act of the 7th and 8th of King William, “for regulating trials in cases of high treason and misprision of treason,” the House, upon reading the report, came to several resolutions, founded for the most part on the construction of that act.  What that construction was appeareth from the Lord High Steward’s address to the prisoners just before their arraignment.  Having mentioned that act as one happy consequence of the Revolution, he addeth,—­“However injuriously that revolution hath been traduced, whatever attempts have been made to subvert this happy establishment founded on it, your Lordships will now have the benefit of that law in its full extent.”

I need not, after this, mention any other judicial acts done by the House in this case, before the appointment of the High Steward:  many there are.  For the putting a construction upon an act relative to the conduct of the court and the right of the subject at the trial, and in the proceedings preparatory to it, and this in a case entirely new, and upon a point, to say no more in this place, not extremely clear, was undoubtedly an exercise of authority proper only for a court having full cognizance of the cause.

I will not minutely enumerate the several orders made preparatory to the trial of Lord Lovat, and in the several cases I shall have occasion to mention, touching the time and place of the trial, the allowance or non-allowance of council, and other matters of the like kind, all plainly judicial; because the like orders occur in all the cases where a journal of the preparatory steps hath been published by order of the Peers.  With regard to Lord Lovat’s case, I think the order directing the form of the High Steward’s commission, which I have already taken notice of, is not very consistent with the idea of a court whose powers can be supposed to depend, at any point of time, upon the existence or dissolution of that commission.

In the case of the Earl of Derwentwater and the other lords impeached at the same time, the House received and recorded the confessions of those of them who pleaded guilty, long before the teste of the High Steward’s commission, which issued merely for the solemnity of giving judgment against them upon their conviction.  This appeareth by the commission itself.  It reciteth, that the Earl of Derwentwater and others, coram nobis in praesenti Parliamento, had been impeached by the Commons for high treason, and had, coram nobis in praesenti Parliamento, pleaded guilty to that impeachment; and that the King, intending that the said Earl of Derwentwater and others, de et pro proditione unde ipsi ut praefertur impetit’, accusat’, et convict’ existunt coram nobis in praesenti Parliamento, secundum legem et consuetudinem hujus regni nostri Magnae Britanniae, audientur, sententientur, et adjudicentur, constituteth the then Lord Chancellor High Steward (hac vice) to do and execute all things which to the office of High Steward in that behalf do belong.  The receiving and recording the confession of the prisoners, which amounted to a conviction, so that nothing remained but proceeding to judgment, was certainly an exercise of judicial authority, which no assembly, how great soever, not having full cognizance of the cause, could exercise.