The debates were the longest and the hottest, the divisions were the largest, the protests were the most numerously signed that had ever been known in the whole history of the House of Peers.  Repeatedly the benches continued to be filled from ten in the morning till past midnight.766 The health of many lords suffered severely; for the winter was bitterly cold; but the majority was not disposed to be indulgent.  One evening Devonshire was unwell; he stole away and went to bed; but Black Rod was soon sent to bring him back.  Leeds, whose constitution was extremely infirm, complained loudly.  “It is very well,” he said, “for young gentlemen to sit down to their suppers and their wine at two o’clock in the morning; but some of us old men are likely to be of as much use here as they; and we shall soon be in our graves if we are forced to keep such hours at such a season."767 So strongly was party spirit excited that this appeal was disregarded, and the House continued to sit fourteen or fifteen hours a day.  The chief opponents of the bill were Rochester, Nottingham, Normanby and Leeds.  The chief orators on the other side were Tankerville, who, in spite of the deep stains which a life singularly unfortunate had left on his public and private character, always spoke with an eloquence which riveted the attention of his hearers; Burnet, who made a great display of historical learning; Wharton, whose lively and familiar style of speaking, acquired in the House of Commons, sometimes shocked the formality of the Lords; and Monmouth, who had always carried the liberty of debate to the verge of licentiousness, and who now never opened his lips without inflicting a wound on the feelings of some adversary.  A very few nobles of great weight, Devonshire, Dorset, Pembroke and Ormond, formed a third party.  They were willing to use the Bill of Attainder as an instrument of torture for the purpose of wringing a full confession out of the prisoner.  But they were determined not to give a final vote for sending him to the scaffold.

The first division was on the question whether secondary evidence of what Goodman could have proved should be admitted.  On this occasion Burnet closed the debate by a powerful speech which none of the Tory orators could undertake to answer without premeditation.  A hundred and twenty-six lords were present, a number unprecedented in our history.  There were seventy-three Contents, and fifty-three Not Contents.  Thirty-six of the minority protested against the decision of the House.768

The next great trial of strength was on the question whether the bill should be read a second time.  The debate was diversified by a curious episode.  Monmouth, in a vehement declamation, threw some severe and well merited reflections on the memory of the late Lord Jeffreys.  The title and part of the ill gotten wealth of Jeffreys had descended to his son, a dissolute lad, who had lately come of age, and who was then sitting in the House.  The young man fired at hearing his father reviled.  The House was forced to interfere, and to make both the disputants promise that the matter should go no further.  On this day a hundred and twenty-eight peers were present.  The second reading was carried by seventy-three to fifty-five; and forty-nine of the fifty-five protested.769