The ultimate jurisdiction of the House of Lords, either by removing into it causes commenced in the lower courts, or by writ of error complaining of a judgment given therein, seems to have been as ancient, and founded on the same principle of a paramount judicial authority delegated by the Crown, as that which they exercised upon original petitions. It is to be observed that the council or star-chamber did not pretend to any direct jurisdiction of this nature; no record was ever removed thither upon assignment of errors in an inferior court. But after the first part of the fifteenth century, there was a considerable interval, during which this appellant jurisdiction of the Lords seems to have gone into disuse, though probably known to be legal.[32] They began again, about 1580, to receive writs of error from the court of king's bench; though for forty years more the instances were by no means numerous. But the statute passed in 1585, constituting the court of exchequer-chamber as an intermediate tribunal of appeal between the king's bench and the parliament, recognises the jurisdiction of the latter, that is, of the House of Lords, in the strongest terms.[33] To this power, therefore, of determining, in the last resort, upon writs of error from the courts of common law, no objection could possibly be maintained. _Their pretensions about the time of the restoration._--The revolutionary spirit of the long parliament brought forward still higher pretensions, and obscured all the land-marks of constitutional privilege. As the Commons took on themselves to direct the execution of their own orders, the Lords, afraid to be jostled out of that equality to which they were now content to be reduced, asserted a similar claim at the expense of the king's prerogative. They returned to their own house on the restoration with confused notions of their high jurisdiction, rather enhanced than abated by the humiliation they had undergone. Thus before the king's arrival, the Commons having sent up for their concurrence a resolution that the persons and estates of the regicides should be seized, the upper house deemed it an encroachment on their exclusive judicature, and changed the resolution into "an order of the Lords on complaint of the Commons."[34] In a conference on this subject between the two houses, the Commons denied their lordships to possess an exclusive jurisdiction, but did not press that matter.[35] But in fact this order was rather of a legislative than judicial nature; nor could the Lords pretend to any jurisdiction in cases of treason. They artfully, however, overlooked these distinctions; and made orders almost daily in the session of 1660, trenching on the executive power and that of the inferior courts. Not content with ordering the estates of all peers to be restored, free from seizure by sequestration, and with all arrears of rent, we find in their journals that they did not hesitate on petition