verely for having quitted his liberal opinions to take office with the tories. Lyndhurst strenuously contradicting this, Denman could only refer in proof of his charges to the general belief prevailing at the bar that Lyndhurst's opinions were liberal, and scarcely came well out of the controversy. Sir T. Martin adds that he subsequently asked and obtained favours of Lyndhurst (Life of Lyndhurst, 330). In 1837 began the legal proceedings which formed the chief event of Denman's life, ‘on which,’ he himself wrote, ‘my future reputation must depend.’ One Stockdale brought an action against Messrs. Hansard for a libel contained in a report of the inspector of prisons printed and sold by them, which described one of his publications as ‘obscene.’ The cause came on for trial before Denman at Westminster 7 Feb. 1837. The defence relied on was simply that the report was published for and by the authority of the House of Commons. Denman held the plea bad on the ground that the house could not authorise a libel or create by its resolutions any such privilege for papers published by its authority. In this view the attorney-general, Campbell, who led for the defendant, at the time concurred; subsequently he took the lead in those proceedings which impugned Denman's view of the law. A committee of the house having reported (8 May) that the house alone could judge of its privileges, the house resolved, 31 May, that ‘for any court or tribunal to decide upon matters of privilege is … a breach and contempt of the privileges of parliament.’ The sale of the report continuing, Stockdale brought a second action, to which privilege was the defendant's sole plea. This plea was demurred to. Upon the argument of the demurrer Denman was prepared to have given judgment against the plea at once. The court, however, took time to consider, and upheld the demurrer on 31 May 1839. Judgment thereupon went by default, and a third action being brought with like result, Evans and Wheelton, sheriffs of Middlesex, levied execution upon Hansard for the sum at which the damages were assessed, 600l., 16 Dec. 1839. The day after parliament met the House of Commons sent Stockdale to Newgate (17 Jan. 1840), and the sheriffs refusing to refund the amount for which they had levied, they were committed to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms on 21 Jan. On 24 Jan. they sued out their writ of habeas corpus. By Campbell's advice the serjeant-at-arms made a return that he held them in custody by virtue of the speaker's warrant committing them for contempt. This Denman held, as undoubtedly was the case, to be a good return, but he reiterated his former opinion. They were remitted to custody, nor was the second of them, Evans, liberated until 5 March. The controversy was finally concluded by the passing of the Printed Papers Act, 3 & 4 Vict. c. 9. On its second reading in the House of Lords (6 April), Denman made a great speech, vindicating himself and his view, and the amendments which he proposed were accepted. Campbell, both in his ‘Lives of the Chief Justices,’ ii. 134, 148–64, 166 (life of Holt), and ‘Lives of the Chancellors,’ i. 373, insinuated that Denman had been prompted in taking the view he did by a desire to pose as the champion of popular liberty. Lord Abinger, however, declared in the House of Lords, 28 March 1843, that the opinion of the profession supported Denman's judgment. Mr. Justice Story warmly supported it, and the action of the House of Commons seems in the end tacitly to have admitted its correctness. Denman's research into the whole law and literature of privilege was very extensive, and he published in support of his view during the controversy, ‘Observations on the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons’ (anonymous), 1837; the ‘Case of Ashby v. White, and Paty's Case,’ from Lord Holt's manuscript in 1837; and in March 1840 an article on ‘Privilege’ in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ vol. lxv., and an article in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ No. 167 (for the whole controversy see ‘Stockdale v. Hansard,’ Adolphus and Ellis' Reports, ix. 1, xi. 253; and Erskine May, Constitutional History, i. 459).
Meantime Denman had made some progress with his projects of legislative reform. In the summer session of 1837 he carried two bills abolishing the punishment of death for forgery and for a variety of other offences, in which, though obsolete, it still existed. In the session after the queen's accession he supported, 3 Dec., Lord Cottenham's bill to abolish arrest on mesne process. In 1838, having previously consulted all the judges, he brought in a bill to permit persons of tender conscience to affirm in lieu of taking the oath in courts of law; but the substantial portion of the measure was lost by thirty-two to sixteen, 14 July. He successfully supported the proposal to hold sittings in banc at other times than during the brief legal terms, and so important a reform did he think it that he directed the fact to be recorded on his tombstone, which was done. In 1839 he supported the Custody of Infants Bill, giving access to her children to a wife separated from her husband (18 July), and on 15 Aug. he began his long efforts for the extinction of the slave trade by a speech on the bill for the suppression of the slave trade,
