The Methodists endeavoured to draw notice to themselves, but were disappointed. Lord Baltimore was prosecuted for a rape on a loose girl, who had staid in his house for some days under many opportunities of escaping, but was acquitted on his trial, notwithstanding the hypocrites had much incensed the populace against him.[98] Six young methodists were expelled from Oxford, but their party could raise no clamour on this supposed persecution. Whitfield, their archpriest, attending one Gibson, who was hanged for forgery, to the gallows, and preaching his funeral sermon, assured the audience that he was gone to heaven; and that a fellow executed at the same time was probably in the same paradise, having had the happiness of touching Gibson’s garment. But these impieties and martyrdoms were drowned in the lustre of St. Wilkes’s glory, and for once the barefaced libertine carried away the vulgar from the holy knaves.
It is true that half the success of Wilkes was owing to the supineness of the Ministers. Lord Chatham would take no part in business. The Duke of Grafton neglected everything, and whenever pressed to be active, threatened to resign. The Chancellor, placed between two such untractable friends, with whom he was equally discontent, avoided dipping himself farther. Conway, no longer in the Duke’s confidence, and who was more hurt at neglect than pleased with power, stood in the same predicament. Lord Gower thought of nothing but ingratiating himself at St. James’s, and though what little business was done, Lord Weymouth executed, it required all Wood’s violence and animosity to Wilkes to spur him up to any activity. Wood indeed said that if the King should pardon Wilkes, Lord Weymouth would not sign the pardon. The Scots complained grievously of this want of spirit; and the Lord Mayor consulting the Chancellor on what he should do if Wilkes should stand for the City, and being answered that he must consult the Recorder, Harley sharply replied, “I consulted your Lordship as a minister; I do not want to be told my duty.” Some of the sheriff’s officers, too, not having dared to apprehend Wilkes, though a capias had been issued for that purpose, the Lord Mayor insisted on their being turned out of their places.
Previous to his surrender Wilkes went to Bath, but met with neither honours nor notice. A subscription had been opened for him, and went on but heavily. His enemies served him better. Lord Mansfield tried every subterfuge of the law, not so much to crush Wilkes as to shift the odium of the prosecution on any other shoulders; and as the law is never defective in furnishing expedients to meanness and chicanery, and as the lowest quibbles appeared like armour to the eyes of Lord Mansfield’s cowardice, it is scarce credible what stores of rusty nonsense were brought forth on this occasion, to the equal disgrace of the Chief Justice and the practice.
On the 20th, Wilkes, according to his promise, appeared to his outlawry in the King’s Bench. He did not avow himself for author of the North Briton, though he owned he had written the forty-fifth number, and approved every word of it. When he recollected the “Essay on Woman” he confessed he blushed; yet pleaded that it would not have been published unless stolen from him. He complained of the usage he had received, and of the alteration of the record. Lord Mansfield palliated the latter charge; and then pronounced that Wilkes was not before the court, as nobody had taken out the writ capias ablegatum, which he affirmed the Attorney-General ought to have done. This implied that an outlaw could not surrender himself voluntarily, though he might get anybody to take out that writ. The judges, Yates and Willes, agreed to this jargon, having been induced by Mansfield to cast the blame on the Attorney.[99] On this curious reasoning was Wilkes dismissed. His speech had been received with little applause, and he retired without riot. He had, indeed, advertised a request to the people to make no disturbance; yet the Government had been so much alarmed that a field-day had been appointed in the Park, that troops might be at hand to quell any tumult.
It appeared from this mock scene that an outlawry cannot be set aside but by a process to show there is a flaw in it. Accordingly the profession who love to accumulate absurdities[100] rather than to correct a ridiculous maxim, always take care to prepare a flaw in an outlawry. Wilkes had demanded from the Attorney-General a writ of error, and he had promised it, but was dissuaded on the 19th by the Master of the Rolls, and on the 20th the Attorney came into court without it. He would have taken it out then, but by some other rule it was then too late, or Wilkes should have surrendered to the sheriff. It was on these informalities that Lord Mansfield had argued that Wilkes was not before the court, for, being an outlaw, the law knew no such person; yet this nonentity his Lordship had suffered to revile him to his face on the seat of magistracy.
In the mean time the Parliament was chosen to the content of the Court, though by the inactivity of the Duke of Grafton, and the unpopularity of their chief friends, the majority was not greater than in the last assembly. Sir James Lowther, the Favourite’s son-in-law, was beaten at Carlisle and in the counties of Westmoreland and Cumberland, though he was returned (I think) for the latter against a majority of thirty-four. The Duke of Portland ravished those provinces from him in which he had been paramount, at the expense of forty thousand pounds and to the great damage of his fortune; nor were Sir James’s disbursements less considerable, to which the odious act of ravishing the Duke’s estate from him for an election purpose added signal disrepute. The county of York thanked Sir George Saville for having introduced the bill against nullum tempus, and the Duke of Portland published his case. It displayed the partial and unhandsome conduct of the Treasury, though the Duke could not prove that the lands wrenched from him had not been encroachments of his family. Lord Spencer had not been less profuse in a contest for the town of Nottingham.[101] The immense wealth that had flowed into the country from the war and the East Indies, bore down all barriers of economy, and introduced a luxury of expense unknown to empires of vaster extent. At the same time the incapacity of the Court, which had first provoked the nation by arbitrary attempts, had now sunk the government to a state of contempt; and Wilkes’s triumph having manifested the pusillanimity and want of vigour both in Ministers and magistrates, almost every class of the lower orders thought it a moment for setting up new pretensions in defiance of authority.
At Peterborough the mob rose and demolished Mr. Sutton’s new hospital for inoculation. The coalheavers committed great violences on the river and in Wapping; and by the meeting of Parliament the metropolis was a theatre of tumults and anarchy:—but of these presently. Nor was the press idle; satires swarmed against the Court, and the authoress of all those calamities was the object at which the most envenomed arrows were shot. In a frontispiece to a number of Almon’s Political Register she and Lord Bute were represented in her bedchamber; and lest the personages should be dubious, the royal arms in a widow’s lozenge were pictured over the bed.
On the 27th, Wilkes was carried by a capias to the King’s Bench. Great bail was offered by Humphrey Cotes, but rejected by the court; and the prisoner was committed to the King’s Bench. When he left the court, the people stopped his coach on Westminster Bridge, took off the horses, and drew him themselves to a tavern in Cornhill, dismissing the tipstaves that guarded him, and insisting that he should not go to prison. He persuaded the mob, however, to disperse, and, slipping out by a back door, went immediately and surrendered himself at the King’s Bench Prison.
The Cabinet-Council, in the mean time, were strangely irresolute and uncertain how to act.[102] The King, the Princess, and the Scots, could not bear the idea of Wilkes’s triumph, nor would hear of his being suffered to enjoy a seat in Parliament.[103] The Chancellor was all moderation; Conway, as usual, fluctuated between both opinions. The Lords Gower and Weymouth were for extremities. Yet the total inaction of Lord Chatham, and the sullen negligence of Grafton encouraging no violence, it was determined not to expel Wilkes in the very short session that was soon to meet to give substance to the Parliament, since, no proclamation having been issued to summon this meeting for business, it might be thought too precipitate rigour. The Ministers, it was decided, should only lay in their claim against his admission, unless the House should be much fuller than was expected in so late and short a session, and the voice of the meeting should be loud for expulsion. The measure was neither equitable nor politic, and betrayed a want of firmness. It would give time, if the flame of faction should spread, for counties and boroughs to instruct their members to oppose expulsion, and presented an opportunity to France of blowing up the embers. Great numbers of French had resorted hither at that time and to Ireland; and though the carelessness of the Ministers was so great as to neglect scrutinizing into it, there were grounds for suspecting that Wilkes was privately encouraged by the Court of France.[104] The Comte du Châtelet, their new Ambassador, had certainly had communication with him at Paris, though Châtelet strenuously denied it; and several Frenchmen of quality had sat with Wilkes on the hustings during the election for London, and were protected by him there and at Brentford; though without such protection, a Frenchman at an election would at any time have a risk of being ill-treated by the mob. They visited him in prison; and one of their agents, to my own knowledge, had intimate connection with him. This was one Kendal, an Irishman, who, though of distinguished service in his profession—the army,—had skulked here obscurely for a year, and when he did appear the second winter at M. du Châtelet’s, it was rarely but at very private hours. He had passed himself for a Frenchman that could speak no English, yet having accidentally and unawares discovered his knowledge of our tongue, he afterwards conversed in it fluently. It happened that going one evening to M. du Châtelet’s, I found them perusing an English book. I looked over Kendal’s shoulder, and saw the name of John Wilkes written in the particular character of his own hand, which was something womanish. Kendal hurried the book into his pocket with some confusion—yet I had time to observe the title. It was “Sir James Porter’s Letters on the Turks,”—a work published after the sale of Wilkes’s library, and consequently showed it was borrowed from himself. Though wishing well to Wilkes’s cause against prerogative, I should blush to myself if I concealed the ill I thought of the man. This story has led me from my argument; I meant to add that to allow Wilkes to retain his seat for six months, and deprive him of it afterwards, was heaping injustice upon oppression.
His outlawry was argued in the mean time at the King’s Bench by Serjeant Glynn, as erroneous, and maintained by Thurloe. Lord Mansfield said the court was to take time to consider the respective arguments (though it was known that a flaw was purposely inserted), and put off the decision to the next term—a delay which detained Wilkes in prison and prevented his taking his seat in Parliament. His appearance there was dreaded by the Administration, especially as it was whispered that he intended to move for an augmentation of the pay of the army, on pretence of the dearness of provisions. Could he shake the loyalty of the guards the Government would have had little to trust to—so great was its weakness and unpopularity. Nor did the Ministers depend on being able to carry his expulsion. Beckford from factious views, Hussey from integrity, and Lord Granby from candour, declared against so rigorous a measure. Nor were all men satisfied of the propriety of the time, many doubts having arisen whether the Parliament could transact business, as such intention had not been mentioned in the proclamation,—an informality soon passed over, it being necessary to renew the Militia and Corn Bills, which had been granted only to the end of the next session. In truth, some exertion—at least, some appearance of authority—was become of absolute necessity, the mutinous spirit of the people and the contempt in which the Government was held, carrying various classes of men into most dangerous excesses. The town of Boston, in America, had invited the other colonies to unite against taxation. The Irish were as warm against receiving an augmentation of troops; and the Irish country gentlemen, though apprehending for their property from the designs of France, did not dare to declare for a larger army, as the new octennial election was approaching.