indeed the right of recommending to mercy, but whose privilege, as
a Privy Councillor, of advising the confirmation of his own
condemnations, and of interposing between the victims of
legal vengeance and the justice of the throne, is spurious and
unconstitutional. When it is considered that my intention of going to
the House of Commons was announced on the day on which my absence from
the prison was discovered; I say, when it is considered that, as soon
as it was known that I had left the prison, it was also known that I
had left it for the express purpose of going to the House of Commons
to move for an inquiry into the conduct of Lord Ellenborough; when it
is considered that every engine was set to work to tempt or intimidate
me from that purpose, to frighten me out of the country or allure me
back to the custody of the marshal, that assurances were given that
the doors should be kept open for my admission at any hour of the
night, and that I should be received with secresy, courtesy, and
indemnity; and when it is considered that I was afterwards seized in
the House of Commons, in defiance of the privileges of the House--can
there be a doubt that the object of that apprehension was less the
accomplishment of the sentence of the court than the prevention of
the exposure which I was prepared to make of the injustice of that
sentence? That recourse should have been had to violence to stifle the
accusations which I was prepared to bring forward, that terror of the
truth should have so superseded a wonted reverence for parliamentary
privileges as to have admitted the intrusion of tipstaves and
thief-takers into the House of Commons, to seize the person of an
individual elected to serve as a member of that House, and avowedly
attendant for that purpose, is extraordinary, though not unnatural."

It must be admitted that the question of breach of privilege was
somewhat more complicated than Lord Cochrane considered. His opponents