Your Committee, at an early period, and frequently since the commencement of this trial, have neglected no means of research which might afford them information concerning these supposed strict and inflexible rules of proceeding and of evidence, which, appeared to them, destructive of all the means and ends of justice: and, first, they examined carefully the Rolls and Journals of the House of Lords, as also the printed trials of cases before that court. Your Committee finds but one instance, in the whole course of Parliamentary impeachments, in which evidence offered by the Commons has been rejected on the plea of inadmissibility or incompetence. This was in the case of Lord Strafford's trial; when the copy of a warrant (the same not having any attestation to authenticate it as a true copy) was, on deliberation, not admitted,--and your Committee thinks, as the case stood, with reason. But even in this one instance the Lords seemed to show a marked anxiety not to narrow too much the admissibility of evidence; for they confined their determination "to this individual case," as the Lord Steward reported their resolution; and he adds,--"They conceive this could be no impediment or failure in the proceeding, because the truth and verity of it would depend on the first general power given to execute it, which they who manage the evidence for the Commons say they could prove."[36] Neither have objections to evidence offered by the prisoner been very frequently made, nor often allowed when made. In the same case of Lord Strafford, two books produced by his Lordship, without proof by whom they were written, were rejected, (and on a clear principle,) "as being private books, and no records."[37] On both these occasions, the questions were determined by the Lords alone, without any resort to the opinions of the Judges. In the impeachments of Lord Stafford, Dr. Sacheverell, and Lord Wintoun, no objection to evidence appears in the Lords' Journals to have been pressed, and not above one taken, which was on the part of the Managers. Several objections were, indeed, taken to evidence in Lord Macclesfield's trial.[38] They were made on the part of the Managers, except in two instances, where the objections were made by the witnesses themselves. They were all determined (those started by the Managers in their favor) by the Lords themselves, without any reference to the Judges. In the discussion of one of them, a question was stated for the Judges concerning the law in a similar case upon an information in the court below; but it was set aside by the previous question.[39]