“Thence to Whitehall, where the Parliament was to wait on the King, and they did: and he did think fit to tell them that they might expect to be adjourned at Whitsuntide, and that they might make haste to raise their money: but this, I fear, will displease them, who did expect to sit as long as they pleased.” A truly regal reception, and a most unceremonious mode of dismissing the “chosen of the people.” The wits of the day thus tersely summed up the situation of affairs:-- “I’ll have a long parliament always to friend, And furnish my treasure as fast as I spend, And if they will not, they shall have an end.” (A. MARVELL: _Royal Resolutions_.) Perhaps the most felicitous sallies were due to the pen of that gifted reprobate, the Earl of Rochester, at times the _alter ego_ of the Merry Monarch, but who finally, after enjoying boundless favour by diverting the king at his own royal expense as often as at that of his subjects, pointed a shaft with too galling a barb, and flitted away from a Court whose vileness he both exposed and shared in equally liberal measure:-- “A parliament of knaves and sots, Members by name you must not mention, He keeps in pay, and buys their votes; Here with a place, there with a pension. When to give money he can’t cologue ’um, He doth with scorn prorogue, prorogue ’um. But they long since, by too much giving, Undid, betray’d, and sold the nation; Making their memberships a living Better than e’er was sequestration. God give thee, Charles, a resolution To damn the knaves by Dissolution.” Later, Pepys is in conference with the king and the Duke of York (April, 1668) upon no less a subject than “about the Quakers not swearing, and how they do swear in the business of a late election of a Knight of the Shire of Hertfordshire in behalf of one they have a mind to have,” which diverts the monarch mightily. We have seen how the juris-consultists who lived contemporaneously with the system of “paid members” considered the impartiality of representatives was protected from outside influences by the receipt of a small independence; later on we find that, owing to a dispute between the two Chambers, the impression was arrived at by the Peers that no salaried judges can be deemed impartial, and that hereditary legislators are the only reliable tribunals whence unimpeachable justice could be secured. On a question of privilege between the Lords and Commons (May, 1668), when the latter took upon themselves to remedy an error of the Upper Chamber, Lord Anglesey informed the Commons that the Lords were “_Judices nati et Conciliarii nati_, but all other Judges among us are under salary, and the Commons themselves served for wages; and therefore the Lords, in reason, were the freer Judges.”