This decision produced a great sensation, and not without reason. A question was now raised which might justly excite the anxiety of every man in the kingdom. That question was whether the highest tribunal, the tribunal on which, in the last resort, depended the most precious interests of every English subject, was at liberty to decide judicial questions on other than judicial grounds, and to withhold from a suitor what was admitted to be his legal right, on account of the depravity of his moral character. That the supreme Court of Appeal ought not to be suffered to exercise arbitrary power, under the forms of ordinary justice, was strongly felt by the ablest men in the House of Commons, and by none more strongly than by Somers. With him, and with those who reasoned like him, were, on this occasion, allied many weak and hot-headed zealots who still regarded Oates as a public benefactor, and who imagined that to question the existence of the Popish plot was to question the truth of the Protestant religion. On the very morning after the decision of the Peers had been pronounced, keen reflections were thrown, in the House of Commons, on the justice of their lordships. Three days later, the subject was brought forward by a Whig Privy Councillor, Sir Robert Howard, member for Castle Rising. He was one of the Berkshire branch of his noble family, a branch which enjoyed, in that age, the unenviable distinction of being wonderfully fertile of bad rhymers. The poetry of the Berkshire Howards was the jest of three generations of satirists. The mirth began with the first representation of the Rehearsal, and continued down to the last edition of the Dunciad, [397] But Sir Robert, in spite of his bad verses, and of some foibles and vanities which had caused him to be brought on the stage under the name of Sir Positive Atall, had in parliament the weight which a stanch party man, of ample fortune, of illustrious name, of ready utterance, and of resolute spirit, can scarcely fail to possess, [398] When he rose to call the attention of the Commons to the case of Oates, some Tories, animated by the same passions which had prevailed in the other House, received him with loud hisses. In spite of this most unparliamentary insult, he persevered; and it soon appeared that the majority was with him. Some orators extolled the patriotism and courage of Oates: others dwelt much on a prevailing rumour, that the solicitors who were employed against him on behalf of the Crown had distributed large sums of money among the jurymen. These were topics on which there was much difference of opinion. But that the sentence was illegal was a proposition which admitted of no dispute. The most eminent lawyers in the House of Commons declared that, on this point, they entirely concurred in the opinion given by the judges in the House of Lords. Those who had hissed when the subject was introduced, were so effectually cowed that they did