These vigorous resolutions produced a conference between the houses, which was managed with more temper than might have been expected from the tone taken on both sides. But, neither of them receding in the slightest degree, the Lords addressed the queen, requesting her to issue the writs of error demanded upon the refusal of the king's bench to discharge the parties committed by the House of Commons. The queen answered the same day, that she should have granted the writs of error desired by them, but finding an absolute necessity of putting an immediate end to the session, she was sensible there could have been no further proceeding upon them. The meaning of this could only be, that by a prorogation all commitments by order of the lower house of parliament are determined, so that the parties could stand in no need of a habeas corpus. But a great constitutional question was thus wholly eluded.[388] We may reckon the proceedings against Mr. Alexander Murray, in 1751, among the instances wherein the House of Commons has been hurried by passion to an undue violence. This gentleman had been active in a contested Westminster election, on an anti-ministerial and perhaps jacobite interest. In the course of an inquiry before the house, founded on a petition against the return, the high-bailiff named Mr. Murray as having insulted him in the execution of his duty. The house resolved to hear Murray by counsel in his defence, and the high-bailiff also by counsel in support of the charge, and ordered the former to give bail for his appearance from time to time. These, especially the last, were innovations on the practice of parliament, and were justly opposed by the more cool-headed men. After hearing witnesses on both sides, it was resolved that Murray should be committed to Newgate, and should receive this sentence upon his knees. This command he steadily refused to obey, and thus drew on himself a storm of wrath at such insolence and audacity. But the times were no more, when the Commons could inflict whippings and pillories on the refractory; and they were forced to content themselves with ordering that no person should be admitted to him in prison, which, on account of his ill-health, they soon afterwards relaxed. The public voice is never favourable to such arbitrary exertions of mere power: at the expiration of the session, Mr. Murray, thus grown from an intriguing jacobite into a confessor of popular liberty, was attended home by a sort of triumphal procession amidst the applause of the people. In the next session he was again committed on the same charge; a proceeding extremely violent and arbitrary.[389]