then sent up to the House of Lords. Shaftesbury was the leading Exclusionist—those who wanted to exclude Charles II's brother James, Duke of York from the succession—and the Bill was a part of that struggle as they believed James would rule arbitrarily. The Lords decided to add many wrecking amendments to the Bill in an attempt to kill it; the Commons had no choice but to pass the Bill with the Lords' amendments because they learned that the King would soon end the current parliamentary session. A popular but likely untrue anecdote holds claims that the Act only passed because the votes in favor were miscounted as a joke. When a parliamentary house votes on legislation, each side—those voting for and against—appoints a teller who stands on each side of a door through which those Lords who vote "aye" re-enter the House (the "nays" remain seated). One teller counts aloud whilst the other teller listens and keeps watch to verify the count. Of the Habeas Corpus Act count, Gilbert Burnet wrote,Lord Grey and Lord Norris were named to be the tellers: Lord Norris, being a man subject to vapours, was not at all times attentive to what he was doing: so, a very fat lord coming in, Lord Grey counted him as ten, as a jest at first: but seeing Lord Norris had not observed it, he went on with this misreckoning of ten: so it was reported that they that were for the Bill were in the majority, though indeed it went for the other side: and by this means the Bill passed.In the words of historian Helen Nutting, this miscount story is "highly improbable". Proponents of the story cite as supporting evidence a discrepancy between the vote total and the attendance count in the parliamentary minutes: the clerk recorded in the minutes of the Lords that the "ayes" had fifty-seven and the "nays" had fifty-five, a total of 112, but the same minutes also state that only 107 Lords had attended that sitting. However, the attendance counts in the minute book were frequently inaccurate, and the attendance count is off by five rather than ten, undermining rather than supporting Burnet's reminiscence. According to Nutting, had the vote been miscounted, James would almost certainly have "taken advantage of a real miscount to overturn the act", since he opposed it. King Charles II assented to the Act in 1679 since,