[27] Lord Rockingham had prepared another motion, but did not produce it, though offended at Lord Chatham’s.
[28] When Lord Chatham’s motion was shown to Grenville, he lifted up his eyes at seeing Wilkes’s name in it. It was no doubt inserted to soothe Wilkes, who had lately abused him in a rancorous letter to Grenville; for nothing exceeded Lord Chatham’s pusillanimity to those who attacked him, except his insolence to those who feared him. At this time he did not avoid holding out hopes to the King’s favourites, that he would not remove them if he came into power. “I will not,” said he, in his metaphoric rhodomontade, “touch a hair of the tapestry of the Court.”
[29] It might be inferred from this statement that it was the practice of the Lord Chancellor to examine the election writs before they pass the Great Seal. This is a duty, however, which neither Lord Camden nor any other Chancellor ever imposed upon himself, and I am informed that there is no instance of the Great Seal having been withheld from a writ which had passed through the Crown-office. In fact, whatever may have been the original intention of the law in requiring the Great Seal to be affixed to the Parliamentary writs, the Lord Chancellor’s office in this respect has of late years become merely executive.—E.
[30] Parliamentary History, vol. xvi. p. 645.—E.
[31] Lord Granby had just accepted a very considerable obligation from the Ministers. At the end of the last session they and their creatures in the House of Commons had most unjustly voted him the borough of Bramber, so legally the property of Sir Henry Gough, that he had been offered forty thousand pounds for it.
[32] Elizabeth, only daughter of Sir William Wyndham, and sister of the Earls of Egremont and Thomond. She was a woman of sense and merit, with strong passions.
[33] A brief report of these debates is given in the Parliamentary History, vol. xvi. p. 668, note. It is obviously partial to the Opposition.—E.
[34] This spirited debate is reported in the Parliamentary History, vol. xvi. p. 668.—E.
[35] It appears from Lord Camden’s MS. letters to the Duke of Grafton, that he had in the first instance underrated the importance of Wilkes’s case. He next entered heartily into the general indignation which Wilkes had excited. On the 3rd of April he writes, “If the precedents and the constitution warrant an expulsion, that perhaps may be right. A criminal flying his country to escape justice—a convict and an outlaw—that such a person should in open daylight throw himself upon the county as a candidate, his crime unexpiated, is audacious beyond description.” Still, he believes that the public excitement on the subject will soon subside.
The proceedings in the Court of King’s Bench, when Wilkes’s counsel gave notice of a motion for a reversal of the outlawry and an arrest of judgment, made a deep impression on Lord Camden. His feelings had by this time cooled, and he viewed the case as a lawyer. He communicated his change of opinion to the Duke in a letter of the 20th of April, and although the communication was confidential, the bent of his mind seems to have been pretty well understood by his colleagues. As the difficulties increased he took the matter more to heart, and on the 9th of January 1769 he writes again to the Duke, expressing great uneasiness, and announcing distinctly his opposition to the view taken by the Cabinet of Wilkes’s case. He pronounces it “a hydra multiplying by resistance, and gathering strength by every attempt to subdue it.” “As the times are,” he says, “I had rather pardon Wilkes than punish him. This is a political opinion independent of the merits of the case.” These representations were fruitless. The Duke had taken his part, was committed to the King and the Cabinet, and, besides being of a hot temper, had become so exasperated by Wilkes’s conduct as to consider his honour would suffer from making the slightest concession to such a man. Unhappily this difference of opinion materially affected the intercourse of the Duke with Lord Camden. The former admits and laments in his Memoirs that they seldom met during the summer of 1769. The Duke’s marriage and frequent absence from London kept them still more apart, and in the autumn it is obvious from the tone of Lord Camden’s letters that he felt the separation to be inevitable.—E.