I cannot yet discover any proof sufficient to convict him of having usurped the authority of first minister, or any other power than that accidental influence which every man has, whose address or services have procured him the favour of his sovereign.

The usurpation, my lords, of regal power must be made evident by somewhat more than general assertions, must appear from some publick act like that of one of the prelates left regent of the kingdom by Richard the first, who, as soon as the king was gone too far to return, in the first elevations of his heart, began his new authority by imprisoning his colleague.

To charge this gentleman with the dismission of any of his colleagues, can, after the strongest aggravations, rise no higher than to an accusation of having advised his majesty to dismiss him, and even that, my lords, stands, at present, unsupported by evidence; nor could it, however uncontestably proved, discover either wickedness or weakness, or show any other authority than every man would exercise, if he were able to attain it.

If he had discharged this gentleman by his own authority, if he had transacted singly any great affair to the disadvantage of the publick, if he had imposed either upon the king or the senate by false representations, if he had set the laws at defiance, and openly trampled on our constitution, and if by these practices he had exalted himself above the reach of a legal prosecution, it had been worthy of the dignity of this house, to have overleaped the common boundaries of custom, to have neglected the standing rules of procedure, and to have brought so contemptuous and powerful an offender to a level with the rest of his fellow-subjects by expeditious and vigorous methods, to have repressed his arrogance, broken his power, and overwhelmed him at once by the resistless weight of an unanimous censure.

But, my lords, we have in the present case no provocations from crimes either openly avowed, or evidently proved; and certainly no incitement from necessity to exert the power of the house in any extraordinary method of prosecution.  We may punish whenever we can convict, and convict whenever we can obtain evidence; let us not, therefore, condemn any man unheard, nor punish any man uncondemned.

The duke of BEDFORD spoke next, in substance as follows:—­My lords, it is easy to charge the most blameless and gentle procedure with injustice and severity, but it is not easy to support such an accusation without confounding measures widely different, and disguising the nature of things with fallacious misrepresentations.

Nothing is more evident than that neither condemnation nor punishment is intended by the motion before us, which is only to remove from power a man who has no other claim to it than the will of his master, and who, as he had not been injured by never obtaining it, cannot justly complain that it is taken from him.

The motion, my lords, is so far from inflicting punishment, that it confers rewards, it leaves him in the possession of immense wealth, however accumulated, and enables him to leave that office in security, from which most of his predecessors have been precipitated by national resentment, or senatorial prosecution.