Arthur Onslow, the late Speaker, who died on the very day of this Committee, had ordered the House to be acquainted that he died in peace on hearing of that bill. But though the good old man’s detestation of corruption did him honour, the House reasoned too soundly to attempt a vain cure by increasing a blacker crime—perjury. When the bill was again read in the Committee on the 19th, it was so ill received, that Beckford, the author, left the House in the middle of the debate. Dowdeswell and all his party resisted the bill; but Grenville, to flatter the country-gentlemen, who can ill afford to combat with great lords, nabobs, commissaries, and West-Indians, declaimed in favour of the bill; but the courtiers moving for the Chairman to leave the Chair, Dowdeswell said, he could approve that proposal no more than the bill, as there had been instructions given to the committee on his clause for disqualifying officers of the revenue. On this he was reduced to vote with Grenville; but they were beaten by 96 to 69, and the bill was thrown out.
Bradshaw, the Duke of Grafton’s favourite secretary of the Treasury, having been concerned in the business at Aldborough complained of by Fonnereau, the Opposition hoped to reach the Duke himself, and ordered the parson to their bar. He demanded counsel. Grenville vociferously ranted against allowing counsel on so enormous a crime as bribery, but was put to shame for his tyranny by Sir Gilbert Elliot, who showed that even on treason and murder, counsel was allowed to prisoners. Dunning, the new Solicitor-General, but not yet in Parliament, appeared as counsel for Bennet, who was a jovial, sporting young parson, neither very moral, nor very modest. Dunning exerted himself with great lustre. Fonnereau, to save 40l. (for he was a very miser) had refused counsel, and behaved so obstinately and absurdly, that though Grenville, Wedderburn, and Dowdeswell supported, and gave him hints, with all their parliamentary craft, he counteracted his own witnesses; and it came out that he had not only been more criminal himself than the clergyman, but for a series of years had established and profited of Ministerial influence in the borough in question. Conway was converted by the rancour of the charge, and with Hussey, as they were the two most candid men in the House, threw such disgrace on Fonnereau, that the parson was acquitted by 155 to 39; the most remarkable event of the debate being a warm dispute between the late friends Rigby and Grenville, in which the former attacked and treated the latter without management.
Though this was the last debate in that Parliament, another had intervened of more weight, but I chose not to intermingle the subjects.
On the 17th of February Sir George Saville moved to renew a bill drawn by Lord Chief Justice Coke, and passed in the reign of James the First for quieting the minds of those who possessed Crown lands, by preventing the Crown from suing for the recovery of them after they had been enjoyed by private persons for sixty years. Sir George made the proposal in very general terms, and with great decency, though in a style too metaphoric. The intention was evidently suggested by the recent case of the Duke of Portland, but he affected not to allude to it, nor to pass any censure on that act. The case they knew would present itself to every man, and the less animosity they discovered the more easily they hoped the bill would find its way through the House and be at once a silent reproach to and a real check upon the Crown. Sir Anthony Abdy seconded the motion. Lord North objected on the impropriety of the time, the very end of a parliament; and he urged that such bills should only arise out of grievances: he called to know if any such existed. Lord Clare said, that the Crown having actually in contemplation to give up or sell to the public many forests and wastes for cultivation and increase of provisions, such a bill would impede that scheme. Charles Yorke, in a very long deduction, argued against vexatious revisals. Himself, when Attorney-General, he said, had been consulted by persons who had obtained such grants and had condemned them. So had Lord Mansfield, whose abilities and merits were only exceeded by slander. He then stated the case of the Duke of Portland, which, he said, had been treated with incaution and precipitation; and that the Duke ought to have had the preference given to him, as being in possession, over Sir James Lowther. Norton replied that the case had been four months in agitation; that the preference could not be given to the Duke, who contested the right of possession with the Crown, and did not sue for it. That though his Grace’s grant dated sixty-three years before the dispute, the encroachment was not of equal antiquity, the lands in question having appertained to the Queen Dowager, who had granted them on lease, which had not expired till the year 1724, when the Dukes of Portland had appropriated them to themselves. He challenged Yorke to meet him in any court in England, and fight out that cause. Yorke evaded the challenge; though Norton and Rigby again called on him to be explicit. Much complaint was made of the surveyor’s refusal of the sight of necessary papers. Sir William Meredith spoke, with more applause than he had ever done, in behalf of the bill. Grenville trimmed with all his art, not to offend Lord Bute and Sir James Lowther. Lord Barrington, in order to get rid of the bill at that time, approved of passing it in another Parliament, and said he should be desirous of taking away the nullum tempus[77] from the clergy likewise. Lord John Cavendish, throwing out insinuations against the Duchy Court of Lancaster for issuing vexatious notices, Stanley said he had been desired by Lord Strange to defy in his name any accuser. Lord North, to avoid putting a negative on so popular a bill, moved for the orders of the day, and at eleven at night his motion was carried by 134 to 114, many courtiers voting in the minority as favourers of the bill.
On the 11th of March the Parliament was dissolved. Thus ended that Parliament, uniform in nothing but in its obedience to the Crown. To all I have said I will only add that it would have deserved the appellation of one of the worst Parliaments England ever saw, if its servility had not been so great, that, as the times changed, it enacted remedies for the evils it had committed with the same facility with which it had complied with the authors of those evils. Our ancestors, who dealt in epithets, might have called it the impudent Parliament.
CHAPTER VI.
On the Literature of the Early Part of the Reign of George the Third.
1768.
It may not be amiss, by way of appendix, to say a few words on the state of literature during the period I have been describing. It will be the less improper as the controversies and politics of the age gave the principal, almost the whole tone to letters of that time. I do not mean to send the reader to the gross and virulent libels of Wilkes and his still coarser imitators. As a writer, Wilkes’s chief merit was an easy style,—the vehicle of little knowledge, of not much more wit, and of extreme boldness.[78] He was so far an original as being the first who dared to print the most respected names at full length. In imitation of him, the daily and evening newspapers printed every outrageous libel that was sent to them. Till that time the abuse of the week was generally confined to essays in the journals on Saturdays. Bolingbroke and Pulteney were content with battering the Administration once in seven days.