gave me real pain to hear the Attorney-General contend that the two Judges merited the foul indignity they underwent, as they had acted corruptly in concert with the Duke of York. In support of this novel charge, he produced no evidence, nor any other reason but that the plea, as set out in Nelson's Abridgement (a), appears to have been in bar, and not to the jurisdiction. But the Commons, who knew their own motives, made no such charge: the record produced there, on law, exhibits a bad plea for the reasons assigned by Lord Ellenborough, and the judgment punished by the Commons could not have been different without a desertion of duty by the Judges." [(a) 2 Nels, Abr. 1248. The plea there is that pleaded, not in Jay v. Topham, but in Verdon v. Topham. Sec. 14 East, 102 Note (a).] 545. In Stockdale v. Hansard, (1839), 112 ER 1112 (supra) the action of the House of Commons, on Jay v. Topham, 112 How St Tr 821 (supra), was practically declared to be illegal or unconstitutional for arbitrariness. The sovereign British Parliament, however, did not alter but has acquiesced in the law as stated by Lord Denman who pointed out, by references to a number of precedents, that Common Law Courts had continuously been determining questions relating to the very existence of an alleged privilege and defining its orbit on claims based on the ground of a Parliamentary privilege. And English Courts have gone on doing this unhesitatingly after Stockdale v. Hansard (supra), just as they had done earlier, as part of their function and duty to interpret and declare the law as it exists. 546. Let me go back a little further to the time when another English Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, who, on being summoned, with his brother Judges, by King James the 1st, to answer why the King could not himself decide cases which had to go before his own Courts of justice, asserted: “X X X X no King after the conquest assumed to himself to give any judgment in any cause whatsoever, which concerned the administration of justice within this realm, but these were solely determined in the Courts of Justice.” When the King said that “he thought the law was founded on reason, and that he and others had reason, as well as the Judges”, Coke answered: “ True it was, that God had endowed his Majesty with excellent science, and great endowments of nature, but his Majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods or fortunes of his subjects, are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgement of the law, which law is an act which requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it, and that the law was the golden metwand and measure to try the causes of the subjects, and which protected his Majesty in safety and peace.” (The “Higher Law” background of American Constitutional law by Edward S. Corwin p. 38–39)