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The attitude of the dema

Wilkes in vindicating his rights. gogue was defiant and irritating in the extreme. One of the Secretaries of State was Lord Egremont, whose father had been imprisoned on suspicion of Jacobitism in the last reign. On his committal to the Tower, Wilkes asked to be lodged in the room in which Windham had been confined, or at all events in a room in which no Scotchman had been lodged, if such a room could be found in the Tower. He wrote a letter to his daughter, who was then in a French convent, congratulating her on living in a free country, and sent it open, according to rule, to Lord Halifax. He applied to the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of Habeas Corpus, and when he succeeded in obtaining it, he addressed the court in a speech in which he complained that he had been 'worse treated than any rebel Scot.' The question of his arrest was fully argued before the Court of Common Pleas, and Chief Justice Pratt and the other judges unanimously pronounced it to be illegal on the ground that Parliamentary privilege secured a member of Parliament from arrest in all cases except treason, felony, and actual breach of the peace, and that a libel, though it might tend to produce the latter offence, could not be regarded as itself a breach of the peace. . Numerous actions had been brought against the messengers who executed the general warrant by the persons who were arrested, and damages for various amounts were obtained, and two other constitutional points of great importance were decided. Chief Justice Pratt authoritatively, and with something more than judicial emphasis, determined that 'warrants to search for, seize, and carry away papers,' on a charge of libel, were contrary to law. He also expressed his opinion that general warrants issued by the Secretary of State without specifying the name of the person to be arrested were illegal, and this opinion was a few years later confirmed by Lord Mansfield.'

When these decisions were announced the triumph of the people was unbounded. Wilkes was not only released from im

was

Compare Adolphus, i. 136, 137. Campbell's Chancellors, vi. 370. The legality of general warrants brought before Mansfield in November 1765. He gave an opinion similar to that of Pratt. In order to

avoid a judgment against the Crown on the merits of the case, the Attorney-General admitted a formal objection, and so contrived to be defeated.-Campbell's Life of Mansfield, p. 462.

CH. X.

TRIUMPH OF WILKES.

75

prisonment, but a special jury at Guildhall awarded him 1,000l. damages against Mr. Wood, the Under-Secretary of State; and Lord Halifax himself, against whom an action was brought, was compelled to resort to the most contemptible legal subterfuges to delay the proceedings. Three great constitutional questions had been decided, and in each case in favour of Wilkes, and the triumph was all the greater because both search warrants and general warrants, which were now pronounced to be illegal, had been undoubtedly frequently made use of since the Revolution. Passions on both sides were aroused to the utmost, and neither party was prepared to desist from the contest. Wilkes reprinted all the numbers of the North Briton' in a single volume, with notes establishing in the most conclusive manner the constitutional doctrine that the King's Speech should be regarded simply as the speech of the ministers. He showed that this doctrine had been unequivocally laid down in the two preceding reigns by such statesmen as the Duke of Argyle, Carteret, Shippen, and Pulteney, and that in 1715 the House of Commons had impeached Oxford among other grounds for having corrupted the sacred fountain of truth and put falsehoods into the mouth of his Majesty in several speeches made to Parliament.' Lord Egremont died on August 21, 1763, but Wilkes pressed on eagerly his action against Lord Halifax. He wrote to him in a strain of great insolence, accusing him of having robbed his house, and he even made a vain attempt to obtain a warrant to search for the missing documents. The King, on the other hand, dismissed Wilkes from the colonelcy of the Buckinghamshire Militia. It was the duty of Temple, as Lord-Lieutenant of the county, to announce to him the fact, and he did so in a letter couched in the most complimentary language. Temple was at once deprived of his Lord-Lieutenancy, and his name was struck off the list of Privy Councillors. The Attorney-General instituted a regular prosecution for libel against Wilkes. He was surrounded by spies, who tracked his every movement and reported to the ministers the names of all who had intercourse with him, and his correspondence was systematically opened in the Post Office.1

1 See much curious evidence of this, Grenville Papers, ii. 8, 71, 130,

155-160. In one of his letters to Wilkes, Temple said: 'I am so used

The struggle was speedily transferred to another sphere. On November 15, 1763, Parliament met, and it soon appeared that a majority of both Houses were determined to pursue Wilkes with the most vindictive perseverance. On the first day of the session he rose to complain of the breach of privilege in his person, but he was anticipated by Grenville, who produced a royal message recapitulating the steps that had been taken and calling the attention of the House to the alleged libel. The House at once responded to the demand, and although the question was at this very time pending before the law courts, it proceeded to adjudicate upon it, voted the forty-fifth number of the North Briton' a false, scandalous, and seditious libel,' and ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman.' Wilkes vainly endeavoured to avert the sentence by declaring that if his privilege was asserted, he was quite ready to waive it and to stand his trial before a jury.

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At the same time another weapon for ruining him had been discovered. Wilkes, after his release from the Tower, had set up a private printing press in his own house, and among other documents had printed a parody of the Essay on Man' called 'An Essay on Woman,' and also a paraphrase of the 'Veni Creator.' They were anonymous, but the former at least appears to have been partly, if not wholly, composed by Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the colleagues of Wilkes in the Medmenham Brotherhood. Bishop Warburton having recently published Pope's poems with illustrative notes, the parody contained some burlesque notes attributed to the same prelate. Both the Essay on Woman' and the imitation of the 'Veni Creator' were in a high degree blasphemous and obscene. Both of them would have been most proper subjects for prosecution had they been published or widely circulated. As a matter of fact, however, the little volume had not been published. Wilkes had not intended to publish it. Its existence was a profound secret, and only thirteen copies had been privately struck off for a few of his most intimate friends. Either by the examination of papers that were seized under

to things of this sort at the Post Office, and am so sure that every line I write must be seen, that I never put anything in black and white that might

not be read at Charing Cross for all I care.'-Grenville Papers, i. 489.

Parl. Hist. xv. 1354-1360.

CH. X.

THE ESSAY ON WOMAN.'

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77

the illegal search warrant or by the treachery of some of Wilkes's old associates who were now connected with the Government, the ministers obtained information of its existence, and one of their agents succeeded, by bribing a printer employed by Wilkes, in obtaining the proof sheets, which on the first night of the session were brought before the House of Lords. As if to mark in the clearest light the nature of the proceeding, the task was entrusted to Lord Sandwich, who had been the intimate friend of Wilkes, who had been like him a member of the Medmenham Brotherhood, and who was notorious as one of the most profligate noblemen of his time. The Essay on Woman' had been actually dedicated to him in lines imitated from the address to Bolingbroke in the beginning of the Essay on Man,' and Wilkes afterwards even asserted that he was one of the two persons to whom the poem had been originally read. He discharged his task in a long speech, descanting upon the profligacy of Wilkes in terms which elicited from their common friend Lord De Spencer the pithy comment that he had never before heard the devil preaching. Warburton then rose to complain of a breach of privilege on account of the appearance of his name in the notes, and in language in which the courtier was at least as apparent as the saint, he declared that the blackest fiends in hell would not keep company with Wilkes, and apologised to Satan for comparing Wilkes to him. The House of Lords at once voted the poems a breach of privilege, and a 'scandalous, obscene, and impious libel,' and two days later presented an address to the King demanding the prosecution of Wilkes for blasphemy.3

Before this time, however, Wilkes was no longer able to answer for himself. Among the many persons who had been attacked in the North Briton' was Martin, a former Secretary to the Treasury, whose corrupt practices at the time of the Peace of Paris have been already noticed. In the debate on November 15

''Arise, my Sandwich; leave all
meaner joys

To Charles and Bob [Churchill
and Lloyd], those true poetic
boys.'

No printed copy of the Essay on
Woman as laid before the House of
Lords appears to exist, but there is a
manuscript copy with another inde-
cent poem called A Maid's Prayer,

but without the notes or the Veni Creator, among the Wilkes papers in the British Museum. An elaborate discussion about the authorship and the true version of the poem will be found in Dilke's Papers of a Critic.

2 Walpole to Mann, Nov. 17, 1763. Lord De Spencer was said to have been the other.

3

Walpole's George III. i. 309–312.

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he got up and denounced the writer in the North Briton' as 'a coward and a malignant scoundrel,' and on the following day, Wilkes having acknowledged the authorship of the paper, Martin left at his house a challenge to meet him in Hyde Park with pistols within an hour. Wilkes, among whose faults want of courage cannot be reckoned, at once accepted the challenge. Martin, though the challenger, selected the weapon, and it was afterwards stated that during the whole of the eight months that had elapsed since the provocation was given, he had been assiduously practising at firing at a target. Wilkes fell dangerously, it was at first thought mortally, wounded, and he showed an anxiety to shield his adversary from the consequences of the duel, which was a strong proof of the genuine kindness of his nature, and added not a little to his popularity.'

It is not surprising that under these circumstances the angry feeling prevailing through the country should have risen higher and higher. Bute was still regarded as the real director of affairs, and the animosity against the Scotch and against the Court was as far as possible from being appeased. In the cyder counties, a crowned ass was led about by a figure attired in a Scotch plaid and decorated with a blue riband. At Exeter an effigy of Bute was hung on a gibbet at one of the principal gates, and the mob was so fierce that for a whole fortnight the authorities did not venture to cut it down.3 When, in obedience to the vote of the House of Commons, an attempt was made to burn the North Briton,' the high sheriff and constables were attacked, the obnoxious paper was snatched from the flames, and that evening a jack-boot and petticoat were publicly burnt in a great bonfire at Temple Bar. The Common Council of London voted thanks to the City members for asserting the liberties of their country in the question of general warrants. The decisions of Chief Justice Pratt in favour of Wilkes raised that judge to the highest point of popularity. The Corporation of Dublin presented him with its freedom, and the example was speedily followed by the City of London and by a great number of

1 Parl. Hist. xv. 1357-1359. Walpole's Memoirs of George III.

i. 280.

3 Campbell's Chancellors, vi. 289. 4 Walpole's George III. i. 330. Annual Register 1763, p. 144.

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