his moral character. That the supreme Court of Appeal ought not to
be suffered to exercise arbitrary power, under the forms of ordinary
justice, was strongly felt by the ablest men in the House of Commons,
and by none more strongly than by Somers. With him, and with those
who reasoned like him, were, on this occasion, allied many weak and
hot-headed zealots who still regarded Oates as a public benefactor, and
who imagined that to question the existence of the Popish plot was to
question the truth of the Protestant religion. On the very morning after
the decision of the Peers had been pronounced, keen reflections were
thrown, in the House of Commons, on the justice of their lordships.
Three days later, the subject was brought forward by a Whig Privy
Councillor, Sir Robert Howard, member for Castle Rising. He was one of
the Berkshire branch of his noble family, a branch which enjoyed, in
that age, the unenviable distinction of being wonderfully fertile of
bad rhymers. The poetry of the Berkshire Howards was the jest of three
generations of satirists. The mirth began with the first representation
of the Rehearsal, and continued down to the last edition of the Dunciad,
[397] But Sir Robert, in spite of his bad verses, and of some foibles
and vanities which had caused him to be brought on the stage under the
name of Sir Positive Atall, had in parliament the weight which a stanch
party man, of ample fortune, of illustrious name, o