Nothing could be more just than the satire, nothing more bold than the unmeasured liberty with which it was uttered.[341] The Prussian monarch must have read with scorn, and Europe with laughter, so absurd a boast as our vaunting to have saved an ally whom we had betrayed and abandoned. Ridicule might have handled this vain-glorious falsehood with full severity and full security, without passing the bounds which law allows. But when Parliament had connived at the treachery, could it be supposed that it would suffer a private hand to wield the bolt which had slept in the custody of so many corrupt representatives? The lie given in print to the Crown, by an obscure man, was an unparalleled license. If the King had a particle of power left, or his servants, or his magistrates, of spirit, such an insult could not be passed over. The rashness of his servants contrived to involve the Crown and themselves in inextricable difficulties, and to make the unwarrantable behaviour of Wilkes appear innocent, when compared with the excesses they committed themselves.
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 Spain[344] 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.