ers, but madly and wantonly
followed his own single will, it should be lawful for them, with the
common assent of the people, to expel him from his throne, and elevate
to it some near kinsman of the royal blood. By this discourse the king
was induced to meet his parliament, where Suffolk was removed from his
office, and the impeachment against him commenced.[157]

[Sidenote: Impeachment of Suffolk.]

The charges against this minister, without being wholly frivolous, were
not so weighty as the clamour of the commons might have led us to
expect. Besides forfeiting all his grants from the crown, he was
committed to prison, there to remain till he should have paid such fine
as the king might impose; a sentence that would have been outrageously
severe in many cases, though little more than nugatory in the
present.[158]

[Sidenote: Commission of reform.]

This was the second precedent of that grand constitutional resource,
parliamentary impeachment: and more remarkable from the eminence of the
person attacked than that of lord Latimer in the fiftieth year of Edward
III.[159] The commons were content to waive the prosecution of any other
ministers; but they rather chose a scheme of reforming the
administration, which should avert both the necessity of punishment and
the malversations that provoked it. They petitioned the king to ordain
in parliament certain chief officers of his household and other lords of
his council, with power to reform those abuses, by which his crown was
so much blemished that the laws were not kept and his revenues were
dilapidated, confirming by a statute a commission for a year, and
forbidding, under heavy penalties, any one from opposing, in private or
openly, what they should advise.[160] With this the king complied, and a
commission founded upon the prayer of parliament was established by
statute. It comprehended fourteen persons of the highest eminence for
rank and general estimation; princes of the blood and ancient servants
of the crown, by whom its prerogatives were not likely to be
unnecessarily impaired. In fact the principle of this commission,
without looking back at the precedents in the reign of John, Henry III.,
and Edward II., which yet were not without their weight as
constitutional analogies, was merely that which the commons had
repeatedly maintained during the minority of the present king, and which
had produced the former commissions of reform in the third and fifth
years of h