The Duke of Buckingham's speech in a late conference

The Duke of Buckingham's speech in a late conference

Table of contents

Title page

The DUKE of BUCKINGHAM'S SPEECH

[Page]

[Page]

The DUKE of BUCKINGHAM'S SPEECH

Gentlemen of the House of Commons.

I Am Commanded by the House of Peeres, to open to You the Matter of this Conference; Which is a Taske I could wish their Lordships had been pleased to lay upon any Body else, both for their own sakes and mine: having observed, in that little experience I have made in the World, there can be nothing of greater difficulty, Then to Unite Men in their Opinions, whose Interests seeme to disagree.

This, Gentlemen, I fear is at present our Case; but yet I hope, when we have a little better considered [Page] of it, we shall finde, that a greater Interest does oblige us at this time, rather to joyn in the Preservation of both our Priviledges, then to differ about the violation of either.

We acknowledge it is our Interest to defend the Right of the Commons; for, should we suffer them to be opprest, it would not be long before it might come to be our own case: And I humbly conceive it will also appear to be the Interest of the Commons, to uphold the Priviledge of the Lords; that so we may be in a Condition to stand by and support them.

All that their Lordships desire of you upon this occasion, is, That you will proceed with them as usually Friends do, when they are in Dispute one with another; That you will not be impatient of hearing Arguments urged against your Opinions, but Examine the Weight of what is said, and then impartially consider which of us two, are likeliest to be in the wrong.

If we are in the wrong, we and our Predecessors have been so for these many hundred of years: and not only our Predecessors, but yours too; This being the first time that ever an Appeal was made in point of Judicature, from the Lords House to the House of Commons. Nay, those very Commons which turn'd the Lords out of this House, though they took from them many other of their Privileges, yet left them the constant practise of this till the very last day of their Sitting▪ And this will be made appear by several Presidents these Noble Lords will lay before you, much better then I can pretend to doe.

Since this business has been in Agitation, their Lordships have been a little more curious than ordinary, to Informe themselves of the true nature of these Matters now in Question before Us; which I shall endeavour [Page] to Explain to you, as far as my small Abillity, and my aversion to hard words will give me leave. For howsoever the Law, to make it a Mystery and a Trade, may be wrapt up in Termes of Art, yet it is founded in reason, and is obvious to Common Sence.

The power of Judicature does naturally descend, and not ascend; That is no inferiour Court can have any power, which is not derived to it from some power above it.

The King is by the Lawes of this Land, Supreme Judge, in all Causes Ecclesiastical and Civil. And so there is no Court, High or Low, can Act, but in subordination to Him: and though they do not all Issue out their writs in the Kings Name, yet they can Issue out none but by vertue of some Power they have received from him.

Now every particular Court has such particular power as the King has given it and for that reason has its bounds: But, the Highest Court in which the King can possibly Sit, that is, His Supreme Court of Lords in Parliament, has in it all his Judicial Power, and consequently no bounds: I mean no bounds of Jurisdiction; for the highest Court is to Govern according to the Lawes, as well as the Lowest.

I suppose none will make a question, but that every Man, and every Cause, is to be tried according to Magna Charta; That is, by Peers, or according to the Laws of the Land. And he that is Tryed by the Ecclesiastical Courts, the Court of Admiralty, or the High Court of Lords in Parliament, is Tryed as much by the Lawes of the Land, as he that is Tryed by the Kings Bench, or Common-Pleas.

When these Inferior Courts happ [...]n to wrangle among themselves, which they must often do, by reason of [Page] their being bound up to particular Causes, and their having all equally and earnestly a desire to try all Causes themselves, then the Supreme Court is forced to hear their Complaints, because there is no other way of deciding them. And this under favour, is an Original Cause of Courts, though not of men.

Now these Original Causes of Courts, must also of necessity induce Men, for saving of Charges, and dispatch sake, to bring their Causes Originally before the Supreame Court. But then the Court is not obliged to receive them; but proceeds by Rules of Prudence, in either retaining, or dismissing them as they think fit.

This is under favour, the summ of all that your Precedents can shew us; which is nothing but what we practice every day: That is, that very often, because we would not be molested with hearing too many particular Causes, we referr them back to other Courts. And all the Argument you can possibly draw from hence, will not in any kind lessen our Power, but only shew an unwillingness we have, to trouble our selves often with matters of this Nature.

Nor will this appear strange, if you consider the constitution of our House; it being made up, partly of such whose Employments will not give them leisure to attend the hearing of Private Causes; and entirely of those that can receive no profit by it,

And the truth is, the Dispute at present is not between the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, but between us and Westminster-Hall. For as we desire to have few or no Causes brought before us, because we get nothing by them; so they desire to have all Causes brought before them, for a reason a little of the contrary nature.

[Page]For this very reason, it is their business to invent new wayes of drawing Causes to their Courts, which ought not to be pleaded there. As for example, this very Cause of Skinner that is now before us, (And I do not speak this by Roate, for I have the opinion of a Reverend Judge in the Case, who informed us of it the other day in the House.) They have no way of bringing this Cause into Westminster-Hall, but by this form; the reason and sence of which I leave to you to Judge of.

The Form is this, that in stead of speaking as we ordinary Men do, that have no Art, That Mr. Skinner lost a Ship in the East Indies: to bring this into their Courts, they must say, That Mr. Skinner lost a Ship in the East-Indies, in the Parish of Islington, in the County of Middlesex.

Now some of us Lords, that did not understand the refineness of this stile, began to examine what the reason of this should be; and so we found, that since they ought not by right to try such Causes, they are resolved to make bold not only with our Priviledges, but the very Sence and Language of the whole Nation.

This I thought fit to mention, only to let you see, that this whole Cause, as well as many others, could not be tryed properly in any place but at our Barr; Except Mr. Skinner would have taken a fancy, to try the Right of Jurisdictions between Westminster-Hall and the Court of Admirallity, instead of seeking Relief for the Injuries he had received in the place only where it was to be given him.

One thing I hear is much insisted upon, which is, the Tryal without Juries; to which I could Answer, That such Tryals are allowed of, in the Chancery and other Courts: And, that when there is occasion for them, we [Page] make use of Juries too, both by directing them in the Kings-Bench, and having them brought up to our Barr.

But I shall onely crave leave to put you in minde, That if you do not allow us in some Cases, to try Men without Juries, you will then absolutely take away the use of Impeachments; which I humbly conceive you will not think proper to have done at this time.

FINIS.

§

§

[Page]

THE DUKE OF Buckingham's SPEECH In a late CONFERENCE▪

LONDON, Printed for M. I. 1668.

Information about this book

Title statement

The Duke of Buckingham's speech in a late conference

Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 1628-1687.

Edition statement

1668

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2004-08 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A29995

ID [STC]

Wing B5331

ID [STC]

ESTC R6911

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

11617712

ID [OCLC]

ocm 11617712

ID [VID]

47914

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A29995)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 47914)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Early English books, 1641-1700 ; 484:19)

Source

— The Duke of Buckingham's speech in a late conference, Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 1628-1687..

Extent

[2], 6 p. ; 18 cm.

Printed for M.I.,. London :: 1668.. (Reproduction of original in Huntington Library.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.