But the charges framed against Chase revealed only imperfectly the animus which was now coming more and more to control the impeachers. Fortunately, however, there was one man among the President's advisers who was ready to carry the whole antijudicial program as far as possible. This uncompromising opponent was William Branch Giles, Senator from Virginia, whose views on the subject of impeachment were taken down by John Quincy Adams just as Chase's trial was about to open. Giles, according to this record, "treated with the utmost contempt the idea of an independent judiciary--said there was not a word about their independence in the Constitution.... The power of impeachment was given without limitation to the House of Representatives; the power of trying impeachment was given equally without limitation to the Senate; and if the Judges of the Supreme Court should dare, as they had done, to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional, or to send a mandamus to the Secretary of State, as they had done, it was the unreserved right of the House of Representatives to impeach them, and that of the Senate to remove them, for giving such opinions, however, honest or sincere they may have been in entertaining them." For "impeachment was not a criminal prosecution, it was no prosecution at all." It only signified that the impeached officer held dangerous opinions and that his office ought to be in better hands. "I perceive," adds Adams, on his own account, "that the impeachment system is to be pursued, and the whole bench of the Supreme Court to be swept away, because their offices are wanted. And in the present state of things I am convinced it is as easy for Mr. John Randolph and Mr. Giles to do this as to say it." The trial formally opened on January 2, 1805, though the taking of testimony did not begin until the 9th of February. A contemporary description of the Senate chamber shows that the apostles of Republican simplicity, with the pomp of the Warren Hastings trial still fresh in mind, were not at all averse to making the scene as impressive as possible by the use of several different colors of cloth: "On the right and left of the President of the Senate, and in a right line with his chair, there are two rows of benches with desks in front, and the whole front and seats covered with crimson cloth.... A temporary semi-circular gallery, which consists of three ranges of benches, is elevated on pillars and the whole front and seats thereof covered with green cloth.... In this gallery ladies are accommodated.... On the right and left hand of the President ... are two boxes of two rows of seats ... that facing the President's right is occupied by the managers ... that on the other side of the bar for the accused and his counsel ... these boxes are covered with blue cloth." To preside over this scene of somewhat dubious splendor came Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, straight from the dueling ground at Weehawken.