Lord Cochrane presented the Bristol petition, and moved the following amendment to the address, which, as a vindication of the conduct of the Reformers, I will here record.
"That this House has taken a view of the public proceedings throughout the country, by those persons who have met to petition for a Reform of this House, and that, in justice to those persons, as well as to the people at large, and for the purpose of convincing the people that this House wishes to entertain and encourage no misrepresentation of their honest intentions, this House, with great humility, beg leave to assure his Royal Highness, that they have not been able to discover one single instance, in which meetings to petition for Parliamentary Reform have been accompanied with any attempt to disturb the public tranquillity; and this House further beg leave to assure his Royal Highness, that in order to prevent the necessity of those rigorous measures, which are contemplated in the latter part of the speech of his Royal Highness, this House will take into their early consideration the propriety of abolishing sinecures and unmerited pensions and grants, the reduction of the civil list, and of all salaries which are now disproportionate to the services, and especially, that they will take into their consideration the Reform of this House, agreeably to the laws and constitution of the land, this House being decidedly of opinion that justice and humanity, as well as policy, call at this time of universal distress, for measures of conciliation, and not of rigour, towards a people who have made so many and such great sacrifices, and who are now suffering, in consequence of those sacrifices, all the calamities with which a nation can be afflicted."
It is a melancholy subject for reflection, that there was not ONE man to be found in the House that would even SECOND this amendment, which was neither more nor less than a true account of the proceedings of the Reformers throughout the country; and in consequence of this, the motion fell to the ground without a division. Lord Cochrane continued night after night to present these petitions, brought up by the delegates; and the most remarkable event of these times was, that the very night that Lord Cochrane presented the petition from Bath, which especially pointed out the enormous sums annually received by their Recorder, Lord Camden, and which prayed for the abolition of his enormous sinecures; that very night a message was brought down to the House, and it was announced by one of the Ministers that Lord Camden had actually resigned his enormous sinecure of Teller of the Exchequer, which did not amount to less than thirty-five thousand pounds a year. No one will doubt that this act of his Lordship was occasioned solely by the resolutions and the petition passed at the Bath meeting. He well knew that Lord Cochrane had presented the Bristol petition, and had stated in the House that he had several other petitions to present; and amongst the number that from Bath, signed by upwards of twenty thousand persons. To prevent, therefore, the discussion which was likely to arise from the presentation of this petition, he anticipated the prayer of it, by resigning his sinecure of Teller of the Exchequer. How often have we been asked by the tools of corruption, what good was there in holding public meetings! We have been everlastingly told that these great public meetings, and the violent petitions passed at them, did a great deal of harm, but that they never produced any good. What these knaves mean by this is, that the House of Commons never attended to the prayers and petitions of the people, and that therefore it was of no use to persevere in petitioning. This, as far as it goes, is very true; the House of Commons never did attend to the petitions of the people for Reform; but yet I boldly answer, that petitioning has done some good; that the petition of the first Spafields meeting obtained four thousand pounds from the droits of the Admiralty, for the suffering poor of Spital-fields and the metropolis. This was some good. Again, I say, that the petition and the resolutions passed at the Bath meeting, caused Lord Camden to surrender thirty-five thousand a year to the public. This alone was some good. Nor must we stop here. Almost all the petitions in which I was ever concerned, petitioned for the abolition of all sinecure and useless places, and unmerited pensions; and I always particularly denounced the sinecures of the late Marquis of Buckingham, the other Teller of the Exchequer, and prayed and petitioned for its abolition. At the death of the old Marquis it was abolished. Does any man of sense and candour believe, for a moment, that this would have ever been done to this hour, if it had not been for the prayers, petitions, and remonstrances of the people? Here, then, is another saving of upwards of thirty thousand pounds a year.—Therefore, I say, that the great public meetings have done a great deal of good; and those who promoted them have rendered very considerable service to the country, although they have themselves been the victims of that system of tyranny and oppression, which, in these two instances alone, has had its plunder curtailed in more than sixty thousand pounds a year. Add to all this, that the Prince Regent surrendered fifty thousand pounds per annum to the public exigencies. Will any man say that the Regent would have done this, had it not been for the great public meetings held in Spafields and other places? and was this nothing? Again, Mr. Ponsonby resigned his Chancellor's pension of four thousand pounds a year. Is this nothing? Here I have shown that, within three months of the great meeting first held in Spafields, and between the second and third meeting which was advertised, no less a sum than NINETY THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR was surrendered for the public exigencies; and was this doing nothing? To be sure, five persons had been found guilty of rioting on the day of the second Spafields meeting, and Cashman was sentenced to death; but this had nothing to do with the meeting itself, which met only for the purpose of petitioning Parliament, and peaceably separated, after agreeing to a petition, which was signed by twenty-four thousand persons, praying for Reform, and the abolition of all sinecures, and a reduction of the public expenditure; which petition had been presented, and received by the House of Commons, before these surrenders and resignations of these large sums were made. To be sure, Lord Sidmouth had delivered in the House of Lords a message from the Prince Regent, laying before Parliament the famous green bag, full of precious documents, got up to prove that sedition, conspiracy, and rebellion were close at hand; and that treasonable practices existed in London, and in various parts of the kingdom: upon which a committee was appointed by the Ministers, in both Houses of Parliament, to examine and report upon the contents of the said bag. The result of this was, that Mr. Evans, of Newcastle-street, the Spencean, and his son, were arrested on a charge of high treason!
About this time I received a letter from the Reformers of Portsmouth, requesting me to attend and preside at a public meeting, which they wished to hold in or near that town, to petition for Reform. I showed this letter to Mr. Cobbett, who said, "I know these people; I will answer that letter for you, and arrange with them all about their meeting. As you are so much engaged in other matters at this time, I will take this trouble off your hands, and you will have nothing to do but to attend the meeting when the day is appointed." This offer I cheerfully accepted, and I thought no more of the business till I saw it publicly announced that a meeting would be held on Portsdown-Hill, on the 10th day of February, the very day that was fixed for holding the third Spafields meeting; and that was done without consulting or saying a word to me upon the subject, although I was the only person written to by the people of Portsmouth. It did certainly strike me at the time, that there appeared to be a good deal of trickery and management made use of to keep me from this meeting. As, however, I was never jealous of any one myself, I had no suspicion that my friends were jealous of me, and I took no notice of it, though I was sorry to find that to the people who met on Portsdown, no apology or explanation was made for my absence, or at least for the meeting being held on the day that I was at Spafields; and I have reason to think that the people of Portsmouth, who first invited me, were very much disappointed at my not being present, and that they felt themselves slighted by me, which, I assure them, was the farthest thing in the world from my wish or intention.
While my friends were acting in this manner, my enemies were not idle, and the agents of Government, in order to injure me in the opinion of the public, not only vilified and abused and libelled me from day to day, in the public newspapers, but they actually caused a placard to be printed and posted all over the metropolis, which was headed "Mr. Hunt hissed out of the City of Bristol," and contained all sorts of infamous falsehoods and scurrilous abuse. It appeared from the newspapers that a boy, of the name of Thomas Dugood, had been committed to prison, by a Police Magistrate, for having pulled down one of these posting-bills. I immediately set about an inquiry, to find out the poor boy, to endeavour to relieve him from his imprisonment, and to gain him some redress for the persecution which he had suffered. To discover where the boy was, I went to the Police Office, and, after a great deal of shuffling, I was directed to Coldbath-fields Prison, which, as I subsequently found, was the wrong gaol, the boy having been committed to the New Prison. In the mean time, however, finding that I was resolved to go to the bottom of the business, they had released the boy. At length I found him out at his lodgings, and learned from him that he had been confined for several days among the vilest felons. I took him to the Police Office, to identify the Magistrate that committed him, and there I caused the police officer, Limbrick, to be placed at the bar, for robbing the boy of his books and money at the time he was apprehended. The inquiry ended in the said police officer returning the boy his books and money, and confessing that he was ordered to attend the posting of the said bills, and to protect them from being pulled down after they were posted. The bills were printed at the office of the Hue and Cry, near Temple-bar, and an agent of the Government paid the bill-sticker a large sum for the posting of them in the night. Finding that I could get no redress for the boy at the Police Office, I took him into the Court of King's Bench, and appealed to the Judges. But Lord Ellenborough could do nothing for him. By the stir which I made, however, the case got into all the papers, and the conduct of the Government was completely exposed. I then caused a petition from Dugood to be presented to the House by Lord Folkestone, and another petition of my own, by Lord Cochrane. The Under Secretary of State, Mr. Hiley Addington, promised that the conduct of the Police Magistrate should be inquired into; but ultimately it was ascertained that Lord Sidmouth had no power to interfere. The Magistrate, Mr. Sellon, who had committed the boy, was not a Police Magistrate, but a Magistrate of the county of Middlesex; therefore his Lordship could not interfere, and the boy must, forsooth, proceed at law against the Magistrate. I shall here insert the petitions that were presented to the House, which will place this transaction in a clear point of view before my readers, and will show them to what meanness the Government submitted, in order to injure my character with the public, and to destroy the influence which they discovered that I had over the people. This transaction will speak for itself without any further comment of mine. "To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament assembled.
"The Petition of Thomas Dugood, of the Parish of St. Paul,
Covent-Garden, in the City of Westminster,
"HUMBLY SHEWETH,
"That your petitioner is a parentless and friendless boy, seventeen years of age, who, until lately seized by two Police Officers and sent to prison by the police, obtained the honest means of living by the sale of Religious and Moral Tracts, which he used to purchase of Mr. Collins, of Paternoster-row.
"That your petitioner has, for more than four months last past, lodged, and he still lodges, at the house of Keeran Shields, who lives at No. 13, Gee's-court, Oxford-street, and who is a carter to Mr. White, of Mortimer-street, and who is also a watchman in Marybone parish.
"That your petitioner has never in his life lived as a vagrant, but has always had a settled home, has always pursued an honest and visible means of getting his living, has always been, and is ready to prove that he always has been an industrious, a peaceable, sober, honest, and orderly person.