I do not mean to lead the reader through the maze of vague and barbarous law-proceedings, which sprang out of this transaction. It did but lay open the undefined or unmeaning magazine of terms which the chicanery or contradictions of ages had heaped together, and it proved that the Crown and the subject might be justified in almost any excesses. The right hand of Nonsense armed the King, and her left defended the subject. The lawyers on either side were employed in discovering springes or loop-holes.
After a week’s deliberation Wilkes was seized, April 30th, by three messengers, on a general warrant, signed by Lord Halifax. They had been ordered to apprehend him at midnight, but abstained till noon of the 30th. Churchill, his friend, then with him, slipped out of the house, either to secure himself or to give the alarm. Mr. Wood,342 the Under-Secretary, and Philip Carteret Webbe,343 a most villanous tool and agent in any iniquity, seized his papers, though he had received intimation time enough to convey away the most material. He was conducted to Lord Halifax’s, where he behaved with much firmness and confidence, and grievously wounded the haughty dignity attempted to be assumed by Lord Egremont. They committed him close prisoner to the Tower; a severity rarely, and never fit to be practised but in cases of most dangerous treason. This treatment served but to increase Wilkes’s spirit and wit. He desired to be confined in the same room where Sir William Windham, Lord Egremont’s father, had been kept on a charge of Jacobitism; and said he hoped, if there could be found such a chamber in the Tower, that he might not be lodged where any Scotchman had been prisoner.
About the same time, being told of the reasons alleged by the King of Spain344 for setting aside his eldest son, two of which were, that the Prince squinted, and did not believe the mysteries of our holy religion; then said Wilkes, “I can never be King of Spain, for I squint, and believe none of those mysteries.”
The rigour of the commitment gave serious alarm; but, the very day on which it happened, Wilkes’s friends applied to the Court of Common Pleas for his habeas corpus, expecting it from Lord Chief Justice Pratt, and scorning or despairing of it from Lord Mansfield.
Lord Temple instantly resorted to the Tower, but was denied admittance to the prisoner; a restraint the ministers found the very next day they must take off. Lord Temple then returned to visit Wilkes, as did the Duke of Grafton and some few others of rank; but, in general, the prisoner’s character was so bad, and his conduct so rash and unguarded, that few who were either decent or cautious cared to be concerned with him.
The habeas corpus being granted, Wilkes was carried to the Court of Common Pleas, May 3rd. He spoke for an hour, said “attempts had been made to corrupt him, now to persecute him; he had been worse treated than any rebel Scot.” The crowd in Westminster-hall gave a great shout; the Chief Justice, with great dignity, reproved them. The judges took time to deliberate. The people were profuse of their acclamations to the sufferer.
On the 5th, he wrote a letter to his daughter (a child whom he had placed in a convent in France for her education), and sent it open to Lord Halifax; it congratulated her on living in a free country. He was the same day turned out of his commission in the militia.
On the 6th, being again conveyed from the Tower to Westminster-hall, Pratt and the other judges of the Common Pleas unanimously discharged him from his confinement; the Chief Justice delivering their opinions, and dismissing him on his parliamentary privilege, “because, though privilege of Parliament does not hold against a breach of the peace, it does against what only tends to a breach of the peace. The case of the seven bishops was quoted; the judges Wright, Holloway, and Allibone had been against them. Allibone, said Pratt, was a Papist; Wright and Holloway had been appointed for the occasion; but Powel, an honest man, had declared for the bishops. On the other hand, he quoted a recent case of Lord Tankerville, who having been arrested on a prosecution for bribery in the election for Windsor, the Lords had declared it a breach of privilege”—we shall find how much less tender the Commons were of their privileges.
The Chief Justice had no sooner granted the enlargement of Wilkes, than two of the King’s serjeants presented letters to the Court, from the Attorney and Solicitor Generals, demanding to be admitted into the Court, as the case concerned the King’s interest. The Attorney, it is said, has a right of interfering in any Court where the King’s interest is agitated; it is doubted whether the Solicitor has the same prerogative. To both Pratt answered, that they had applied too late. Now did the Court feel the consequence of having forced Pratt to be Chief Justice against his will.
This triumph quite overset the little discretion of which Wilkes had been master. He seemed to put himself into the situation of a King, who, not content with the outworks with which the law has surrounded his person, attempts to employ the law as offensive artillery. Affecting to have been robbed of moveables when his papers were seized, Wilkes entered into a virulent controversy, by letter, with the Secretaries of State; and even endeavoured, though in vain, to obtain warrants for searching their houses. This wild conduct did not help his cause. His next step fell more perniciously on his own head. He erected a printing-press in his own house; and, against the remonstrances of Lord Temple, who never wanted fear where there was room for it, and who had no taste for anything that did not lead directly home to faction, indulged himself in realizing those sallies of his humour and intemperance, which are scarcely excusable when transient and confined to the jollity of intoxicated moments at table. The Court regarding Lord Temple as the instigator, not as the Socrates, of this Alcibiades, removed him from the lord-lieutenancy of the county of Buckingham. The printers, who had been vexed in their business by the orders of the Secretaries of State, and encouraged by the victory of Wilkes, prosecuted the messengers, and obtained damages to the value of 300l.
The same spirit spread into the west. In the cider counties they dressed up a figure in Scotch plaid, with a blue riband, to represent the Favourite, and this figure seemed to lead by the nose an ass royally crowned. At the same time they voted instructions to their members to try to obtain a repeal of the act. The circumstance of the act being passed under so unpopular an administration was most unfortunate. It had taken thirty years to open the eyes of mankind to the benefits of excise: the only, at least the best, method of improving the revenue without imposing new burthens. Being started at so ungracious a moment, the old prejudices were industriously revived.
The Court at the same time met with some mortifications in their pursuit of congratulatory addresses on the peace, which they sedulously promoted. One Judge Perrot345 was so servile as to recommend it from the bench on the circuit. The Duke of Newcastle and Lord Hardwicke, the one Chancellor, the other High Steward of the University of Cambridge, refused to go to St. James’s with the address of that body. Allen,346 the ostentatious patron of Pope and Warburton, the latter of whom had married his natural daughter, prevailed on the city of Bath to thank the King for the adequate347 peace, and had himself the insolence or folly to send that address, so profligately worded, to Mr. Pitt, with whom he had maintained a mutual intercourse of flattery. Mr. Pitt disdained to present their compliment to the King, and even declared he would represent their city no more.
Wilkes, in the meantime, had gone to France to visit his daughter. There he received a challenge from one Forbes348 an outlawed Scot in the French service, who could not digest the torrents of abuse which Wilkes had poured forth on his country. Alexander Murray, brother of Lord Elibank, and an outlaw too since the Westminster Election in 1751,349 was the go-between in this quarrel, not without being suspected of inflaming it. Wilkes accepted the defiance for the next morning, but, when Forbes called on him, affected to laugh it off, saying, he was bound to fight Lord Egremont by preference before any other man. When that excuse availed not, he asked Forbes if he had provided a second; to which the other replied, such preparation was too dangerous in France. Altercations thickened, till at last the lieutenant de police was sent for, who obliged Forbes to promise not to proceed any farther.
Had the duel with Lord Egremont been seriously intended, from that too would Wilkes have been delivered; for the earl, who was of a sanguine and apoplectic complexion, of which he had felt attacks, and though warned in