Walpole, Jekyll, and others, maintained the king’s right to arrest whom he pleased, and under any circumstances; but the former assured many members near him, in conversation, that the information against the Doctor was supported by oath. ‘Doctor Freind,’ said Shippen, ‘is a prisoner for nothing more than what he has said in this House; and the members, therefore, were deprived of the freedom of speech.’ Walpole, of course, expressed himself amazed that anyone should for a moment suppose that any ministry could be capable of so base a thing as to take up any gentleman for what he said in that House, without any other reason. Pulteney described the speeches of Freind, in defence of Kelly and Atterbury, as excuses which one traitor made for another. To which Shippen with great warmth declared that it was past bearing for a member to be called a ‘traitor,’ before he was proved to be one. At the end of it all, a majority of the House justified the king in sending Freind to the Tower, and expressed a hope that he would keep him there. [Sidenote: _DEBATE IN THE LORDS._] The Doctor quietly turned his imprisonment to good purpose, by producing his ‘De quibusdam Variolarum generibus,’ and laying down the plan, subsequently carried out, of his famous ‘History of Physic, from the time of Galen to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.’ Lords Strafford, Kinnoul, North and Grey, with Atterbury, were compromised so far as the evidence of the Captain-Lieutenant Pancier of Cobham’s Dragoons went. He deposed that he had been told by one Skene that the above peers were concerned in the plot. This took place when a Committee of the House of Commons visited Layer, under sentence of death, in the Tower. Plunkett deposed that he had heard Layer say the same of the Earls Scarsdale, Strafford, and Cowper, Lords Craven, Gower, Bathurst, and Bingley, all of whom were said to belong to a seditious company called Barford’s Club. Motions to get Pancier, Skene, and Plunkett before the House of Peers were made and lost. Lord Cowper was the only peer who denied the alleged facts by a formal declaration; he shocked Lord Townshend, moreover, by his ridiculing as a fiction ‘a horrible and execrable conspiracy.’ Townshend, however, acknowledged that the peers named were blameless as to the allegations. It was on this occasion that the Earl of Strafford declared his feelings in a very lofty manner. ‘I have the honour,’ he said, ‘to have more ancient noble blood running in my veins than some others; so, I hope I may be allowed to express more than ordinary resentments against insults offered to the peerage.’ This vain boast was founded on the fact that the Wentworths held land in Yorkshire in the Saxon times. But the Barony, Viscountcy, and Earldom dated only from the reign of Charles I., in the person of Thomas Wentworth, who was born in Chancery Lane, in 1593. The later earl, who boasted of the antiquity and the nobility