The managers and their legal advisers had agreed that Lord Wintoun’s counsel should be allowed to speak only on condition that the managers of the impeachment on the other side should have the last words. They followed accordingly. Mr. Robert Walpole suggested that Sir Constantine Phipps had forgotten that Lord Wintoun’s case was not in an ordinary court of law, but in a Court of Parliament, which was not to be bound by common procedure. ‘What might quench,’ he said, ‘an Indictment in the courts below should never make insufficient an Impeachment brought by the Commons of Great Britain.’ The delighted Attorney-General went on the same war-path, and proclaimed that parliamentary impeachments were not to be governed by the forms of Westminster Hall. Mr. Cowper added that the courts below had many forms for which no reason could be given. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘in parliamentary process, that nothing is necessary that is not material.’ ‘Besides,’ said Thomson, ‘time, date, and places _were_ laid in the five days at Preston. For the deeds done there, Lord Wintoun had been convicted, and judgment could not legally be stayed.’ Phipps and his colleagues replied that they were not convinced by the arguments of their opponents; and the Attorney-General had the last word in a speech, the chief point in which was the assertion, sarcastically conveyed, that as far as concerned the rights of the Commons of Great Britain, Lord Wintoun’s counsel had left the case just where they found it. Lastly, ‘the unhappy lord’ himself, who was the subject of this mortal controversy, was asked if _he_ had anything to say why the sentence of the law should not be carried out against him. He referred to his counsel, and then the old series of explanations and irritable squabbling, which Wintoun seemed delighted to provoke, ensued. At length, on being told that if anything was to be said in arrest of judgment, it must come from him, the doomed earl tranquilly remarked, ‘Since your lordships will not allow my counsel to speak, _I don’t know nothing_.’ [Sidenote: _THE SENTENCE._] The Lord High Steward then proceeded to deliver sentence. He prefaced it by a speech, full of commonplaces about his own office, the crime of rebellion, and the duty of punishing rebels. Lord Cowper then proceeded to reconcile the earl with what he had to go through, by observing:――‘Believe it, notwithstanding the unfair arts and industry used to stir up a pernicious excess of commiseration towards such as have fallen by the sword of justice (few if compared with the numbers of good subjects murdered from doors and windows of Preston only), the life of one honest loyal subject is more precious in the eye of God, and all considering men, than the lives of many rebels and parricides!’