Parliament met on November 15, and the government at once made an attack on Wilkes. In the lords, Sandwich complained of two profane and obscene pieces printed in his private press, An Essay on Woman and a paraphrase of the Veni Creator. There was no evidence of publication; a few copies only were printed, evidently for private circulation, and one of them was obtained by tampering with a workman. Even if publication had been proved, there would still have been no reason for the lords' interference; for obscene and profane publications were punishable by law. But the ministers were anxious to obtain support for their measures of revenge. The name of Bishop Warburton of Gloucester was attached in mockery to notes in the Essay on Woman, and with his concurrence the case was brought before the house as a breach of privilege. The lords lent themselves to this transparent device; they petitioned the king to command the prosecution of Wilkes and, later, when he was out of their reach, ordered that he should be confined for his offence against themselves. Their proceedings excited public ridicule. That Sandwich should complain of obscenity and profanity, and should censure Wilkes, a fellow-monk of Dashwood's debauched fraternity, for indulging in them was, indeed, a case of Satan rebuking sin. At a performance of the "Beggar's Opera" at Covent Garden theatre the audience caught up with delight Macheath's words, "That Jemmy Twitcher should peach me I own surprised me," and Sandwich became generally known as Jemmy Twitcher.
WILKES EXPELLED FROM PARLIAMENT.
On the same day as the proceedings in the lords, Grenville brought a message from the king to the commons informing them of what had been done in Wilkes's case. They voted, 273 to 111, that the North Briton, No. 45, was a false and seditious libel, and ordered that it should be burnt by the common hangman. In the course of the debate, Martin, who had lately been secretary to the treasury, called Wilkes a cowardly and malignant scoundrel. The next day, the 16th, they fought a duel with pistols in the ring in Hyde Park; they had no seconds and each fired twice. Martin's second shot wounded Wilkes dangerously. In his absence the commons discussed his plea of privilege. Pitt strongly urged the house to maintain its privileges. Parliament, he said, had no right to surrender them; if it did so it would endanger its own freedom and infringe upon the rights of the people. As for Wilkes personally, Pitt was anxious to show that he did not approve of Temple's support of him, and called him "the blasphemer of his God and the libeller of his king". The house voted by 258 to 133 that privilege of parliament does not extend to seditious libels, and ought not to obstruct the ordinary course of the law in such cases. In itself this was an excellent decision. Parliamentary privileges had increased to a mischievous extent. By the abandonment of many of them, such as certain invidious exemptions from the course of law which it claimed for its members, the exclusion of strangers from its debates, and the prohibition of reporting, parliament has gained in dignity and purity, and has confirmed the liberties of the people. Nevertheless, though the abandonment of privilege was in itself a step in a right direction, it was reprehensible in Wilkes's case, because it was an ex post facto measure, designed to meet a special case, and vindictive in its intention.
The lords agreed in the decision of the commons, though a protest against the surrender of privilege was signed by seventeen peers. On December 3, the day fixed for the burning of No. 45 in front of the Royal Exchange, a large mob broke the windows of the sheriff's coach and pelted the constables. Encouraged by gentlemen at the windows of neighbouring houses, they tore a large part of the paper from the executioner with shouts of "Wilkes and liberty," carried it in triumph outside Temple Bar, the boundary of the city, and there made a bonfire into which they threw a jack-boot and a petticoat, the popular emblems of Bute and the Princess of Wales. Yet Wilkes was in an unpleasant position. A Scot went to his house intending to murder him; was arrested and found insane. A summons was sent to him to appear at the bar of the house of commons; his surgeons stated that he was too ill to attend, and a later day was fixed. Before it came he went off secretly to Paris, and while there excused himself from obedience to the order of the house by sending a medical certificate. The commons refused to give any weight to it, declared him in contempt, and guilty of a seditious libel, and on January 19, 1764, expelled him the house. An information was laid against him in the court of king's bench for reprinting and publishing No. 45; he was convicted and, as he did not appear to receive sentence, was outlawed.
While little sympathy seems to have been felt for Wilkes personally, except among the lower classes, the attack upon him was widely resented because it was regarded as an encroachment on national liberty. Parliament was not in accord with public feeling. A strong effort was made to induce the commons to declare that general warrants were illegal. Pitt acknowledged that he had issued them during the war, when it was necessary to find out and remove suspected persons; but no such necessity existed at present, and he urged the house to do justice to the nation, the constitution, and the law, by condemning them. The ministers managed to shelve the question, but carried the adjournment only by 234 to 218. Though on other matters they commanded a large majority, several members from whom they expected support voted against them in the debates arising out of Wilkes's arrest. Among these were General Conway and Colonel Barré. Conway, the brother of the Earl of Hertford, had gained much credit in the war in Germany; he was a dashing officer and a respectable general, a man of refined tastes and high principles. As a politician he was thoroughly honest, of small ability and utterly wanting in decision of character. He was the dearest friend of Horace Walpole; and Walpole, who regarded politics in a personal light, exercised an unfortunate influence upon him. Barré, who had served with distinction in Canada, was a coarse man, eloquent, and feared by his opponents on account of his remarkable power of invective. He sat for one of Shelburne's boroughs, and believing himself slighted by Pitt, attacked him vehemently in the house on his resignation of office. As a supporter of Bute he was appointed adjutant-general and governor of Stirling, posts worth £4,000 a year. George, who regarded a vote against the ministers in this matter as a personal affront to himself, was determined that all who held either military or civil appointments should clearly understand that they could not continue to serve him if they opposed his policy in parliament. With Bedford's approval, Conway, Barré, and with them General A'Court, who had also voted in the minority, were deprived of their commands, and Shelburne, Barré's patron, was dismissed from his office as aide-de-camp to the king. Barré followed Shelburne's example in attaching himself to Pitt.
GRENVILLE'S ECONOMY.
These dismissals violated the most valuable of the privileges of parliament, freedom of speech and immunity from royal coercion. It was a well-established constitutional rule that the king should not take notice of anything which passed in parliament and that no member should suffer for his speeches or votes. This rule had been broken in the last reign when, in 1733, two officers lost their commands and, in 1735, Pitt his cornetcy for acting with the opposition. On the present occasion the responsibility for its violation rests on Grenville at least as much as on the king himself. Parliament took little notice of this infringement upon its privileges, though on the first day of the session, 1765, Granby pleased the army by some sharp remarks on the dismission of officers on account of their votes in parliament.[67] Encouraged by their success against Wilkes, the ministers waged war on political libels. A large number of ex officio informations, or accusations presented by the attorney-general on which the person accused was brought to trial without the previous finding of a grand jury, were laid against printers and others during the course of the year. As this looked like persecution, it excited popular anger. One bookseller who was sentenced to stand in the pillory in New-palace-yard, Westminster, drove thither in a hackney coach numbered 45, and was cheered by a crowd estimated at 10,000 persons. Two hundred guineas was collected for him, and the mob hung a jack-boot and a "Scotch bonnet" on a gibbet and then burnt them.
Grenville insisted on economy in the national expenditure; it was needful, for during the late war the public debt had risen from £72,500,000 to £132,700,000, and the country was heavily taxed. His budget stood in honourable contrast to the finance of the late administration; it did not propose lotteries or a private loan, and it included an advantageous bargain with the Bank of England for the renewal of its charter. Yet in some matters his economy was short-sighted and peddling. He starved the naval estimates. During the war many ships were built hastily of timber insufficiently seasoned, and had fallen into so bad a condition that half their original cost was needed for the repair of their hulls; there were too few workmen in the dockyards, and the stores were empty of sails, rigging, and cordage. Lord Egmont, the first lord of the admiralty, represented the necessity for a large expenditure on the navy, but Grenville would not hear of it. So, too, in less important matters, he grudged spending money on the police of London, and highway robbery and other crimes of violence were insufficiently checked, and he even refused so small a sum as £20,000 which the king wanted for the purchase of some land at the back of Buckingham House, the site of part of the present Grosvenor Place, in order that the garden which he was then making might not be overlooked.
The expenditure on the American colonies and the irregularities by which they evaded their legal obligations, were offensive to his frugal and orderly temperament; he proposed to enforce their obligations, and to draw from the colonies some part of their cost to the mother-country. The colonies occupied a long and comparatively narrow tract of country stretching for seventeen hundred miles along the Atlantic. They differed in character. In the northern colonies the puritan element was strong, and the chief sources of wealth were commerce and farming. The southern colonies had cavalier traditions, and their wealth was chiefly derived from plantations which were cultivated by slave labour. Though puritanism as a religious force was well-nigh extinct in the New England provinces, it affected the temper of the people; they set a high value on speech-making and fine words, and were litigious and obstinate; lawyers were plentiful among them, and had much influence. As a whole the colonies were impatient of control and jealous of interference. Their constitutions differed in various points; in some the governor was appointed by the crown, in others by the proprietary. All alike enjoyed a large measure of personal and political freedom: they had the form and substance of the British constitution; they had representative assemblies in which they taxed themselves for their domestic purposes, chose most of their own magistrates, and paid them all; and it was seldom that their legislation was interfered with except with respect to commerce.
RESTRICTIONS ON COLONIAL TRADE.