when he was suddenly released without any explanation of the step being given. On 19 Oct. 1669, at the first meeting of a new session of parliament, Barnardiston was called to the bar of the House of Commons, and there invited to describe the indignities which the lords had put upon him. At the conclusion of his speech the commons voted the proceedings against him subversive of their rights and privileges. The lords refused at first to ‘vacate’ their action in the matter, and the quarrel between the houses continued till December; but finally both houses yielded to the suggestion of the king to expunge from their journals the entries relating to the incident.
From the date of these proceedings Sir Samuel enjoyed all the popularity that comes of apparent persecution. In 1672 the death of Sir Henry North created a vacancy in the representation of Suffolk, and Barnardiston was the candidate chosen by the whigs, with whom his religious opinions and his fear of arbitrary government caused him to heartily sympathise. The election was viewed as a trial of strength between the ‘church and loyal’ party and the country party. Dissenters and the commercial classes faithfully supported Sir Samuel, and he gained seventy-eight votes more than his opponent, Lord Huntingtower. But the contest did not cease there. Sir William Soame, the sheriff of Suffolk, was well-disposed to the losing candidate, and on the ground that Sir Samuel's supporters comprised many of the ‘rabble,’ about whose right to vote he was in doubt, he sent up to the commons a double return announcing the names of the two candidates, and leaving the house to decide their rights to the seat. Each candidate petitioned the house to amend the return in his interest; and after both petitions had been referred to a committee, Sir Samuel was declared duly elected, and took his seat (Commons' Journal, ix. 260–2, 291, 312–3). But these proceedings did not satisfy Barnardiston. He brought an action in the King's Bench against the sheriff, Soame, to recover damages for malicious behaviour towards him, and Soame was placed under arrest. The case was heard before Lord Chief Justice Hale on 13 Nov. 1674, and judgment, with 800l. damages, was given in favour of the plaintiff. By a writ of error the proceedings were afterwards transferred to the Exchequer Chamber, and there, by the verdict of six judges out of eight, the result of the first trial was reversed. In 1689 Sir Samuel, after renewing his complaint in the commons, carried the action to the House of Lords. In the interval Soame had died, and his widow was now made the defendant. The lords heard the arguments of both parties in the middle of June, but they finally resolved to affirm the judgment of the Exchequer Chamber. The whole action is one of the utmost constitutional importance, and the final judgment gave the House of Commons an exclusive right to determine the legality of the returns to their chamber, and of the conduct of returning officers. The two most elaborate judgments delivered in the case—that of Sir Robert Atkyns, one of the two judges who supported Sir Samuel in the Exchequer Chamber, and that of Lord North on the other side in the House of Lords, who, as attorney-general Sir Francis North, had been counsel for the defendant in the lower court—were published in 1689, and have since been frequently reprinted. The case was popularly viewed at the time as a political trial, and is elaborately commented on with much party feeling by Roger North, the tory historian, in his ‘Examen.’ North declares that Barnardiston throughout the proceedings sought the support of ‘the rabble,’ and pursued Soame with unnecessary vindictiveness, in the first instance by making him bankrupt after the trial in the King's Bench, and in the second by sending the case to the House of Lords after his death (pp. 516 et seq.).
These lengthy proceedings had made Sir Samuel's seat in parliament secure for many years. He was again returned for Suffolk to the parliaments of 1678, 1679, and 1680, and to William III's parliaments of 1690, 1695, 1698, and 1701. Throughout his career he steadily supported the whigs. In 1681 he was foreman of the grand jury of Middlesex which threw out the bill of high treason against the Earl of Shaftesbury. In 1688 he openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the proceedings that had followed the discovery of the Rye House Plot, but too much weight was attached to his opinions by the opponents of the court to allow this expression of them to go unpunished. On 28 Feb. 1683–4 he was summoned to take his trial for libel as ‘being of a factious, seditious, and disaffected temper,’ and having ‘caused several letters to be written and published’ reflecting on the king and officers of state. No more flagrant instance of the extravagant cruelty of the law courts at the close of Charles II's reign has been adduced than these proceedings against Barnardiston (cf. Stephen, Hist. of Criminal Law, ii. 313–4). Two of the four letters which formed the basis of the charge were privately addressed to a Suffolk friend, Sir Philip Skippon, and the others to a linendraper of Ipswich and to a gentleman of Brightwell, with both of whom Sir Samuel was intimate. They contained sentences
