_Impeachment of tory ministers._--It will be admitted on all hands, at the present day, that the charge of high treason in the impeachments against Oxford and Bolingbroke was an intemperate excess of resentment at their scandalous dereliction of the public honour and interest. The danger of a sanguinary revenge inflamed by party spirit is so tremendous that the worst of men ought perhaps to escape rather than suffer by a retrospective, or, what is no better, a constructive, extension of the law. The particular charge of treason was, that in the negotiation for peace they had endeavoured to procure the city of Tournay for the King of France; which was maintained to be an adhering to the queen's enemies within the statute of Edward III.[338] But, as this construction could hardly be brought within the spirit of that law, and the motive was certainly not treasonable or rebellious, it would have been incomparably more constitutional to treat so gross a breach of duty as a misdemeanour of the highest kind. This angry temper of the Commons led ultimately to the abandonment of the whole impeachment against Lord Oxford; the upper house, though it had committed Oxford to the Tower, which seemed to prejudge the question as to the treasonable character of the imputed offence, having two years afterwards resolved that the charge of treason should be first determined, before they would enter on the articles of less importance; a decision with which the Commons were so ill satisfied that they declined to go forward with the prosecution. The resolution of the Peers was hardly conformable to precedent, to analogy, or to the dignity of the House of Commons, nor will it perhaps be deemed binding on any future occasion; but the ministers prudently suffered themselves to be beaten rather than aggravate the fever of the people by a prosecution so full of delicate and hazardous questions.[339]