took on themselves to direct the execution of their own orders, the Lords, afraid to be jostled out of that equality to which they were now content to be reduced, asserted a similar claim at the expense of the king's prerogative. They returned to their own house on the restoration with confused notions of their high jurisdiction, rather enhanced than abated by the humiliation they had undergone. Thus before the king's arrival, the Commons having sent up for their concurrence a resolution that the persons and estates of the regicides should be seized, the upper house deemed it an encroachment on their exclusive judicature, and changed the resolution into "an order of the Lords on complaint of the Commons."[34] In a conference on this subject between the two houses, the Commons denied their lordships to possess an exclusive jurisdiction, but did not press that matter.[35] But in fact this order was rather of a legislative than judicial nature; nor could the Lords pretend to any jurisdiction in cases of treason. They artfully, however, overlooked these distinctions; and made orders almost daily in the session of 1660, trenching on the executive power and that of the inferior courts. Not content with ordering the estates of all peers to be restored, free from seizure by sequestration, and with all arrears of rent, we find in their journals that they did not hesitate on petition to stay waste on the estates of private persons, and to secure the tithes of livings, from which ministers had been ejected, in the hands of the churchwardens till their title could be tried.[36] They acted, in short, as if they had a plenary authority in matters of freehold right, where any member of their own house was a party, and in every case as full an equitable jurisdiction as the court of chancery. Though in the more settled state of things which ensued, these anomalous orders do not so frequently occur, we find several assumptions of power which show a disposition to claim as much as the circumstances of any particular case should lead them to think expedient for the parties, or honourable to themselves.[37]

Resistance made by the commons.—The lower house of parliament, which hardly reckoned itself lower in dignity, and was something more than equal in substantial power, did not look without jealousy on these pretensions. They demurred to a privilege asserted by the Lords of assessing themselves in bills of direct taxation; and, having on one occasion reluctantly permitted an amendment of that nature to pass, took care to record their dissent from the principle by a special entry in the journal.[38] An amendment having been introduced into a bill for regulating the press, sent up by the Commons in the session of 1661, which exempted the houses of peers from search for unlicensed books, it was resolved not to agree to it; and the bill dropped for that time.[39] Even in far more urgent circumstances, while the parliament sat at Oxford in the year of the plague, a bill to prevent the progress of infection was lost, because the lords insisted that their houses should not be subjected to the general provisions for security.[40] These ill-judged demonstrations of a design to exempt themselves from that equal submission to the law, which is required in all well-governed states, and had ever been remarkable in our constitution, naturally raised a prejudice against the Lords, both in the other house of parliament, and among the common lawyers.

This half-suppressed jealousy soon disclosed itself in the famous controversy between the two houses about the case of Skinner and the East India Company. This began by a petition of the former to the king, wherein he complained, that having gone as a merchant to the Indian seas, at a time when there was no restriction upon that trade, the East India Company's agents had plundered his property, taken away his ships, and dispossessed him of an island which he had purchased from a native prince. Conceiving that he could have no sufficient redress in the ordinary courts of justice, he besought his sovereign to enforce reparation by some other means. After several ineffectual attempts by a committee of the privy council to bring about a compromise between the parties, the king transmitted the documents to the House of Lords, with a recommendation to do justice to the petitioner. They proceeded accordingly to call on the East India Company for an answer to Skinner's allegations. The company gave in what is technically called a plea to the jurisdiction, which the house over-ruled. The defendants then pleaded in bar, and contrived to delay the enquiry into the facts till the next session; when the proceedings having been renewed, and the plea to the Lords' jurisdiction again offered, and over-ruled, judgment was finally given that the East India Company should pay £5000 damages to Skinner.

Meantime the company had presented a petition to the House of Commons against the proceedings of the Lords in this business. It was referred to a committee, who had already been appointed to consider some other cases of a like nature. They made a report, which produced resolutions to this effect; that the Lords, in taking cognisance of an original complaint, and that relievable in the ordinary course of law, had acted illegally, and in a manner to deprive the subject of benefit of the law. The Lords in return voted, "that the House of Commons entertaining the scandalous petition of the East India Company against the Lords' house of parliament, and their proceedings, examinations, and votes thereupon had and made, are a breach of the privileges of the House of Peers, and contrary to the fair correspondency which ought to be between the two houses of parliament, and unexampled in former times; and that the House of Peers, taking cognisance of the cause of Thomas Skinner, merchant, a person highly oppressed and injured in East India by the governor and company of merchants trading thither, and over-ruling the plea of the said company, and adjudging £5000 damages thereupon against the said governor and company, is agreeable to the laws of the land, and well warranted by the law and custom of parliament, and justified by many parliamentary precedents ancient and modern."

Two conferences between the houses, according to the usage of parliament, ensued, in order to reconcile this dispute. But it was too material in itself, and aggravated by too much previous jealousy, for any voluntary compromise. The precedents alleged to prove an original jurisdiction in the peers were so thinly scattered over the records of centuries, and so contrary to the received principle of our constitution that questions of fact are